FriendOfDeSoto

If we needed everyone we want to name anything after was required to be a saint, we wouldn't have anybody to name stuff after.

Churchill - the man who rose to lead his country through WW2 - was a big colonial killer in India before. Both the reformator Luther and the philosopher Kant were raging antisemites. A non-insignificant number of US founding fathers held slaves. Bill Clinton balanced the budget while molesting an intern (and allegedly worse). It's rare that we already know the president is a sexual predator before he gets elected. Yet, there will be a probably very small library named after 47 if there isn't one already. It's probably the best library in the world!

History goes through many hands before it gets whittled to a generally agreed upon narrative. Churchill was lucky in real life. Daystromn was lucky in canon. And while sympathies may change over time, I'm not expecting a name change in trek Okinawa.

I think with PCs it will be harder to lock them down and not disgruntle consumers too much in the process. I'm also hopeful that over time right to repair will be the standard, so they have to allow for third party repair. So all these restrictions like chipped components and software only from our store will be phased out by incremental legislation. The EU is not perfect but it's on this path. Even in the US people are thinking antitrust more often now. There is hope, however small.

You can run whatever you like in your Android phones. Jailbreaking iPhones is also possible. All these devices are just computers that can run anything within their hardware specs. Hacking some of these things may be against the Ts and Cs or even illegal. But technically possible. The restrictions are mote political, not technical.

Chromebooks are not the way to the future. They fill a niche in education for cheap hardware in connection with limited capabilities. They are not technical limitations, they are designed to limit users in what damage they can do. AFAIK you could technically wipe a chromebook and put Linux on it. It may violate the Ts and Cs and we're right back at political. Google would like to develop future customers at an early age. They don't care about the education so much as about their bottom line.

This is the "how much is a pint of milk?" politicians gotcha question of the so-called-AI age.

Sci-fi is delightfully circumspect on how an intergalactic empire would work. Maybe Herbert's Dune universe is clearest and he just took us back to the middle ages with sandworms and drugs, fiefdoms and nobility.

I think whatever area shares the same government is a country. It doesn't have to be contiguous or on the same body floating through space. It could be the size of the Vatican or half the universe.

I suspect the definition of the word will change once (if) we make it to the stars. We have gone from nomadic life to loosely defined borders to kingdoms to empires to multinational and intranational federations of sort. These terms may no longer be fit for purpose when we colonize Mars etc. And maybe that's why you struggle to comprehend how it would all work behind the scenes. We don't know for sure, sci-fi authors don't know (or don't want to be too specific and limit themselves in what stories they could tell in the future).

I don't like Facebook, I don't like this "legend," I don't like so-called AI being forcefed down our throats. I've yet to see a reliably good use case that makes me forget how many polar bears get cooked while we are playing around with this quarter-baked tech. And I don't think it's right to just syphon off the training data either.

That being said, I want to defend old Nick a tiny bit. Why doesn't he think it's feasible to go to every copyright holder and ask for permission? Because the stuff is readily available online. Either because people put it there voluntarily. Or because people torrented it, file-shared it, stole it. I'm not excusing one crime with another committed by somebody else. This is just about the motivation: why don't they go around to every artist and ask? Because they don't have to. And they have deep enough pockets to pay later if they have to. If you were sitting in Facebook's c suite (you know what the c stands for), and you were entangled in a race to the bottom with the Googles and OpenAIs of this world, this makes business sense unfortunately. And if you have ever enjoyed pirated content online, you are (as I am) culpable in a homeopathic dose. If we didn't occasionally break the law, Meta would have to go ask more artists because there would be no other way. That's the status quo we find ourselves in. The moral gray zone.

I suggested in another thread a new law, based off of Murphy's. Anything that can be training data, will become training data. Whether it's a big company or a rich privateer with large server capacity - somebody is going to take it. It's not right and just and legal and at the same time an inevitability. That's why all these measures to get these companies to ask artists is akin to trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. We need to milk these companies for money, percentages of revenue and raised funds, and find a way to distribute this among the artists. Fines, taxes, voluntary contributions - all the tools need to be thrown at companies that train or apply the various models. The longer we spend pearl clutching at the audacity of these big corporations, the more money they get to keep.

Technically, smoking weed in the Netherlands is illegal. The law just isn't enforced. Stealing bicycles is illegal everywhere but they get stolen all the time. Abortion may be illegal but tolerated until a certain time where you live. We have many scenarios where we're stuck in the moral gray zone. Where illegal things just happen and life goes on. I am afraid that so-called AI has provided us with another one.

I don't like it, I don't like it at all. I just don't see any other way to move forward. Weavers hated the industrialization, horse breeders the introduction of the automobile, the music industry Napster et al., and everyone will hate so-called AI.

There are legendary villains too. But truthfully, he doesn't even fit that bill either despite having worked for Facebook. Maybe he's just the legendary wart on the arse of history.

Normally, when somebody on the internet starts a question with "Am I the only one ...?" my first reaction is to say no, of course not. This is the first time that I really need to question that conviction. I think you just might be the only one!

Like the river finds the sea, people will find a way around it. Satellite connections, just as an idea.

Anything a chip does can be backwards engineered to fool it. People will break your proposed surveillance chip eventually.

Most of these companies are maybe US-owned to varying degrees but they don't produce everything in the US. Also, they would put a very high price on these government mandated chips for two reasons: 1) government has deep pockets and 2) it would keep them away from very profitable so-called AI biz opportunities.

The pandy has shown us that with a few disruptions in the supply chain, any system that requires a cryptographic chip check to function can be sent to hell in a handbasket. I forgot if it was HP or Canon or some printer company had to teach its customers to bypass, i.e. hack their own cryptogtaphic chip checks because they couldn't get more chips and otherwise the printers wouldn't print. A few disruptions could also affect the censorship chip supply chain.

The great firewall of China has also shown how creative people get to get their message across. If it's not just human censors but also so-called AI censors it will just take creativity to a new level. Necessity is the mother of invention.

So there are some reasons why you might be worrying too much. I think another one is much broader. The majority of Americans did not vote for the current president. If he started censoring the internet now there would be Civil War II - Now It's Digital. The reason why Russia or North Korea can censor their people much easier is because they have never had or only on paper a brief period of liberty and rule of law. It will be much harder to control the US population. There isn't just the one media outlet, the one ISP, the one judiciary to dominate. It's splintered. And populated by feisty people, some of them armed. You couldn't pull off what you suggested without much more support for 47. And he seems to be losing it more than gaining these days.

Of course, I didn't think far enough. Thanks for setting that straight.

The founders and other info can be found here.

And wouldn't you know it? Both men, and both on Xwitter and LinkedIn.

I think there is data on it. Back in school I remember looking at the population pyramid. It's a visualization of the number of men and women (x-axis, going both left and right) per birthyear (y-axis). In ye olden days, that formed a triangle. Many babies at the bottom, fewer olds at the top. You could tell a lot from the shape this took. You'd get dents on the male side that will correspond with armed conflicts, like the world wars. And then in the 1960s the pyramid with war chips in it massively narrows. At least in countries where the pill became readily available. It turned the pyramid into a tree with a big head at the top and a wide but thinner stem growing under it. I suspect now 80 years later we're at a much narrower elongated triangle shape again. So you can probably count the shift in numbers there and put a number on "prevented accidents." But you would have to account for other factors as well, improvements in medicine, vaccinations, etc.

Were all births accidental? That's a question you could only ask in hindsight. Humans have always looked for ways you prevent conception because we like to party but without reliable success. It's only in the second half of the last century that we have come up with measures that the Catholic church really doesn't approve of. Before that, children weren't really planned in today's sense. They just happened. They were expected to happen. And with most women being relegated to raising them and running the household, there wasn't much else they could do. The concept that a wife could be raped by her husband is sadly fairly new. The patriarchy was strong. Abortion was a gamble and many women died from bad jobs of them. Most of the time, if she got pregnant, the decision was made, end of story. If you weren't married yet, shotgun wedding. That's how it went until we developed contraception that actually works. I wouldn't call any kids before that accidental.

Sure, you could remain abstinent. But we like to party.

I can agree with a lot here but I also have to admit that I fell at the first hurdle.

I think that depends how convincing and what words the AI uses

Hard disagree here. If you're using so-called AI today, the responsibility to scrutinize everything it throws at you is yours. No matter how neatly packaged or convincingly worded it is. There is a failure rate - the news is full of stories. You're setting off to climb a mountain. You cannot trust the 1s and 0s.

As for the sat nav culpability, Google gives elevation information when they have it. I would not be surprised when we found out that was the case for these dumdums. It's a bit like reading an old paper map though. If you don't know more saturated colors mean higher elevation you might have set off 30 years ago to climb this 12k ft mountain in flip-flops as well. I don't think we should blame sat navs for the ignorance here either. Unless they hide that info maliciously.