You can't count on voting records to mean anything, thanks to the "designated villains:" the politicians whose job it is to tank a law that a party wants to be on record as having voted for, but don't want to pass. We're watching this happen right now with votes on the Iran war. Democrats don't want them to pass. What they want is to be on the record as being against it and want Republicans to be on the record as supporting it, even though there is no chance they'll do anything to stop it if they get the power to do so.

Both sides play games like this, with the end result being that only laws that have the support of large donors having any real chance of passing. Who votes for and who votes against is always carefully calculated to let vulnerable politicians give the appearance of supporting things constituents support, while never needing to support those things in actual fact.

Wow, Apple, screwing over a partner? Who ever could have seen this coming?

I don't understand why anyone would ever partner on Apple on anything. They are notorious for screwing over their partners at this point. There's even a term for it, "Sherlocking." People seem to have forgotten that Apple's "privacy" stance originated as Steve Jobs not wanting to share any of the data "Apple owned" with anyone else.

In theory I think it was more energy efficient, giving them a very slightly longer battery life. Plus there were probably supply chain reasons for it too, such as allowing them to stop making the older chip while continuing to make the Vision Pro.

The Vision Pro has always struck me as a device in search of a purpose. I think Apple was hoping someone else would figure out what it was useful for an then swoop in and Sherlock them, but so far, no one really has.

It is a vast majority. The midterms won't go like people on the left expect. There's one group that's hated more than just about anyone else in polls of Americans: Democrats. They manage to be less popular than Trump and less popular than Republicans.

People may not be terribly happy with Trump and the way things are currently going, but it won't take too much to remind them how much worse things were when Democrats were in control.

Despite his current negative approval rating, Trump manages to be one of the most popular politicians in America right now, even with a net negative approval rating. That mostly because Americans just do not like their current politicians than Trump, but ultimately, there's a reason Trump won in a landslide. Americans may not really like Trump, but they loathe the alternatives.

Not to mention that the first thing any gamer does when they get a game is turn all that artistic crap off, both to get a better framerate, but also to make the game easier to see. The fewer "artistic effects" on the screen, the easier it is to see what's happening. The idea that gamers care about "artistic intent" is hilarious if you've ever seen any gamer community.

It is called the Department of War. Hilariously enough the rest of the Fortune article uses the correct name everywhere else, it's only the quoted sentence that misnames it.

There's a reason I phrased it "appearance of working" - you're assuming that enough people will be able to tell the difference between "working right" and "not working right." As long as it looks to be working properly for the majority of use cases, that's good enough. For most of these tasks, it isn't a simple binary between "doesn't work" and "does work," there's a whole spectrum.

In fact, I would argue this ultimately makes AI more dangerous, because it does a very good job of appearing to work while failing in ways a human doesn't.

Sure, probably, assuming it fails badly enough, which it might. But you're assuming "short term" won't be years, and that it fails in ways that make it clear profit was lost. It's pretty easy to assume that if a computer made a mistake, a human would have as well, especially if you're the one who put the computer in charge.

But that's the thing: AI doesn't have to work particularly well to displace hundreds of thousands of white collar jobs. It just has to create the appearance of working, while being cheaper.

It's already there in places where, even at minimum wage, it wouldn't be cost-effective to have a person perform the task, but an AI can do it cheaply enough. Even if it doesn't do it particularly well. That it can do it at all is enough.

Jobs are going to be given to AI, even if the AI does a worse job of it, simply because it's cheaper. The assumption will be that AIs will only ever get cheaper and more productive. The same assumption isn't being made of humans.

It's not in the Slashdot blurb because it's not in the Ars Technica blurb. The only reason we know it's Benj Edwards is due to his posts on social media. So I disagree: it shouldn't be in the Slashdot blurb, because it hasn't been verified by, ironically enough, real journalists. Once it's on the record, then Slashdot can post that information, but right now, it hasn't been reported by any official source.

Discord won't be. Some random vendor they use will be.

They're outsourcing the verification process to third party vendors. In fact, they already do:

That happened with a vendor they contracted customer support to. Discord is happy to point out that none of their systems were compromised. (This is, sadly, very common: a lot of companies "don't store personal data" but instead contract with third parties to do it for them. And, you should also note, no one seems to know who this "third party vendor" is. Likely a small company that can safely shield their clients from legal liability and fold and reincorporate as a "new company" as needed.)

As these third party vendors specialize in "age verification service" via storing face scans and IDs, you can be sure that they're already a huge target for nation-state attackers. But Discord can truthfully claim that their systems were never breached. Just the third party vendors that they chose and that they'll require you to use if you want to access everything Discord offers.

My take is that Apple is finally admitting that Siri is useless as a voice UI and that they're going to let you use other voice UIs.

Of course, you're still right, because Apple's implementation won't let you replace Siri, but instead require you to launch the specific app that provides the alternative voice control. But it may be worth it to get a voice UI that is functional rather than Siri.

I didn't bother reading the article, but I did do something else: I looked up "Solid protocol" and tried to see what it is.

Originally I compared this to ATproto, but according to the Solid website itself, "Solid is a file system for the Web". And that seems to be about all it does, it provides an API for storing data. It has mechanisms for handling encryption keys, meaning that in theory whoever runs the "Solid Pod" where your data is stored can't read it. But you've basically created a standardized method of accessing OneDrive or Dropbox or any other number of cloud storage providers at that point.

This feels like a whole bunch of API specifications that simply implement a cloud storage service. Sure, all your data may be in "one place" and in theory you can then download it all and move it somewhere else, but in practice you'd still be accessing it through other services that presumably can read it. Assuming this is supposed to be able to provide social media services, these third parties would still be able to determine what you see, whether for advertising or more nefarious purposes.

Again, from the Solid website: "The Solid ecosystem is built on a simple but powerful idea: separating applications from the data they create." Why would applications agree to do that? Even if they do, how you can you be sure they don't save a copy? Even if they don't save a copy, how do you prevent them from using the data that passes through them to track you?

This seems to be a whole lot of added complexity that doesn't really solve anything.

I have to agree. I don't think we've seen a game that definitively failed due to using AI. Deciding not to release a game due to "backlash" isn't the same thing as releasing it and watching it fail. (Although maybe the linked article lists games that released and failed due to use of generative AI. I don't know: it's one of those articles that will only load the first three sentences and blocks reader mode.)

What I've noticed is that more and more games are attempting to enter the whole "continuous revenue stream" space, AKA "live service games." And these are failing because that market is effectively full. Once you've sunk hundreds of dollars into a game, you don't want to move to a "new" game that's designed to get you to do that again. People want to keep using their Fortnite skins. They don't want to move to some clone, even if it is "better" in some way.

The cancelled game in the summary was, according to people who played it, simply a bad game. The backlash against Larian and Expedition 33 doesn't appear to have affected sales at all. There's an argument to be made that Expedition 33 isn't "really" an indie game in the sense of a "small studio" in that it was a multi-million dollar budget game that was made by what's being called a "AA" studio. Taking the "game of the year" award away over "AI" appears to be a way of side-stepping that debate and giving "game of the year" to a small studio.

To the extent that there is any real backlash affecting sales, it appears to be over rising prices more than anything else. There is evidence that Nintendo increasing the price of their games did hurt sales. There's evidence gamers are sick and tired of "always online team shooters" as there have been quite a few failures in that space. There's plenty of evidence of a vocal crowd mad about generative AI in the gaming space, but no evidence - yet - that it's affected people's buying decisions.

This is a plan intended to kill ad blockers. One of the major issues advertisers have right now is that they can't guarantee that their code will be executed as intended. A lot of ad systems now have anti-blocker technology that checks to make sure an ad loaded successfully, and if it didn't or if the dimensions are wrong or if the element is messed with, throw up a page-wide dialog to block access to the site. (Or do what Slashdot does at present, throw you into an infinite alert() loop.)

But that requires JavaScript to work. Block that JavaScript, and you block the ability to block ad-blockers.

Add in things to insure "integrity" of JavaScript delivered to the client, and you break that. No more blocking scripts, no more blocking ads - or at least, no more blocking the scripts detecting if you're blocking ads.

If every person using an AI assistant becomes a mechanical turk for sending data back upstream to the AI provider as a means to bypass robots.txt that's what isn't cool. Local usage for the benefit of that user should be ok, but not the follow on effects.