that yummy koolaid

Mozilla has realized that AI is going to kill search and when search dies Google won't keep giving Mozilla the money it needs to stay above water. So now Mozilla is scrambling to find an AI business model that users don't hate. Goodbye Mozilla, it's been a fun couple of decades.

Investment bankers in New York are absolutely aware of how much time they spend working. They know that they slept on a cot the last two nights, have eaten delivery for their last twenty meals, and cannot remember what their friends look like. Which is why most of them quit and leave New York in two years or less. I can only imagine that the software timer is there to push the weak ones to quit sooner and not get a bonus.

Addiction is neurological, not chemical. Addiction is the consequence of the rewards centre of the brain becoming dependent on stimulation and that can be from anything.

Do try to make an effort.

Doesn't have to be a credit card. A class III user digital certificate requires a verification firm be certain of a person's identity through multiple proofs. If an age verification service issued such a certificate, but anonymised the name the certificate was issued to to the user's selected screen name, you now have a digital ID that proves your age and optionally can be used for encryption purposes to ensure your account is only reachable from devices you authorise.

And those come with warnings, legal penalties on vendors who sell to known addicts or children, legal penalties for abusers, financial penalties to abusers, etc. There are cars which have their own breathalisers.

So, no, society has said that the responsibility is distributed. Which is correct.

It is possible to verify age to the same degree (or better) than any "age verification service" without any sort of privacy invasion.

A six digit UID is not one that could be remotely considered "old".

*goes off grumbling and looks for anyone he can shout at to get off his lawn.

It is legitimate for any service that constitutes a "common carrier" to be free of consequences for what it carries. But Meta do not claim to be a "common carrier", and that changes the nature of the playing field substantially. As soon as a service can inspect messages and moderate, it is no longer eligible to claim that it is not responsible for what it carries.

Your counter-argument holds some merit, but runs into two problems.

First, society deems any service that monitors to be liable. That may well be unreasonable at the volumes involved, but that's irrelevant. Meta chose to monitor, knowing that this made it liable in the eyes of society. There are, of course, good reasons for that - mostly, society is sick and twisted, and criminality is encouraged as a "good thing" and "sticking it to the man". This is a very good reason to monitor. But Meta chose to have an obscenely large customer base (it didn't need to), Meta chose to monitor (it is quite capable of parking itself in a country where this isn't an obligation), and Meta chose to make the service addictive (which is a good way of encouraging criminals onto the scene, as addicts are easy prey).

Second, Meta has known there's been a problem for a very long time (depression and suicides by human moderators is a serious problem Meta has been facing for many years at this point). Meta elected to sweep the problem under the rug and create the illusion of doing something by using AI. If a serivce knows there's a problem but does nothing, and in particular a very cheap form of nothing, then one must consider the possibility said service is not solving said problem because there's more money to be made by having the abusers there than by removing them.

Can one block every criminal action? Probably not, which means that that's the wrong problem to solve. Intelligent, rational, people do not try to solve actually impossible problems. Rather, they change the problems into ones that are quite easy. This is very standard lateral thinking and anyone over the age of 10 who has not been trained in lateral thinking should sue their school for incompetence.

An America full of old tech, frozen in time, actually sounds pretty cool. Everybody is running Linux or BSD on a computer cobbled together from parts. People have revived old Sun, Next, and SGI workstations. DEC computers get business use again. Large files are transferred by couriers. It sounds like a paradise for those of us who cut our teeth on the computers of the eighties and nineties.

OpenAI probably shut Sora down so the Sora budget can go somewhere with a better looking future. Every week Altman's plans for data centers full of NVIDIA chips gobbling up incredible amounts of nuclear power get bigger. That money has to come from somewhere.

I find it hard to believe that there were over 1,000 people working on Fortnite to fire. The game has been around for almost a decade, the visuals have the detail of a Dreamcast game, and the sound is nothing to write home about. It does not take 1,000 people to poop out the mediocre advertising that makes up much of the new content in Fortnite. Something else is wrong at Epic and I think that it probably has something to do with the continuing unpopularity of the Epic Games Store.

> "Our vehicles are giant paperweights right now through no fault of ours," one wrote on Reddit.

No fault? None at all? That seems... counter-intuitive.

I get it that the technology failed spectacularly, and that this is a serious problem for which people need to be held to account, but my car is working just fine.

I gave up on Apple Maps because the directions are often wrong. It once told me that a local office building was located in the middle of a big green public park that has no parking. And when they're correct the routes often meander through out of the way neighborhoods which adds significant amounts of time over Google Maps directions. Putting ads in an app that is already broken is just stupid.