People expect a driver to be just that: a driver, that provides whatever is needed to make full use of the device, and nothing else. Maybe MS ought to be a little bit more like Apple, set some strict policies, and police them.

The cost of mitigation isn't that large even. Way back when, I helped build a backup for a system holding critical data that had a far greater transaction volume than the typical cadastre ever will. The system was pretty basic and cheap to build and operate, basically a daily incremental backup written on immutable media, along with a printout of each transaction. This was before ransomware was even a thing, though hacking was already a concern and part of the reason the customer wanted this system (the printout was a regulatory requirement). These guys were serious, they even wrote procedures for restoring the system from this backup, and practiced those procedures.

Free speech includes lying.

They are morons, yes, but the "AI" providers also set them up for failure. Default configurations matter, and these "AI" tools are given way too many privileges out of the box. Presumably because that makes them easier to set up and hook into existing infrastructure in order to be more immediately useful and/or "powerful".

It's the fucking binary browser plugin security nightmare all over again, but with "AI" this time around. And just like you could harden your Internet Explorer to make it less susceptible to ActiveX malware and whatnot, you can set these LLM-fueled spicy autocompleters up to not be able to nuke your production database or whatever, too. But in both cases these precautions make the tools less useful and/or more difficult to use, so that's just not going to happen in the vast majority of cases.

There's something real nice about having a single, physical album and having to take the effort to put it in the player. There are hundreds of great CD players on eBay too. There's an investment in putting the CD in and experiencing an entire album. I think we're hardwired to understand that, and it can't be replaced by digital streaming, no matter how it's programmed.

> He understands that ideologues only make technical endeavors worse, and he's is correctly inviting people to prove him wrong.

Actually, from what I've seen, we *SHOULD* make technical endeavors worse. If they were significantly worse we might not have invented AI in the first place, and that would be a better world.

Oh they know all right... They can sense weaknesses like that.

That's the thing: these OpenAI things are basically Alexa +. But what's the plus? What compelling new features are being added that justify buying a new device, and paying for a bunch of AI data centers to make it work? I've got voice control for my smart home working cloudless already, and I rarely use it; I prefer silent interactions. Same for asking questions, I prefer using a regular search engine, where a quick peek at the returned links can give me an indication of how accurate the AI summary is (sometimes it is, often it isn't).

Merit should always consider strictly value.

Wages and career prospects are a factor in what students chose to major in:
- Business and Finance: relatively easy courses, excellent career prospects and very good pay. Good social status too
- STEM: work long and hard to graduate. Wages are decent but in general there's not a lot of upward mobility (unless you go into management). And no one looks up to engineers.
- Academia: unless you love what you do, forget about it, because you're not going to get anything else out of it. Not even tenure, these days.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

Not saying that this company is not legit, but most of these startups looking for investors claim to have some special doohickey or exotic process. To reassure investors: we are unique, no one will easily copy us, and even if we can't make it work there might still be a valuable patent in the company.

Well, if you need cat piss, I got you covered.

The app receives a token when you present your ID, and uses that token in subsequent age verifications, it does not need to contact the central authority each time. The scheme and app are open source, so you can verify what data is communicated when and with whom.