Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

I get that the ancient (32-bit) PC computers are pretty much worthless now and that's mostly all of interest in the old IBM sites (wondering what the current state of the Sloatsburg location near NY 17/17A in Orange County is like - I drive past it at least once a year).

What gets me are the schools more than the malls or offices - all this talk of teachers having to buy school supplies (and now no longer getting a tax break for it), and yet every one of these buildings we see the reels walk through are full of things that current teachers could use. Why is nobody willing to connect that dot and save their county (and teachers) money?

The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

I took four years of German, didn't cheat, had a B+ average, and three years after I graduated high school I could pretty much just count, say the alphabet, and knew maybe a dozen phrases. If you're not actively using the language, even a little, it's not going to stick whether you cheated or not.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

So... ordinary airport before enshitification ?

Air travel used to be pretty cool. Now absolutely every part of it is annoying. Especially the booking and its 25 upsale offers.

A few years more of this and you'll have to book business just to get a seat and fresh air.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

Probably.
But the mirrors, for example, are made by Zeiss. Lots of parts are from the supply chain and ASML doesn't even HAVE their secrets.

You are right that some industrial espionage could be useful. I just say it's not as useful as most people would assume (which is basically the Hollywood plot of "steal this secret and we can copy it"). Nah. You can find on the Internet how a nuclear bomb is made. But it takes a lot more than a print-out to actually make one, and a couple of those steps are genuinely hard.

Fascinating answer.

It seems to me that the unablated thoughts fall into the category of "what would a human user expect that a good answer to this prompt would be?" - and out comes something that is clearly an aggregate of stream-of-consciousness writing.

But then the ablated models seem to go for a direct answer without much less interpretation and "pretend to be human". I wonder what that's about. I'd love the AI to answer more like the machine it is, and right now I'm getting that through skills.

Not sure how far industrial espionage gets you here.

There's nothing fundamentally secret in lithography. We know how it works. The secret sauce is the experience, processes, know-how, highly specialised suppliers etc. The practical complexities are immense. Given the security incidents ASML already had, I'd make a bet that a large amount of the valuable data is already in China. But the supply chain and the engineering don't live on paper and are not easily duplicated.

... as in: If you get in bed with them, you'll get screwed.

You really have to be a special kind of dumb to buy anything from Facebook. What did you expect? Their entire business model is selling YOU.

I credit most of SpaceX's success to CEO Gwen Shotwell. She keeps things going even when Musk is off on an irrelevant tear somewhere else.

Unfortunately, Musk seems to be on a path to sabotaging her efforts. The SpaceX prospectus showed that xAI (which bought Twitter, because why not?) was the reason they posted a loss in the last fiscal year. Even with all the expenditures on Starship, SpaceX would have been profitable. Like every other major AI company, it is not at all clear that xAI can reach profitability anytime in the near future, especially since xAI is blocked from so many enterprises and doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the big three at all. As Starship production scales up, the costs are going to increase, and they need payload revenue to offset those costs. There's so much focus now on the Pez dispenser and the lunar mission that I haven't seen any hints of the conventional payload delivery version (aka, "Chomper") in a couple of years. Maybe it's being quietly worked on. I hope so, because the big space station payloads that were talked about a few years ago will need it.