dbspin

Strongly disagree. Most crimes are crimes of opportunity. Most 'pervs' don't start out that way either. Detecting increasingly easy to conceal sousveillance devices is probably essential for any kind of normative public sphere to continue to exist.

Antifa isn't an organisation at all. It's a loosely defined ideology / set of tactics that leftist movements (everything from black block kids to local democratically organised spaces) sometimes use or follow.

Doesn't do bike routes at all in my country (Ireland) for some reason.

The scale is new. Obviously a nightmare or even a tragedy for individual people that it happens at all. But this happening to (tens of?) thousands of people all at once is a whole different thing.

Fortunately there's a near infinite demand for boosterism too.

Citation needed. I've owned Apple laptops for many years - and I'm a video editor (amongst other things). If this is the case it's new behaviour.

> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.

When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.

I think you'll need a more sterling critique than 'why would you wnat to tie this to a file format', to the most successful open source media technology of all time. Aside - yes there are or were legal issues with the fraunhofer patents for MP3, but these weren't enough to stop the LAME project and expired in 2017. The combination of MP3 and RSS should be studied as quite likely the most popular open format ever. They've kept podcasting out of the hands of wannabe privatisers from spotify to apple for twenty years.

OK... I'm going to assume good faith even though your wording makes it somewhat unlikely.

Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be.

Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera.

Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago.

This is a classic mistake. We have no way of estimating the future value of a given book. It's perceived current value (a large part of which is simply obscurity) may be low. But it's future value - to historians, ethnographers, to researchers seeking a specific fact or example of language use or a hundred other things - is literally inestimable.

To take a crude example in a different medium - new york in the 90s - widely documented right? Yet, if you want to find high definition video of street life in a given burrough on a given day or year, you're faced with an enormously difficult task. There were some HD test videos done in Manhattan in the late 90s (which have been posted to Hackernews before), but there's no equivalent for the other burroughs. Your best best would be finding original negative out takes or location scouting footage from feature films, a very hard task. That's only 30 years ago. Outside of the focal points of the worlds attention - English language, rich countries, places in the news, contemporaneous sources for 'non notable' events (lifestyle, how people spoke dressed etc) is surprisingly poorly preserved.

Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.

Doubtful. A robust protocol would be to scan several of each edition (to ensure no scanning errors), and scan each edition. Then too, these books are being purchased in lots with accidental duplicates, and all the major labs are doing it. So we're likely talking about tens of each book. For rare books - anything over a couple of hundred years old or small print runs either, that could well be most or even all copies. This wouldn't be immediately noticed either, especially if the books aren't currently considered noteworthy or well known.

"Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.)."

Hell no. Sourcing ideas? From AI? Are you kidding? Essentially guaranteeing they won't be original? Refining prose? Making it much more likely it'll be generic as hell. Call me old fashioned, but while I can certainly understand asking LLMs concrete questions - how do I fix this, where can I unsubscribe from that - using AI to help communicate seems bass-ackwards. LLMs have no idea what you're talking about - they're free associating probabilistic sentences! What on earth value could that have in communicating. They self contradict, hallucinate, speak most frequently in a weird smug corporatese. How is this an attractive use case of the technology?

Interesting. In every European country I know of, the private option is still available. Just vastly cheaper and more beneficial due to having to compete with a public option which covers basic necessities, surgery etc.

Downvotes are disturbing and ideologically motivated rather than bothering to engage with the point.

You're not a musician if you hop onto Suno and generate a song. You're not a filmmaker if you open Gemini Omni and prompt some video. And you're not a bloody writer if you have an LLM do it for you. Talk about wheelchairs for the mind...

So... You don't write with language models... You have a language model write for you... You can spend all the time you like developing structure and ideas, but if you don't actually do the writing you haven't written it.

This is spectacularly wrong headed. If you want a book with your name on it for adulation or career reasons, but lack the interest, time or talent to produce one - hire a ghost writer. Writers are affordable and plentiful.

Similarly if you have a hyperspecific interest, kink or genre preference - use your position as a presumably well remunerated tech person to hire a writer to cater to it. Trust me, we need the patronage.

If you're looking for the pleasure of writing, you will unfortunately have to undergo, as all writers have through history, the process of suffering and discovery that we call writing.

From my observation and discussions I'd say 'the public' are far more concerned by material conditions - i.e.: the threat of job loss, the noise and environmental concerns around data centres, the increases in the cost of electricity and so on - than too much positive talk about AI.

No... As tech helper for various family and friends, I've been the one to clean install brave on a variety of machines. I typically demonstrate youtube before and after ublock for them, so they can see its effects. Never once not had adverts on a clean brave install. Not a representative sample obviously, but I've installed it for a fair few folks over the years.

I don't know what to tell you... It most definitely does not block youtube adverts for me and never had / did... Also, I found Ublock origin updates less reliable / frequent on Brave. Since switching zero issues.

Brave's ad block is pretty ineffectual by itself. For example it doesn't block youtube adverts. Recently switched to Firefox with Ublock origin, and loving it. So much more efficient and quick than it was back in the day when we all switched to Chrome.

I was replying to the references to the canon of Western mythology around dwarves and the like.

Since dwarfs (little people) actually exist, I don't think we need to reach into psychedelics for an explanation.

100% this. I wish more techies could understand this. That same logic underlies the 'scanning books and music and movies without permission is just like a student / artist / filmmaker learning'. Differences in technology and information access elicit different outcomes, different processes and entail radically different consequences for society.

That's not the case at all. You can regulate and audit a small number of players. To a great extent at least. You cannot even theoretically regulate local models. Hell I've got a jailbroken Qwen 3.5 running on my mac studio that has no guardrails at all.

Not spear phishing in organisations... Spear phishing against individual people. Your grandmother, your aged uncle...

Your comment on nuclear waste is so ill considered and poorly informed it's not worth responding to.

I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a couple of years now that real time identity theft voice and video calls are going to be an enormous problem. I don't think anyone realises how much of a problem. I haven't seen a single effective solution proposed to proving digital identity given these new attack vectors. It's akin to nuclear waste in that way - the benefits are obvious, but the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.

If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it.

A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.

The investors.

They're not remotely similar. The consequences for a spill of nuclear waste - either from a storage facility that's been compromised or hit by a strike during a war, or for example the sinking of a delivery ship that's transporting waste - are enormous. Ditto the largely unsolved costs of decommissioning.

Yup, and a duopoly isn't a free market!

> most of my contrarian ideas are correct.

My stripper finds me attractive, my therapist is in love with me, and my genius goes unrecognised because of small men intimidated by ideas they cannot comprehend.

I'm really hoping your comment is satire, but assuming it isn't, genuinely it might be time to get some help. Our capacity for self delusion as humans is enormous, and it's only higher in brighter people - particularly autodidacts who are used to being the smartest person they know.

Beautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical.

Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.