run any game at max settings, 4K, future proofed (at least for a while)

You do understand how excessive that is right? They’re called “max settings” for a reason. Like “any game max settings 4k” on its own is already like asking for a Formula 1 car, asking for it to be future proofed on top of that is like asking for not just any Formula 1 car but one that can dominate the next 5 seasons.

That said, if you truly do believe your daughter needs this and can’t live without max settings 4k on every game imaginable into the foreseeable future, then your friend did a good job trying to meet your requirements.

… but is it truly necessary? Only you know the answer.

And of course they will get it, because many fools and their money are easily separated.

Joke’s on them, I’ve already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.

In all seriousness, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it’s already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I’ve heard countless terms and most of them aren’t terribly accurate, but the web doesn’t need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.

We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don’t own it. We are it.

I can accept that the inverse exists. I can’t accept that they’re running things. Not just running some things either, apparently pretty much ALL things.

I don’t think I will ever forgive humanity for this lack of humanity. Words are insufficient to express my the depth of my feelings. Words are the problem. Words are all these atrocities ever get. Soft empty words for hard genocidal things. There is no action, never action. There are only words, and death, and more words, and more death. I hate it.

We let tech and advertising companies whose ultimate goal and generator of revenue is to sell things to users by convincing them of things, and they created LLMs that they are using to sell LLMs to users by convincing them that the LLMs are great, something they are in fact uncannily good at. Finally, we have closed the loop. The sales pitch is the product. The product is the sales pitch. Everyone will just fall down the AI rabbithole and never come out again, all productive work will cease, all dollars will be consumed. ???, profit.

makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.

Totally an accident by the way! They weren’t trying to become a monopoly, promise!

I think I missed the part where they said this will all come at no cost to consumers… I’m sure it’s just an oversight.

I look forward to dying at your side.

Don’t worry. Once we are no longer useful to them, something the billionaires are actively working on, and once they have successfully insulated themselves from the resulting conflict, they will start to kill us all off and they will say they are doing it to “save the planet”. They still care about the planet. Just not with all of us poor people still on it. It deserves to be returned to nature. Except for the billionaires and their friends, of course.

That sounds annoying. The old FF7 is also buggy, but mostly in funny and delightful ways.

There are weaknesses and attack vectors, but they are in my opinion more secure than almost all realistic alternatives. If you think you’ve come up with a better system, by all means, implement it. I commend your skepticism of following the herd and may it serve you well. But beware of pursuing security through obscurity. People recommend password managers because they are one of the best solutions available for navigating this complex threat environment we live in and they are appropriate for most people’s situations.

Absolutely true. They’ll buy the data they want from some shitty crawler running from some data broker in some far-flung and lawless part of the world, hallucinate the actual source, and pretend they had no idea their “data partner” wasn’t respecting robots.txt if they have to, which they won’t ever have to do because it’s literally impossible to detect and prove and realistically unenforceable.

This is a company that removed it’s company motto of “Don’t be evil” because it found it too “limiting”. Don’t be naive.

Elevator music is a surprisingly profitable commercial niche. For that matter, there are always going to be soulless, insipid, overused imitations of real art that gets turned into staggering commercial success precisely because it’s bland and meaningless. “Live, love, laugh” for example.

Not everything has to have meaning and significance, but we also have the right to judge it when it should.

The problem with AI is that a lot of artists literally rely at least to some extent on the money that flows from that soulless commercial drivel, either with their eyes fully open to the situation, or by convincing themselves that it does have meaning to somebody, or just themselves if nobody else. They need to pay the bills and put food on the table and a huge source of that comes from commercial art work which has a high bar for visual impact and a very low bar for ideas or meaning.

If AI replaces the meaningless filler content of the art world, how do artists survive if that’s their bread and butter? It’s never going to directly replace real human art, but if it removes their meal ticket, the outcome will still be the same. Soon there will be almost no real human artists left, as they’ll start to become prohibitively expensive, which will drive more people to AI in a self-reinforcing feedback loop until only a handful of “masters” and a bunch of literal starving artists trying to become them without ever earning a penny. The economics of the situation are pretty dire and it’s increasingly hard to picture a future for human art that doesn’t look bleak.

I’m planning to do my part to make sure exclusively human-made art is always the choice I’m going to make and pay for, but there are bigger forces at play here than you or me and I don’t think they’re going to push things in a happy direction. The enshittification of art will happen, is already happening, and we’re just along for the ride.

Never been happier that all my computers run Windows 10 or Linux. Windows 11 is dead to me, and if anything happens to accidentally get it installed somehow, it’s going to be replaced with Linux going forward.

The problem with lies is you have to have a good memory. You need to make sure all the lies line up and don’t leave holes in your story that reveal the lie underneath because ironically the smaller the slip the more damning and harder to explain it can be. That applies to falsifying documents too. It’s actually more dangerous to try and create something fake because now you need fake evidence for all the fake stuff you’re putting in there, and you need to hide any evidence or corroboration that points to the stuff you’ve removed, and it all gets really complicated and really error-prone really fast. Liars survive by keeping things simple enough that it can’t be challenged, or in Trump’s case, by hiding all the small lies behind big obvious ones, like “there are no Epstein files” which everyone knows is a lie but the lie is so big it’s immovable while all the juicy details are buried underneath.

We didn’t call them AI because they weren’t (and aren’t) intelligent, but marketing companies eventually realized there were trillions of dollars to be made convincing people they were intelligent and created models explicitly designed to convince people of things like the idea that they are intelligent and can have genuine conversations like a real human and create real art like a real human and totally aren’t just empty-headedly mimicking thousands of years of human conversation and art, and immediately used them to convince people that the models themselves were intelligent (and many other things besides). Given that marketing and advertising literally exist to convince people of various things and have become exceedingly good at it, it’s really a brilliant business move and seems to be working great for them.

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That’s the fun part, you can’t. A lot depends on the details here. You’re looking for a one-size-fits-all answer to a very not-one-size situation.

In 99% of cases a major crime like a kidnapping that I know I didn’t have anything to do with should be reported immediately, and “speaking to the police” only ceases when I become aware they have decided to suspect my involvement. In the other 1% of cases, I have understood how bad it looks and I’m talking immediately to the best lawyer I can find and letting them do all the talking from the beginning.

It’s not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it’s very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don’t leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.

Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they’ve gone through (and not always against the right people). They’ve learned how to operate within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and it is natural to adopt some of the same tools and practices. As resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.

At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can’t do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It’s not that we enjoy the fighting, it’s that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.

On the other hand, even that hasn’t helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we’ve tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don’t know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we’re not making it worse, because we often are. For that matter, we have our own problems, and we haven’t figured those out either. Just because we’re doing much better than the worst countries in the world or even much better than average doesn’t mean we’ve got it all figured out or even that we’re doing anything right at all.