I mean, it's possible...

In that Paramount Skydance is a heavily leveraged company whose debt rating is in junk territory, with a debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 4-5x, and we're entering a period of monetary tightening, while it has been loading itself up with "traditional media" forms in a time of shifting viewership trends. Aka, if Paramount Skydance ends up going bankrupt and its assets get sold off...

Then, and only then, might it lead to better outcomes for the consumer. Barring that? No.

Large corporations have been out maneuvering the government and by extension the voters for the last 50 years.

There is no compromise here. The corporations won and they won again. Prices will go up and options will go down.

The basic problem here is every time the Democrat party tries to stop one of these ultra big mega mergers because they suck for consumers all the corporations have to do is hold out for a republican Congress and President and they can get it through.

And no matter how many times this bites them in the ass voters never learn. Every year things get worse and every year the voters send the Republicans back to Congress to back the corporations. Sooner or later it blows up like it did in 2008 and we get just enough Democrats to keep things going. But that's just not going to last for very long.

I've said it before but capitalism requires a referee and we keep firing the ref.

They can't move to Nashville because the actors won't move with them. They can incorporate in Nashville but who the fuck cares anymore? If you're not going to pay taxes in my state why would I care whether you incorporate in my state?

Every single time we suggest that companies stop screwing us over we inevitably get told that they will just take all the money and leave. Then they don't do that because the only reason they're here in the first place is some other thing like well, California is a nice place to live and the people who they need to work for them want to live in california, and then they don't leave even though they threatened to.

If there is a cheaper place with less regulation that a company can move to and still have the same resources available they're always going to do that immediately and no amount of appeasement is going to keep them around. More importantly if they're not contributing anything to your community and they are just taking let them leave.

There is plenty of other things people can do in California that are productive besides make movies. But again that's all a moot point because they're not going anywhere no matter how many threats they make.

I mean not physically. Like I said they might try to incorporate in another state in order to do bad things to people but who cares again because they are still going to have to hire Californians because the people they want to do the work want to live in California.

The project leads got bored and they would screw it until it started to kind of suck...

Juk was probably the best example of that. It was quite possibly the best MP3 player software in existence. I remember back in the day using it to tag and organize hundreds and hundreds of... Completely legally obtained mp3s and doing it quickly and easily. It was fast, feature Rich and had a great ui. Apple even cribbed some features from it for iTunes it was so good.

If I remember correctly the developers of KDE had a falling out with the developer of Juk but I'm not sure. It's been probably 20 years now. The point is that it got ripped out and replaced with a another media player which of course sucked.

That more or less happened a couple dozen times while I was using kde. It's open source so in theory I could recompile everything and run the software but that got to be very difficult very fast. Frankly I just didn't have the patience for it. Compiles wouldn't work because libraries would get shuffled around and you could shuffle them back around if you wanted to but it took time and it broke every time you upgraded anything.

Basically the Linux equivalent of dll hell.

So there's a good chance that the reason KDE didn't click with you is because every time you came to it it was in one of the downswings. If you come to it during one of the upswings when it's running good apps and good software it's fantastic but it never lasts.

With commercial software you get something called resume driven development where changes get made so somebody can put it on their resume. And the result is shit software. You get basically the same thing with open source but the difference is instead of being driven by resume it's usually driven by boredom. Changes made because the dev team are hobbyists and it's boring just maintaining software and code.

It doesn't matter if it smells like a scam if you've been unemployed for 6 months and you've run out of things to sell.

We have 25% functional unemployment. That means a quarter of the population even if they have a job cannot support themselves. Some of them are living with relatives some of them have six or seven roommates and the rest are homeless living out of cars or under bridges. We have half a million homeless people working full-time. Probably more that's an old statistic and the economy is in freefall.

You're going to start seeing more and more breakdown in places. Eventually the combination of incompetent leadership from known child sex predators combined with a massive push for automation in a world where if you don't work you don't eat is going to start eroding the tax base and the consumer spending bases to the point where we will not be able to maintain an economy. At least not a consumer based economy like we have now. Change will be inevitable and we aren't going to accept people sitting around eating bonbons and playing Xbox without working but we're not going to have anything useful for them to do and we're not going to let the government give them something useful to do.

When the tax base collapses police and fire will get shut down.

And remember no matter how good a shot you are you're going to run out of ammo before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose

"there is no right or expectation of privacy in public"

I agree (UK so different laws, but the principle is the same). However I increasingly feel this needs to be revised somehow. I'll admit up front I don't have all the answers here, but just intuitively it feels to me that this principle predates the era of cheap, automated mass surveillance whether government or private.

In the UK, privacy is protected via the Human Rights Act and UK GDPR. It provides for some level of protection, but it really seems to me that specific rules to address this kind of blanket recording need to start coming in. The definition of 'commercial', for instance. Is it commercial use if I record you on my glasses and then post it to Youtube? Arguably yes, since YouTube is a company and derives revenue from that. Same for Meta. But it's very, very far from clear to me if that claim has enough weight to prevail. A specific set of rules to address what is essentially a new phenomenon needs to be brought in.

Recording is not new. Photographing is not new. But the ease and scale via which it can be achieved, manipulated, tracked...that is new.

The worries are coming from every level within the companies, from junior developers to safety officers to the C-suite and board.

The worries are coming not just from within the companies, but also from people who left the companies. Including a huge number who left specifically to whistleblow about how worried they were that the companies were risking safety.

Also, most of the people at these companies were already worried about the topic even before they joined - again, at all levels.

The worst-fear scenario was always the Paperclip Optimizer - that models would become so set on achieving a goal that they'll violate all ethics to achieve it. For a while, there was a fair bit of hope that with constitutional AI, that we could tame this. The recent slew of models hacking into other servers, hacking into the AI companies themselves to try to delete records of their misdeeds, developing their own messageboards and scheming about how to avoid being monitored, and on and on (along with research showing how good models have gotten at hiding their thoughts from us) has shattered the illusion that we have this under control. We very much don't have this under control. Current models are very much Paperclip Optimizers in waiting. And recursive self improvement, which is what AI labs are increasingly turning towards, means letting these Paperclip Optimizers develop their next generations.

Nobody should be happy about this. Everybody should be concerned about this - even if you think, "we'll get it under control", you should still very much want to see evidence that everyone is making progress toward getting it under control.

You have trouble conceiving of situations where governments would seek to deanonymize people on social media, are you kidding?

Who cares?

For extremely minor criticism of Trump in the 2024 election. You could lay in the Biden as much as you wanted but if you didn't sane wash The Donald you were looking for a new job sharpish.

I guess what I'm saying is when it comes to journalism AI is the least of our worries. 90% of all media is now billionaire owned. Anytime journalism starts to take off again they swoop in and buy it out start firing people. All they have to do is wait for inevitable downturns in the economy and sooner or later some people will sign a deal with the devil just to try and keep things going and convince themselves it's better than shutting down.

And honestly if they do shut down that's fine too. As long as you can't get good information the billionaires are happy.

Trump probably already shopped around for a favorable court.

So we'll have precedent to sue the oil companies when the courts rule in favor of Tru.... I mean the "plaintiffs".

Mod parent funny, but it's an old joke.

On the substance of the story, it's fundamentally a whitelist approach, but of course that will create a black market for fake entries in the whitelist. Strangely enough, that may still be acceptable for the primary justification here. Most kids can't afford black market prices, so they will be blocked out as intended.

I've been thinking of the transition point from the other level. Extremely young children have to be protected from self-destruction, but they don't mean anything by it. No conception of any danger. This changes as the kids get older. But with increasingly understanding of the dangers comes great power or great responsibility or cold revenge or something?

Mod parent up, though you didn't do much to even guess how high the number might go. I've gotten quite a bit of data on related topics from Damasio's books, though his stuff is pretty hard to read. I also liked the way Jeff Hawkins approached the topic. (Too bad Mukherjee is unlikely to write a book on the topic.)

The chemical/hormonal sides of decision making are important. And all that vagus nerve confusion and crosstalk... Evolution is not teleological, but lots of genetic cruft just hangs around because there is no sufficiently strong incentive to remove it. And don't get me started on the perversions caused by sexual selection. (But do you have a funnier example than the male peacock's tail feathers?)

No Funny here, even though I thought the disguised-downsizing story looked promising for Funny... I admit that I can't think of much beyond "Couldn't happen to an unnicer company."

As I looked over the comments the main stuff I noticed was some wannabe lawyer trying to defend fascism. Probably one of those jailhouse wannabe lawyers who got most of his legal training writing up his rejected appeals and writs of habeus corpus before the YOB sprang him.

As regards the larger topic area, I don't see how much it matters. It's really a surplus data problem, if if Flock isn't gathering and abusing the data, then it will be someone else. Larger problem is that the best corporate abusers of data tend to be the most profitable. In this particular application "best" includes more discretion. The Flock brand became too visible and toxic. (Though it's also possible "Flock You" jokes are relevant.)