And the answer as usual is AI slop.

This has been going on for ages and used for spam and cybercrime and they didn't care.

The reason it's a problem now is AI companies are buying access to your TV so they can use your clean IP address to go scraping data from websites that are blocking them.

Don't get me wrong it's still a good thing that these are getting banned but they have been around apparently for quite some time and none of the TV manufacturers gave a shit. Probably because the problem wasn't big enough until the AI swap bots got involved.

This is exactly why I keep my television tuned 24/7 to Fox News Network. There is absolutely nothing you can do to make a TV dumber than that!

AI slop posts farming karma so they can do scams and political post floods during an election season mean all of the discussion on any of the hobbyist forums is basically garbage. You get the same low effort obvious bot posts pretty much everywhere. Besides that there's the usual outrage porn all over the place designed to get you all angry so you will engage.

All that stuff was always a bit of a problem but the AI chat bots have made it so much worse.

Because everyone should be able to interact with the government without using a proprietary software package. That's why. Accessing government resources is necessary to function in society and we shouldn't put that behind a paywall.

Also basic services are best handled by the government. Things like water and electricity. What you would call infrastructure. At this point something is simple as open formats qualify as part of our infrastructure.

It takes a ridiculous amount of crime for a police officer to qualify as doing a bad thing. Police are more or less above the law unless what they do is so cartoonishly evil that it triggers moral indignation and makes the news.

We're going to see Mass automation and large scale unemployment because of it. Those people aren't going to eat a bullet. They're going to have to find a new way to survive. For some of them it's going to be crime, for some of them they will be organized into militaries and start wars and some of them will put the nose to the grindstone to survive and come for your job. Maybe they won't do it as well but your boss doesn't care he just wants cheap labor. With a complete lack of competition in the markets these days your boss doesn't have to care if he has a substandard product...

I guess what I'm saying is no man is an island and you can't just keep ignoring other people's problems because they're going to make problems for you whether you like it or not. And no, having a stash of firearms isn't going to help. There are millions of these people and you don't have enough ammo to shoot them all.

No, I mean because I care about Slashdot and having an interesting, insightful debate here. I know, I'm expected too much, but it happens sometimes.

We are going through a transition where these tools are just becoming available and a massive number of bugs are being fixed, but in future they will be standard for software developers as part of the QA process.

I fully agree, but I do think this might actually be an improvement for customers, at least in some cases.

I've been talking to some AI chatbots for a couple of companies I have been dealing with, to get stuff sorted out. They are much better than multiple choice menus or the old dumb chatbots that just scan for keywords and then print out an FAQ entry. I don't need to guess the special magic words to make them do what I want, and if they are doing down slightly the wrong path I can correct them.

The ones I have used hand off to a human when necessary. I'm sure that will get enshittified, but at least for now I find they are more reliable at either resolving the issue for me, or at least getting the right information to the right people to get it resolved.

I don't have a side here. I use both Windows and Linux. Windows pisses me off, Linux pisses me off.

What I care about is how it's hard to have an honest conversation about any of this stuff without it becoming a Microsoft hate-fest or ridiculous assumptions about open source being somehow inherently more secure.

Yeah, I know, no EV will ever work for you, you simply must emit CO2 and dump pollution into other people's lungs, 6 minutes and saving time by not going for petrol is just something you can't abide. Give you convenience or give you death.

Yeah, I'm asking which model of Ioniq have 6 seats? I thought they were all 5, so maybe your definition of a seat is different and actually there are a lot more cars that fit your needs.

Anyway, no charging at all on a day trip... Well, 6 hours of driving and 6 minutes of charging seems reasonable to me. I'd have filled up a fossil car too, maybe the day before and again after or something, which would doubtless have cost me more than 6 minutes total time. Not that it cost me any time because I needed to pee anyway.

You have to be realistic, not just arbitrarily set the bar slightly above where you think EVs are today.

The LLM thing comes up in a lot of "switch to Linux challenge" scenarios. The issue is that a lot of the Linux community is sadly very toxic. Someone says they want to use X, and the response they get is "why? Just use Y instead". They google an error message and get an out of date Reddit thread where the copy/paste solution bricks their OS (happened to Linus of LTT a couple of years ago).

LLMs try to be helpful and sift through all the outdated forum posts for you. They make using Linux a lot more pleasant and, ironically, human.

With Windows having enshittified, while Linux isn't perfect it does at least feel like some distros are trying to do the right thing, and aren't outright hostile to the user.

I get sent Word and Excel documents at work. I've found that if I reply in ODF format, people just start using ODF without realizing it.

The only real issue is Excel programming, which isn't supported by ODF. There doesn't seem to be an open standard for spreadsheet macros or whatever they are called, and Excel uses some kind of BASIC variant that nothing else supports.

It's like nuclear power. Sure, only 1.25% of civilian reactors have ever melted down, but the consequences for individuals of those meltdowns can be extreme. Anywhere from massive loss of property and community to death.

While 500 stalkers might be a small percentage of 800k officers, for the victims they probably don't find much comfort in the fact that there are only 499 other victims of the same thing. Especially when the technology is relatively new and still rapidly expanding.