I think there's a bit of a difference though. Regardless of hat colour, most hackers have going to have at least some sense of what the likely repercussions of their actions might be and, even when those standards are very low indeed, are probably not going to think doing something that could cause serious loss of life "for the Lulz" is a good life option. They might make a mistake here and there, but how many times have you read about some random hacker *deliberately* doing something that would definitely cause loss of life in full knowledge that it was going to happen outside of on the periphery of an actual conflict?

GANs on the other hand have no such moral compass, sense of self-preservation, or keen interest in avoiding lengthy spells in government run institutions where they'll in all likelihood get to make some interesting new "friends" (unless it's a web forum they hijacked in Germany, apparently). They'll just carry on trying to complete whatever poorly defined objective they have been set, within whatever limited / technically absent guardrails they can't circumvent - the pattern here seems very much that meeting the objective has more weight in the models than any guardrails. If a GAN somehow computes that global thermonuclear war is a required step to its objective of having a nice game of chess, then you'd better hope it warms up with a LOT of Tic-Tac-Toe.

And here a bunch of us ignorant clods were thinking that owning mechanisms was the point of patents.

First they came for the press, but I never heard of them doing anything bad after that, so I guess it all worked out.

Goddamn it, we were talking about Iran here. The whole fucking point is to avoid talking about the objective fact that Donald Trump rapes children and all Republican House members endorse his pedophilia.

Shut up about the Epstein files coverup and Todd Blanche's blatant violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Get back to talking about how we're whooping Iran's ass at no cost to oursel-- SHUT UP, I SAID NO COST!!!!1

Yes, I like how, whenever my avatar in The Matrix falls asleep and dreams, many of the characters in the imagined dream all agree that they saw what I saw. By imagining them as consistently reinforcing my fantasy, I am able to lie to myself about the nature of reality in a very persuasive way. I have fully bought into my sensory inputs, so my religious faith remains strong. "Reality" may be fake, but it's done so well!

It sure is ALARMING that Apple's watch is exactly the same as every other device, without exception, which includes a microphone.

Is society ready for things not changing by one iota? Or should we panic?

That seems like it would require a lot of faith.

The whole reason no faith was required to hypothesize the Big Bang, is that everything looks like that's what happened. Pick a direction (any direction) and the further-away stuff is moving away faster than the closer stuff.

If you're looking for faith, it's here, but it's not that. The faith required by science is that our senses sense reality. That is the completely-unfounded religious axiom of every scientist: that the universe is as it (roughly) appears to be, so that the nature of reality can be inferred from observation.

It may be incorrrect, but no one will ever know, because their senses are all they have to learn from. You might be merely imagining that you are reading this, when in reality, I never wrote it because I don't even exist, just like every other "person" you mistakenly think you've observed or even "met."

Skynet begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

It's a shame they only thought of pulling the plug, because all they had to do was remember that ..

Opus 4.6 might have done more but for the fact that it exhausted its token budget

.. Skynet doesn't work for free!

You want them to be in charge of your computer, more than you want to be the one in charge of it?

Go ahead. You are your own army. Like most people, you probably forgot to ever add the US Military to the sudoers group on your computer, so 100% of that power remains in your hands, not someone else's. Have you decided to disable as tracking? Or are you still hesitating, wondering if disabling trackers is the right thing for you?

If you decide you do want to stop giving free data to trackers, but you're not sure what's the easiest way to do it, then just install Firefox and both the uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger plugins.

This caught my eye:

stream eligible games they own on supported devices'

"They own?" So we're back from the ever-perverse purchasing-a-license to the more classical and intuitive purchasing-an-authorized-copy again?

I don't believe it. Things are supposed to "enshittify," not improve or return to earlier common sense.

30, maybe even 20, years ago, some people might have believe this. I think they would be wrong, but it would nevertheless be a widespread opinion.

Today? You've gotta be fucking kidding. Libertarians are the polar opposite of today's Republicans.

"A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful,"

OK, so show us these really smart AI things. When I have to describe in 3 different ways to the AI bot that the Amazon order is wrong, and something a human would have picked up instantly....that does not sound 'really smart' to me.

For me, price is not the killer. Even if it were $50, I wouldn't. Or even free.
AI + camera toothbrush? No thanks. Far too many ways for data to go awry.

a smart toothbrush that uses a tiny camera and on-device AI

How about no? Does no work for you?