I haven’t yet seen where use of AI hasn’t made things worse.

• Agents: Every instance of AI for “customer service” I’ve run into basically just closed cases for invalid reasons, spouted bullshit, and was used to block interacting with a real human, trapping users in infinite loops (thanks eBay) or disconnecting on them (thanks PayPal)

• Security: M365 seems to be relying heavily on this now, which means that the same phishing email which was successfully blocked last week will randomly get through a few times this week for no apparent reason

*Coding: sometimes useful, but also points to do stuff like reference functions that don’t actually exist in the API/language being used

I mean, I do get it. Some people take on debt as a way to live beyond their means when they could still live a “comfortable” life without the glamour or “keeping up with the Jones”. The $80k+ gas guzzling truck bought on credit - that’s only used for driving to work and grocery trips - is a good example of this.

But a better way of saying this is “live within your means”, but it’s becoming increasingly impossible to do this and have a standard of living that’s just “decent shelter and healthy food” (or even, “enough food”) which should be a bare minimum

At the same time I’m seeing a bunch of ads for “hardware is getting too expensive, use Akamai cloud for your gaming etc instead, now with AI blah blah!”

Bitch, you’re the reason hardware is so expensive!

Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!

I kinda wonder.

Sexual abuse is often more about power than about physical gratification.

Child abuse of this nature is pretty universally decried as one of the most heinous crimes.

So after these rich pieces of shit get away with breaking all the other laws on the books, are they going after kids for the thrill of feeling untouchable by any standard of law and morality?

And to further that, I wonder if there’s almost some sort of sick initiation that involves this sort of abuse. Once you’re in “the group”, they can out you for all the sick and illegal shit you’ve been involved with so you can’t turn on anyone else. This also follows tactics commonly used by Russia etc.

Given all the stuff that’s happened and turned out to be projection, what’s the chance there actually was some sort of pizzeria based child-dungeon, but operated by the same people throwing out accusations?

I think it’s the other M.

Money.

Money and power.

Once they got those, it’s an addiction they’ll pursue over anything else

And this is also why we NEED mainstream Linux mobile (phone) devices. Google is actively locking down their ecosystem. Both Apple and Google see customers as walking wallets

Needs more bagpipe!

One thing I’ve been impressed with China for is moving towards greener technologies. They’re a leader in solar, their EV’s are apparently very good (not that I can get one here to verify that), and they’re pretty dogged in their pursuit of nuclear energy.

Meanwhile USA is apparently still in “let’s overturn regimes and take over other countries for the oil companies” mode

I think that the cloud system might be needed to initially pair the speaker to a network+account, but apart from that no. The speakers in my media network are not allowed Internet access.

That kinda sucks, especially since even the older ones work with Home Assistant etc directly now