Making motor vehicles without safety features illegal also removes choices/products.

Multiplayer video games ought to be designed up front for private servers after end of support, in the same way that motor vehicles are designed up front for the safety of occupants of that vehicle, occupants of other vehicles, and pedestrians.

A choice becomes a Hobson's choice when all sellers in the relevant market choose not to offer an option to buyers, such as an option to run a private server after end of support. A Hobson's choice is no real choice.

If the publisher of a single-player or small-group multiplayer game can't make a useful subset of the server software available to licensees, they should go out of business.

That's advertised up front as the equivalent of a rental. I draw a sharp contrast with buttons labeled "buy" that do not grant equivalent rights to those of the owner of a lawfully made copy.

Per the copyright statute of Slashdot's home country, Title 17, United States Code:
- A copy is a physical object in which a work is fixed. (Section 101)
- It is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to resell that copy. (Section 109)
- And it is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to make another copy of a computer program in RAM as an essential step of running it. (Section 117)

If the publisher of a movie or video game refuses to make it available in physical copies, am I justified in pretending that the work was never released?

If it becomes a crime or tort for the server middleware publisher to provide middleware that is "licensed and not redistributable", server middleware publishers will have to either change their standard license terms going forward or close.

Until you realize that to keep up with what your friends are playing, you need the equivalent of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock, and a bunch of other services. Netflix streaming began as the online extension of Starz, and now Starz is its own separate subscription service.

I use DuckDuckGo Privacy Tools. I see every single advertisement on John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball and on Read the Docs. DuckDuckGo does not block them because these sites serve ads in a way that respects viewers' privacy. They are contextual, not behavioral.

However, larger sites with a more general audience can't rely on contextual ad placement. Instead, they feel a need to tailor each ad impression to each viewer's interests inferred from observing the viewer's interests across several websites. A 2014 article by Beales and Eisenach reported that behavioral advertising produces triple the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) compared to contextual advertising.[1]

Before Forbes, Wired, and The Atlantic went behind a paywall, they went through a phase of treating privacy tools as ad blockers.[2] The Atlantic's help page insistently mentioned "ad or tracking blockers" in the same breath.

A lot of times, I can get past misclassification of privacy tools as ad blockers by using an extension to turn off all script-in-the-browser for a particular domain.[3] Other times, I find that the website was deliberately made script-dependent. Articles on Reuters didn't load for me last I checked a couple days ago. Instead, I got a notice to reenable JS and turn off ad blockers.

[1] JavaScript Switcher by meetDeveloper on Mozilla Add-ons
[2] Doc Searls. "An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers" (April 15, 2016).
[3] Beales, Howard and Eisenach, Jeffrey A., "An Empirical Analysis of the Value of Information Sharing in the Market for Online Content" (January 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fssrn.com%2Fabstract%3D2421... or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Until streaming providers start doubling the price of the monthly plan to offer a 50% discount on an annual plan.

These homeless shoppers are likely to get poached sooner rather than later. With the deep knowledge they build up of any given Walmart store's layout, they'd make good candidates to get hired into the store's online grocery pickup (OGP) department.

I don't know if HEB includes a tip, but I know that Walmart doesn't do tips. When I worked in the front end of a Walmart Supercenter six years ago, associates were trained to refuse tips, and if someone insists, to ring it up as a donation to whatever charity Walmart is collecting for at the time. Often that ends up being the nearest Children's Miracle Network hospital.

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

If you have three different compilers for a language, and you bootstrap a compiler using all three of them, the first generation (e.g. GCC compiled with QuestionableCC, ShadyCC, or SlopCC) should be functionally identical, and the second generation (GCC compiled with GCC, which was compiled with the other compiler) should be bit-identical. See "Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling" by David A. Wheeler. Some people have trouble trusting Rust because only the latest stable rustc can compile the latest stable rustc.

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.