This “China’s AI is taking your data and that’s bad” is shockingly similar to “TikTok is taking your data and that’s bad”. Lots of US counterparts do the same thing, but I don’t see (as much) media coverage about that.
Don Draper: “no no no, everyone else’s cigarettes are dangerous. Lucky Strikes are… toasted.”
Why have just one additional failure point when you can have two?
I’ve been thinking of the “capitalism breeds innovation” thing a lot lately.
It may still be true, but the latest innovations are always in money making. There is no incentive to innovate in a way that serves a common good, but there is massive incentive to “innovate” in a way that drives profits up.
Subscriptions to everything and the erosion of ownership? Innovative.
Insurance companies taking your money and then denying your claims? Innovative.
Uncapped campaign finance and buying politicians? Innovative (well, it’s been done before, but not to this scale in a very long time).
Exactly this. There was a meme (or maybe many) rolling around long ago about how the intention was not to have humans do all the jobs and AI do all the art: quite the opposite.
This is related to the growth in productivity we have seen across industries for the last 50 years. It is through the roof, but wages are lower per unit production and aren’t showing any signs of ending their stagnation.
The problem there is the same with all this new tech enhancing lives and production, while people still have to work as much as before, if not more: the gains, monetary or otherwise, are being pocketed by someone else.
It’s like wage theft, but “better”: it’s progress theft.
Between this and Tim Cook’s generous personal donation to the Trump inauguration, those folks seem strangely silent.
I saw it when I worked retail (which was a long time ago, so I guess as an anecdote, add an extra grain of salt; maybe things have changed but I doubt it).
We would get pallets of product right before Black Friday, and curiously, they would overlap with product we already had in the store. For example, if we carried a 40" TV from brand X (TVs are very notorious for this Black Friday swapping), we’d get a pallet of 40" TVs from brand X which looked exactly the same, had the same specs on the box, but a different SKU. In some cases we were instructed to remove the original stock and replace it with the Black Friday stock, which would be priced lower.
As others have mentioned, returns on the sale stock would be high. And there would be interesting differences, like an obviously cheaper remote or an overall lighter unit.
And of course sometimes there was no overlap – we’d get some product from some no name brand that just sat out in the aisle on its pallet. These were absolutely only brought in for Black Friday and I have to assume they were the cheapest imaginable garbage inside.
I’ve never sought out a Black Friday sale since those days.
But definitely double check SKUs. A lot of Black Friday products are more cheaply made than their usual counterparts, even if they outwardly seem like the same product.
The right has tried to censor video games for years.
I’m old enough to remember Doom being blamed for Columbine.
This is one effect of a general lack of real consequences for corporations and those that run them.
The company has already determined their likely fine after being caught doing something egregious. The profit from being early to market is significant, and so long as it is considerably higher than the likely fine, they go for it. The expected real earnings are the difference between the profit and the fine. It’s all made worse since so often the fine is absolutely nothing compared to the profit, since the numbers these companies are dealing with are so damn big.
This is why you won’t see real change until we stop slapping corporations with fines and start slapping executives with jail time. That is literally the only way to break the cycle.
Got the update the other day. Immediately disabled Assistant in settings.
There will be no new features worth using, especially considering privacy concerns, until this AI craze blows over, and ultimately that’s a long way away since so many executives have more $$$ in their eyes than ever.
My main worry is how long it will take before even disabling such features on one’s own device is impossible (and yes, I’m aware that there is already only so much you can do).
I started my Steam account in 2004(?) because it was required to do so even though I bought the DVD-ROM version of HL2. Imagine my rage when it also forced me to update – I was on dial-up at the time.
Potentially the worst music take I’ve ever seen. Enjoy the upvote.
I tend to use food names, like
tomatoandsausage. But nopotato, and definitely noapple.I also utilize the special-use domain home.arpa for all my LAN systems, so accidental collisions are largely impossible.