Now I know why they’re trying to push corporate users off of Linux, again.

This is the right way, but holding it in their hands will be the way so many clever rebels do it at first.

Thanks Microsoft, I’m investing in cell-phone tripods today.

Jerb security.

Oh, no, AI Recall has “special privileges” - just you lusers don’t.

Laughs at all the cell phone camera captures that will start showing up…

Your statement reminds me of entrepreneurship: you’ve got a dream, a vision, a goal to improve people’s lives. What you don’t got is enough money to get your dream into the hands of people it will help. So, you go in search of people with money who honestly don’t give a damn about your dream, they just want to know how it’s going to get them more money, which they already have in abundance but somehow feel the need to continue to grow their hoard. They want to see business plans, with exit strategies. They want to maximize ROI, minimize (monetary) risk, minimize time to market - and those are the criteria your pitch will be evaluated on relative to all the others they receive all the time.

Politicians aren’t selling a business plan, they’re selling a legislative agenda. They don’t have to show ROI, they have to show low-cost electability.

It was cringe when it released - it’s dated cringe now…

That’s the thing about being paranoid about MkUltra - it was actively suppressed and denied while it was happening (according to FOI documents) - and they say that they stopped, but if it (or some similar successor) was active they’d certainly say that it’s not happening now…

At the time there were active rumors around town about influenza propagation studies being secretly conducted on the local population… probably baseless paranoia… probably.

Now, as you say, your (presumably smaller) country has never known such things to happen, but…

The only thing driving solar panel production development to China is cost. Cost of labor, cost of environmental regulations, maybe cost of raw material acquisition… All that investment there for the past 20+ years driven by cost is “paying off” now with their production capacity. We’re getting TMSC plants in Arizona, we’ve already got BMW, Mercedes, Toyota etc. production plants in the US, nothing stopping us from building solar panel factories, except international corporate profit optimization.

Oh, I investigated it too - it seems like it was a real thing, though likely inactive by 2005… but if it were active I certainly didn’t want to become a subject.

Bad results are nothing new.

Currently, we’re preventing the “sunken coastal cities, economic crisis and famine in poor regions” kind of change

Are we really preventing it? Seems like the track toward that change is mostly unabated. Sure, it’s a couple of generations out before it gets serious, but what are the signs that the track has improved?

I’m reading hopeful signs from China that they are actually making positive progress toward sustainability. Not that other big players are keeping up with them, but still how 1 billion people choose to live does make a difference.

It’s just that now it tries to be a bit more stealthy.

With regard to what has been happening the past 100 days in the United States, it’s not even trying to be stealthy one little bit. If anything, it’s dropping massive hints of the objectionable things it’s planning for the near future.

There are still existential threats: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

The difference with a population of 8 billion is that we as individuals are less empowered to do anything significant about them than ever.

1925: global financial collapse is just about to happen, many people are enjoying the ride as the wave just started to break, following that war to end all wars that did reach across the Atlantic Ocean…

Yes, it is accelerating. Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock 45 years ago, already overwhelmed by accelerating change, and it has continued to accelerate since then. But these are not entirely new problems, either.

There have been a couple of big discontinuities in the last 4500 years, and the next big discontinuity has the distinction of being the first in which mankind has the capacity to cause a mass extinction event.

Life will carry on, some humans will likely survive, but in what kind of state? For how long before they reach the technological level of being able to leave the planet again?

My problem with LLMs is that positive feedback loop of low and negative quality information.

Vetting the datasets before feeding them for training is a form of bias / discrimination, but complex society has historically always been somewhat biased - for better and for worse, but never not biased at all.

Not all of us, and that’s the problem with compassion.

It’s a luxury state: analysis; whether self or professionally administered on a chaise lounge at $400 per hour.