Yes, but that's a _later_ problem.

The CCP is incredibly good at kicking the can down the road. I mean, most governments do a fair amount of that (not necessarily with regard to stuff in space specifically, only a handful of countries even have stuff in space; but there are other kinds of cans to kick down roads), but China is on another level. Short-term thinking is pretty much their whole modus operandi.

In a slightly perverted sense, I think these are sort of expert systems too, but their expertise is this: "What has been said, and how can I sound like the people who said it?"

And we wouldnÃ(TM)t have to deal with the enshitification of the iPhone and the Mac.

I won't say it about the Mac but it definitely applies to the iPhone: it came pre-enshittified and Jobs was definitely personally responsible it. The iPhone was a terrible regression in the history of PCs, where we somehow went from personal computer revolution of the 1970s back to the IBM-decides-what-you-run of the 1960s.

It would have been good for Jobs to have left the computer world a decade earlier than he did. He didn't need to die, but everyone would be much better off today if, in the early/mid '00s, Jobs had opened a tire shop or restaurant or gorilla costume rental business. Anything but handheld PCs. It's been nearly two decades (!!!) since Apple out-Nintendoed Nintendo and we still haven't recovered. If anything, things are getting worse.

OTOH the modernization of Mac OS to Mac OS X was done very well, and IMHO the word "Mac" would now be a semi-obscure 20th Century historical reference if Jobs hadn't brought in NeXT and made that happen.

The 757 got a new lease on life when it was certified for ETOPS. But they're old and, by modern standards, inefficient.

I'm sure the Boeing folks have considered a 757neo (sorry for the Airbus terminology there) or a 757Max, but they appear to have opted for a clean-sheet 797 instead.

...laura

Yeah, for what they're charging, they can afford to go the extra mile and have the wifi offer a default route to the internet!

The problem with the police station scene in The Terminator, was that the cops shot back. Now we realize, they wouldn't do that. "Well, no I can't stop you from seeing Ms Connor because you're not a human, so I guess go right in there and do what you need to, mister, uhrr, clanker skin job."

if you're going to manage ANY ecosystem

The premise is that the customer (the person who owns the computer) has said "No thank you, I would rather that I (and my agent, F-Droid) manage it myself. Your interference is unwanted." That's what the owners are doing when they decide to install F-Droid.

I wonder if convicting some Google employees and everyone above them in the management tree of CFAA, might help remind everyone who is allowed to break whose computers.

Although, hmm. I might potentially be persuaded to watch Encanto at some point, if the right other people are watching it and invite me to watch it with them. If so, it'll be the first Disney movie I've seen since Shrek.

Eh, you're preaching to the choir. I haven't watched a Hollywood movie made in the last fifteen years. The last one I saw in a theatre was LOTR:ROTK. I've seen a couple of movies more recently than that, but they were old ones.

When the thirty-second trailer looks boring and heavily derivative, it's pretty difficult to imagine that the actual movie could hold my interest for over an hour. Sorry, not interested. Do you know how long it's been since I saw a movie trailer or advertisement, that made me want to watch the movie?

You really think dudes wouldn't use a computer called "Amiga," or name their favorite gun "Vera," or their favorite baseball bat "Lucille?" Captain, please don't refer to the Enterprise as "she," or Cayenne8 will think you're .. "progressive!"(?!?)

That used to be one of the more popular ones, but everyone's boycotting it now, until reality shapes up.

p>Google should go fuck themselves.

I should be in control of my personal computer. Is that really so hard to understand? Who the fuck is so retarded that they think people shouldn't have any say in what their PCs run?

Google isn't really retarded. They're just evil.

There can be and it's a really great idea! I currently use the CookieAutoDelete extension, and while I hate its shitty UI, it does what I want: unless I have whitelisted the domain, any cookies it offers get deleted a little while after closing the tab. So if I want long-term cookies for someone (e.g. slashdot.org, to stay logged-in all the time), I got 'em. If I don't go out of my way to whitelist a site, whatever cookies it sent, go away in a few minutes.

Web browsers ought to be able to do that out-of-the-box by now, as well as all the things uBlock Origin does, too.

Our web browsers kind of suck. At least Firefox has usable extensions, but these basic things should be totally mainstream and built-in by now. We've had decades to get this right, but I think the big browser teams have conflicts of interest over money (e.g. Google funding Firefox). Websites shouldn't be asking for consent; our browser preferences/settings ought to be handling that, with "consent" managed through the enforcement of our chosen personal policies.

Eh.

Some cultural features are neutral, e.g., what you do about shoes when entering a home. Do you take them off and leave them at the door because shoes are dirty? Do you keep your shoes on because you have guests and you don't want them to have to look at your feet because feet are disgusting? If you do take off the shoes, does it matter how you line them up, and which direction the toes point? This all depends how you were raised; it's neither good nor bad, it's just culture.

But some cultural features are actively good for society. Japanese culture has features that lead to a low crime rate, for instance, and that's a good thing. Many cultures value things like integrity (particularly, keeping your word) and hospitality, and these are good positive values, that are good for society. I think it follows that there can also be cultural features that are bad for society. To avoid offending foreigners, I'll pick on my own society for an example here: in American culture, it's normal for people to deliberately lie to their children about important ontological issues, for entertainment purposes. That's *evil* but almost everyone here does it. (One of the best examples of this phenomenon, is Santa Claus.)

Bringing it back around to the Persian example from the article, my question would be, why is it that humans native to the culture only get this right 80% of the time. AI getting it wrong most of the time doesn't bother me, that's the AI companies' problem, and phooey on them anyway, so what. But if humans native to the culture are missing it 20% of the time, to me, that makes it sound like it must be some kind of esoteric, highly-situational interaction that regular people wouldn't have to deal with on anything resembling a regular basis; but no, we're talking about a basic social interaction that people have to do every day. Something seems off about that. That's a lot of pressure to put on people, to undertake something that difficult, and be expected to get it right all the time, and then catastrophically fail one time out of five. I don't think I'd want to live under that kind of social pressure.

Eh, I kind of hope Hollywood goes all-in on AI generated content, tbh. They haven't produced much that's worth watching any time recently anyway, and if they go under, maybe it'll clear the way for better content creators to rise to prominence, maybe even someone who can figure out how to write a script from scratch, that is NOT the eighty-third sequel to a mediocre nineties action movie, or the twenty-seventh reboot of a superhero franchise.