This is almost a textbook example of the broken window fallacy.

“Microsoft”, who? Certainly not Suleyman, Davuluri, or Nadella.

Even if you’re in the camp that understands memes like “6 7” have more significance than they’re given credit for,

I think 6-7 is a shibboleth. It doesn’t say much on its own, except which group you belong to.

Substance, as ever, remains a relative notion. Nyan Cat perhaps didn’t have the substance of an Andy Warhol image

I’d argue the Nyan cat is more substantial than what Andy Warhol came up with.

If you want a great reset you’ll need a new internet that is outright hostile to corporate interests. No corposlop being produced there, no derailing old memes to sell you junk.

Nah, quoting Stormfront is not a bug. Quoting well-sourced facts retrieved from Wikipedia is.

I’m mindblown at him being mindblown.

Oh wait, I’m not. Because I know those CEOs are completely detached from reality, and take users for dumb cattle ready to be herded.

Funny but insightful comment from the link:

“Never get high on your own stuff. A lesson this guy doesn’t seem to have learned…”

Fediverse, please enlighten me - is Windows a drug? …on a more serious note, “don’t overestimate the desirability of what you’re trying to sell” is sensible advice.

I am talking about the sort of everyday interaction that would make a 5yo get scolded for not being nice. This is clear by context.

Her 5yo got it right.

By default you should be nice to people. Care about their needs, avoid offending them (and if you do, apologise), avoid unnecessary lies, all that thing. And since most people are surprisingly reasonable, they’ll do the same towards you.

However. There’s always “that” arsehole, petty, assumptive person. No matter how nice you are towards them, they won’t be nice to you. Don’t be nice to them - even if on the outside it’s irrelevant, it’ll eat you from the inside and make you feel like shit. Or, like she said, “hurt your energies”.

Yeah, the terminology is currently a mess. Not just due to language changes, but also synchronic variation - different people using the same words for different meanings, at the same time. But for me, it’s a mix of motivations, methods, and morality:

• hacker strictu sensu - like a kid who dismantles toys to see how they work. Sometimes they break things, but they want knowledge the most. Usually grey hat, sometimes white hat, only rarely black hat
• cracker - like a kid who bashes toys with a hammer. Not interested on the knowledge itself, except when it allows them to bully other kids. Almost always black hat.

It’s more than that: they’d need to have desires, aversions, goals. That is not automatically granted by intelligence; in our case it’s from our instincts as animals. So perhaps you’d need to actually evolve Darwin style the AGI systems you develop, and that would be way more massive than a single AGI, let alone the “put glue on pizza lol” systems we’re frying the planet for.

My guess:

Coverage roughly follows money, and that money comes the top of the hierarchy. However, the top is too far from the production to actually get that 1) automation is nothing new, and 2) AI won’t help as much with it as advertised.

The middle of the hierarchy is close enough to the production to know those two things, but it’ll parrot them because doing so enables the inefficiency they love so much, under the disguise of efficiency.

Then you got the bottom. It’s the closest to the production, but often suffers from a problem of “I don’t see the forest, I see the leaves”, plus since it has no decision power so it ends as a “meh who cares”. So it’ll parrot whatever it sees in the coverage.

As such, who’s actually going to get screwed here? The answer may surprise you.

All three. However not in the way people predict, “AI is going to steal our jobs”. It’s more like suckers at the top will lose big money on AI fluff, and to cut costs off they’ll fire a lot of people.

Setting aside “and how will it do that?” as outside the scope of the topic at hand, it’s a bit baffling to me how a nebulous concept prone to outright errors is an existential threat. (To be clear, I think the energy and water impacts are.)

Ditto.

Interestingly enough, not even making them actually intelligent would be enough to make them liable - because you can’t punish or reward them.

More like an Autumn/Spring thing than a Summer one, but…

If you live in a place where temperature varies a lot across the day, you’ll want to wear a jacket at some hours, but not others. Then you need to choose between three options:

1. Wear the jacket through the day. You’ll feel hot at ~noon.
2. Don’t bother with the jacket. You’ll feel cold at ~early morning and ~early night.
3. Take off the jacket at ~noon. Now you’re carrying (and potentially forgetting) yet another item.

All three suck. But people disagree which one sucks the least, and for some it’s #1. So you get people wearing jackets even when it’s too hot for that.

No problem - miscommunication happens.

Yes, this should be illegal, but it’s already common practice. I’m just hoping that enough of this will eventually get people to stop buying these products, and hopefully we can start seeing some real legislation against it in some countries.

Problem is, people won’t stop buying them. Often “smart” products are sold comparatively cheaper, because the business expects additional profits through ads; and if Samsung is going this way (ads on your fridge), it’ll do it.

The “crackers” part of this confuses me. Samsung is a Korean company. The chairman’s name is Lee Jae-yong (이재용). Samsung NA’s CEO is Yoonie Joung. Maybe I’m misreading this?

By “crackers” I mean “black hat hackers”. The sort of people who’d love to drop some ransomware into your fridge and then say “if you don’t want me to brick your fridge, pay me a few bucks”.

(After some websearch, apparently Americans use it as a derogatory term. I wasn’t aware of that.)

However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads.

For now, like the author herself mentions later on (“The bigger issue is that of trust. […] that’s today.”)

[Higby] “This pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful, contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub, and we’re testing a responsible, user-controlled way to make that space more helpful.”

What Shane Higby is saying here boils down to “we’re trying to help the user”. But if he said so, in clear words, every bloody body would call it bullshit, because it’s common knowledge companies smear ads on your face for their own sake - not yours. But if you hide it behind fancy words, like “further explores” and “deliver” and the likes, it’s harder to call the bullshit.

I’m getting real tired of this shit.

[Higby] "…future promotions will depend on the feedback and insights gained from the program.”

Translation: “we’re just testing the waters now. Let’s see if the suckers swallow it or spit it.”

This is similar to the justification Panos Panay, Amazon’s […] He said it was looking to be “elegantly elevating the information that a customer needs.”

Emphasis mine. You can always trust Amazon in one thing: belittling the user.

The problem here isn’t just the ads themselves (although they are a problem); it’s that they are being added to the device after it’s in my home.

[Warning, IANAL.] Fight this shit. Seriously, fight it. On legal grounds. What they’re doing should be outright illegal in most countries; it’s equivalent to changing a contract unilaterally after both parties signed it.

Additionally, I’d strongly advise against buying any sort of “smart” device, unless you’re pretty sure the benefits of connecting your toaster to the internet outweighs all the risks. Including corporations and crackers taking control of it, harvesting your data, spamming you, building kill switches into it, etc.

This reminds me a bunch of dumb jokes in Portuguese between “RAM” and “rã” toad. Including questions about “memória sapo” (toad memory).

Side thought/my own ramblings here: Has there ever been hosting where the information is scattered across the world rather than one localized spot? That seems like it might be helpful, but I honestly don’t know enough about site hosting

In a certain sense we are using a system like this, due to federation. I don’t think the exact same model would work well for Wikipedia, but it could try something similar.

“What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out,” Sanger said. “There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”

“Oh noes, people in Wokepedia aren’t willing to accept my opinion that gravity doesn’t work on Fridays!”

“Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales,” Musk posted in 2022.

If you’re really, really invested on 2+2 being five, then 2+2=4 becomes “subjective”.

In my opinion Wikipedia being hosted in USA is a liability. Or even being hosted in a single place, whichever it is.

If a megacorporation could profit nine zillions and fifty dollars, and instead it’s profiting only nine zillions, its shareholders are already screeching at the CEO “YOU INCOMPETENT FOOL, YOU’RE ROBBING US FIFTY DOLLARS!”.

For each 1kg of cheese you need around 10kg of milk. Add labour and storage costs - specially relevant for aged cheeses.