So we're giving up on CAPTCHA then, are we?

And the only alternative we can come up with is literal ID verification?

Something tells me that we skipped a step - i.e. a better CAPTCHA.

It's basically plugging the output of ChatGPT into a sudo terminal on your machine with write-access to all your data.

It's quite literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

But then, even Slashdot are running obnoxious "generate apps with AI" ads in massive bars on my screen, and I paid to disable advertising and have ad-blockers.

What could go wrong?

LLMs have no business model.

That's why OpenAI is trillions in the hole, with no profitable tier of product in sight.

It's a cute toy that costs far too much to generate and maintain, and relies on basically stealing the data of the entire Internet to keep itself up-to-date and vaguely relevant, and the lawsuits on that have barely started yet.

And if an LLM was actually "AI"... it wouldn't need customers, as such. It could be left to wander off onto the Internet, given a credit card number and it would: set up its own company supplying goods that it obtains from others, answer customer queries, set up a fivr account and respond to every job on there, sell its own unique products, design its own 3D models for sale or production, trade on the stock market, bet on sports, or whatever... it would literally... just earn money for its owners. Directly. No need for a user to ask it to do so and then to give the result back to the user. Just... do the things that would directly earn it money.

Give it $100,000, a credit card, an Internet connection and... leave it to its own devices. It's "intelligent", right? And it has capabilities and capacities far in excess of any human, so we're told? So it could literally just start up a fake company, fill in the paperwork, register for tax, import goods, have a courier handle them, put them into a warehouse, set up a website, sell the product to the public, have a courier collect them from the warehouse, sell the product direct. Nobody would ever have to know that it wasn't human, and it could join the dots and just do what humans the world over do to make money directly.

If AI was any good... then IT would be the next billionaire.

https://www.sandlawnd.com/dui-...

(I don't understand the odd wording at the start of this quoted paragraph because it sounds like it's being set up for a contradiction when it's not)

"While the United States may seem like we have high numbers for DUI accidents every year, we actually are the third worst country when it comes to drunk drivingâ"which obviously isnâ(TM)t great. In 2015, South Africa was ranked number one as the worst country when it comes to drunk driving. With 58% of their fatal accidents involving alcohol in some way, they sit high above the second and third seats. The second seat goes to Canada, at 34% and the third to the United States at 31%. Countries on the lower end of the spectrum include Germany (9%), Russia (9%), India (5%), and China (4%)."

FYI, I've been on Slashdot nearly 25 years (maybe more? I can't remember).

You can read my FULL post history. Hell, I was a "paying subscriber". I used to run Slackware as a desktop for 10 years. Then I went to XP, then 7, then 10, and now... I'm back to Linux. Precisely because of... Windows 11, Microsoft's shovelling of shite into my OS, and increased frustration with it.

I manage Windows professionally, thousands of clients, and... at home... I'm now entirely Linux. Would you like an inventory (but I really gave one in the post above)? And I'm Linux BECAUSE of modern Windows. I literally went DOS, Linux, Windows, Linux, Windows, Linux over ~30 years. I did an awful lot of work on a single-floppy Linux router distro called Freesco. I ported code to the GP2X, a Linux-based handheld that sold mostly in Korea.

And now... I've gone back to Linux, the December just gone, because I've had enough of fighting with Windows 11 professionally and Copilot, Edge, taskbars and all the other nonsense necessary to make the OS do what I want to do. So I bought a Framework laptop. You can see posts from me going back a year or so talking about getting one. You can see YEARS of posts about the Steam Deck and, before it, my desire to have the Steam Machine/Box concept work better than it did going back to the original time of release of SteamOS back then.

I got my laptop for Christmas. I installed Linux on it, day one. I have then been praising it on here, and other tech sites I frequent, on my same username.

Tell me... how is that "made up"?

"You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful..."

Yeah, you and I are not on the same page.

Why does America have 150,000 drivers who can't be trusted to not drink and drive?

And why are they allowed a licence?

Well, I like to think that I'm a tiny part of the reason for this sudden change of "heart" (yeah, right).

Because Windows stopped being an OS and started becoming a walking advertisement for products I have zero intention to ever use, or even entertain the idea of their use, tying me into Bing, into Copilot, into Microsoft accounts, etc. etc. etc.

So I ditched my last MS OS before Christmas.

So far, after a tiny period of adjustment to "modern" Linux, the impact has been:

- Utter boredom.

Things "just work". They work fast. They do what I ask. They don't argue. They don't pressure me. They don't get in my way. Updates sit quietly and wait for me, then install with the smallest impact possible, and in extremis require a maximum of 1 reboot, on my schedule, with my permission, no forcing of it.

The OS... is basically invisible to me.

Which is how it should always have been and how it used to be in the past. It shouldn't be any more than a glorified application launcher.

There aren't ten thousand background services sucking up most of the RAM and CPU, programs can't just lob stuff wherever they like, admin rights are only necessary for justifiable admin tasks, even Windows applications running on Linux just... work better. They're forced to play nicely. And when I do have a (rare) problem, I can kill a program and it... dies. Like stone dead. Gone. Goodbye. Instantly.

Plus, when I move 10,000 small files, it doesn't take a century to perform. Sure, there are some thing I'd change, but I'd say the OS has come 98% my way, and I've had to go 2% its way, which is in stark contrast to how Windows has ever worked.

My use of the computer is also: 99.9% my applications. 0.1% fighting with my OS / launcher / window management.

MS have a long way to go to get anywhere close to that. I've let it creep and creep and creep over the years for the "convenience" of having Windows applications and - thanks Valve! - Proton means that I'm not going to suffer that any more.

I now have a machine that runs my entire Steam library, at full speed, better than Windows could ever manage (I have already found half a dozen games that simply don't work on Windows any more and which "just work" on Linux/Wine/Proton without any tweaks, even).

My house is now entirely Linux. RPi's for "servers" and services, Steam Deck (which was worth the money just to prove the concept was now viable - I always wanted a Steam Box but they were just too expensive and not ready at the time), and now a Framework Laptop (because it officially supports clean Linux but also... because it does things that a laptop should do... like just let me change bits however I like without ten thousand screws and bending the mainboard to get it out).

Newsflash - you're not an amateur with that kind of kit running around.

Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.

No, you seem to think that this is about 4chan, rather than about what happens when websites don't comply.

Nobody gives a fuck about 4chan. What they want is it to be used as an example of what happens when companies that DO trade in the EU/UK don't comply.

So it's a fine. A court case. A larger fine. Another court case. Blocked.

Nobody cares if 4chan is still running the day after that. Or a year. Or a decade. What they will notice is "oh fuck, you can't just get to them in the UK/EU, so our UK//EU customers are going to be entirely locked out if we don't comply".

Which, everyone with a brain was able to know already so they paid up, or put in ID verification, or implemented a simple Geo-block.

But 4chan think that is magically doesn't apply to them and that blocking them in the UK will have no effect, right? Good. Perfect test case, with no victims. Block them. They won't care. But they will be blocked in the UK. System working as designed. And other companies that DO have revenue streams in the UK will then go "Hell, they blocked 4chan in the UK, and they don't even operate in the UK, why wouldn't they block us?"

The UK and all EU countries operate block lists.

If 4chan is found to be supplying content "illegally" (by local definition, not "US-imposed international law"), they can be added to the block list.

Then all credit card, donation, advertising, supply, datacentres, servers, online services, etc. based in the UK... will be forced to stop supplying services to them. ISPs will be forced to block them.

Well, not even forced. ISPs already have to abide by a blocklist maintained by the Internet Watch Foundation (a UK quango). 4chan will just end up being added to that. ISPs will suck down the list once an hour or whatever they're already doing. 4chan will be blocked.

Sure... there'll be ways around it. Of course.

But to the average user, 4chan will be gone from the Internet from the UK. Which ... perfectly achieves what the UK wants. Nobody cares if 4chan goes bust or not, or loses all its money from the loss of advertising - there are plenty of other countries. That's not the aim.

The aim is "this website didn't comply with UK law" - "Oh, look, you can't access it from the UK without having to jump through so many hoops that you basically have to have deliberate intent to do so".

Bam. Aim achieved. And now you can see all the people trying to access a site that's deemed illegal through it deciding of its own accord that it doesn't want to implement age-related measures to a site with content deemed unsuitable without age-verification.

You just put a massive target on all your visitors. You just lost all your UK revenue. And the UK achieved its aim much like any other country that doesn't want you to view a website (the US does it for pirate and emulation ROM sites - and even enlists Microsoft/Google's help to do so!), China does it for all kinds of things, the Middle East countries do it for all kinds of things, every country... has some kind of blocklist like that).

It's like a DMCA takedown. It isn't going to stop them existing. It is going to make it much harder for people to stumble across that content, strip it from search engines, make it harder to use UK services to provide that site (if they do), make it impossible to take UK payments (for advertising or from users), and so on.

It's a really quite significant hurdle. 4chan can laugh it off if they want. Maybe it will have little effect on their site as a whole. That's not the point. That's not why they're doing it. They're not doing it to bring about the downfall of 4chan. They're doing it because the UK have rules about websites, and the websites that don't follow them won't be easily accessible from the UK. That's it. And that's precisely the outcome they'll get.

Honestly, it'll take about 10 minutes to add 4chan to the IWF lists and then every major ISP in the country will automatically start blocking them because... their systems have to. Then they put in a court order to stop people providing service to 4chan (e.g. credit card companies, Paypal - a regulated bank in the UK - , advertisers, server hosts, domain name hosts, etc.) Outcome achieved.

Will you still be able to get to 4chan? Sure. If you want to pay for a VPN or jump through hoops. Nobody ever claimed otherwise. Will anyone care? No. Will other companies that were thinking of not complying with the same laws think twice about just ignoring them? Hell, yes, especially if they have any customers or services running in the UK.

Models become out of date very quickly. Haven't you noticed? There's even a conversation about "if we were to only train on, say, data up to 1900, would AI be able to derive Einstein's theories" (the answer is "hell no", by the way).

The models are huge, proprietary, and have already "stopped learning" by the time you get them. They were trained on STUPENDOUS amounts of illegal data that, without a company willing to gather, process and take liability for, in the future you will find hard to ever gather again. Retraining those models with that newer data, if you wanted to pay to collect it all, is THE MOST EXPENSIVE bit of AI... people aren't going to do that for free.

Yeah, sure, you might be able to throw a small piece of data at an OS model and get something back but... nowhere on the scale of current AI which is consuming the world's electricity, water, datacentre space, processing power, GPU supply, RAM etc. etc. etc. to the point that ordinary people have noticed the costs added because of that, even if they can't understand where they came from.

There is no way that, having set up your company reliant on this tech, you're going to be able to sustain maintenance of that model to be sufficiently useful any cheaper than just hiring a bunch of programmers at the top market rate.

Yesterday I was doing something and I stumbled onto Whatsapp in the process (who I have a pending data protection complaint with) and for the first time ever it asked me for feedback.

Specifically about Meta, not Whatsapp. They seemed very concerned with their image, and especially their image in AI and VR fields. Had I heard of this? What do I think of that? Where would I rate Meta for this? and so on. About 20-something questions.

I can safely say that I answered absolutely honestly and yet... every answer was "don't know, never heard of it, never tried it, don't care, awful reputation, nope, etc.".

I think they're starting to realise that they've overreached into a dangerous and pointless area, spending countless billions on that VR and AI nonsense that they have, and got nowhere.

And I had to have a little chuckle because like almost everyone, I've ever only used 2 of their services. Facebook. And Whatsapp. And I used Facebook to... talk to people I know. And I used Whatsapp to... talk to people I know. And for both services, I've basically stopped a long time ago because... the people I know don't use it to talk any more, and actually most of the Facebook service is nothing to do with other people any more, it's just a Reddit-like constant-infinite-scroll of the same regurgitated "engagement" tripe, but without the quality or filtering. My Whatsapp has a status which is just all my other ways to be contacted, because nobody really uses it.

I love the way that someone in Meta is trying to prove "Hey, people do want/use our AI/VR services" via surveys that I've never had before, while actually even their CORE services are dying through their completely worthless management of the original products.