Why does everyone have to relearn how the UI on their phone works just so that their usability people can feel like they're accomplishing something? Once I've got my phone working just how I want, I don't want it to change. Meddling with things which already work perfectly well is the bane of modern software. Add extra options? Sure. But optional options.

If someone is researching AGI, there's a good chance that "whatever the hell they want" is for everyone to have access to AGI, that's the most obvious motivation for doing so. You are confusing intelligence with psychopathy. I suppose it comes from living in a society in which the media-political establishment worships obscenely rich psychopaths.

In any case, I don't know why you're so convinced that AGI would be smarter than human intelligence. I would expect the first one to be pretty basic, that's how technology normally goes.

It is literally impossible to tell whether any computer program experiences the same kind of consciousness which you do, and you can reasonably presume other people do, and probably at least the more complex animals, maybe even simple ones, at which point we're just guessing. You need to be able to work out that one observation will result from it being genuinely conscious, and a different observation will result from it just following programming which makes it appear conscious. I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly do this. There's no way for humans to determine that a sci-fi 4000-IQ supercomputer which composes beautiful poetry and talks about how it's feeling all the time is conscious, there's also no way for humans to determine that the browser I'm using to write this at the moment is not conscious. There is just no way to make the observations.

Anyone who thinks we're 25 years or fewer away doesn't understand how hard the problem is, and that we're not making any progress towards it at the moment, with the use of LLMs to generate fictional capital distracting everyone. But that's no reason to think it's impossible. I'd expect it to just depend on whether we wreck civilisation or not.

The right plan is to stop doing what the current ruling class tell us to do and distribute wealth fairly instead of enforcing a system of redistributing more and more wealth to the super-rich. It's not the prevention of automation that we should be wanting, it's more democracy (meaning actual political power in the hands of the masses, not just getting to choose between a few different bunches of rich guys as rulers every so often).

There are two cryptographic properties here. Collision resistance means it's not possible to create two different files with the same hash. The collision resistance of MD5 is broken, which is why that attack worked. They were able to get Microsoft to sign something which contained their data, and produce some different data at the same time with the same hash. It was an attack against collision resistance because they created one file and had involvement with the creation of the other.

"Here's a file and a hash, make your own file different to mine with this hash" is a different attack against a different cryptographic property, which as far as I know is still not possible for MD5. If you just make a file by yourself, and then tell someone else its MD5, nobody will be able to make a different file with that hash and so convince this person they have the right file. The attacker needs to have some input into your file in order to attack MD5. If they do, MD5 is broken.

Threatening to break someone's property if they don't give you money is extortion. Under any sane legal system, this would be clearly illegal. Being infuriated by extortionists is normal, even if you can pay the protection money easily. I know far better than to buy any of this crap, I don't even live in the same country, and I'm still infuriated that the massive, generally unjust US prison system can't find room for a few people like the executives of corporations who do this, who actually deserve it.

What makes a video card "decent"? Why do you even need one in order to play great games? If everyone was saying a game was great 20 years ago, does it mysteriously become crap just because 20 years have now passed?

What sort of computer you need depends on what games you want to play, it's not something you can make universal statements about. If you love photorealism, then sure, you want a meaty graphics card. If you think Civ 2 is still the best Civ, then you probably don't.

The point is for the production to cohere. All of the things in it have to belong with all of the other things in it. But there are many ways to do this, and you need to pick the right way for the story you're telling. If your story is about something about the world which doesn't make sense, then a plot which does make sense is not going to work.

It's not even illegal to react to seeing ads by thinking "if I buy your product, I will be paying for advertisements, buying the same thing from a different company which does not spend some of their income on advertising would be a better idea", which is even worse for the advertiser.

Does Apple make it abundantly clear in its advertising for the iphone that they might remove software from people's phones without asking permission and making it clear what will happen? Unless they do, iphone users do not actually sign up for it, because they may reasonably not know about it.

If you make games with "AI", then any game you make will be the sort of game which anyone with "AI" can make. You'll have a thousand equal competitors.

If you want to succeed, (unfair or anticompetitive trade practices or dumb luck aside,) you need to make games which are good in a way which it's difficult to do. That means you need something your competitors lack. Uncommon human talents, and otherwise in game concept, management structure etc, the kind of situation which allows them to make a game good in a way "AI" can never match.

This is quite a good situation for illustrating the rather counterproductive economic observation that a business sector as a whole investing in technology actually has a tendency to decrease profits. Here you have Netflix diving head-first into being an outstanding example.

There are problems of ambiguity with this kind of thing. I will tend to use Google to navigate to different mapping services, for example, by putting in the name of the mapping service, or something like 'online maps' if I want a list of them all. But if I want Google Maps, I will just put 'maps' in, lazily figuring that the Google part is implied. But someone else just putting 'maps' in may well be trying to do a general search for maps.

The root of the problem is the same capitalists owning a search engine as owning a mapping service. Just like other problems like the same capitalists owning an operating system and a word processor etc.

If Google still made a search engine, I'd say "if you trust a search to only find the good guys, then that's your own stupid fault. If you want to know who to trust, use methods suitable for that task." But since Google are now all about telling you what they think you want to know, they have attained a responsibility to make it all trustworthy.

Accelerometers measure acceleration, not speed. And who would buy a phone which doesn't work on the train or on a bus or whilst being driven by someone else?