It's the same Rich assholes as always, not all of them are white. I mean technically they are all white because white isn't a skin color it's a way that we have traditionally decided whether or not you are in the in-group or not here in America and other places but that's a whole nother can of worms...

I think this is more about buying into who gets to be a member of the ruling elite in the coming automation apocalypse than anything else though.

AI can't be profitable as a business or a service without fundamental changes to how computing works that are nowhere is near on the horizon.

But the prospect of freeing up the billionaires from their dependency on us filthy filthy peasants is worth any amount of money and so AI doesn't have to be profitable.

People keep asking, if there aren't any jobs who is going to buy the billionaires products?

They asked themselves that question and they answered it in a completely different and unintuitive way. They realized they were dependent on you and me and they are taking steps to break that dependency and free themselves completely.

Now if you're paying attention this means that all of us are about to become completely redundant. Or at least that's the plan.

Now here's where it gets complicated. They don't have to eliminate all of our jobs to completely fuck all of us over. If they even take 20% of us out then we are going to have to follow over backwards to fight like dogs for the remaining jobs.

But of course you, dear reader, do not need to do that because as a highly skilled and brilliant reader of slashdot you are completely irreplaceable and under no circumstances will the collapse of the current order and human civilization even slightly inconvenience you.

Possibly but they're going to take tons of good studios with them if they go.

Thanks to a complete lack of antitrust law enforcement Microsoft was allowed to buy about a dozen pretty major studios. They have basically done fuck all with the studios and it is now painfully clear that the only reason they bought them was to stop Sony from getting games made by those studios for the PlayStation platform.

In other words exactly the kind of anti-competitive behavior that is ridiculously illegal for extremely good reasons.

I'm guessing that they want to take the Activision games exclusive but they aren't quite ready to do that yet because they're afraid of public outcry. A few more years of corporate power consolidation thanks to voters choosing culture War over economics should put Microsoft in the position to do that.

One of the things that slightly worries me is that one of the few things angry young men have left his video games and between AI spiking the price of video game hardware and this kind of anti-competitive bullshit we are on track to take away their video games.

Meanwhile a bunch of asshat demagogues like Steve Bannon and Steven Miller are salivating at the prospect of weaponizing those angry young men against the rest of us. If you're paying attention that's what that Trump weaponization fund is about it's there to fund the proud boys and a little private army for their Gestapo.

The problem is when you say stuff like this it's so fucking insane people don't want to believe it. I called that the Dick Cheney effect. If you do something insane and horrific enough people will refuse to believe it's happening because certainly somebody would stop them from doing that right?

It's the old problem of, it can't happen here. Nobody believes their country is becoming a fascist hellscape until after it's a fascist hellscape and by then it's too late to do anything about it.

Machines don't unionize or boycott. They're tired of you having power over them.

I think this is the thing people are getting confused about.

AI isn't a business. For a brief period of time it will be integrated into the economy as capital. That's not the same thing as a business. It's something you own to produce things. It's not a business in and of itself it's a cost center that is part of a business.

That's not going to last very long. Because that's not the purpose of ai..

The goal of AI is to completely replace wages. Or at least replace enough of them that the bargaining position of working people become so bad that the trillionaires ascend to godhood. You know how Japan had an emperor that was considered a deity? Sam altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg want that.

The problem is right now they are dependent on you buying their products and working for them. So they want to automate you away so that that dependency goes away and they can have the power to control whether you eat or drink or have shelter but you can't withhold your labor to counteract that.

It's debatable to what extent they will achieve that goal and people will cope with the horror of it by telling you that it's just impossible. However if you do a little googling you will find that 70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 got taken by robots not outsourcing. And that is have a huge impact on your ability to bargain for higher wages and therefore a better quality of life. They want to expand that.

Dude robots and computers aren't going to fix the shit. We already have computers and robots are too expensive. Also they don't work.

The problem here is like everything we've let private equity devour in the world. They have cut staffing levels to dangerous levels. Meanwhile we cut all the government funding to higher education so there are fewer nurses and doctors. Remember if you're over 50 when you were growing up the government paid 70% of your tuition. Now they paid 20%. The thing is they didn't cut you a check they paid that money to the university and the university passed it on to you in the form of cheap tuition.

I am fully aware that rich assholes are going to enter markets and they are at a huge advantage because we refuse to do away with Rich assholes by taxing the fuck out of them.

But just having a little bit of competition and a little less power at the top would be a good place to start.

And yeah I need to proofread my shit. Then again I mean for fucks sakes I'm posting on a dead forum mostly to scream into the void. I don't actually type any of this crap I'm using text to speech on my phone.

Every few years Facebook faces a mass Exodus because no teenager wants to be on the same platform as their parents. The way they got around that was they just bought all their competitors or they ran them out of business or in the case of tick tock they lobbied the government to shut them down.

Removing teenagers from the pool is great for Facebook because it means they don't have to deal with them going to their competitors and then buying those competitors or worse risking a serious antitrust enforcement action that prevents them from doing that and leads to a real competitor.

Meanwhile when the kiddies become adults they're not going to be as uptight about being on the same platform as their parents anymore so they can be easily funneled into Facebook's ecosystem for cheap.

Facebook could collapse almost overnight if people just stopped going to the website. They are painfully aware of that and they take measures to make sure it doesn't happen.

If the boobs on my character aren't sufficiently pointy the cut glass then there's too many polygons.

From things other than cigarette smoking.

We have been consistently making cars cleaner to the point where vast swaths of them are zero emissions. I've mentioned this before but if you are in a city or even a decent sized town you're breathing in little bits of tire particulate and there is no way around that. People really really really really hate it when I point that out because people grew up loving cars so the idea that there is a problem with cars that is basically impossible to solve doesn't go over well....

My point is like it or not you are going to get along full of contaminants unless you can live out in the country or some shit. And fact of the matter is most people can't. You still need jobs and unless you own a shitload of land you're not making it as a farmer. Modern farmers are actually pretty fucking wealthy. The small family farm is long long gone.

So yeah somebody who has all the genes that make me prone to lung cancer I'd like to see you some more research on it for sure.

There is exactly one scenario where nuclear power makes sense now and that's if you have extreme space constraints and can't just put a wind or solar form up. For everything else you were taking a huge amount of risk, specifically the risk is that billionaire finance bro wanna be tech bro asshats are going to stop paying for the maintenance on those reactors and you're going to have a meltdown. And because these reactors are being proposed to power AI slop data centers they're going to be close to where people live because that's where the water is and those data centers are thirsty. Don't have to be but they are.

I do not know why old nerds are so obsessed with nuclear power. I know that we are I just don't understand the obsession. I'm assuming it's some weird techno future that never happened that we were all dreaming of and that we are upset we didn't get.

It's frustrating because that future is right there waiting for us if we just force the switch to wind and solar. But we can't have that because the oil companies want to control the transition that is inevitably going to happen so that they can continue to control your access to electricity.

Yep. It really pisses me off and freaks me out that we've let so many grifters take over.

Between the gambling houses that are claiming to be securities trading and this nonsense and the president of the United States constantly selling pardons and soliciting bribes I know the shit's going to hit the fan hard and there's not a hell of a lot I can do about it.

I used to think the baby boomers were all going to die and leave everyone was a mess to clean up but I think they fucked up so bad letting these lunatics and grifters in charge that a lot of them are going to live to see the crash and spend the last years of their lives struggling to get food and medicine.

For me the problem with AI art is that it is like putting a heavy wash over a miniature. It's something you do when you don't have the skill to really make good art.

That's not just me being pissy it shows up throughout the entire experience. It's fine when I'm playing tabletop with my friends to use shortcuts like that that make the miniatures look kind of so so because we are just casual hobbyists but if I saw white dwarf doing that shit you can bet I would be looking for a different mini company.

The problem is it tends to make everything look bland and the same because it's all drawing from the same data sets.

And no human beings aren't going to get a chance to refine shit. The entire point of using AI is so you can fire people and give the survivor is very little time to make the game. The game industry has fired about 1/3 of their staff. It's gotten to the point where it's causing major issues because they're just aren't enough people to make the games. Meanwhile all those people they fired didn't just eat a bullet they're out there working and making indie games and people are picking them up and spending time on them. The actual Indies seldom make a living especially in countries without universal Health Care but there are so many games out there that are designed and made by skilled people that it's tough for the AAA studios to compete on just hours and time. I've got a backlog of cool indie games to play through and they're 10 or 20 or $30 a piece. Ask me to drop 70 or $80 on AI slop is going to be a no-go

That book must have sent waves of panic in the secret parts of the UK government. During WWII, a highly secret site built early computers to break the German Lorentz cipher. The existence of these was kept secret until the mid '70s.

That someone would write a book about a fictional computer called "Colossus" would have lots of people wondering if the name was a coincidence, of if there had been a leak.

I think that these are all just adult album alternative format stations that keep playing that one Wilco record.

A lax regulatory environment and a technology that is outclassed by wind and solar in virtually every single metric except space usage in a country with nothing but space?

Hey what could possibly go wrong?

Really looking forward to having nuclear powered data centers dropped in the middle of my community by finance Bros pretending to be tech Bros...