thefurdrake

This is feeling somewhat inevitable.

There are a nonzero number of highly-intelligent individuals capable of developing weapons tech AND AI/ML who are also 100% Dead Certain nothing could go wrong because they're super clever and would never fuck up and create skynet.

... I don't think it'll be a skynet situation, though. Less global domination and more "Someone activated the autonomous systems and [lost control, had control subverted, entered the wrong command, deployed ansible wrong, uploaded CCID ssh key to github], and now we have lingering munitions and angry turrets everywhere". What we have brewing is what happens when you upgrade "Minefield" on the tech tree too far.

There are no benefits to bog-standard, crappy replacements for genuine human-crafted creative products.

Period.

These tools should be applied to solving real problems. Instead, they're being used to solve nonproblems like "how can creatively-bankrupt but affluent parasites extract more money from human creativity while paying as few other human beings as possible?".

It's gross, and it's also pathetic, because the models aren't even /there/ yet. They're certainly gonna get there, but I can't help but feel my future is being robbed at the behest of people who want to remove humans from humanity, rather than remove humans from mundanity, and all we're going to end up with is a pile of statistically-average mediocrity.

Yeah, sorry, this feels like a strawman. The adblock issue is only the most recent and exciting of the multitudinous pile of suck Youtube has been generating the last 5 years or so.

The content discovery genuinely sucks. Being forcefed tiktok cancer content (shorts) and needing to install plugins to remove that shit from /my/ browsing experience is asinine. I just checked Blocktube, too: I have 1012 blocked channels, and the list constantly grows, because their "algorithm" is less competent than their search function somehow, and I'm constantly shown bullshit I'm not interested in. If blocktube couldn't programmatically block all videos with <1k views or <120 seconds of content, that blocklist would be at least twice as large.

So what is this delightful, friendly, relaxing experience worth to me?

Zero. $0. Nil. Nul. Null. 0. False.

I will pay them nothing and continue using their resources to the detriment of the multinational megacorp until it becomes more difficult than `yt-dlp $url`, after which I will replace their valueless time-wasting experience with something else.

Because their product (trying to recreate cable television) has no value beyond wasting my time.

And to head off the "But muh creators" argument:

I don't care. Between having to install plugins to remove ads AND being forced to constantly watched 2+minute inline sponsorship ads (which I tolerate a single time, after which they're skipped; I already know about the product and I'm not interested), I just don't care anymore. I will not be advertised to constantly. I will not comply. I haven't watched cable TV since 2006, and I'm not about to start now.

And discussing piracy isn't it.

Egregiously bad. Remember wannacry?

It has also been super gross to me to watch these infant technologies be thrown at removing humans from creative tasks. The whole point was supposed to be to automate the mundane, boring bullshit so we could do more things involving higher thought, not less.

Fair enough! However...

I'm still not seeing why that experience requires an account, so while this response is academically interesting, it doesn't actually address the purpose of my comment. Any reason why these calculations can't be performed without an account? Any reason why needing to enter the street address is functionally different from needing to enter the zipcode for this functionality, or were you just attempting to add detail/nuance?

Please explain in excruciating detail the need for an account to provide a single input box for zip code to just calculate fees? I need a serious breakdown of the logic behind this position, because from where I'm sitting, it seems to me like you could determine someone's "country, county, even municipality" with that single piece of data and no more.

Yeah, you'd need someone on the network to be doing something like browsing the internet and coming across a malicious website capable of making requests to other nodes on the local network, or downloading something that gives an attacker userspace access to scan the local network.

Those situations strike me as super rare, unlikely, and unrealistic, too.

"Unsecured AI" is the "Ghost Gun" of AI control now, I guess? We're inventing new terms for the AI models people can run on their own without the involvement of a megacorp? Nice narrative.

Sorry, IEEE, but just putting a disclaimer about it being a guest post doesn't reduce the amount of respect I've lost for you.

HN doesn't amplify drama as a business practice, as best I can tell. Arguments happen, but they don't seem to blow up much here.

I don't think it's just the internet. Covid was a very (ahem) masks-off moment for people realizing just how shitty things are and deciding they don't want to put up with /anything/. I think culturally, we're experiencing burnout, and at least in the US, stuff has gotten a lot rougher economically. People have less emotional bandwidth, and that translates to less self-filtering. Over that same span of time, it's gotten more dangerous to drive where I am, more drive-by shootings, more robberies...

Individuals are /angry/. Societies are /angry/. Our entire species is pissed right now.

That's okay, I can stop dualbooting once win10 is out of support and the hassle will be gone!

Though I've been refunding games that don't run on proton sometimes as well, because dual booting does indeed get annoying! Perhaps, if missing out on the Deck userbase isn't a motivator enough, we can add some more lost revenue to the motivators convincing devs to use cross-platform or ideally linux-native environments.

Or I'll just stop gaming. Parasite publishers have ruined most of the fun I get from video games the past decade or so, and their product certainly isn't good enough to convince me to go through 5+ ads every time I boot windows for the experience.

The fact that the targeting part is the output of a multibillion-dollar industry focused on scientific experimentation on humans without informed consent.

Also the fact that they're ads. That's a problem, too. Basically the whole thing is one big downside for everyone who isn't in adtech or trying to sell you shit you otherwise wouldn't buy.

Linux is not even close to matching Windows in gaming performance.

I'm curious if you've actually, you know, tried linux with proton/wine at all in the last three years. Things have really changed since the Deck. You might wanna try updating your opinion to reflect reality; performance is less an issue than one-off compat issues by far in most circumstances in my experience, IE I'm more likely to have to make config changes to deal with a crash than I am to have a huge disparity in FPS/load times/stuttering/frame dropping between linux and windows.

So I now get advertised to by windows:

1) On the login screen (if you let it do its OOBE login background thing)

2) On the post login screen every time I update asking me to sign in to cloud (which is actually asking me to pay for cloud)

3) On the OS notifications on login prompting me to sign in to cloud

4) On the badge of my non-cloud user in the start menu with an orange blip that looks like a notification but is really a prompt to sign in and pay for cloud

5) At the top of my start menu begging me to pay for xbox live

6) Looking at email

7) Any app with AI features that'll be horny to beg you to buy new AI credits. Like notepad.exe

Is there a reason I shouldn't continue showing people how to steal their software or /ideally/ invest in alternatives?

Ceding your concept of morality to a book someone wrote thousands of years ago is the pinnacle act of moral apathy. That level of apathy is revealed in the way you make your argument: Others' way(s) of life can't possible be moral because they're doing things differently... revealing a lazy mind incapable of compassion and unable to comprehend the values of others.

Seriously, take a look at what you wrote and think about the implications of painting people involved in Not Your Preferred Religion as "naive followers" with "amoral apathy" that are lured into "actual worship"... which sounds a lot like how certain popular religious organizations slip into the philosophies of others who were better off without them, not that I'd name names. It'd be difficult, anyway, as the hypocrisy is usually thick with individuals who engage in these sorts of mental gymnastics.

It's super common when TST gets involved, and it's always amusing to watch.

Oh, yeah. ICS/SCADA is definitely the worst industry I've heard of as far as security is concerned.

I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to that, because no, I don't think Microsoft possesses the technical competence to deal with these systems. They might have more /generalized/ infosec knowledge, but snark aside, I doubt they have the resources they need to really dig into SCADA security simply for the fact that they've never really needed to. I think it'd take them years.

It'd take them years to build a power plant, though...

Because Microsoft has a difficult relationship with information security and developing internal corporate procedures that are more conducive to growth and safety than to pleasing interpersonal and interdepartment disputes.

No, it heavily depends on their ability to enforce it.

This CEO can't enforce it and should thus shut his mouth and continue being the quiet little corporate parasite he is.

How is that relevant?

Wow. Is Ars really stretching this hard? Can we not just let the evidence speak for itself?

Despite their desperate attempt to scarequote and chop up excerpts from a direct quote, they fail to demonstrate "Google exec said users get hooked on search engine like “cigarettes or drugs.”"

He didn't say that from what I'm seeing; the quotes they use don't say that, and anyone who can read can clearly see the evidence they provide doesn't support the claim. The unquoted part ("with /economics/ that[...]") even indicate it's not a behavioral observation.

That subheadline really detracts from the point of the article.

It'd be fun to participate in an effort to purchase cheap drone FCs en masse to ship to Ukraine. I'd love to help violate China's export restrictions.

Really, it's the FCs and ESCs that are probably going to be the hardest to source, I figure?

Good.

Theorycrafting here, but wine and proton will make it pretty easy to decouple Steam platform DRM.

It should be noted that it's perfectly possible to release your game on steam in a way where the steam client doesn't even need to be running in order to launch the game. The choice to tie Steam's service into the ability to run the software you purchase /seems/ to be a decision made entirely by the people publishing their games.

If that's the case, you should really be more concerned about that behavior rather than Steam's DRM existing. Don't buy games whose behaviors you disagree with!

Nuclear power plants to offset power use from new tech: Good.

Nuclear power plants being run by Microsoft Corporation: Concerning.

Talk of peak oil demand is “withering under scrutiny”, said Saudi Aramco chief, Amin Nasser.

It genuinely pleases me that they are sticking their heads in the sand. It actually brought half a smile to my face.

I hope they continue being this confused about what is happening and where the world is going.

There's nothing we as a species need more than for oil dinosaurs to die off like the dirty anachronisms they are.

I see a lot of people who are down on this. I read the comments before the article, which was perhaps a mistake, because I went into the article thinking this was a lot less clever than it actually is.

This is neat. This may not be The Most Practical Solution, but the idea of having a thing that you can carry around and turn local bikes into power generation seems like a perfectly-reasonable invention for me.

We're talking about helping the homeless. They don't need the minmaxxed optimal solution. Not every homeless person may have access to a power outlet-- I don't know who wouldn't be able to move enough to pedal a bike but not enough to get to a public library, but that's really /not the point/. There are a lot of reasons that people end up homeless, and they can cause some really spotty/unreliable behavior.

There's nothing wrong with adding ideas/solutions to the mix. There's no need for a concept like this to replace other solutions. We can use all the viable solutions at the same time.

Eh, those are probably just bots it's losing! This is clearly evidence that these policies are working./s

It depends. Oobabooga's webUI is pretty simple to set up on linux.

It's not as easy as a tor plugin or browser made for it, definitely.

But tor is neither as secure nor as anonymous as running the LLM on your GPU.