Yes, but also, this is huge. People love to make these "well it's just the cost of doing business" comments so much that I don't think they really think about the individual case much. This is unprecedented, these legal rulings are in fact an existential threat to Meta. Zuck does not see this as a slap on the wrist. He's stupid, but he's not that stupid. They may be the first big tech company to literally go out of business, and it may be to legal damages.

New Mexico only has a population of just over two million people.

This is approximately $400 per person, a bit over.

Scale this nationally to just the US, and it's well over a trillion dollars. Meta's market cap, let alone their revenue, is about 1.5 trillion. Even half of that potential fine, from just the US, would more or less end them. If just Europe and Canada got in on the game, they are utterly destroyed several times over.

So yeah, you can argue that the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet, but this is a pretty wild ruling. Other states will certainly line up fast to do the same, states like money.

They didn't say 58,000 people are accused of cheating.

They said enough people cheated that the results of the first test are just useless, so anyone who still wants a shot at getting in (about 58,000 people) will have to retake the test.

"According to Gaceta UNAM, the school's official news publication, the university rector has apologized to honest applicants, since they will now have to prepare for and take the test again despite doing nothing wrong. Still, the control exam is "necessary to give certainty and guarantee equity in access," the rector added."

It's in the freaking summary, this isn't even a RTFA.

A lot of people, most loudly Ed Zitron have suggested for a while if this happens it should be taken as the sign the bubble is popping.

Not only is the supposed insatiable demand story not true, but the only buyers are Anthropic and OpenAI.

They do though.

The whole basis of the case was similar to tobacco, that's the simplest.

Monsanto wasn't gutted nearly this hard.

Plenty of people would argue fossil fuel companies have done at least as much damage, and known it, and they've been arguing it for decades.

Hell, Coca Cola has arguably done as much damage globally, and has also been caught knowing it. There was this scandal about five years ago when Coca Cola got caught funding dicey research minimizing how much ultra calorie dense things like Coke contribute to obesity. If Meta is on the hook for a trillion dollars for this, I'd say Coca Cola is truly at least as guilty.

We could do more. This would be a huge step, it's not just a matter of Meta being unprecedentedly guilty.

There is a fundamental crisis going on in colleges that has nothing to do with AI.

The professor wants a classroom full of students who actually care about what he has to teach. The administration wants those students, their paying customers, to keep paying.

Universities have had this crisis brewing for a long time:

We made a college degree necessary for most desirable jobs. Universities loved this, college degrees grew at a massive rate, the cost of them grew even more.

Then all at once they realize that hey, the students who are there, don't actually *want* to be there. They just want to buy their diplomas and get out, and act accordingly.

They can't have it both ways, this tension has been a thing for a long time.

Something fundamental has to give.

Actually, no. That's really not it.

Up through especially the 60s and 70s, the American prison system was all about reform over punishment. It changed very quickly in the 80s and 90s and we started incarcerating wildly more people. The current state of the US prison system is far more a modern thing than people realize, it's not some fundamental American core, even as easy as it is to assume it is, as we say it's rooted in slavery and all. (It is, but not half as simply as a single sentence would say.)

Modern, two party American politics basically created this feedback loop starting at Nixon and peaking at Clinton where "tough on crime" was a whole platform.

Everyone should read the New Jim Crow, it's aging, but still very good. The first half is just a history that stays kind of evergreen.

If only there were some sort of linked article that explained. Maybe /. could link to such articles, and then if people looked past the headline, they would know what's what?

We could have some sort of phrase, maybe an acronym that . . . Nah.

"It’s technically been possible to run SteamOS on your own hardware for a while now, but compatibility has been mostly limited to AMD systems. So far installing it has also required using a Steam Deck recovery image, a process that, speaking from experience, is much less straightforward than the installation process for most other Linux distributions. Trying to run SteamOS on Intel or Nvidia hardware has not been easy so far."

Actually yeah, it will.

It is, that's why they're doing this. They've already made a bunch of quiet changes no one wants but are most certainly related, like killing E2EE in Messenger I believe it was, WhatasApp still has it.

It they are liable in that one, they are *easily* as liable in thousands, probably more like tens of thousands more. It's an existential threat to their business.

The critical detail isn't the amount, it is the court said Meta didn't have to have caused this kid's mental illness, but merely have contributed to it at all. They basically opened the door to *easily* $60 billion in lawsuits, that are already being filed in huge numbers, as the summary says, thousands so far.

I don't mean this as an easy dunk, I really want to know if anyone can think of any counterpoints. I mean they have to exist right?

It really seems to me that Meta, and by extension Zuck, are the worst tech company and CEO of all time, propped up by a money machine they arguably fell into by accident.

But think about it, their only successes since Facebook itself, are just having cash first and buying their competitors.

Otherwise:
- their mobile efforts were basically a failure, but they bought Instagram
- their "pivot to video" was a money losing joke
- within that, remember when they wanted to be Twitch? That was a thing for a while.
- their messaging never really succeeded despite basically starting with the market cornered, but they bought WhatsApp
- where's Farmville today? they were supposed to become an app platform. That was a thing.
- they were going to be the world's ISP for a while, seriously, does anyone even remember that? Starlink broke them.
- and of course, The Metaverse is arguably the single biggest failure any big tech company has ever done

So seriously, am I missing any? Like Google is similar, but they birthed Chrome, gmail, Android, there are big wins among their failures. Meta . . . only misses.

Even if there are AI winners, it's just really difficult to imagine Zuck ultimately doing anything other than taking billions from his ad business and setting them on fire. But maybe the next $100 billion they burn will pay off, it kind of feels like they have to succeed eventually.

From what I understand, they were judging when Musk knew what he knew.

For fraud, for malpractice, for many similar things the statute of limitations is worded as something like "when the damaged person knew, or reasonably should have known."

This is pretty common with medical malpractice. You may not learn your doctor screwed up for years, but the statute is generally just one year.

So the jury had to decide at what point Musk reasonably should have known it was time to sue, a judge can't just decide.

It's not that it isn't true and it's nice he used Claude to do it . . . but . . . best I can tell this is just a total non-story.

All he really did, was find a backup of a file with the passphrase he knew. Then despite knowing the passphrase, he couldn't get it to open with some software he tried. And it looks like Claude didn't "find a bug" in that software, it just showed him how to use it. He was entering the passphrase in the wrong format. And like users will do with all software for all time, he called that a bug, and someone else repeated it.

It is good he used Claude to do this but it . . . didn't really do anything. I mean the article compares it to researchers spending months cracking a key. It's not even sort of the same thing.

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

But now it's not a matter of being not smart enough, it's about just leaving yourself the exhausting, miserable work that never should have existed in the first place.

They are (replacing?) Chromebooks. Just one example, the next time my seventy-three-year-old mother destroys her Chromebook, she'll probably wind up getting a Googlebook.

And she'll be utterly baffled and probably angry thinking she "got hacked" every time she accidentally shakes the mouse.

Lots of people buy tech like this. They just need a cheap laptop. They're just using what they're school/job provides. Lots of people who use Chromebooks didn't buy them at all.

"Googlebooks will have a Magic Pointer feature that offers contextual suggestions whenever you shake your cursor and point it at something on the screen. "

Seriously, that sounds awful right? In no way is shaking better than clicking, people will do it accidentally all the time to activate AI they likely don't even want.

It could be a three finger press, or clicking both buttons, or a right button double click. Literally anything would be better than that . . . right? It sounds like a joke or an ill conceived movie computer.

Yes, over the last month it ticked up from 3.6% to 3.8%. It peaked at SEVEN percent at one point in 12 months. The trend is unquestionably, wildly down.

Those are both the lowest readings in 12 months. It's been hovering near 5% all year. It's been consistently over the national average.

It's not under the average, very solidly trending down all year. But the headline is a .2% increase and noise about AI.