It's both people's natural inclination to use it this way, and the way it's actively marketed. "A PHD in your pocket." "A teacher." "An expert on tap."

A teacher instructs someone who doesn't know.
An expert is there to advise people who don't know.

There are as many criminals operating stingrays as law enforcement. You don't hear about it because police departments don't look for it, and users can't detect it.

I never heard of the lock icon, but I do remember a year or two ago hearing that iOS and Android were now offering a feature that warned when your phone received excessive tower handoff requests that typically happen with stingray activity. Not sure if that's still there or not.

Addendum: Could very well be both malice and incompetence, that seems to be their modus operandi.

I don't doubt they are weapons, but it seems odd they would be doing what sounds like continuous test fires across a wide geographical area.

Either somebody messed up, causing their secret weapon to be revealed... or they are deliberately sending these signals off to make a statement, daring that the laws be enforced. Similar to Russia's GPS jamming campaign.

Malice or incompetence?

I've had 1 drive fail in 6 months, back in 1999, but I think that had to do with the iMac G3 packing a 90s-era computer and CRT in a tiny plastic bubble with no fans.

The only other drive that failed on me was from ca 2005 and lasted 15 years. It didn't head crash, but a decent chunk of the files on it had regularly-spaced corruption in the bitstream. This was on an AM2 system with a FSB overclock, so I'm not totally sure if that was maybe from corrupted memory during a copy operation.

I do recall after the flooding event in Thailand in 2012 or 2014 that hit all the HDD factories, reliability went way down. Not sure how long that effect lasted.

Presumably you understand coding well enough to check the bot's work. Most people are not programmers.

Typical users of AI, use it precisely because they don't understand something. Or, they're using it as a shortcut, so that they don't have to read a primary source and don't have to use any brain cells second-guessing the answer.

Sounds like something they won't let you buy, then.

As for firearms, the country with the most guns in history is letting their government run all over them. We'll see how long that goes on, but that would indicate the key ingredient is something other than firearms. Courage, maybe. Plenty of ways to kill someone without a gun.

Doesn't look much different than Battlefield 2, other than the graphics. I acknowledge that people buy these games, but that doesn't make them interesting.

There's sadly a segment of people so dumb and easily amused that they actually enjoy listening to or watching the stuff, and they have money to be taken. The recent success of whatever that shitty 70s soft-rock AI band was called, shows that you just need the right people promoting the crap and they'll gobble it up.

The monetization path is identical to that of the social media dreck that existed before AI. Individual uploaders can achieve monetary gains with the right promo, but the biggest winner is of course the house. Facebook has geared their whole platform to push and even generate AI slop, from what I hear.

Doesn't sound like it's going anywhere, unless the users decide to quit rolling around in that sty. I don't see that happening without either a broad cultural shift like we saw with smoking, which required a whole lot of messaging and some intervention from the government. With the US government being a wholly owned subsidiary of the tech companies, and ideologically opposed to doing anything useful for the people at large, I don't see that happening. And so we will all suffer the idiots.

"We're not going to do anything about the AI deluge, we're just going to wave our hands and declare ourselves 'responsible'. (In the sense of describing our greatness, not in the sense of 'accountable'.)"

The guy at Logitech could be a genuine idiot, but it's equally likely he's getting some sort of reach-around from his fellow tech CEOs on this.

They need to have "important", "smart", "successful" people continually spouting off the sci-fi bullshit in public so that it sounds believable to a certain type of person. They need the visual imagery of I, Robot sitting in a boardroom. Typically they have some worse-than-clipart AI-image in the article depicting exactly that.

What's better than masked, secret police? Faceless robots.

And for what? Fostering "stronger public trust", of course. Nothing says "trust" like secret police.

I don't think I've played an EA game since SimCity 4. I don't see much loss if EA disappears. Maybe the employees can find jobs where they are allowed to develop interesting games.

That said, I think it's more likely people keep buying the same EA game every year, but now the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and the US get a cut. That is, of course, a bad thing.

I used to work for a wannabe "ISP" - their main business was providing other services to apartment complexes, but they heard tech was a money printer, so they moved into repackaging and reselling services from an actual ISP.

The few apartment complexes they set up before I left were a predictable shitshow. The whole apartment complex shared a single IP, with everything behind NAT. Each apartment had a wifi access point, but no modem. I wasn't directly involved with that property, but I have no doubt every aspect of the deployment was fucked up. You look at the Google reviews for these apartments and one of the most-mentioned words is "internet", and not in a positive way. Ongoing for 5 years now.

Kickbacks were definitely involved. Knowing this company, they also employed kickforwards and roundhouse kicks, delivered directly to residents' chests.

So, while no one else is able to stop the authoritarian takeover, Big Tech will make a bold stand, sacrificing their cash and Most Favored Industry status for their altruistic principles.

If that doesn't sound absurd on its face, you've internalized some of your employer's propaganda. It's not just aimed at customers; it's aimed at you, and your coworkers. They let you and your friends have your little culture, beliefs, and morals. But when the dictator's call comes, you and your friends won't be the ones making the decision.

Your employer's contributions to the fascist project will be hidden from you to the greatest extent possible. At the point they can no longer be hidden, any serious dissenters will be fired. Keep in mind the economy will be tanked by then. Your friends will fall in line, or fall homeless in the street, which by that point will be a ticket to one of the concentration camps.