Jesus Fucking Christ.

Yeah. Let’s not get started on fucking Oracle. We’ll be here all day. Or year, possibly.

Kudos! I wish you the best of luck and hope for your success.

That seems unlikely to persuade those people to continue using VMware, but good luck with that business strat Broadcom.

Agreed. The sentiment was fine, the execution terrible.

The following:

If companies are indulging in abusive use of cookies (or index DB, local storage, plugins or other things) then ban those abusive use of cookies and fine companies that transgress until they stop. The EU essentially caves to industry pressure and put the burden on the individual visitor, which just allowed the companies to make it very, very annoying to opt out. Have you noticed how ‘allow all’ is always a single click, but allow none isn’t, if the option exists at all? Regardless, those settings? Guess where they’re stored: Cookies. Which means that those of us who were already preventing local storage of data are now having to deal with those lovely “choices” over, and over and over. Every visit to youtube, every newspaper article we try to read.

This was not an improvement in my quality of life. And I doubt the practical efficacy to boot. Can’t track user behavior and Internet usage patterns by way of cookies anymore? Fingerprinting to the rescue.

I’d say ‘a set of individuals’. The distinction is admittedly subtle.

Personally, I much prefer individuals.

Some individuals, at least.

Hey EU? Do you remember when you forced every website to ask for permission to store cookies and made the entire web immeasurably worse to use without in any way having a positive impact on people’s right to some fucking privacy?

Yeah.

Soon my life-long dream of using a shaver the size of my entire face will become reality. Eyebrows? Nose? Who needs them anyway?

Sure, I’ll just sell my car so I can buy a pair of fucking shoes.

If you have to supply your users with AI support to figure out how to configure your OS, you might be doing something wrong.

Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It’s not that people are getting dumber per se - it’s that they’re having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn’t even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you’ll be aware in minutes.

And you’ll be expected to care.

Edit: Apologies. I wrote this comment as you were editing yours. It’s quite different now, but you know what you wrote previously, so I trust you’ll be able to interpret my response correctly.

Yeah okay, listen: MAGA miiight not want to go there.

Thank you. I appreciate you saying so.

The thing about LLMs in particular is that - when used like this - they constitute one such grave positive feedback loop. I have no principal problem with machine learning. It can be a great tool to illuminate otherwise completely opaque relationships in large scientific datasets for example, but a polynomial binary space partitioning of a hyper-dimensional phase space is just a statistical knowledge model. It does not have opinions. All it can do is to codify what appears to be the consensus of the input it’s given. Even assuming - which may well be far too generous - that the input is truly unbiased, at best all it’ll tell you is what a bunch of morons think is the truth. At worst, it’ll just tell you what you expect to hear. It’s what everybody else is already saying, after all.

And when what people think is the truth and what they want to hear are both nuts, this kind of LLM-echo chamber suddenly becomes unfathomably dangerous.

Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn’t going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don’t like it.

As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.

Our species really isn’t smart enough to live, is it?

Those are some excellent points. The root cause seems to me to be the otherwise generally positive human capability for pack-bonding. There are people who can develop affection for their favorite toaster, let alone something that can trivially pass a Turing-test.

This… Is going to become a serious issue, isn’t it?

Look, I realize the frontal lobes of the average fifteen year old aren’t fully developed, I don’t want to be insensitive and I fully support the lawsuit - there must be accountability for what any entity, corporate or otherwise opts to publish, especially for direct user interaction - but if a person reenacts Romeo and Juliet with a goddamn AI chatbot and a gun, there’s something else seriously wrong.

Yes, why not waste some more taxpayer funds to polish the knob of Dear Leader like a bunch of servile supplicants? This, this right here is why I refused to serve. Not because I didn’t want to defend my country (not the US), but because I didn’t trust the political masters of the armed forced to use me appropriately.