I’m surprised the journalists are reporting their full names. Russia isn’t known for leaving these people to live their lives in peace. No doubt Russia has its own ways of finding these people, but we don’t need to make it any easier for them.

They missed Canada? Canada has a bill C-34 in the works which bans social media for under-16s and just happens to require everyone to submit their ID to non-Canadian corporations.

I hope you’re not saying you were aware of this. Stay where you are and the authorities will be with you shortly.

The amazing thing about responsibility for right-wingers is that they can preach about it endlessly because it’s always someone else’s.

I’ll give you three guesses.

It means if we want them to stay nice and keep letting us be our own country, we have to fix the effects of climate change without mentioning either its existence or the USA’s massive ongoing contributions to it, while the USA goes on trying to increase fossil fuel use and shut down renewables. Otherwise the USA will say “Look what you made me do!” and annex Canada. In other words, “We’re the USA and we are assholes in more ways than you could possibly imagine.”

You mean ordinary Americans will. It’s not like he’ll pay anything.

I suspect the thoroughness of the vetting is inversely proportional to the size of the kickback to Microsoft.

Indeed. I use Linux most of the time, and MacOS a bit of the time, but the old Windows desktop is still there for the infrequent times when I need it to work on old music projects. I have it too dual-booting into Linux, so even it spends most of its time in a more sane OS.

I’ve used an LG monitor for about 5 years, and never install the manufacturer’s software unless it looks genuinely useful. When I saw the Gamers Nexus video I went to check my installed apps, and sure enough there was LG’s monitor app, installed silently without my knowledge. I used Bulk Crap Uninstaller to get rid of it.

To prevent this kind of thing in future, run gpedit.msc and enable “Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata” under Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → System → Device Installation.

As a programmer I’ve been doing this, but only because a friend lent me a very powerful computer that I could never afford myself. That’s the problem right now: local LLM use requires a huge upfront investment in equipment that most workers can’t afford. But it does feel a lot better (and cheaper, once you have the equipment) to run the LLM on a server at home than on a server owned by some nasty tech company. If everyone could run open models locally some of the main objections would fall away.

So I disagree with the poster who said anything you can run at home isn’t worth it, but the catch is you need an absurdly expensive computer. The one I’m using would cost about 6 times what I used to pay for a powerful development PC. The model and agent I’m using can do some complex things and get decent results. But right now no affordable computer can run them. On regular affordable computers the models you can run are indeed limited.

Economic damage, environmental damage, concentration of power with multi-billionaire fascists, cultural damage due to huge quantities of slop crowding out everything else, mass unemployment and the exploitation of remaining workers, disempowerment of everyone who doesn’t have the resources to control this technology, destruction of ordinary people’s access to suitably powerful computing machinery so that we’re all forced to either rent access to AI from its corporate gatekeepers or not use it, total surveillance by the state and its favoured corporations, profiling and predictive policing, marketing, etc. That’s quite a lot to object to, and I’m sure there’s more.

It takes a lot of practice and patience. Even for experienced programmers it can be a slow process and full of missteps. One of the main skills is to be patient and methodical enough to figure out why something doesn’t work. Don’t be discouraged or impatient, and don’t be tempted to get AI to do it for you or to find your mistakes. You can use AI later but it isn’t a good idea when you’re trying to learn the skills. Try to do it yourself and, when it doesn’t work first time, take time to figure out why. Then do this lots more times.

Israel is the country of rape, torture and genocidal mass murder. That’s its reputation in the world now, and we all see it clearly.

As far as I can see it doesn’t improve that situation. The Google Play Store may be forced to list alternative app stores, but by default the only apps that will install on Android, no matter which store they are downloaded from, are those whose developer has registered with Google, and where Google has approved both the developer and the app. So Google can still censor any app or developer they (or the US Government) consider inconvenient.

Google promises a slightly laborious workaround for this, but they don’t say how long the workaround will remain available.

And the “fix” was to add an option to hide the spinner, it seems. I guess understanding why stuff is happening is too old-fashioned for today’s vibe pioneers.

Continuing that unbroken streak of bad artistic decisions towards an inevitable Star Wars Special 50th Anniversary Slop Edition reissue.

This seems unsurprising, given how AI agents typically have elevated privileges and are notoriously hard to lock down.

Maybe we could ask the AI to do that thinking bit then tell us what to say.

They watch Black Mirror and they see a world in which ordinary people have to obey the wishes of the rich and powerful or they suffer. And they like what they see.