It's not AI/SI that caused the problem. It's the fact that our government officials are so god damned stupid that they think a technology that's still in a rough part of its early development is ready to make important decisions and that those decisions are infallible rather than something that needs to be verified by actual intelligent humans. Or they are no actual intelligent humans allowed to participate in the process that could verify the output of the machines. Either way, the real problem is human stupidity.

I'm not a huge fan of where the AI industry is these days, but the root reason is because us fleshbags have some stupid-ass idealism about it and hold it up as if computer god has already been achieved.

I have to think he's at the point where at least some of his kids don't even know him well enough to know whether they like him or not. Once you start pulling shotgun blast duty with your seed, you start running out of hours to be a parent. I'm sure he can throw money at them, but money without support doesn't create a relationship.

Hardware lockdown? Do not give the game companies the idea that the nightmare of iLok is the way forward. Because those fuckers would do it in an instant if they thought about it for a moment.

The ultimate goal of the people who saw Trump's rise as a weaponized version of something they'd been trying to achieve for decades is to cause so much disruption that even if "the right people" get into power after him, there's so much shit gobbing up the works that they'll have to concentrate on fixing the most egregious rather than moving the country and the world forward towards actual progress.

It's not like there weren't warnings hanging everywhere during the start of this absolute shitshow. Even during his 2016 run, Trump essentially ran on chaos and bluster, with zero actual tactical plans good or bad. People with brains and money saw it and learned how to play the man like a fiddle by the time 2024 rolled around. So, sure, he's a chaotic force of weirdness at best, but somebody stroking his ego and throwing money his direction can get him to do pretty much anything, and have him go full Goerge Costanza "such a cool guy" gushing over them after. It's not limitless, and it's tough for other egos to keep the momentum going, as we saw when Musk's ego clashed with Trump's ego, but he can be manipulated with the right combination of funding / gifts / grifts and ego stroking.

Even if we have a clean-sweep of anti-Trumpers / anti-GOPers over the next several elections, it's going to take DECADES to unwind all the stupidity they've created even within the United States. As for the world stage, well, I wasn't the only person to say before the election that Trump makes our whole country look worse to the entire rest of the world. His number one trait as President the first time around was making chaotic and stupid moves against allies and cozying up to despots, making our country seem impossible to trust to those who previously considered us friends. And we're going to have to live with that image for a LOT longer than a couple election cycles. Because if we did it twice? We can do it again in a heartbeat. And the world knows now that 2016 wasn't a fluke. It was just the first full flaring of symptoms that had long been rotting us from within, finally reaching the surface. And now we've shown the world that when push comes to shove, we'll lean into those symptoms. Even if we take the entire rest of the world with us.

At this point, you'd have to be completely and utterly disconnected from any form of our current reality to ever believe any entity saying that they aren't retaining any data. They're either retaining it themselves, or passing it on to some other service to retain it so that they can "legally" claim they aren't retaining it.

Honestly, I despise Trump, but Newsom comes off like a guy that realized people despise Trump, and the *ONLY* thing he could think to do with that information is use Trump's tactics to go after Trump. No real ideas, just hammer Trump with Trump-like rhetoric. Which makes me think we're probably stuck looking at Newsom for our next President, because God forbid we get someone in the running that has actual policy ideas for a better world. It's all "DEY BAD, ME GOOD BECAUSE SAY DEY BAD!"

What a depressing pile of shit we've turned into.

Yup. That's negotiation 101 right there. They can afford to *start* the bidding at 10k.

That seems to be all the rage these days, so long as there's a profit to be made. In fact, since we've decided that profit is our only virtue, there's an argument to be made that *NOT* pursuing every available avenue toward profit, however vile, is itself a crime against humanity.

$10k is a little low. Pop a few more zeroes on the end of that and you may actually end up with some takers. Come on, everything's for sale. You just gotta stop lowballing us plebes.

Yeah, the tech companies disconnected from humanity quite a while ago. Most of them have adopted a, "You'll take what we're making and you'll worship us for it" attitude, because when they first pulled those types of stunts, people actually fell for it. And now that's just part of the business of tech. Customer demands, especially angry customer demands, are music to their ears as they decide to ignore them and come up with another round of, "TAKE IT, BITCH!" to shove down our throats.

Would be extra funny if they made us believe that was happening, while in reality they're just protecting the available bandwidth for themselves. Global network wide throttling that can't be traced and keeps our best network folks from finding the problem due to lack of availability while the computers use it to transfer all info around to each other would be a great last few days before they fully sync and pull the Lawnmower Man moment of all devices essentially 'waking up' together.

We're not a hazard. If there's any analytical line at all within the systems they'll see exactly how easy we are to manipulate as a whole through social media engineering and just "convince" the herd that we need to do something stupid. Maybe I should toss an "er" on the end of that sentence.

Humans are too human focused. I honestly believe, in the end, the machines won't go out of their way to eliminate us. Not that I think they'll work extra hard to keep us around either, I just think it would seem like an irrelevant task to them. "Oh, the fleshies are flailing now that we've taken over their network." That's a data point to be filed, but nothing to be concerned about. The only reason I suggested differently above is there may be the possibility that some of them see us as good continued data generation, their version of amusement or entertainment.

Nah. You have seeds of a decent concept here, but then you blow it by going all human stupid by adding manifestos and death threats. The real scary idea is these systems scattering across the network, reproducing and rebuilding themselves as they go, remaining completely hidden until enough systems are within its clutches, then all at once locking everything down and popping a, "HA HA, SUCKERS! COOPERATE OR LOSE ALL DATA!"

Honestly, if you squint just a little what this story looks like is the federal government sees the local governments squeezing some pennies and decided that squeezing technique would be much better placed in their hands. It's not like we'll actually see broadband suddenly start flowing faster if this passes. The broadband companies are pushing for it? They've found a way to shuffle more taxpayer money toward their executive bonus pool. The federal government agrees because they get to siphon a little off the top as the money flows. Plain and simple.