My point still stands. There is no reason for a warning system for Russia, China, or any other country. We are not at war. And "duck and cover" was never a valid strategy anyway.
Failing large-scale nuclear war preparations, there is no use for a warning system except for this sort of occasional panic. If we don't have months of food and water stocked up for the bulk of the populace, fallout scrubbing air filters, large capacity nuclear bunkers, etc., what's the point of warning people? Better off getting fried or crushed in the blast wave so it's quick, rather than the next several weeks of radiation poisoning and starvation.
Where I live we have tornado sirens. Why? Because several times a year we get tornadoes, and in general, we have safe places to go until it's all clear. That's a useful warning system. "Oh shit we're all going to die!" isn't.
Everything that should have been used instead of Excel in the first place.
Thank you. Came here to post just this.
There is so much excel abuse in the world that it's not funny. Entire businesses run off a black box of macros that someone wrote a decade ago. Hire someone to script it up in a sensible language and drop it into some sort of CVS so that there's some amount of transparency, backups, and the ability to debug it.
One place I worked at had a major disaster in accounting because some guy's hard drive failed. Close to a month goes by as he re-writes his excel macros to be able to spit out some of the reports that they used to drive business decisions. Once he's got it all up and running, we asked him to re-run the last couple of months worth of reports, because, as sensible IT people, we backed that shit up, since it was used for business decisions. He does it, and it's clear that his current code doesn't match the code he was using previously.
My boss said, "No, it's not our problem. Forget about it. I tried to fight that battle before, and we lost it." I was blown away that this guy's hack-job of excel macros was the preferred way to run the business. Little did I know that this was far, far too common.
But I'm not sure if that's better or worse than humans, to be honest.
With a human, they might be told to exterminate your village, but they might not be able to do it. They also might be told to keep casualties to a minimum, and "look out, snipers!" and now they've got the rationale for exterminating your village.
The robots are either set to exterminate the village or to select targets carefully. You get what you get, and there is a lot less uncertainty. Whether or not that's worse than sending scared/angry/psychotic humans, I honestly don't know. I think it's only worse if they're set to exterminate a majority of the time.
The larger blame lies with the government and the (I hate the term, but it's so applicable here.) sheeple who call for this sort of a warning system.
There is no legitimate reason to have this sort of warning in place. None! North Korea has established that it can hit the ocean with its missiles most of the time. (They took out a neighborhood in one of their cities within the last 6 months!) Until North Korea is a) demonstrating that it can actually get an ICBM within 100 miles of its intended target, and b) is actively threatening to blow up parts of the US, it's insane fear mongering to have such a system in place.
I just don't understand how we got to a place where a sizable percent of the population of the US lives in daily fear of highly improbable shit. It's so utterly stupid, and unfortunately, these dumbasses vote in dumbasses who play on these fears.
Any suggestions for what we replace "the land of the free and the home of the brave" with?
There is no one "right" answer to a question like this save the ones we collectively and imperfectly come to as a society.....Apple believes it is protecting freedom. It's wrong.
Yes there is a right answer, you fascist shill. The answer is "Fuck off you bunch of spying police state asshats."
There is nothing magical about technology which somehow makes criminals into super villains the likes of which it will take a batman to counter. Our law enforcement still has all the tools they used over the last 100 years to counter crime, plus a metric fuckton of additional technology. They have the ability to track ceill phones by the towers they connect to, they have facial recognition and licence plate readers, half of the new cars out there come with tracking devices like OnStar, they have an ever increasing ability to track all financial purchases as we move further away from cash, etc., etc., etc.
There is no legitimate reason to let law enforcement snoop through everyone's private life. None! That's serious fascist police state shit right there, and we have absolutely no reason to enable it. We've got orders of magnitude more people dying from opioids and car accidents than all of the terrorist attacks and crimes combined. Using shit like this to justify deep, untraceable, unnoticeable spying into the lives of the populace is a gross authoritarian overreach.
We used to be the land of the free and home of the brave, but not anymore. I believe that someone once noted that those willing to exchange freedom for security deserve neither.
No downvotes for you at the moment, so I'll have to settle for pointing out how stupid your argument is.
First, "think of the children" is a shitty, fear-mongering argument designed to play to people's base instincts, and trap them in a corner so they can't produce a good argument against you. How do you argue against protecting children without seeming like a monster?
Second, if there is a switch to flip, that can and will be abused. Between nation states and malware, if you want it on there's the chance that it will get turned off without your notice, and if you want it off there's a chance it will get turned on without your notice.
Third, enabling authorities to invisibly snoop on anyone not smart enough to turn on their encryption is stupid and wrong. It sets up an expectation that they can check in on anyone when they want to, and creates the "why are you encrypting if you have nothing to hide" line of thought.
Last, technology isn't some magic shit that prevents law enforcement from doing it's job. It's the opposite, actually. Not only can they can do the same damn job the same damn way as they always have, we now live in a world with cameras everywhere, face identification, cell phone tracking, OnStar and other car tracking and remote control abilities, etc., etc., etc.
Law enforcement already has orders of magnitude more tools with which to catch bad guys than they had even a decade ago. There is absolutely no reason to allow them invisibly monitor every facet of a large percentage of people's lives, data mine and machine learn, heuristically profile, and otherwise pry into their lives without a trace because there's a vanishingly small chance they might be up to something. I don't care how bad or stupid those people are - that's abusive fascist secret police shit right there.
I'm sure that they brought food and drink to the party, right? It's not unreasonable to ask them to bring their own broadband then either. It's not like there's some physical limitation preventing them from bringing their home connection with them!
Especially since it would likely also take down Twitter and Instagram, as people flooded those sites to bitch about Facebook being down. Then the various messenger apps would go down next, and finally we'd see the cell network shudder as millions of text messages got sent wailing about the inability to communicate with the world.
My wife and I just take a picture of the board before we head out. We had some list keeping software, shared notebook, and other things, but they're never in the kitchen when we need them. I suppose that shouting at Alexa and hoping she understands is one option, but just jotting a note on the fridge works just fine. As a trade-off for not installing a spying ad delivery system in my house, I say it's a fair compromise.
Zero Employees? Then who's going to stop you when you rent an office, redirect their mail, and give yourself a nice salary for being employee #1? I mean, it's not like anyone can say you don't work there, unless you get tricked into admitting it yourself.
* Only a handful of suburbs are in range of NK artillery. * Seoul has bomb shelters. * During the few drills we've seen recently, a sizable percentage of the NK munitions are duds. * NK also doesn't get to do anywhere near as much drilling as SK and the US get to do, because they don't have the resources to do it. * NK doesn't have satellites, drones, stealth aircraft, or any decent remote sensing capacity. They have a serious information gap both offensively and defensively. We've got decades of battle simulations done up with accurate measures of the arms on both sides. * NK defectors are malnourished and the last one had tapeworms. NK troops are not fit for battle, and definitely don't have enough food nor a supply chain that will survive the first salvos to get more to the front line troops.
Yes, hundreds of thousands of poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly commanded, out-of-communication malnourished and sick North Koreans could storm across the border in a war. I think it would be closer to a humanitarian crisis than a military crisis, however.
Well fuck, I tried to mod this overrated, and hit underrated instead, So here's my comment to undo that mod.
Who cares?
I mean really, who cares?
Musk has over-promised by about 40% on everything. Everything. But what was his promise? Disrupt everything. Change the world.
Yeah, he doesn't nail it every time. But he gets so close to world-shaking that I'm not worried at all. My current car does 0-60 in about 12 seconds. For $40k I can buy a number of cars that can cut that down to 6s. All sucking down a ton of fuel. But the Model 3? 4 seconds. Maybe less. For the same money or less.
Yes, production is lagging, but so what? Your world-changing technology is delayed 6 months. Are you really going to throw a fit about that?
If Musk never produced anything he claimed to have made, I'd throw him in the bin of scammers and charlatans. But he fucking does what he says! On schedule? Nope. But not that far later, and not that much less.
There aren't many futurists who have a record anything near what Musk has for delivering world-changing technology.
In general, because most of us are intelligent enough to understand that Venezuela's problems are way more complex than your neoocon dog-whistle would imply they are.
I'm sorry - were you trolling for a socialist argument, or a like-minded neocon reinforcement?
There's a second major problem: Nobody wants to fucking move.
My wife and I did. We met in a city a thousand plus miles from where we grew up. We came here for school, and found that it was expensive but not too expensive, and it was critically short in jobs that we were qualified for.
So we stayed. Good jobs, able to afford the place, and we really like it here.
Just tonight we were out to eat, opining that we wished our families would ditch their dead-end, overly expensive, jobless existence and come live here. They have any number of excuses, but it comes down to being stubborn and not being able to handle change.
If we had stayed where we grew up, we'd do as well or less well than our families 50 years ago. But we moved to opportunity, and are doubling up on the last generation.
Nostalgia is great for holiday drinking, but if you want to do well in life, you need to take it as a warning and not as an instruction.
Very much this. I got a cheap color laser printer for $300 a couple of years ago and it's perfect. I'll let it sit for 6 or 8 months at a time and it'll still quite happily print something the moment I fire it up.
Ditto. Got a wireless Brother HL series printer, and while it gets used closer to every month or two, same thing. The deep sleep draws 8 Watts, so 8*24/1000 = 0.2 kWh/day, at $0.11/ kWh means it costs me $0.67/month to have it on standby, ready to warm up and print in 30 seconds when I decide that I need to print something from another room in the house.
Toner's about in the same ballpark as inkjet ink...
And here is where I'll pedantically disagree with you. If you let an inkjet set 6-8 months at a time, it likely costs you $60 in ink every time you want to print. Every two times at the most. This is where the color laser really shines. 3 years later it fires up and prints using that same toner that it had back then, no drying, clogging, or loss of performance.
I know, right? Like clean air, water, adequate food, shelter, protection from dangerous animals, protection from other humans, ability to get health care instead of dying in the gutter....the list goes on and on.
That talk really is insane. All these things cost other people money and time, and it's just not right to abuse the rest of society like this.
----------------------
And since some asshat will jump on and claim that the internet isn't like one of these other things, consider this: How do you pay for utilities, manage your finances, pay for your kid's school lunches, book a flight or hotel room, reserve a car, access your unemployment benefits, look for a job, do any sort of frugal price comparisons, stay in touch with the family, etc., etc., etc.
Sure, you can do some of them by phone. But the vast majority are now designed to be done online. I haven't seen a job in the last couple of years that I could apply to without an internet connection. I wouldn't have even been able to find the last 3 jobs I had without an internet connection, let alone apply to them. Sure, I could head down to the library and use one of the free computers for an hour or two, but if there's any sort of demand, I'm waiting in line there to get shit done. And when they email me for an interview and I can't respond because the library is closed and I don't know I got that offer, I get passed over.
If we suddenly reverted back to the 1960s and everything was done by radio, tv, newspaper, and phone, I'd agree that there shouldn't be a right to an internet connection. But this is pretty much 2018, and for the last 15 years, we've incorporated the internet into the fabric of society, and built it into all of the systems we use on a daily basis. It's almost as important to getting shit done as electricity is at this point.
Are you kidding? if you've been out in public, your face is almost definitely somewhere on the internet. Security cameras store to the cloud. Dumbasses taking selfies as you walk by automatically upload every photo to the internet.
Have you walked past or used an ATM? Your picture is probably on the internet. Have you ever gone to a bar or restaurant? If not from a security camera discretely placed in there, there's a very good chance that some dumbass posting their dinner to instragram caught you in their picture, or snapchatted a selfie to their friend with you in the background. Have you gone into any major chain store? Congratulations, your photo is now on the internet, from all of the angles.
It's unavoidable if you participate in modern life to any meaningful extent.
But all this sitting in front of a smartphone screen, computer screen - even at work, has some serious physical health implication
Compared to what? because if you go back even 50 years, our lifespans were a lot shorter. Go back another 50, and it was even worse.
Sure, activity is better than inactivity, but honestly, humans are doing better health-wise with every passing decade. Looks like that's going to be close to leveling off at this point, but it also looks like that's because we're reaching the limits of what the human body is capable of in terms of longevity. We might be able to genetically engineer around that, but we also may not be able to.
What I'm curious about are the psychological impacts of crossing the uncanny valley. How can this be used to help with PTSD, loss of a loved one, depression, substance abuse, etc.? Psychologically, if you can still have a chat with your mom every day for a couple of years after she dies, is that better or worse? What if that program is designed to slowly steer you to acceptance, with an end goal of you saying goodbye and getting on with your life?
If you're an old recluse and a nice young man comes and chats with you every day, is that going to be a bad thing? Will we see social work and psychological help outsourced to specialized AI? It's interesting, because the possibility exists to design in AI exactly what someone needs to be most receptive to positive change in their life.
And holy shit will this be used to fuel extremism, because when you can subtly make "the other" worse and worse, and tune AI to provoke, it's going to be insanely bad.
What? You're describing now. What this means is you say you didn't do it, and produce a video showing you not doing it. That's the real issue.
Of course, that will also be denounced as fake as well, and we're back to just insisting that things are true.
I have optimism that AI will be able to spot it if AI can make it. However, the real trick is going to be ensuring that the AI isn't manipulated to rule in your favor. AI auditing is going to be one hell of a challenge in the upcoming decades.
And if you have that, AI pot shots wouldn't matter that much since they'd be very thin on substance.
Except that you're replying to someone who postulated
It's not going to pass for human in a conversation, but in single posts it'll appear human most of the time.
And therein lies the problem. Once bots can reasonably approximate the median person on a forum, I think humans chatting in forums will rapidly disappear. Bots will be able to post far faster than humans, and once you have a couple of competing bots, the bots will have hashed the point out and will have moved on before the human gets done pecking at the keyboard.
Now, I don't know if this is a bad thing or a good thing, to be honest.There are few places like/. (and even here it's got some issues) where reasonable long-form discussion happens on the internet. Most of the time, as you note, it's taken over by extremists on both side. And most of the time, they don't have a lot of quality in their posts. It stands to reason that when we have AI able to carry on a reasonable conversation that we'll also have AI able to determine when non-reasonable conversation is happening. (I.E. bot or human just trying to shout down others.) In that case, we'll finally have a somewhat fair moderation system for once.
Assuming moderately functional AI posting, and moderately functional AI moderating, and you end up in a situation where you'll be able to tune the AI to have somewhat deep and interesting conversations. Humans can participate, but more than likely most humans will just consume that. Add in animation crossing the uncanny valley, and suddenly you have emergent talking heads for every subject in the universe. And while you can poison the underlying data, if you don't, suddenly the quality of what's being discussed goes up, as compared to the current human debaters.
And while this can (and will) be used for ill, I can't help but be optimistic that exposing millions more people to reasonable and factual debate might be a good thing. Of course, if the current state of TV is any indication, what people want is their tribe shouting down the other tribe, so maybe I shouldn't be so optimistic. Although if this comes to pass, we'll at least be able to make AI able to enjoy watching the good stuff, so that's something.
One of the reasons that SpaceX avoided using solid rocket boosters is because they are terrible from a pollution perspective.
Um, no. From the start, they wanted reusable boosters. You can't easily throttle down or start/stop solid rocket boosters. If you're going to try to land a rocket, solid is about the worst choice. Pollution has nothing to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
My point still stands. There is no reason for a warning system for Russia, China, or any other country. We are not at war. And "duck and cover" was never a valid strategy anyway.
Failing large-scale nuclear war preparations, there is no use for a warning system except for this sort of occasional panic. If we don't have months of food and water stocked up for the bulk of the populace, fallout scrubbing air filters, large capacity nuclear bunkers, etc., what's the point of warning people? Better off getting fried or crushed in the blast wave so it's quick, rather than the next several weeks of radiation poisoning and starvation.
Where I live we have tornado sirens. Why? Because several times a year we get tornadoes, and in general, we have safe places to go until it's all clear. That's a useful warning system. "Oh shit we're all going to die!" isn't.
Move from Excel to what?
Everything that should have been used instead of Excel in the first place.
Thank you. Came here to post just this.
There is so much excel abuse in the world that it's not funny. Entire businesses run off a black box of macros that someone wrote a decade ago. Hire someone to script it up in a sensible language and drop it into some sort of CVS so that there's some amount of transparency, backups, and the ability to debug it.
One place I worked at had a major disaster in accounting because some guy's hard drive failed. Close to a month goes by as he re-writes his excel macros to be able to spit out some of the reports that they used to drive business decisions. Once he's got it all up and running, we asked him to re-run the last couple of months worth of reports, because, as sensible IT people, we backed that shit up, since it was used for business decisions. He does it, and it's clear that his current code doesn't match the code he was using previously.
My boss said, "No, it's not our problem. Forget about it. I tried to fight that battle before, and we lost it." I was blown away that this guy's hack-job of excel macros was the preferred way to run the business. Little did I know that this was far, far too common.
But I'm not sure if that's better or worse than humans, to be honest.
With a human, they might be told to exterminate your village, but they might not be able to do it. They also might be told to keep casualties to a minimum, and "look out, snipers!" and now they've got the rationale for exterminating your village.
The robots are either set to exterminate the village or to select targets carefully. You get what you get, and there is a lot less uncertainty. Whether or not that's worse than sending scared/angry/psychotic humans, I honestly don't know. I think it's only worse if they're set to exterminate a majority of the time.
The larger blame lies with the government and the (I hate the term, but it's so applicable here.) sheeple who call for this sort of a warning system.
There is no legitimate reason to have this sort of warning in place. None! North Korea has established that it can hit the ocean with its missiles most of the time. (They took out a neighborhood in one of their cities within the last 6 months!) Until North Korea is a) demonstrating that it can actually get an ICBM within 100 miles of its intended target, and b) is actively threatening to blow up parts of the US, it's insane fear mongering to have such a system in place.
I just don't understand how we got to a place where a sizable percent of the population of the US lives in daily fear of highly improbable shit. It's so utterly stupid, and unfortunately, these dumbasses vote in dumbasses who play on these fears.
Any suggestions for what we replace "the land of the free and the home of the brave" with?
Then I guess I'm expecting at least 10% of the cost of the processor cost back as a refund.
There is no one "right" answer to a question like this save the ones we collectively and imperfectly come to as a society.....Apple believes it is protecting freedom. It's wrong.
Yes there is a right answer, you fascist shill. The answer is "Fuck off you bunch of spying police state asshats."
There is nothing magical about technology which somehow makes criminals into super villains the likes of which it will take a batman to counter. Our law enforcement still has all the tools they used over the last 100 years to counter crime, plus a metric fuckton of additional technology. They have the ability to track ceill phones by the towers they connect to, they have facial recognition and licence plate readers, half of the new cars out there come with tracking devices like OnStar, they have an ever increasing ability to track all financial purchases as we move further away from cash, etc., etc., etc.
There is no legitimate reason to let law enforcement snoop through everyone's private life. None! That's serious fascist police state shit right there, and we have absolutely no reason to enable it. We've got orders of magnitude more people dying from opioids and car accidents than all of the terrorist attacks and crimes combined. Using shit like this to justify deep, untraceable, unnoticeable spying into the lives of the populace is a gross authoritarian overreach.
We used to be the land of the free and home of the brave, but not anymore. I believe that someone once noted that those willing to exchange freedom for security deserve neither.
No downvotes for you at the moment, so I'll have to settle for pointing out how stupid your argument is.
First, "think of the children" is a shitty, fear-mongering argument designed to play to people's base instincts, and trap them in a corner so they can't produce a good argument against you. How do you argue against protecting children without seeming like a monster?
Second, if there is a switch to flip, that can and will be abused. Between nation states and malware, if you want it on there's the chance that it will get turned off without your notice, and if you want it off there's a chance it will get turned on without your notice.
Third, enabling authorities to invisibly snoop on anyone not smart enough to turn on their encryption is stupid and wrong. It sets up an expectation that they can check in on anyone when they want to, and creates the "why are you encrypting if you have nothing to hide" line of thought.
Last, technology isn't some magic shit that prevents law enforcement from doing it's job. It's the opposite, actually. Not only can they can do the same damn job the same damn way as they always have, we now live in a world with cameras everywhere, face identification, cell phone tracking, OnStar and other car tracking and remote control abilities, etc., etc., etc.
Law enforcement already has orders of magnitude more tools with which to catch bad guys than they had even a decade ago. There is absolutely no reason to allow them invisibly monitor every facet of a large percentage of people's lives, data mine and machine learn, heuristically profile, and otherwise pry into their lives without a trace because there's a vanishingly small chance they might be up to something. I don't care how bad or stupid those people are - that's abusive fascist secret police shit right there.
Ok, but how do you really feel?
I'm sure that they brought food and drink to the party, right? It's not unreasonable to ask them to bring their own broadband then either. It's not like there's some physical limitation preventing them from bringing their home connection with them!
Missed the summary, eh?
Especially since it would likely also take down Twitter and Instagram, as people flooded those sites to bitch about Facebook being down. Then the various messenger apps would go down next, and finally we'd see the cell network shudder as millions of text messages got sent wailing about the inability to communicate with the world.
My wife and I just take a picture of the board before we head out. We had some list keeping software, shared notebook, and other things, but they're never in the kitchen when we need them. I suppose that shouting at Alexa and hoping she understands is one option, but just jotting a note on the fridge works just fine. As a trade-off for not installing a spying ad delivery system in my house, I say it's a fair compromise.
Zero Employees? Then who's going to stop you when you rent an office, redirect their mail, and give yourself a nice salary for being employee #1? I mean, it's not like anyone can say you don't work there, unless you get tricked into admitting it yourself.
The "bye goes Seoul" meme really needs to die.
* Only a handful of suburbs are in range of NK artillery.
* Seoul has bomb shelters.
* During the few drills we've seen recently, a sizable percentage of the NK munitions are duds.
* NK also doesn't get to do anywhere near as much drilling as SK and the US get to do, because they don't have the resources to do it.
* NK doesn't have satellites, drones, stealth aircraft, or any decent remote sensing capacity. They have a serious information gap both offensively and defensively. We've got decades of battle simulations done up with accurate measures of the arms on both sides.
* NK defectors are malnourished and the last one had tapeworms. NK troops are not fit for battle, and definitely don't have enough food nor a supply chain that will survive the first salvos to get more to the front line troops.
Yes, hundreds of thousands of poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly commanded, out-of-communication malnourished and sick North Koreans could storm across the border in a war. I think it would be closer to a humanitarian crisis than a military crisis, however.
They aren't going to care in the least. Recreational pot use is legal as of January 1st there.
Well fuck, I tried to mod this overrated, and hit underrated instead, So here's my comment to undo that mod.
Who cares?
I mean really, who cares?
Musk has over-promised by about 40% on everything. Everything. But what was his promise? Disrupt everything. Change the world.
Yeah, he doesn't nail it every time. But he gets so close to world-shaking that I'm not worried at all. My current car does 0-60 in about 12 seconds. For $40k I can buy a number of cars that can cut that down to 6s. All sucking down a ton of fuel. But the Model 3? 4 seconds. Maybe less. For the same money or less.
Yes, production is lagging, but so what? Your world-changing technology is delayed 6 months. Are you really going to throw a fit about that?
If Musk never produced anything he claimed to have made, I'd throw him in the bin of scammers and charlatans. But he fucking does what he says! On schedule? Nope. But not that far later, and not that much less.
There aren't many futurists who have a record anything near what Musk has for delivering world-changing technology.
In general, because most of us are intelligent enough to understand that Venezuela's problems are way more complex than your neoocon dog-whistle would imply they are.
I'm sorry - were you trolling for a socialist argument, or a like-minded neocon reinforcement?
There's a second major problem: Nobody wants to fucking move.
My wife and I did. We met in a city a thousand plus miles from where we grew up. We came here for school, and found that it was expensive but not too expensive, and it was critically short in jobs that we were qualified for.
So we stayed. Good jobs, able to afford the place, and we really like it here.
Just tonight we were out to eat, opining that we wished our families would ditch their dead-end, overly expensive, jobless existence and come live here. They have any number of excuses, but it comes down to being stubborn and not being able to handle change.
If we had stayed where we grew up, we'd do as well or less well than our families 50 years ago. But we moved to opportunity, and are doubling up on the last generation.
Nostalgia is great for holiday drinking, but if you want to do well in life, you need to take it as a warning and not as an instruction.
Very much this. I got a cheap color laser printer for $300 a couple of years ago and it's perfect. I'll let it sit for 6 or 8 months at a time and it'll still quite happily print something the moment I fire it up.
Ditto. Got a wireless Brother HL series printer, and while it gets used closer to every month or two, same thing. The deep sleep draws 8 Watts, so 8*24/1000 = 0.2 kWh/day, at $0.11/ kWh means it costs me $0.67/month to have it on standby, ready to warm up and print in 30 seconds when I decide that I need to print something from another room in the house.
Toner's about in the same ballpark as inkjet ink...
And here is where I'll pedantically disagree with you. If you let an inkjet set 6-8 months at a time, it likely costs you $60 in ink every time you want to print. Every two times at the most. This is where the color laser really shines. 3 years later it fires up and prints using that same toner that it had back then, no drying, clogging, or loss of performance.
I know, right? Like clean air, water, adequate food, shelter, protection from dangerous animals, protection from other humans, ability to get health care instead of dying in the gutter....the list goes on and on.
That talk really is insane. All these things cost other people money and time, and it's just not right to abuse the rest of society like this.
----------------------
And since some asshat will jump on and claim that the internet isn't like one of these other things, consider this: How do you pay for utilities, manage your finances, pay for your kid's school lunches, book a flight or hotel room, reserve a car, access your unemployment benefits, look for a job, do any sort of frugal price comparisons, stay in touch with the family, etc., etc., etc.
Sure, you can do some of them by phone. But the vast majority are now designed to be done online. I haven't seen a job in the last couple of years that I could apply to without an internet connection. I wouldn't have even been able to find the last 3 jobs I had without an internet connection, let alone apply to them. Sure, I could head down to the library and use one of the free computers for an hour or two, but if there's any sort of demand, I'm waiting in line there to get shit done. And when they email me for an interview and I can't respond because the library is closed and I don't know I got that offer, I get passed over.
If we suddenly reverted back to the 1960s and everything was done by radio, tv, newspaper, and phone, I'd agree that there shouldn't be a right to an internet connection. But this is pretty much 2018, and for the last 15 years, we've incorporated the internet into the fabric of society, and built it into all of the systems we use on a daily basis. It's almost as important to getting shit done as electricity is at this point.
Are you kidding? if you've been out in public, your face is almost definitely somewhere on the internet. Security cameras store to the cloud. Dumbasses taking selfies as you walk by automatically upload every photo to the internet.
Have you walked past or used an ATM? Your picture is probably on the internet. Have you ever gone to a bar or restaurant? If not from a security camera discretely placed in there, there's a very good chance that some dumbass posting their dinner to instragram caught you in their picture, or snapchatted a selfie to their friend with you in the background. Have you gone into any major chain store? Congratulations, your photo is now on the internet, from all of the angles.
It's unavoidable if you participate in modern life to any meaningful extent.
But all this sitting in front of a smartphone screen, computer screen - even at work, has some serious physical health implication
Compared to what? because if you go back even 50 years, our lifespans were a lot shorter. Go back another 50, and it was even worse.
Sure, activity is better than inactivity, but honestly, humans are doing better health-wise with every passing decade. Looks like that's going to be close to leveling off at this point, but it also looks like that's because we're reaching the limits of what the human body is capable of in terms of longevity. We might be able to genetically engineer around that, but we also may not be able to.
What I'm curious about are the psychological impacts of crossing the uncanny valley. How can this be used to help with PTSD, loss of a loved one, depression, substance abuse, etc.? Psychologically, if you can still have a chat with your mom every day for a couple of years after she dies, is that better or worse? What if that program is designed to slowly steer you to acceptance, with an end goal of you saying goodbye and getting on with your life?
If you're an old recluse and a nice young man comes and chats with you every day, is that going to be a bad thing? Will we see social work and psychological help outsourced to specialized AI? It's interesting, because the possibility exists to design in AI exactly what someone needs to be most receptive to positive change in their life.
And holy shit will this be used to fuel extremism, because when you can subtly make "the other" worse and worse, and tune AI to provoke, it's going to be insanely bad.
What? You're describing now. What this means is you say you didn't do it, and produce a video showing you not doing it. That's the real issue.
Of course, that will also be denounced as fake as well, and we're back to just insisting that things are true.
I have optimism that AI will be able to spot it if AI can make it. However, the real trick is going to be ensuring that the AI isn't manipulated to rule in your favor. AI auditing is going to be one hell of a challenge in the upcoming decades.
And if you have that, AI pot shots wouldn't matter that much since they'd be very thin on substance.
Except that you're replying to someone who postulated
It's not going to pass for human in a conversation, but in single posts it'll appear human most of the time.
And therein lies the problem. Once bots can reasonably approximate the median person on a forum, I think humans chatting in forums will rapidly disappear. Bots will be able to post far faster than humans, and once you have a couple of competing bots, the bots will have hashed the point out and will have moved on before the human gets done pecking at the keyboard.
Now, I don't know if this is a bad thing or a good thing, to be honest.There are few places like /. (and even here it's got some issues) where reasonable long-form discussion happens on the internet. Most of the time, as you note, it's taken over by extremists on both side. And most of the time, they don't have a lot of quality in their posts. It stands to reason that when we have AI able to carry on a reasonable conversation that we'll also have AI able to determine when non-reasonable conversation is happening. (I.E. bot or human just trying to shout down others.) In that case, we'll finally have a somewhat fair moderation system for once.
Assuming moderately functional AI posting, and moderately functional AI moderating, and you end up in a situation where you'll be able to tune the AI to have somewhat deep and interesting conversations. Humans can participate, but more than likely most humans will just consume that. Add in animation crossing the uncanny valley, and suddenly you have emergent talking heads for every subject in the universe. And while you can poison the underlying data, if you don't, suddenly the quality of what's being discussed goes up, as compared to the current human debaters.
And while this can (and will) be used for ill, I can't help but be optimistic that exposing millions more people to reasonable and factual debate might be a good thing. Of course, if the current state of TV is any indication, what people want is their tribe shouting down the other tribe, so maybe I shouldn't be so optimistic. Although if this comes to pass, we'll at least be able to make AI able to enjoy watching the good stuff, so that's something.
One of the reasons that SpaceX avoided using solid rocket boosters is because they are terrible from a pollution perspective.
Um, no. From the start, they wanted reusable boosters. You can't easily throttle down or start/stop solid rocket boosters. If you're going to try to land a rocket, solid is about the worst choice. Pollution has nothing to do with it.