Really, it's true: we are all weird. We all have our ticks and issues. Why do people need a label?

You are the way you are. Take other people the way they are. Get on with life.

Anti-trust should not take years. Ruling, delay, appeal, delay, ruling, delay, appeal, delay...

Anti-trust needs to be simple and largely automatic. When a company exceeds a certain size, it should be prohibited from M&A activity. When it exceeds a certain, even larger size, it should be forced to divest. No discussions, no court proceedings.

Have the politicians learned nothing from 2008 and "too big to fail"?

That's what they should have done years ago. They could be compliant with EU legislation, instead of fighting it at every step.

I do, reluctantly, have to give their marketing department a lot of credit. Despite Microsoft being blatantly non-compliant with European legislation, virtually every government and most companies still use their stuff. Whenever some organization thinks of changing, the marketeers go into overdrive, wine and dine clueless executives, and - voila - they stay Microsoft after all.

Wikipedia's running costs haven't changed significantly in years, but their running costs are up by an order of magnitude. Lots of hiring of administrative staff, middle managers and other fluff.

With their current endowment and the annual income they get from various sources, they could create a nest egg that would fund their (old level of) expenses forever. But money begs to be spent, so...

...so now they are going to cut some content-related costs using AI? That's not where they need to be cutting.

You could already ask it about products. I can only imagine that money is now (or will soon) change hands, in return for preferential recommendations.

The enshittification begins.

It's all about "user friendliness". I put that in quotes, because this is well-intentioned but counterproductive stuff. Don't stress the user out about "help.txt" vs. "Help.txt" - surely they mean the same thing. The problem is that this generalizes very poorly as soon as you leave the realm of basic ASCII. As Linus points out, there are two heart-emojis - is one lower-case and the other upper-case?

This fits right in with the idiocy of hiding file extensions. Don't stress the user over whether it's a JPEG or a PNG, you can just show some completely random indication that it's a pic. But many users have a dangerous half-clue, so they know files extensions exist. So life is fine when they get CutePic.jpg.exe and the ".exe"is hidden.

Or the current trend in hiding actual directories. Where did that file get saved? How many different places do Windows and iOS store files? How many of those are hidden? Which ones are in the cloud and which are local? It's all magic and your average user has absolutely no clue...

Even if they can make such a calculation - which is complete nonsense - it is irrelevant. Extracting and using oil is not in any way illegal, nor has it ever been. Oil products can be, and often are, subject to taxes. However, you cannot make taxes retroactive. So even if you could say that a liter of oil cause $xx in costs, you cannot go back in time to collect that.

But you cannot perform such a calculation anyway! There are far, far too many arbitrary assumptions that you have to make.Aside from the climate hysterics, there is a lot of debate as to the amount of warming caused by CO2, and the extent to which this effect may have already effectively reached saturation. It is in any case a curve where the early increases had a lot more effect than later increases.

Then you have the question of the costs. What costs are those, exactly? Sea levels were already rising, now they rise about 1mm/year faster. Far more significant is the subsidence in coastal cities. New York, for example, is sinking at a rate somewhere between 2mm to 4mm per year. What measures will New York take over the next few decades? No one knows. What will they costs? No idea. What portion of those unknown costs do you assign to CO2? Assumptions built on wild guesses built on fantasies.

Ok, let's have a look at just the first page of those cancelled projects. Maybe judging only by titles isn't entirely fair. OTOH, researchers do give a lot of thought to the title, because that is the first impression a reviewer has.

Looking only at the projects on the first browser-page: The *majority* of the projects are about CoVID testing and vaccines. If this is any indication then there are an insance number of such projects in total. Lots of redundancy, lots of questionable utility. Here, the CoVID projects from the first page:

- Expand at-home CoVID testing for Latinos. Why specifically Latinos?

- Reducing vaccine hesitancy amoung hispanic Parents (CoVID). Again, why specifically Hispanics?

- Teen-Parent dynamics in adolescent CoVID vaccine acceptance. Another very specific target group?

- Mental health of LGBTQ+ affected by Covid. Why should LGBTQ+ be affected specifically?

- Trans-women's behavioral responses to CoVID vaccines. WTF?

Then we have other projects that are pretty questionable:

- Find undiagnosed TB in South Africa. Why is the US government funding health research in South Africa?

- Regional ecology of a future HIV vaccine. Say what? Ecology?

- Connecting humans, animals and the environment. Huh?

Again, judging by the titles. Ten projects on the first page, only three sound like they make sense.

Research funds are not inexhaustible. It makes sense to distribute them to the most useful projects.

Like the American Red Cross, when they collected crazy amounts of money for Haiti and built...6 houses.

NGOs and charities are incredibly vulnerable to Pournelle's Iron Law.

I don't see it. If a company wants to do something with AI, there is zero reason for them to follow any sort of "employee" model.

Consider the example of a call center: AI answers the phone, and goes through the support-tree with the customer, just like human employees currently do. This is entirely within reach of AI in the next year or two. That's just going to be a piece of software attached to the phone bank. No employee status, not even separate AI instances for each phone line.

As you move to more complex jobs, the situation doesn't really change. Have AI manage your accounting? Again, why simulate individual employees with individual roles? Just hand the AI the accounts, provide an interface for people to submit their hours, expense reports, or whatever, and done.

You do have the questions of security - just as for any other piece of software. The AI may make errors, just as with any piece of software. It may be vulnerable to hacking, just as with any piece of software. Someone needs to be responsible for monitoring and maintaining it, just as with any piece of software. This is all nothing new.

AI will no more disruptive than the introduction of office software was. Introducing PCs with word processing, spreadsheets, etc. had a huge effect on office work. The revolution happened over 10-15 years: an office in 1990 was a very different place from 1975. We're at the beginning of the AI revolution: an office in 2035 will be very different from the office of 2020.

Search by itself isn't the problem. The problem is the combination of search and advertising. Those absolutely need to be separated, because the synergies between the two are just too large.

Just this week, a nearby catholic school "apologized" for sexually abusing children in past decades. The leadership had clearly hoped this would never become public. Now that it has, *now* they are sorry.

An organization that abused countless children, in countless countries, over decades? Any other organization would have been disbanded as a criminal enterprise, and the leadership put on trial. If the church believed their own doctrines, they would have taken dramatic public action on their own.

Pope Francis was the leader these past years. He also did nothing.

Instead of a chance to break once per year, now your certificate process can break every 47 days, or even more often.

For a lot of services, even most services, this is overkill. How about letting each service decide?

First, uncensorable isn't possible, because ultimately governments can just demand that it be blocked. Sure, you can VPN around it, but your average citizen isn't going to do that. Second, uncensorable isn't useful without effective anonymity, which is also beyond the capabilities of your average citizen.

Authoritarian governments will nail people who say stuff they don't like.

Consider the German politician Nancy Faeser, who had a journalist prosecuted and sentenced to 7 months in jail for publishing a meme that said "I hate freedom of speech". Pretty damned ironic, in the first place. Absolutely frightening that the prosecution was successful, since it quite literally proves the truth of what the journalist published.