And the answer as usual is AI slop.

This has been going on for ages and used for spam and cybercrime and they didn't care.

The reason it's a problem now is AI companies are buying access to your TV so they can use your clean IP address to go scraping data from websites that are blocking them.

Don't get me wrong it's still a good thing that these are getting banned but they have been around apparently for quite some time and none of the TV manufacturers gave a shit. Probably because the problem wasn't big enough until the AI swap bots got involved.

This is exactly why I keep my television tuned 24/7 to Fox News Network. There is absolutely nothing you can do to make a TV dumber than that!

AI slop posts farming karma so they can do scams and political post floods during an election season mean all of the discussion on any of the hobbyist forums is basically garbage. You get the same low effort obvious bot posts pretty much everywhere. Besides that there's the usual outrage porn all over the place designed to get you all angry so you will engage.

All that stuff was always a bit of a problem but the AI chat bots have made it so much worse.

Because everyone should be able to interact with the government without using a proprietary software package. That's why. Accessing government resources is necessary to function in society and we shouldn't put that behind a paywall.

Also basic services are best handled by the government. Things like water and electricity. What you would call infrastructure. At this point something is simple as open formats qualify as part of our infrastructure.

It takes a ridiculous amount of crime for a police officer to qualify as doing a bad thing. Police are more or less above the law unless what they do is so cartoonishly evil that it triggers moral indignation and makes the news.

We're going to see Mass automation and large scale unemployment because of it. Those people aren't going to eat a bullet. They're going to have to find a new way to survive. For some of them it's going to be crime, for some of them they will be organized into militaries and start wars and some of them will put the nose to the grindstone to survive and come for your job. Maybe they won't do it as well but your boss doesn't care he just wants cheap labor. With a complete lack of competition in the markets these days your boss doesn't have to care if he has a substandard product...

I guess what I'm saying is no man is an island and you can't just keep ignoring other people's problems because they're going to make problems for you whether you like it or not. And no, having a stash of firearms isn't going to help. There are millions of these people and you don't have enough ammo to shoot them all.

So it doesn't take long to get them on the street but there is a metric fuck ton of additional training much of which is military training that the police are given. It's often an extremely low quality and dubious value and clearly intended to line the pockets of some well connected asshole. But the cities have to do it because if they don't then they will piss off the police Union and lose their re-election campaigns.

So a typical police officer has several hundred thousand dollars worth of training poured into them. Now most of that is either worthless or nothing you want to be training a police officer to do but it's still going to get done. So cash strapped cities look at that and look at a recently disgraced police officer showing up for a job that they look the other way.

Largely due to corruption means they're basically untouchable. It doesn't matter if you get caught doing something hideously illegal another subdivision of your city will hire you because they don't want to have to spend the money training somebody else.

Given the limitless military budgets to spend on spying yeah I'm sure it would be.

As always we can't give food to people who are hungry but when it comes to coming up with ever increasingly intricate ways to hurt them we've always got the money for that...

Oh and I'm sure companies like Planitir are interested in this technology. Dystopian bullshit like this is a side effect of giving too much money to a handful of psychopaths. Outside of the occasional mega celebrity it's basically impossible to have people that rich who aren't psychopaths because if you're not a psychopath you stop somewhere around 50 to 100 million.

If you ever want to see open source software and open formats take off then the way you do it is you get the government to do it. People then have to get software to interoperate with the government and by doing that the software spreads. You also need to break up the monopolies and that means you need politicians who will enforce antitrust law. Because those monopolies are powerful and they will sabotage any attempt to get your open formats used by the government.

It's a political problem and one that requires politicians that are not openly corrupt like the current batch most countries have. Unfortunately corrupt politicians are often very good at being likeable because they have lots and lots of billionaire cash and there's all sorts of little ways to push people's buttons to get them to vote for them like moral panics (Google it if you don't know what that is).

That's kind of the point. This is a headline grabbing piece of bullshit for you to engage with as content. It is not the final word or even a serious word on the topic. It is meant to be a useful piece of information for somebody who might do more research on the topic that is all.

One of the major problems we have is that we don't have good science communication because everything depends on eyeballs and clicks so that you can get attention and put advertisements in front of people. So a study like this which is really just somebody collecting a bunch of data for somebody else who might be doing work in the field gets blown way out of proportion by the headlines

That's how scientists talk. You don't see news stories about well understood research because that's boring and it's not headline Worthy. You see news stories about early stage research that has some findings. Those kind of things get a lot of attention from your eyeballs and a lot of clicks and engagement which is what you want if you're running a website that depends on advertising which is most websites.

The issue here is that you haven't been taught these things. All the little tricks that go into making newspapers and magazines and whatnot. We really should teach journalism as a mandatory class with an emphasis on those nasty little tricks. But even if you take a journalism class in high school it's mostly going to be about ethics and process and not about the actual work that goes on or how to avoid being manipulated by propaganda.

I suspect if we put serious effort into preventing people from being fooled by propaganda the billionaires would step in and shut it down. Get toward also cause all sorts of problems with various fundamentalist religions. One of the big complaints among parents is they send their kids off to college and they come back atheists. Or at least diests

Microsoft has had dog shit software in the past. But it wasn't necessarily because of evil it was incompetence. There is some problems with Microsoft Office where the format is intentionally overly complex to make it difficult to reverse engineer and other bits of nastiness like that. But for the most part when an entire operating system from Microsoft sucks like Vista or 8 it's because Microsoft screwed the pooch by accident.

Typically Microsoft intentionally bloats their operating systems so that oems have something to sell new computers for. That's a long standing and not terribly secret thing and it's why every new iteration of windows gobbles is much RAM and GPU and CPU as they can. But that wasn't really a factor with Windows 11 or even Windows 10 because we had just gotten to the point where computers were fast enough.

With Windows 11 it's the spyware. It's grinding the computer to a halt so they can monitor what you're doing to train their AI bullshit to replace you at your job. It's also a fuck ton of nasty DRM and other associated nastiness so that corporations can spy on you and control your computer. This makes your computer increasingly unusable. That's a relatively new thing.

And you learned economics from a handful of right wing propaganda Mills.

You would have been better off going with Saturday morning cartoons. Scrooge McDuck had a lot of money but in the magic world of duckburg it never actually hurt the general population. In the real world Scrooge McDuck would have been more like his namesake causing massive social problems from his greed and lust for power and money

Or rather who that matters actually cares?

Return to office was about commercial real estate property values so that a couple of billionaires who are heavily invested in it didn't lose their investments. Every single credible study has shown that work from home improves productivity and is universally beneficial because it gets people off the roads so if you are somebody who genuinely has to go into the office you have less traffic and cleaner air.

Nobody is going to care whether employees are happy or not anymore. Not broadly. Automation has been devouring jobs since the late 70s and by all accounts the pace is going to accelerate. So employers don't need to be nice to you anymore.