3RTB297
My parents live on a rural property, and I'll help them do research on things like livestock practices or occasionally "prepper" related things to give them a sanity check before they spend money. I have to weed through a dozen or more obvious ChatGPT-created pages that are the first page or two of results on every search engine before I get to anything a human has touched. The vast majority of the LLM-created pages are either massively verbose and vague, or often wrong. But they're getting clicks. Very often, when asking an LLM the same question and to give citations, I'll get a combination of useless, irrelevant sites with no connection to the material, maybe one of these LLM-generated sites, and maybe one online forum.
I'm not aggressively pro-AI, I'm in the middle, but stuff like this has me worried that we're looking at the equivalent of the Dark Ages all over again. But instead of simply no one bothering to write anything down as was the case in the early Middle Ages, it's going to be the task of searching for real human work and thought in a sea of aggressively spammed LLM-generated slop pages.
Can the dictator turn off the power? Turn off the phones? Turn off the internet? Close the ports of entry? Hold food hostage? Hold your shipment hostage? Stop fuel imports, production, and distribution? Nationalize anything and potentially everything? Run off or genocide entire ethnic groups? Yeah. And it happens often enough that examples are easily found of most of these (note: turning off power and stopping fuel imports are possible, but would simply piss people off, so it's usually bad politics).
Not sure what's dark about how the world works. Doesn't make it right or just, but that doesn't mean it can't be how things are.
With the token budget sticker shock and end of the honeymoon phase, just a guess, but I expect a significant market share might start to look at open weight "not quite frontier" models and outsource compute alone and have greater control over the model rather than outsource everything. Which will also be a trend that peaks and folds as it's discovered it takes a lot of human work to get what you need. Maybe then settling into a pretty standard tier of medium-quality contractors that specialize in LLMAAS for cheap, running open weight models.
Which isn't to say that AI has plateaued, but rather that budget-friendly, functional options might undermine the importance of frontier models sooner rather than later.
Boomers today would much rather squawk about threatening lawsuits or getting other people to do the work for them. The ones alive today feel confident in their command of the legal system to get what they want. During the 1960s, how many young Boomers and Silent Generation protested against the Civil Rights movement? Literal bombings and terrorism took place. One black family moving into Cicero, IL led to a violent mob of 4,000 people where it was also young Boomers that shouted and held up swastikas and eventually firebombed the building where the family was going to move in, leaving many other residents of the same building out on the street. -- https://allthatsinteresting.com/anti-civil-rights-movement
Yes, there were obviously not the same people protesting against the war in Vietnam. But, to their credit, Boomers used to turn out for protests back when they were 20.
If you asked Boomers this questions when they were 18-25, I expect their opinions would align pretty close to Gen Z in this survey.
>He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night.
I say wild caught, because farmed snails are fed wilted lettuce, and taste like wilted, rotten lettuce.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/google-now-al...
There's a fingerprint demo on github called JSCreep (https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/) that used to keep your fingerprint profile for 90 days and show you how many times you visited. Worked extremely well, and is still around, but no longer uses the API to retain fingerprint data, so you have to track your hash yourself. It would easily track most browsers across changes in IP address. Only Mullvad, Brave, or Tor would not leave an easily tracked fingerprint.
The demo presented in the royfish.dev link is easily foiled by browser extensions that scramble fingerprint data, the presence of which would itself be detected by more sophisticated profilers and used to define the fingerprint. I can refresh the page and get a new hash and adjective-animal name with the same IP. JSCreep sticks firm to the same hash for me, even with a new IP address and some spoofed browser data.
Lovey example: https://frescocooks.com/platform/marketing-and-engagement
Air Fryers selling data: https://abc7news.com/post/certain-air-fryers-app-connected-a...
Student in NZ protesting it: https://www.consumer.org.nz/consumer-rights-and-campaigns/da...
Hope your TV isn't connected to the internet: https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/tv-spying-yes-h...
Considering that half the parking lot of my building was out of state plates, it seems like it's not a huge concern for anyone.
And thinking of clothing as akin to open source software is fair. Before the industrial revolution, all clothing was hand-made, almost entirely at home or by a friend, or a tailor if you had money. From the end of the 18th century until pretty much the 1980s, sewing patterns were the paper version of open source software. Could be copied infinitely, forked and changed, traded and borrowed, or created from scratch if you knew what you were doing. Magazines included them to boost sales, just like how software magazines used to include pages of code you could try at home - no license needed.
Fabric stores were commonplace for a century or more, and big box stores reserved a huge amount of floor space for fabric sales up through the 90s. Patterns were trivially inexpensive, and picking your favorite material for the pattern was how you could personalize it.
Real aliens might look at us the way we would look at a raven using tools. It's cute and novel, but not exactly scary. It's either pure hubris, or drama for the sake of a story that doesn't end in the first 2 minutes, to assume that humans with little bottle rockets we can barely use to defend ourselves from rocks in orbit around us would stand a chance against any species advanced enough to physically cross light years of distance to show up here.
A single bumper sticker or distinctive paint color or a dent in the door can be just as immediately identifying as a license plate at that level. Even in places where the plate is always the same for the car and doesn't change when it's sold, it's just a way to tell one vehicle apart from another.
Case in point, my user name is a license plate number of a total stranger, and I imagine you'd be hard pressed to even tell me the color of the car, let alone their name and address. I'm not asking you to doxx someone, but saying it's not trivially easy for the average person, even when considering the boatload of data broker information out there on every individual.
Functionally, that's what already exists - the standards are dimensions and readability. There's no CA smog inspection station as you enter the state, this is about people abusing a loophole. I spent all 4 years of college in CA with a CA driver's license, a car with out of state plates, and zero Kafkaesque issues. Maybe tax avoidance loopholes are Kafkaesque because they're not how anyone is supposed to do things.
As one more wacky way to do it, some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN, so the owner and their place of residence don't matter, only where the car was first registered.
Why nuke us from space when we're the best reality show in this corner of the local cluster?
Then it starts a 24 hour timer. When that hits zero, you have 1 hour to go back in and select that you want to install apps on a device you own and paid money to own.
It's not scam-resistant at all. Any scammer will gladly work around this and send someone to one of many malicious apps in the play store, or a malicious URL, or even just set an appointment to call Grandma back the next day.
And MS Office corporate licenses account for a significant part of MS's revenue stream. More than 400 million Office 365 licenses paid in 2024, not one-off Windows licenses. So a business might save $150 per person per year on a large group of staff migrating them to a FOSS alternative for email and a replacement for light users that only ever touch Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And they might never know the difference, functionally. That's also less of a tangled web than switching operating systems and network setups that would require work for any users of critical systems. I can see the logic in migrating the willing as a test out of Office, then a few more people every month until you have one pool of FOSS users, and one pool of must use Office 365 users.
That shift might not be nothing to a small business as well, and at scale, might also be significant to larger businesses. Even if 5% of Office 365 users moved over, that's tens of millions of users.
Second, the EU has been pouring money into an OpenOffice fork for official use and replacement of Office 365 for a while. https://office.eu/
I've also made the Babylonian stew from this recipe, and it's rich and hearty. It's easy to see how this would knock the...sandals off of ancient people.
Other ancient recipes...let's just say that humans have very much not held the same tastes over the eons. Some recipes were incongruent or sweet and savory in a strange way, or simply a flex about how many spices you had access to and cold throw in a dish, not about what it really tasted like. YMMV.
I've worked with and for a couple non-profits where IT help was someone's spouse or kid or brother willing to help out. Often I've been the spouse. Often a shared Google drive filled with poorly managed PII is the solution that works well enough...until something bad happens.
If you care, then care enough to do small, practical things for yourself. A little loop of tape. Paint marker. Even just sorting them into drawers/boxes/whatevers by type.
Imagine traveling somewhere, and run through the things you'll need to work without tinkering. Camera, eSIM, GPS/maps, more "exotic" messaging apps that for some reason people use instead of Whatsapp.
It seems like most Linux phones are barely suitable for someone that just goes home to work 99.999% of the time.
The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation.