The problem is that you're focusing on the tech and - over time - you WILL lose track and get tired of the tech, because it happens to literally everyone. I'm extremly techy. But there are some things that are entirely in the realm of tech where I think "Oh, come on, this is nonsense, why can't I just do it the old way?!" (e.g. systemd, which I find to be the universal bane of anything I want to achieve).

That will come to us all. We're already doing it. Why do I have to ID myself to access this website? Why do I have to jump through MFA hoops just to sign in to my email? etc. etc. etc. All with good intention, good reason, and with purpose, but increasingly we, the users, will get frustrated with it all while the 20-somethings will just treat it as normal because they grew up doing it, and then get frustrated with whatever comes after when they are 50-somethings.

The tech is not the problem here. The problem here is sheer, utter, idiocy. Maybe in the form of someone far outside the normal mental bounds being solely in control of their finances (for example), but idiocy nonetheless.

And the cure isn't tech-training. The cure is "being a suspicious / paranoid bastard". I'm a suspicious / paranoid bastard. Good luck trying to scam me because even when there are legitimate processes, I am happy to just stop and say "Nope. I'm not going to do that." Look at the nonsense in your posts and the OP - buying Amazon gift cards, buying gold and giving it to a courier, etc. etc. etc.

It doesn't matter how sweet-talking someone is... I ain't gonna do that. Letting people take over my computer remotely? I don't even let people I know and love TOUCH my computer (and they know that). Nobody touches my computer. Nobody logs into it but me. Nobody knows that password. And no, even my kid, doesn't get to "just browse" on it, nor on my phone. I have other devices if they want to do that.

Scam-prevention isn't about learning the latest tech and keeping up to the date, it's about being an entirely suspicious bastard about everything. It's why my dad distrusts electronic transactions. He'll do them but you know what he does? He gets me or my brother to CHECK first. Others in my family have been scammed - credit card cloning in restaurants (good, luck, that card doesn't leave my sight... and, yes, I've had that argument with restaurants and pubs... card reader behind the bar? Okay, then bring it here? No? Then I come there? No... oh look you CAN do it in front of me but you just didn't want to...), mum accidentally signed up to a new electricity company on the doorstep (but UK contract regulations mean we shut that down once we heard about it), I've had a guy at my door trying to insert a key into a pre-pay electric meter in my house who said - explicitly - that he was "from your electricity supplier". He wasn't. He was from a rival, committing fraud on my doorstep, trying to force me to switch supplier to him without me noticing. And me, being the suspicious bastard, refused to let him do so, and warned the rest of the street (the police came along eventually, shut them down, and asked for evidence, but I didn't have any CCTV recording audio near the porch or I would have nailed him to the wall). He looked all official in his little hi-vis, and they were blanketing the whole street the same way... and people fell for it.

My dad REGULARLY asks me if "that was you on the texting again the other night" - because he gets texts with the "Hi Dad, I lost my phone and have no money...." He never responds but he always checks in with me afterwards just to make sure. And I think him realising how often it's NOT ME makes it clear just how widespread scams are so he's even more suspicious.

We just need to teach people to be suspicious and make official processes official enough that they are NOT suspicious. This requires absolutely no fancy tech or tech-training at all.

It just needs people to think "What the fuck am I doing buying Amazon gift cards to pay my tax bill?"

Dumbest take ever. Xbox runs Windows. Xbox games are sold for Windows. Xbox can not be separated from Windows, period.

This legal system is a shit joke.

It's designed to fail under the weight of its own bullshit.

Woha! a tech firm overstated their position on privacy and spied on users! I guess it is a day ending in 'y'

People's expectation have shifted a lot too. Having a cookout with another family be it in your own back yard or at the park on one of those nice grills the park service dutifully spends our tax dollars maintaining but (sadly) I hardly see family use much these days.

It works for all ages depending on the people involved you might need to add $6 bottle of wine, or $3 beach ball or package of water guns; but all told you can still have pretty nice little party for 6-8 people for $60 between you.

A lot of it is people just don't want too, and yeah maybe because they think they'd rather stream another movie. I don't know.

Maybe...

However the previous generation certainly could have a novel in their back pocket, a magazine, a comic book, flipped the radio on, etc. It is not like Apple invented personal entertainment in 2007.

Something IS different about they way interact with smart phone and related technologies. Centuries, of anthropological study says humans are social animals. It is hard just go whoops they must have all been wrong, turns out we just did not have good enough portable video games and mobiles, and people just spent time together because they hadn't anything better to do!

Obviously the only answer is we will have to do the science somehow ultimately. Still I find a hypothesis that we just did not have something more stimulating than talking to uncle Marty about old dodge pickup grandad "forced" him to drive in high-school is the reason we did not previously tend to all retire to our own corner as readily.

It sure seems like we are getting 'something' out of these connected devices that meeting or making us feel our needs are being meet.

Microsoft will never appreciate your mod abuse, clown

I haven't made poor choices though. I have happy healthy child, and a great life thank you very much. I think I'd pretty much do it all over again save for a stock trade or 10.

That said people like you are making that harder for everyone else to achieve. Why, I don't know; you're addicted porn, you own Alphabet stock, who knows.

Nobody is forcing you to do shit, we are talking about regulating what are in fact dangerous products; like we do everything else. The simple truth is this, if you think it is reasonably to say you have to be say 18 to buy a box the .380 rounds or a bottle of Rye, then it is equally reasonable to say we should be will to make device manufactures keep the likes of youtube under the black covers.

Have you tried it?

Parenting in a world where kids face unlimited temptation to consume things that you believe are harmful to them paired with near instance access all over the damn place is pretty hard.

In ever previous era, with every previous vice society has agreed to put at least some barriers in front of children and to do so in a mostly if not perfect way. Most 8 year olds cannot simply go get a case a beer anytime they want, and if they do there is ample opportunity for parents to find out about. You know if your two young child is running with inappropriate people and you either do something or don't.

Same thing with other things like smoking, hazardous materials, etc. The book shop won't let your kid into the adults only section...
but here is the important but, you CAN still let your child take their bicycle and pocket money and go to the c-store, bookstore, etc and get some candy and comics/pokemon cards etc. They can go an interface with the world in a safe way.

Now try this online... At best you get parental controls on the platform, which may or may not reflect what YOU the parent feels is or is not fit for your child, but rather what someone at Meta decided was fine. Things like youtube-kids, ok but nothing stops them from just watching as a guest. Sure you can lock down their phone, but you have control over the library PC, their friend bobby's tablet, etc. Thanks to 'privacy and security' which we all know is really just about DRM you can't implement your own parental controls without entirely breaking the web and apps, and smart devices.

You are left with accepting mega corps get to put whatever they want in front of your kids eyes, infantalizing them entirely and/or never letting them touch anything electronic without your shoulder surfing.

The status quo is an should be treated as unacceptable. The privacy and expression concerns should be the problems to solve rather than reasons to toss our hands up. Anyone just saying 'parent harder' should should get busted in the teeth!

Everyone caught onto the fact that it's nonsense that's nothing to do with AI.

I am not sure I agree. Strong typing prevents a lot of errors in large complex projects. It adds a lot of complexity to small and simple projections.

I still think Visual Basic was and IS just fine. The problem is that people tried to use it not for the simple intake forms, business calculators / quoting tools, "scripting" on top of ISV built COM enabled apps, it was designed to be and tried to do stuff like make Enterprise scale server applications with it, and usually it was people with previous experience consisting of writing those little calculator and intake form apps and little else.

Well-loved? How many people were using it? Follow the chain of links and you'll see they never actually say.

I long ago lost track of the number of times I've needed to use the command line to fix something on Windows. You weren't doing anything very complicated if you never did.

This idea is purely another example of 'this time it will be different' its bogus and would not play out anything like the way you think it would. Actually it would probably bring down that Empire (which is what I think you really hope for).

Go look at the history of Soviet healthcare. Sure there was a time it was envy of the world but it did not stay that way, because Socialism and Workers Unions turn everything they touch into shit.. Let me give you the really short version. You might end up with a paid for MD to stand over you but you're still going to die because he won't have access to diagnostic tools needed to treat you let a lone a sterile syringe to use.

The SSR managed to do things like mass vaccination (mind you they had to important everything from capitalist economies to do it) but the standards of care and the technical capability absolutely stagnated at 1950s levels. At best you could hope a government run system to trap us where we are at. You will never see cure for cancer, never see type-1 diabetes solved, and so on... If that is what you want for your fellow citizens - well DAMN YOU

I don't think it is really about the backlash so much as the value of the AI is going to replace soooo many people narrative has played out.

Amodei, Altman, et al needed massive amount of capital to buy a compute hardware by the ton as well as the facilities to house it and the power to run it. Jensen Huang can only funnel so much of NVIDIAs own money to its customers to buy its own products without the markets crying foul, turned out they could push that much further than I would have initially expected but still limits exist (at least in theory). So to make it possible for everyone to keep doubling down, they needed a story growth story like never before to keep soaking up all those investment dollars.

The reality is starting to overcome the rumor, with Ford bringing back engineers, Microsoft having to back pedal on CoPilot features, the PC market not exploding because of people wanting by new machines that are AI ready.

Now that the idea every business is going to be able to drip 30% of work force and/or the compute resources can be rented or capitalized cheaper even if they could is getting harder push, they have been pivoting to AI is so dangerous... Defense contractors, the DOD directly, and F500 financial engineering space have stupid amounts of money and can be relied upon to spend it out fear the other guy might show up the party with fancier toys. Those guys actually have more concrete applications for this tech any way. - At least something better than hey lets provide an agent to help you navigate our product offerings but rather than deliver a consistent experience with Dialog Flow or similar for 15 years ago, we use and LLM that will cost 10x to run and occasionally fail in spectacularly embarrassing ways..