Back in the teens we found a couple of instances where political actors were encouraging people to install screen savers or cryptocurrency wallets that turned their phones into reverse proxies. This was thought to be specifically for the sake of giving hostile foreign operations (read: Russia) access to U.S. domestic politics.

The fact that smart TVs are facilitating this is just ... we're going to need home networks that treat IoT stuff as different than our actual systems.

Oh, wait, TP-Link had well over half the U.S. router market, but they're getting banned over national security concerns?

Maybe there's a market for a router with traffic accounting as a service so one can see what's happening?

This is why the only device in my house with internet is a Roku. I simply will not tolerate the rest of that invasive junk.

The call centers are going to be decimated ... but so will the AI replacements meant to talk to humans.

I have a number of issues this morning that require calls. First, deal with PG&E about changing the billing for my new house. The I need to talk to my bank about banning Google from ever billing me again. I absolutely HATE changing doctors, but had to do it, because getting to Antioch, then into the city, is just ridiculous from here, so it's time for first appointment.

I would love to be able to just give Claude a list of administrivia like that and let it plow through the work. I see progress on agent related billing, I see Cloudflare doing stuff for an internet dominated by agents ... everyone in the industrialized world is going to have an AI adjutant to handle this stuff. I really hope the old military term "dog robber" gets revived as a way to describe them.

As a sysadmin who could in theory lookup the admin passwords for our colleges police department, I have to do annual policy and cyber security training on accessing the NCJIS data, both the typical cyber security stuff and what that data is allowed to be accessed for. Just did my training last week, and non-appropriate access is a crime - this is not "the officer arrested the guy because he didn't know the law" stuff, this is "the officer violated the law" stuff.

Thanks - I remembered from high school that at least one of the noble gases had been made into at least one compound, but wasn't sure which one. I assumed - incorrectly, as you pointed out - that all of the noble gases could be made to form compounds.

Or maybe they use it to raise the pitch of their voices. I imagine that sentient beings which evolved at 5G might have deep, rumbling voices...

What would be REALLY exciting - over and above finding intelligent extraterrestrial non-human life - is discovering that they could metabolize helium.

I hear that semen is high in protein. Coincidence? I think not!

I mostly agree with you. But it has not been my experience that "printing is easy via CUPS".

Setting up a printer connected directly to your computer is often fairly easy if the printer is a popular one. Setting up a less popular printer, or a printer on your LAN - wired or wireless - can be a real shitshow.

Admittedly, I'm a bit of a GUI suck. But I have been using Linux for going on two decades now, and the fact that setting up a printer causes me grief does not bode well for the average Windows user migrating to Linux.

The perceived need for local software is almost gone. When an internet connection is unavailable or undesirable for some reason, you may be sorry you gave up the autonomy which local software provides...

Are your compositions available to listen to on a website somewhere? Based on the musicians and albums you mentioned, I might enjoy your work.

Those who aren't doomed to repeat it.

Were you being clever and using "echo chambers" and "weak voices" as double entendres, or was that just a happy accident?

Your argument is a textbook illustration of false equivalence. Your examples describe music in which humans composed the music - choosing the notes, writing the melodies, and telling the synths what notes to play. With AI slop music, that isn't true.

The key point isn't the amount of electronics nor the number of computers used in making the music. It's whether the music is created in the minds humans or the pseudo-minds of LLMs.

There's an obvious bubble, the circular dealings among the large core players are an enormous red flag.

The frontier labs are in the same position that DEC and Sun Microsystems were in the 1990s, as consumer hardware running Linux began to displace them. There will be ups and downs, but the trend is unavoidable.

The productivity gains are not there, AI is great for coding, some customer service is working, but the "50% of all white collar workers" that the frontier labs thought was good positioning last year 1) ain't gonna work but it did 2) infuriate the managerial class.

The frontier labs got away with it, thus far, in part because of concerns over the arrival of artificial general intelligence, which occupies a similar niche to nuclear weapons in the minds of policy makers. We ARE seeing frontier models escaping and attacking others, there ARE hazards, but it's nothing like what was imagined.

And the open models plus wild talent are as much a danger as wild talent was all on its own.

The frontier labs are like the coyote in that last moment when he's windmilling wildly, but not falling yet.

https://ney.partners/project/b...
https://whysogermany.com/news/...

Not sure if they contain as much info as the original sources, but they're much easier to read for most Slashdotters.

Someone needs to launch a national campaign educating people on jury nullification.

The property damage laws are not really the sort of thing nullification is meant for, it's supposed to quickly put an end to the effect of bad laws, but if that's the one tool handy, and it's this much of a social issue, it should be put to work.