Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

This makes you sound unaware that a phone is a general purpose computer with more power than any of us had just a couple of decades ago.

The amyloid hypothesis is not based on fraudulent foundations, but they are pretty weak. Additionally, from what I've heard the mouse model of Alzheimer's disease is a pretty bad model.

This is worth following up on, but not on getting too excited about.

China wants a new world order where they are masters. They also see the lessons of the 20th century clearly. That is it is far better to be the worlds hegemonic master than to try to conquer and rule it in the traditional sense. Exactly non of this is possible though unless their sphere of influence appears irresistible. To that end they can't have a island they claim to rule sitting there doing its own thing, and worse being nominally oriented to the existing global power structure.

They also rightly see the rather 19th century western model of national borders being determined by a few world powers who make agreements about lines on map without regard to the reality on the ground or blood sacrifices the plebs for the political theater of the occasional proxy-'fight' over those borders, as limiting.

China wants to be able to use both soft power and hard power whichever seems least costly / most expeditious and have the results stick. To that end they have seen the muted response to Russia's actions in Ukraine as useful.

However the reality is Ukraine is not part of NATO, Europe is weal and broke, the USA is strong but broke, and nobody wants to see the mass destruction that would result from a atomic contest with Russia. So a truly muscular defense of Ukraine was never going to happen, is never going to happen. The mistake politically was not ignoring the situation. In making a fuss over it we have turned it into the precedent setting event China wants if Russia succeeds.

Ironically as far as US political influence is concerned, thwarting Russia is becoming important in a way it never needed be and wasn't four years ago. We made to big deal about it, so now we have to show we have influence and the ability to impose our vision. What we should of done is handled it like Crimea, looked the other way and it would have been no big deal in geo-politics or US power. Now we have to both avoid a hot contest with Putin AND win proxy-war. We are not that good at proxy-wars... Biden and Blinken really FUCKED UP.

"The side that lost has zero tolerance for any dissent."

Hahahahahhahahahhaha

If you don't suck Trump's dick you get elected from the Republican party.

Get some perspective.

I had it on good authority that this wasn't possible because only pixel phones have certain security features. Snort

Real 'Muricans don't leave the ol' US of A. Anyone who regularly travels beyond driving range of their home town is suspicious, frankly.

(Meanwhile, I got the extra-thick passport booklet and have made a good try at filling it with stamps.)

Well, and FWIW, 2C is probably an underestimate, like most of the forecasts. The official forecasters never want to sound too extreme.

OTOH, it still depends on what we (as a world civilization) do. So far we've kept raising our CO2 discharges, but we *could* reverse that.

While this is accurate, it's not plenty for people who want to run LLMs, 16GB is totally inadequate for that since you have to run your OS and apps in that as well. Apple is advertising this hardware at being great for LLMs, but they don't offer enough memory to where you need hardware that could be that fast at running LLMs if only you had enough RAM to load them.

Nothing is less surprising than Reich wingers not understanding 1) that they are promoting fascism, i.e. they are fascists or 2) fascism is bad even when it's in America, not only when it's in Italy.

Cowards or complicit.

Democrats talk a good game but then vote for corporate interests and the MIC in almost every case. It's easy to believe that they were unwilling to do anything that would bring real substantive change. Biden is responsible for the student loan crisis since he led the charge to prevent We The People from being able to discharge those debts through bankruptcy like you can gambling debts, then he campaigned on student loan forgiveness and delivered it for a tiny fraction of student loan holders, and went around congress to fund genocide in Gaza but not to forgive student loans.

It's not cowardice. They deliberately chose not to rock the boat that brings them money. They aren't just cowards, they are traitors as surely as Donald Drumpf himself.

The lives, yes. The ships, not at all. They were literally completely replaceable.

Slashdot is now owned by Nazi-harboring cryptocucks. Don't be surprised the stories are crap.