EXACTLY. High-five!

That’s what I worry about. Right now we can ignore social media somewhat, but if Ai gets wedged into contracts with government/infrastructure and other unavoidable daily life, I imagine that’s where a plausible threat could come from.

I’ve no doubt such things are already in the works. Ai controlled traffic lights or something, for instance. Obviously the military and law enforcement are already giddy about it, of course.

Giving a stupid machine a seemingly simple goal to pursue and the wrong set of keys could lead to disasterous consequences, I think. We also have the whole “Do Ai cars protect the driver or all human life even if it risks the driver?” Debate.

“But it’s trendy, it’s the future! And there’s so much venture capital involved, how lucrative!” Seems to be how major decisions are made these days.

I don’t see it some day “waking up” and thinking “I feel like humans are unnecessary.” It’s scarier than that…it will see us as just another variable to control and “maximize” us out of the picture.

I don’t forsee it becoming “sentient” so much as “Being given a stupid amount of access and resources to figure out a problem by itself, and stupidly pursuing the maximization of that goal with zero context.”

There’s that darkly humorous hypothetical that an Ai tasked with maximizing making paperclips would continue to do so, using every resource it could get a hold of, and destroying any threat to further paperclip production!

So that, with data center expansion and water. Lol

See “paperclip maximizer” under “hypothetical examples” Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

Definitely. Ask anybody who finally evacuated the last thing they ate from Olive Garden!

As a whole, we tend to be garbage and materialistic…

This might be one way to see it. I think a lot of people WANT to resist, but resistance costs a lot of mental and sometimes tangible energy. If you can smooth out a lifestyle that naturally excludes stupid brands like Roku, great.

But there’s a point when you want to participate in the rest of society, and people will break down for that. I do my best to avoid walmart, amazon, and other abusive tech companies, and educate others to do the same.

But someone still gifted my mom-in-law one of those stupid “alexa” spheres that I immediately put on its own V-LAN, and the family wanted a TV so they brought home a TCL/Roku because it’s what they could afford. (It was a good value at the time, years ago.) PiHole showed me exactly why it was so cheap.

Companies know after all the stresses you already encounter in your adult life, you’re gonna run out of bandwidth and cave eventually, because you’re human, and the path of least resistance becomes more tantalizing. That’s why they bombard you relentlessly, and evil tech is the most immediately accessible and familiar.

I’m personally thinking of just plugging a decently capable little media PC into the display, using KDE’s “big screen” interface with KDE Connect as a remote. I’m pretty sure I could train my family on that…

Roku is so scummy.

Also, I can’t even imagine how many resources image-generating AIs take up, especially when it’s all based around “refining prompts” over and over and over…

That’s the 1984 version, perhaps.

I’d posit the Brave New World version is

“It keeps buzzing your brain into doing your stupid task until the 30 hour shift is up, but don’t worry, you get sweet dopamine hits and painkillers the whole time and aren’t sure why this is so enjoyable! The pleasure-task curve is perfectly computed. You’re not even sure how long it’s been. There’s a momentary sadness when you witness a fellow worker just convulse and drop like a sack of rocks. This work feels so important though! You can understand their dedication.”

But in general, you would use specially rated components and materials if you need them to last decades - not the cheapest most basic parts you can find.

Keep in mind this is modern tech and an Elon-helmed corpo we’re talking about lol. Do decades-lasting components bump stock shares THIS quarter? I point to all the bits falling off of Teslas lately.

lol God help us all…

I still love the concept of floppy diskettes. Sure, some of this is nostalgia, but what if you had something like super fast solid state memory encased in a nice solid shell like that? Sure, sure, like a USB drive…but the contacts could be protected with the little slidy-shield bit and nobody could accidentally snag the USB sticking out and damage it and the port.

I think I just really miss the “kaCHUNK” of inserting physical solid media, and flipping through stacks of them…maybe not so much the capacity or read speeds :)

Oh I know that voice!

It was the one that told me to “stop torquing now!” When I ended up breaking a crossed bolt off in an awkward blind spot on the side of my engine…so now the VTT solenoid is held in by a little epoxy. Because otherwise the engine would have to be removed and a machinist would likely need to just destroy and rethread that thing.

Oh, the shame…

No I’m not a mechanic, I’m just not “pay a mechanic $600 to install a $40 part” rich. :D

But this is exactly why I won’t get into something like electricianship or other dangerous stuff. ADHD sometimes just squelches that little voice and I’m left asking myself why I did something so stupid and wishing I could go back 10 seconds.

If the consequences were life or death? Yeah no way I don’t need a sudden brain-lapse killing/maiming me or someone else.

I bet you got that toaster to run DOOM didn’t you? 😏

“Sorry your pacemaker has the silliest little flaw but the patented blobbed firmware could only be updated with some vendor program on Windows XP that was reliant on XP-specific libraries but Service Pack 2 broke it after the company went under…”

Same stuff with car electronics. Maddening.

B…bluetooth?

Oh no. Reverse that flow of data and “Hackable brains” are a thing. Cool. /s

“Move fast and break things monkeys before getting FDA cleared to risk humans.”

Oh geeze, so much. “Hey just grab Signal real quick, it’s super simple and private and SMS seems to get worse as time goes on anyway. Plus I can send you better pictures and videos!”

“Lol meh why you tryin to sell it to me.”

It’s weird, the things people really dig in their heels on. They’ll download apps for the silliest thing but “another chat app” is such an inconvenience.

It’s the only reason I think reddit dot com still resolves at all anymore. If the users weren’t the product, to both the company and other users, better alternatives would be the norm by now.

Ok Honda, you see it right? 2025 Honda Element would absolutely dust this trash.

Clearly there’s been a market segment since 2011 that still wants it so c’mon.

This cybertruck feels like it would be such visual pollution on campgrounds and stuff.

I remember rooting for their upstart little browser and being excited getting an invite to gmail, and thinking their OS was a cool alternative to the big mega-maniacal Apple stuff…

…now I just feel like my younger self had been taken for such a fool.

I got one for you: You’re on a tightrope of balancing security and your pocketbook, because a firmware update might also include DRM to brick any aftermarket toners you might have purchased.

Oh, you don’t wanna pay out the nose for gEnUiNe HP?? What’s your threat model look like?

Ridiculous.

Theoretically anyone at the right point can read all your SMS texts.

A great example being the police “stingray tower” system that masquerades as a cell tower that your phone will happily (and quietly) connect to.

Convince a phone that you’re just another authorized relay, have a target in mind, and it’s like reading postcards before they hit the mailbox.

This is also why it’s an absolute joke for 2FA, but institutions like banks still happily use it because it’s easy to understand.

SimpleX looked pretty intriguing…is it basically a better / private / more secure replacement for IRC?