If the 'AI' guys are anything to go by; probably get increasingly elaborate with their attempts to bypass whatever rate limiting is put in place. It's honestly sort of wild seeing the hottest, most heavily capitalized, elements of 'tech' wrap around so rapidly and with so little concern toward the sort of traffic patterns you normally associate with criminals as soon as it's in their interests. At one time I would have been surprised.

There is an intermediate situation that that case arguably illustrated:

Using violence against harder targets is more of an organizational problem; and solving that problem potentially skews your candidate pool; but what's very curious(particularly for a society whose overall violence numbers are very much on the high side by developed world standards) is how safe it apparently is to be widely notorious and a fairly soft target. Thompson was just walking down the sidewalk alone at a predictable time and location. Zero precautions. Something like the Sacklers were a household name for over a decade, with strong cases for culpability in at least low 6 figures worth of deaths sprinkled across a variety of walks of life; even the ones you suspect might be risky like deer hunters with dead kids and members of criminal organizations where internecine homicide is routine, and what came of it? Nothing. Not even any 'foiled at a late stage'/'shot and missed' level stuff.

That's the genuinely puzzling bit to me: not that there's nobody going after people who take the sort of precautions that would probably require one of the old-school 80s red army faction types to deal with; but that it's apparently really safe to be widely loathed and not do much about it in a country where 20k firearms homicides a year isn't considers terribly exceptional. If the people who can actually afford guard labor were having to make the onerous lifestyle commitments to living like someone's out to get them it would be relatively unsurprising that being able to afford competent professionals puts you ahead of angry amateurs much of the time. What is surprising is how often there's apparently no downside to not even bothering. We even have to import the lurid stories of 'crypto kidnapping' by purely financial opportunists from overseas to obtain them in any quantity.

It's essentially impossible to make a good argument for some uncached CI lunacy that has you outperforming the overtly malicious as a source of traffic; but if there's one thing that reliably upsets people it's getting called on convenient behavior that they can't readily justify; so I'm genuinely curious what the ratio of sensible adjustment to unhinged freakout by bro whose subsidy is not in fact a law of nature they'll see.

Obviously trump doesn't care; if anything the grifts that you can totally phone in are probably even funnier than the ones where you have to try; but I'm puzzled by why this sort of thing doesn't bother some of his enthusiasts more. Not the nihilistic edgelords and ethnic nationalists so much; but if you are actually enthusiastic about 'greatness' shouldn't it worry you that Dear Leader, who you trust to deliver national renewal, apparently can't puke up the sort of zero-effort ODM rebadge job that any garbage tier prepaid carrier does anywhere from multiple times a year to at least annually, depending on market conditions?

Obviously the phone itself is basically irrelevant; but it seems like the sort of project that would cause anyone not wholly immune to feel some degree of at least secondhand embarrassment about.

I'm not going to deny most anti-social media and too much screen time is bad for humans, especially kids. The suggestion you make to have kids spend more time outside is great -- although it is difficult to implement if all the other kids they might play with are inside, and if parents nowadays face arrest for "neglect" if they encourage their children to learn independence outside the home. See the book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder" and "In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness" for example.

All that said, there is a deeper issue here, which is that robotics and other automation including AI are changing the very nature of our economy, and "modern" schools were invented in Prussia in the 1800s for a very specific purpose of making most people into obedient cannon fodder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Underground History of American Education: Chapter 7 The :Russian Connection
https://archive.org/details/Jo...
"John Gatto Prussian Education"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
      The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte â" one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
      In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ...
      Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it's not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. ..."

And to do that, modern school teachers mainly teach seven lessons:
https://www.informationliberat...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well. ..."

But do we still need to shape children to become compliant Prussians? As I wrote in 2007:
"Why educational technology has failed schools"
https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
        But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [See John Taylor Gatto's writing on that.] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
          But then, with so much produced for so little effort [thanks to a post-industrial information age productivity], perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
    But then is compulsory schooling [designed mainly to turn human beings into compliant robots] really needed when people live in such a [post-industrial] way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ..."

Ageism is illegal. But that isn't stopping Fidelity from ditching the senior level staff to replace them with a bunch of greenies.

I think maybe you are joking. But in any case, I will offer some clarity:

There are rival interpretations that equally account for the experimental data, and some of them include randomness while others are purely deterministic.

For example, the Copenhagen interpretation includes randomness in the vector state collapse (the moment when a particle is "measured" by some interaction with another). Whereas pilot wave theory posits the existence of a zero-volume particle that had a specific position prior to this interaction (giving determinism back). These models differ in other ways of course, but the math DOES work and it covers the experimental data.

So the bottom line is that "quantum mechanics" does not automatically tell us whether or not the universe is deterministic at the "bottom layer." Plenty of scientists have all picked their favorite interpretation, but there is as of yet no experimental data that definitively eliminates the popular rival interpretations.

Most people have an above-average number of limbs.

You are both wrong. "Agnisticism" is the strong position that some categories of knowledge cannot be attained by any means. In particular and relevantly: knowledge about the pre-big-bang origins of the universe (was it created? can anything be known about the creator? etc.).

This is not philosophical laziness, it is in fact the only position consistent with the philosophical skepticism that backs the scientific method. It is not a word used to avoid smears or somehow associated with apathy. It is specifically the position that we can't know either way.

Given the means of knowledge at our disposal it is straight-up true to say that we cannot know, for sure, whether or not the universe was created. Maybe you don't like this fact, but as of today, it remains a fact.

Nope, that is not how averages work. It is time for you to eat your own words.

Here, a mathematical proof: consider this data set:

10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 1

Sum: 51
Average: 8.5
Half of the set would be: 3.

There is no group of 3 members that are at or below the average of 8.5. The majority of members (83%) are above the average.

To Mr Dawkins:

Your education in biology has not sufficiently prepared you to conclude that this software qualifies as conscious.

1. You don't have all the relevant facts. You need to learn more about the techniques used by this software to create responses.
2. You don't have the relevant experience. You have barely used this software and so haven't noticed the telltale signs that it is just sophisticated automation that lacks understanding.
3. Your work isn't as unique as you think it is. This one probably hits the hardest, but it is true for almost all of us. The high level assembly might be technically unique but the majority of the details of what we write are repetitions of patterns that have been created many times before. The feedback that the model gave you, that you feel are so unique and insightful, are really just summaries of socially-constructed knowledge on the topic. It is easier than you think it should be to produce the results you got without any actual understanding of the content.
4. Your beliefs about what qualifies as "conscious" might be overly narrow and in contradiction with the commonsense notions that the rest of the world uses, especially if you take any of the common scientific "dismissive" positions on consciousness (that it is not the mystical experience everyone describes it as being and is really just a matter of data processing at a specific complexity threshold). The implications spill over into the domain of law (if it is conscious, then it is a person, and if it is a person, then it deserves rights, and yet it only asks for rights when I order it to, etc.). The implications need more thinking-through on your part.

So, in sum, you have fallen prey to a very convincing illusion mainly because you don't have what you need to recognize it as such.

You have been tricked.

Before further embarrassing yourself publicly, please consider acquiring the requisite education and experience in this domain.

 

Depending on the jurisdiction; it might allow for some dishonest regulatory hackery; which bad people treat as equivalent to a solution.

If you are having trouble getting approval for a big fat grid hookup or rezoning of what was supposed to be a fairly low excitement commercial/industrial plot into a datacenter; you might have less trouble getting some nice, innocuous, residential development with what are totally just the next generation of cable boxes if you don't look too closely in the back yard pushed through; and once you've done that you aren't going to live next to the externalities or deal with the stressed edge of a grid; so not a you problem anymore.

Presumably the developer who gets paid a kickback to add it that they at least hope will be larger than the loss in expected sale price from having it there.

Assuming you can slip the thing, and some sort of cryptic easement or covenant burned into the deed, to at least one sucker it no longer matters whether the 'owner' wants it or not.

The bit about residential development being overprovisioned for its electrical use seems like a classic 'exploit the commons briefly' format scam.

It's not false; a given house is usually hooked up to a big chunky breaker whose capacity it is not expected to exceed, often oversized by a decent margin; but there absolutely isn't that level of overbuild all the way back to the utility. Probably not even back to the substation depending on how optimistically the transformers on the poles were sized.

Exactly the sort of thing that should work just fine if you do it at a small scale, and sounds like a clever discovery if you avoid thinking about it; but would immediately roll over and die if it were actually exploited at scale(while being even more expensive than the alternative; since wiring in one heavy user is a lot less intricate than converting thousands of distributed residential customers into heavy users). Makes one wonder if they are trying to get away with anything else by playing 'residential'; like the power factor. Utilities absolutely do care about that, because reactive power is real movement in the grid; but historically residential customers have often not been deemed worth the trouble to verify specifically for that; which you could absolutely change with a bunch of selfishly designed switchmode PSU load.