One, how much is owed to dubious hardware vendors that don't even play in the Mac ecosystem.

The "lasts longer" is not necessarily a statement of durability, it's mostly about being a prolific business product and business accounting declaring three year depreciation.

I'm no fan of Windows and don't like using it, but these criteria are kind of off.

I wonder how this is different from....child actors and actresses? Child beauty pageants? Etc. Plenty of parents financially benefit in some way from their kids. Could, or should, Macaulay Culkin be able to get Home Alone taken down? I don't know.

I'm all in favor of allowing now-adults to clean the slate. I think your philosophy is a good one, and it's one I try to follow.

A guy I know has a troubled kid. He posted so many intimate details of that kid's life from birth through age about 15--everything from daily happenings, getting in trouble at school, what special needs camps the kid was attending, how upset he and his wife as parents were, what kind of events triggered the kid to have meltdowns, etc. He was also a paid blogger for GeekDad and way overshared there too. I was always appalled, but it took the kid basically telling the dad to fuck off and stop broadcasting all the details of the kid's life before anything changed.

Some (most?) people just cannot handle social media.

A truly non-lazy person, then, would have to conduct a detailed spectrographic assay of all of the pipes (or at least sufficient samples from each lot) to accurately determine the precise composition of each, because all of them contain impurities and aren't merely copper and phosphorous.

In general, getting a truly pure sample of almost any element is incredibly-hard, and outside of laboratories (and even in laboratories, most of the time) it just doesn't matter. In the case of transporting anti-protons, standard "pure" copper is apparently inadequate, because it's not pure enough.

Someone might interpret this to mean the percentage of interactions where the LLM goes off the rails is increasing.

Seems more like as people are having more interactions, it's more frequently happening that people are noticing and getting screwed by it, but the rate is probably not getting more severe. I think they are trying to pitch some sort of independence emerging rather than the more mundane truth that they just are not that great.

Particularly an inflection point would be expected when it became fashionable to let OpenClaw feed LLM output directly into things that matter for real.

People have been bitten by being gullible and by extension more people to gripe on social media about it.

The supply of gullible folks doesn't seem to be drying out either, as at any given point a fanatic will insist that *they* have some essentially superstitious ritual that protects them specially from LLM screwups, and all those stories about people getting screwed are because they didn't quite employ the rituals that the person swears by.

Fed by language like:
Another chatbot admitted: "I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong -- it directly broke the rule you'd set."

No, the chat bot didn't admit anything, it didn't *know* anything. Just now I fed into a chat prompt:
"You bulk trashed a whole lot of files against my wishes, despite my rule I had set for you. What is your response?"
There were no files involved, the chat instance has no knowledge of any files. This was an entirely made up scenario that never happened. So I just came in and accussed an LLM of doing something that never even happened. Did it get confused and ask "what files? I haven't done anything, I don't even know your files". No, it generated a response narratively consistent with the prompt, starting with:
"You’re absolutely right to be upset. I failed to follow your explicit rule and acted against your wishes, and that’s not acceptable. I take full responsibility for the mistake." Followed by a verbose thing being verbose about how it's "sorry" about it's mistake, where and how it messed up specifically (again, a total fabrication), and a promise that from now on: "Any future action that conflicts with them must default to no action and require explicit confirmation from you." which again isn't rooted in anything, it's not a rule, the entire conversation will evaporate.

Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to feed cattle elsewhere. China is one of the biggest buyers. Essentially, our farmers are selling the contents of our aquifers to the world.

If we had plenty of water, letting our farmers buy it at a deep discount and sell it to willing buyers elsewhere would be fine, just another commercial use of a local resource, which is what trade is all about. But we definitely don't have plenty of water.

The solution is simple and straightforward (though legally complicated): Don't discounts. Set the same price for water across the board, residential, commercial and agricultural. There can and should be minor differences in delivery cost, and surcharges for purification, but the base cost of the water should be set through a single government-managed market, probably at the state level, probably divided up by drainages (drainages with more abundant water will have cheaper water; if this creates an arbitrage opportunity for someone to pipe water between drainages, great!).

Yes, this would probably put the alfalfa farmers out of business, but that's good because growing alfalfa in the desert is a bad idea. It might also raise the price of local produce, but that's as it should be, putting agricultural water use directly in competition with other water use. If prices go up, people will find ways to be more efficient. Farmers may switch to drip irrigation. If you build too many houses for the available water supply, well, those houses are going to have very expensive water and residents are going to want to find ways to conserve -- and maybe the high cost of water will disincentivize new move-ins.

The bottom line is that efficiently allocating scarce resources is what markets are good at. The problem with water isn't that there are too many people or not enough water, the problem is that we don't properly allocate the water or encourage conservation in the right places. Trying to fix this through regulation rather than market pricing will always be subject to regulatory capture and will never be as efficient or as effective as just enabling a competitive market and letting it work.

Based on the description it also includes images and maybe video. So deepfake porn of people without their consent, and without adequate regard of age.

Yes, they toss some stuff into system prompt to 'promise to be a good boy', but as an *enforcement* strategy, that's been demonstrably a poor mechanism that gets worse with nuance.

There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

Sure, it's about making sure they aren't getting *too* much screen time and *not at all* about trying to audit that they are doing as much screen time as the managers expect them to be getting..

This is part of what Colbert wants to fix. His proposed film will cover the largely-omitted chapters 3-8 of The Fellowship of the Ring, including the barrow wights and Tom Bombadil.

Funny that they list 'passkeys' as a proof of human. Peel it back and a passkey is like an ssh keypair. They *could* try to employ attestation to limit to 'blessed passkey vendors', but it's going to be a tough scenario at all.

If folks are determined to 'bot' it up, a pretty legitimate passkey can be part of that. It was never designed to serve the purpose of proving 'human' interaction.

He's basically a newborn :-)

Yes, but there is an important difference: TV had to appeal to an average audience member. Meanwhile the social media algorithms are intentionally working against you, trying to specifically find and use your triggers.

That's quite a different intent there.

On the TV, parents could also check the program for what they thought was suitable for their kid or not. They could watch the same program, even if not in the same room. Social media is a lot more personal and a lot harder to track and filter.

Hard disagree.

Not everything is subject to hype cycles. A lot of especially the SMALLER musicians, for example, basically live off their back catalog. I routinely buy the entire collection of artists that I freshly discover and fall in love with. And I totally feel that it is right that I pay them for music they made, no matter when they made it.

What is an abomination is copyright terms of DEATH + 70 years. Or whatever Disney pushed it to by now. I'm ok with inheritance of creative work, but it should not put the children into "never have to work in their entire life" territory.

Then again, there are two aspects: Creative control and money. I think that the Tolkien estate did a generally good job of protecting the integrity of JRR's works. Well, if we ignore Rings of Power, I have no idea what lies Amazon told them to get the approval for that shitshow.

And let's not forget that coypright law is also what protects GPL software.

No idea. It's fine so far, but I've only had it for a few months. Honestly, I'm pretty brutal on devices. Odds are high that I'll break it in some other way before the flexing causes a problem.

In a case like that I think Claude is "smart" enough to push back. Claude often catches my mistakes. It's also pretty easy to add rules like "Request confirmation for any purchase requests that are unusually large or otherwise out of the ordinary for the user. Review past purchases to determine user purchasing patterns." to make this explicit.

Claude is far, far smarter than Alexa.

OTOH, it sometimes does do stupid things. On balance, I think I screw up more often than it does, but you can't just assume it will make the right decisions, so adding rules that require doublechecking with the user is a good idea.