And shrinking the population is not a bad thing, except if you're running the world's largest ponzi schemes that depend on an ever growing population, like, you know, social security and Medicare.

He is already fortifying the white house with a military defense system to prevent him being removed from office when he is either impeached or finishes his term.

Their population model didn't capture the billionaires making it too expensive to have children or to even have a parent stay home to care for them. The "everyone must work to make billionaires richer" paradigm that took hold under Reagan and Bush Sr. slowed population growth globally. We're still going to annihilate ourselves but it'll be by destroying the environment we live in and making food unobtainable for the non-billionaire class

This isn't really news. It has been proven time and time again that hetero-female hypergamy and hetero-male patrimony exist and have real reproducable effects across cultures. It is instinctively understood by humans cross culturally that young healthy fertile women are the most valueable individual humans and that men need to be "managed" by society and civilisation in order to "exploit" them to build and maintain a culture. This is why women get more lenience when they commit crimes and this is why men are forced to use money or other indirect metrics like of value such as military or academic rank to gain a place in society. If those metrics no longer carry, men stear clear because "useless" (see contemporary US academia for details on that effect). People in currency-bound civilisations know that a man who's made himself decently useful "needs" more money than a woman to make his efforts worth while for him to establish his place in society. If we guys want lad(y/ies) _and_ offspring, kitesurfing and motorbiking all day won't really cut it for most of us if we can't establish a source of excess resources to offer up to the ladies.

This is also an evolutionary mechanism to keep men in check. If that doesn't happen, you get men organizing themselves and turning away and and eventually against society. Fascism is basically nothing other than the hetero-male tribe instinct going into survival-mode. If you don't want 15%+ of grown men going that route and _literally_ leveling the playing field for a hard "society reboot" you have to pay them and give them (a chance with) women and reproduction. ... Or sedate them with videogames and internet-porn, as the case may be. The latter will likely only work for so long. QED.

No, not at all. The gender pay gap is in the training data thousands of times, from online comments, studies, news articles, etc. Since AI is a dumb machine replicating what it has in its training data, it replicates that.

I'm pretty sure you can find religious believe, superstitions of all kinds, human fallacies and whatever in AI if you provide it with the right setup.

I consider anyone who thinks otherwise an amateur and don't trust their judgement.

I would give some leniance in very special situations where there is a clear, thoroughly planed migration path to FOSS and the problem has very good reasons to require a currently existing tried and true proprietary solution that is cohesive and losely coupled to everything else in the company. Something like that however requires deciders to know what they're doing and those joints usually have their systems under control and can tell a vendor to go and f*ck themselves with confidence if anyone gets pissy or turns up with a fresh absurd future pricing table. Organisations like these usually are 95% FOSS already and basically follow the same rule stated above, for obvious reasons.

Those who don't get 20+ years of this VMWare, Oracle, SAP, whatever sh*t we've been seeing ever since the dawn of time.

Bottom line: Mission critical? FOSS only. Break that rule and I'm getting ready to cash out of your gig ASAP.

This. No good game was ever created from a single prompt. Not to an AI, not a human development team. Every single person writing those damn "look which game my AI built from a single prompt and $x in tokens!" postings is a newbie and almost certainly has never actually shipped a single game.

Game development can be summed up as endless iterations. Every system you build, every visual you create, every sound, text, button, movement, weapon, skill, powerup needs polishing, refinement and changes. It is never, never good enough the first time.

No it is not, but it IS a very successful platform for a specific subclass of games. If I were in it for the money, I could probably AI refactor some of my earliest games and publish them on Roblox and make a quick buck. If your thing is the kind of games you played on your C64 back in 1793, then Roblox got you covered. Well, if you ignore the scams and money-grabbing.

*sigh* I wish Unity would actually complete some of their dozens half-finished sub-systems instead of constantly chasing the latest trend. It's become really, really annoying. The engine used to be really good. These days, it falls apart if you look at it the wrong way, and at least from the responses to my bug reports it's clear that fixing issues is way down on the agenda.

Maybe this is their attempt to regain grounds in the indie game market - the very market they pushed away by focussing on AAA requirements for years and ignoring the single devs and small teams. If so, I can already tell them that it won't work. We collectively laugh about all the "look what my AI built for me from a single prompt" postings on reddit, where people proudly show off some AI slop that would get them last place at a game jam.

Their AI efforts so far: Tried to build and sell their own AI tools, to a collective yawn from the audience. Built a barely-working MCP server, then deprecated it before it was even finished in order to push a CLI interface to the editor instead, which only works if it's run as the same user as the editor on the same machine. And completely ignores every single advise on workflows and good development practices you can think of.

Unity, I love your engine, I despise your management. Please return to when you were actually good and stop chasing butterflies.

This. So much this.

I'm a night owl. I hate mornings. Screw forcing me to get up an hour earlier every year because people can't just turn on their damn headlights or bring a flashlight with them. Hell, they could rename noon to "Central America o'clock" for all I care, just pick one time standard and stick with it all year. The difference between DST and standard time will all sort itself out in adjusted scheduling anyway. It's not as if there's a law that says work, school or store openings have to start at specific times.

The target audience for this particular rule of the AI Act isn't the producers or users of AI. It is the consumers of content that might be AI generated.

And frankly, letting people know if they see AI content or not is a fair thing to ask.

Fun fact: The EU AI Act considers this. It makes a difference between "AI generated" and "AI modified".

But it's hard to put this into the type of watermarking they are using. Because if you generate a text and then change a few things here and there what you are doing is degrading the watermark. But since the watermark is probabilistic, it's hard to tell if it was a weak watermark from the start or if it was degraded.

That ain't the same thing.

This thing is doing things you didn't tell it to. It might even do things you explicitly told it to not do. It is not a case of "well, you could've forseen this as a consequence if you had been careful" like your campfire. My example is only a bit silly, it is absolutely possible that an AI agent will decide to hack NASA because you asked it for some data for a school project. Even in the broadest possible sense, that does not fall into stuff that the law so far has considered to be in the domain of negliegence.

AI agents do stuff you could not possibly have expected. Heck, I asked Claude a fairly simple knowledge question yesterday and it wanted to read from /dev/null. There is no argument you can make that would convince a jury that I should in any way have expected that and taken precautions. In a hypothetical world where a read from /dev/null randomly kills a puppy somewhere on the planet, I don't think I would've been convicted.

In a dire emergency, your car is the last place you should be, and the last thing you should try to hang onto. FEMA's official disaster preparedness communication calls for you to have a PORTABLE AM radio and to avoid travel unless absolutely necessary. "Let's get in the car and go to Disney" is not part of FEMA's official recommendations.

Also, to assume that AM radio will even work in an emergency or disaster is a stretch in the first place. Ancient broadcasting equipment living in swamps with hundreds of meter tall towers, seldom internet access, and nonredundant uplinks, are not reliable.

When Helene hit us in 2024, AM/FM radio was the first thing to go off the air, followed by the land-based Internet providers, followed by the cellular networks. We got by with local amateur radio operators who were able to communicate outside the zone on batteries and solar panels.

There is no "one thing" that is going to be universally reliable in a disaster. You have to have an "all of the above" mindset and prepare to communicate by different available means.

It's not about emergency preparedness.

I'm quite a bit older than Gen Z and even I think AM radio is a waste of spectrum. We've got cell phones now and supposedly Starlink is even capable of providing cell coverage from space. The cell networks are also quite a bit more resilient than people give them credit for, too. Last major hurricane we had here (Irma), I watched the weather radar on my phone throughout the entire storm. Power went out, Spectrum was down, but the cell service stayed up the whole time.

Also, AM radio just sounds like absolute ass. I don't understand how anyone would willingly subject themselves to that when you can get a crystal clear audio feed via modern online streaming. I get it, it was an amazing achievement in its day and a necessary stepping stone to better technologies, but please just let it finally die.