"Make America healthy again"; unless it's bad for business.

My 65" C8 is the best television that I have ever owned, hands-down, but I turned that smart TV dumb almost immediately. Once a year I check for firmware updates using a temporary guest network. If I find an update that I think I need I install it then otherwise I leave it alone.

In my electronics graveyard are three generations of Roku, two Nvidia shields, a Chromecast, a couple of Kodi, boxes, on Amazon fire stick, and probably some more devices that I have forgotten about. I also have an Xbox that was my go to device until recently. But now everything runs through two Apple TV boxes.

With so many inexpensive options, why anybody would use an outdated, underpowered piece of shit like WebOS is beyond me.

For me, the ability to turn off the built-in smart center is a must have for any future TV purchase. No exceptions.

See: "Old Western TV Show Predicts Trump"
Excerpts: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
Full episode: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
"A 1958 episode of the Western TV show "Trackdown" features a con man named Trump who comes to town and promises that he alone can save the townspeople from the end of the world. He is accused of being a fear-mongering snake oil salesman and they try to stop him, but Trump threatens to sue. Then the high priest of fraud promises to build a wall! The episode is called "The End of the World"."

Sounds a lot like what some AI company CEOs are also doing according to the article -- by using fear mongering to control the narrative and concentrate wealth? Of course, sometimes fears are well-founded, so it is a complex issue. AI could become a destructive force -- even as Alfie Kohn suggests more nuance and understanding "projection":
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Fblog...
        "Another form of projection, also employed by groups rather than individuals, attributes certain features to the nonhuman realm. One example was offered recently by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. He observed that tech titans sometimes warn us that AI could (a) eventually acquire intelligence that surpasses that of its creators and then (b) use that intelligence to dominate us, eventually leading to human extinction. But why do they assume that (a) would lead to (b)?
                "Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?...When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.... Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that's the attitude they adopted....The way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own."
        The techno-doomsters, in other words, may think they're warning us about AI, but what they're actually doing is showing us an MRI scan of their own septic psyches."

That said, some of the Trump administration's ostensible initiatives or ideals make sense to me (e.g. questioning the H1-B visa, emphasizing re-shoring manufacturing, questioning a dysfunctional sick-care system, questioning the ~65 million aborted US Americans and more for kids they might have had in turn since Roe v. Wade -- even as there is legitimate debate about what to do about all these issues and whether Trump administration (and "Project 2025") policies might make ultimately make some of these concerns worse -- same as with AI as in this article).

Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (perhaps AI-assisted) is a way for small groups of people to productively visualize and explore the thought landscape of such "wicked problems" in a productive way. A talk I gave on that:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcognitive-science.info...

And Trump undoubtedly has been over the years a very smart, charismatic, and humorous guy -- even if his humor is sadly often of the harming variety instead of the healing variety. From:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.humorproject.com%2Fd...
      "Taking Humor Seriously
        By Joel Goodman
                "There are three things which are real:
                God, human folly, and laughter.
                The first two are beyond our comprehension.
                So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)" ...
        Although joke-telling is one way to transmit humor, it's not the only way. In fact, there are literally thousands of ways to invite smiles and laughter in addition to joke-telling. So, if joke-telling is not your forte or if it is inappropriate for you to become the stand-up comic on-the-job, then there are alternatives. Here are four tips to get you going: ... (2) Use humor as a tool rather than as a weapon. Laughing with others builds confidence, brings people together, and pokes fun at our common dilemmas. Laughing at others destroys confidence, ruptures teamwork, and singles out individuals or groups as the "butt". In the words of one fifth grade teacher, "You don't have to blow out my candle to make yours glow brighter." Humor is laughter made from pain, not pain inflicted by laughter. I subscribe to Susan RoAne's AT&T test- is the humor Appropriate, Timely, and Tasteful? If so, you can reach out and touch people positively with humor. ..."

Humor is often an antidote to excessive fear. We've had the potential to become a humor-powered post-scarcity society for decades or maybe even centuries or millennia, but politically-rooted scarcity fears have held humanity back (for good or bad).

Related is my ironic-humor-pivoting sig which applies to AI as well as many other technologies ranging from nuclear energy to just the humble transistor: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Although, as the book "Abundance" written "by liberals, for liberals" suggests, there are many aspects of the current US political order that impede effective solutions by emphasizing legalistic process over desirable results (and a different approach to making such decisions is one reason China is pulling way ahead of the USA in many areas). The book's authors suggest providing subsidies to people using systems unable to grow due to dysfunctional rules just results in essentially artificial scarcity and inflation (examples include housing, transportation, energy, and medical care):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

So, there is some legitimate righteous anger at bureaucratic dysfunction which Trump has harnessed for political gain. The deep question is, as Mr. Fred Rodgers' sang, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" Something similar could be sang about "fear". Trump is one answer to such a question, but there are presumably other possible answers...

Welcome to the same story with AI since its inception. The same nonsense spouted since the 60's and before then, even.

"If only we had more processing/storage/nodes/money/training data/time/scale, I'm *sure* this statistical blackbox will magically become intelligent through some unexplained mechanism never once observed in all of existence."

It's always been the same. It's literally a superstition that has dogged AI and hindered AI research for decades. That there's some kind of "intelligence critical mass" beyond which a system collapses unavoidably into intelligence.

Well... now we know that's bollocks, finally.

Because we've never thrown so much money and resources at it, we've never had the whole of the planet using it and funding it and training it, we've never hit a point before where we'd RUN OUT of training data and now all potential new training data is actually corrupted by... AI output.

All that nonsense might FINALLY be laid to rest within the next few years and people would be so much more reluctant to try this same bullshit again, having cost us TRILLIONS this time around.

Now, maybe, just maybe, academics in the AI field can actually start to study... intelligence. With a view to developing... an artificial analogue to it. Rather than just bashing on statistical black boxes as if they're going to become the next messiah.

It's also been the same way, but with any luck this generation of AI will kill all that bullshit once and for all.

No, that's infraintelligence.

Literally "below" / "beneath".

Vacuum Wars.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvacuumwars.com%2Fvacuum-...

They test the various robots and some are reasonably good at the pet hair situation.

That said, the huge innovation in robot vacuums came out of countries where they have few carpets, and they like their floors really, really clean: Japan and Korea. China has taken it over, but the cultural influence from those two countries where you sit and sleep on the floor is huge on these devices.

You can get a highly rated one which mops, avoid objects fairly well, can find your pet, maps your house, cleans just particular rooms, etc. for less than $150 now.

They don't generate the same kind of suction. They're a different beast, but they work great.

The reason these are good is that they are smart. They vacuum every day. They roll over the same spot multiple times if the spot is really dirty. They yes, blow their whole, battery doing half your house, but then they go back to the charger, recharge, then start from right where they left off and finish the job. They have built-in mops now that work better than your powerful vacuum because whooshing air power just cannot compete with electron attraction (water on a pad which actually rubs on the dust, that is).

And they may not do a great job of vacuuming up when you spill a bag of flour on the floor, but they blow you away in terms of keeping your whole environment a LOT less dusty and your floor, generally speaking, completely free of hair, dust, fibers, bits of plastic, etc.

I recently suggested that my exercise place get one. One day I came in and was using a machine where you face down -- I knew right away they'd gotten a robot. The floor no longer had that dull look of a very thin layer of dust. The owner was really happy with it. Modern vacuums don't get snagged on cords, scoot around machine legs, under machines, and don't get bored -- they clean every inch they can reach. And they do it every single night while you're gone, in the dark, without you having to remember or do work.

Your comparison to plug-in vacuums is like saying a napalm bombing run just doesn't have the stopping power of a 38 special.

The reason these guys failed is that they were not a good robot maker.

Their original robot defined the market in the US. They were not the first, but they were the first in the US. However, as the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese robots developed robots with room mapping, lidar, remote control movement, object avoidance, etc., iRobot kept selling the same thing -- random walk robots you did not want. The only thing selling Roombas was brand-recognition.

Why were they not developing their robot? Because they were busy trying to get military contracts to make battlefield units. hustling to be in the news/trade-press for battlefield robots (and generating a lot of buzz there) while their bread-and-butter vacuum robots got more and more out of date.

When they finally improved, years later than anyone else, they'd lost their brand's good reputation -- it was like starting again as a new company, and the people who knew about room-cleaning robots didn't trust them anymore. And they were generally always behind in the tech, behind in the cost-per-unit of production, not bringing new benefits/ideas.

Sound familiar? Sound a little like Toyota eating Ford's lunch, so Ford gave us the Pinto?

iRobot might be missed as a name, but you didn't want their vacuums anyhow. And that wasn't because of state-sponsored competition per-se, it was because they were a complacent do-nothing company, when it was critical to evolve.

iRobot and Amazon say EU approval was the problem. Not sure if they had a specific reason to be selectively truthful and focus on only one of multiple regulatory hurdles; but they don't mention the US.

It also looks like the sale is basically formalizing their plan to gut themselves. Shockingly enough; firing everyone you can and switching to rebadging stuff from an ODM because that's cheaper puts you in "what would you say you do here?" territory pretty quickly.

Code.org is just an industry advocacy group and lobbyist. Their actions demonstrate that their mission is to make money for tech companies, so they should have their nonprofit status revoked. They're basically just an industry marketing effort.

Jetbrains would disagree.

What you are suggesting is a law. The executive branch does not have that power.

It goes to show why you Trump idiots never see anything wrong with what he does. You do not understand basic civics.

Did you not hear the OP?

There are *commodity* chips that are bought and sold all over. It's not like asking for oxy, it's like asking for water. Do you really think there needs to be a regulation about background checks for perfectly normal chips being bought and sold on the open market? Welcome to dystopia!

I'm amazed that 16% of respondents feel in control. I'm just curious if they know something I don't about countermeasures to take; or if it's a matter of what they don't know.