You don't have to like the forecast to track it against the news reports. (Of course, the news reports are often just PR, and you need to weigh that in.)

To be honest I'm not sure there is a really good solution to this. It's very difficult to implement a backup system where you can rebuild a corporate network and devices quickly and without significant data loss. Getting as close as possible is expensive too.

The brainstem is probably rather invariant between people. That's an area where differences are likely to be fatal.

Actually, we're pretty sure it CAN happen by random chance. The argument is about how small that chance is...and what environmental conditions give the highest probability. And in what order things happened. (Currently I, not really knowledgeable in the field, think metabolism probably came before centralized information storage.)

YES!!
And *part* of the reason it's tricky is that we've got no real idea of what current AIs are going to develop into. Projections are all over the map.

FWIW, I tend to consider the AI2027 projections as identifying the most probably sequence, but there are lots of others, and none of them have any chance of being more than approximately correct. (The AI2027 people say it isn't moving quite as fast as they projected, but when I compare what they said against the news I'm not sure I believe them.)

I find that Anubis is a lot, lot less of a pain in the arse than Cloudflare's captchas. Usually I said right through Anubis in a second or two. Cloudflare usually requires at least a click, and often a stupid game.

Two reasons it's allowed.

1. The iPhone sells well.

2. Android lets you replace most of the OS, including core parts like Google Play Services.

There is definitely a case for requiring better interoperability where people do things like replace Play Services and then find that their banking app won't open because there is no way to tell it that the device is secure, but it's mostly enough to ward off Microsoft style anti-trust issues.

Sucks for people with accessibility issues though. Moving the mouse in a straight line, say because they have a joystick or their eye tracking software interpolates, is going to get them blocked or forced to do a long captcha challenge that isn't very accessible either.

The games industry is dealing with a saturation problem. There are so many games, especially from indie developers, because the tools have lowered the barriers to entry so much.

Most of those games barely get noticed because there are dozens more being released every day.

It will happen to TV and movies too. I've already seen AI generated TV shows gaining traction on TikTok. People pooh-pooh it as slop, and it is, but like indie games that rely on a lot of off-the-shelf assets what matters is that people watch/play them.

Eh, HDD failure and ransomware are not the same things. If you have two HDDs in a mirror configuration, and one of them dies, you lose nothing. If you get ransomware, both are encrypted.

If one machine suffers an SSD failure, you lose one machine and inconvenience one user. If your network is hit with ransomware, potentially it spreads to every machine and through file servers, affects all users.

Obviously you should have a 321 backup system, but management tends to resist anything too robust. And even with that, there are the competing needs of getting machines back up and running, forensics to figure out what happened and stop the same thing happening again, and the insurance company audit to see if they feel like paying out or not.

6 weeks of shutdown for a manufacturing company is not something that is easily survivable. Customers will be looking for alternative suppliers, and many won't switch back. Contracts may have delay and non-fulfilment clauses. Few places are going to have 6 weeks of stock to cover such an event.

What seems unforgivable is that it took 6 weeks to fix.

Aren't the ISPs motivated to fix their shit anyway? If their customers become part of a botnet, there is a good chance that their network will get blacklisted.

Microsoft is panicking because Linux market share is increasing rapidly. Now that you can play a lot of games on Linux, AI bypasses the toxic community, and a lot of major media outlets are promoting switching to Linux as a way to de-shittify your computer, they need to take action or lose their dominant position.

Worse case scenario would be that people start buying computers with Linux pre-installed in large numbers, and their bread-and-butter OEM Windows licence revenue starts to decline. AI taking all the RAM and SSDs isn't helping sales of new computers either.

So I think they are at least somewhat sincere about making Windows less of a pain in the arse. Microsoft tends to go in cycles. Enshittify, fix it, enshittify, fix it... Windows 7 was decent, 8 was a disaster, 10 was decent, 11 is a disaster... Hopefully they fix 11, and we don't have to switch to 12.

And the main one should be "Never expose your critical information on the internet, or to any computer connected to the internet.".

That's not sufficient, but it would eliminate most problems.

Actually, I think the federal government has accumulated too much control. I blame the direct election of Senators, but I'm not sure that's totally fair.