"If a person could look at a picture and say "hey! I recognize that place..." then a computer can do it faster and more reliably."

It's a common mistake to think that is the same thing. It's not.

Doing something automatically, massive at scale and storing that information changes the nature of that thing.

If I saw you at the beach, that's fine right? If I took a picture of my kids as you walked by in the background, no big deal right. But I followed you home constantly taking pictures, and storing in them in a file on you, I think you'd probably have a serious problem with it. Or maybe I follow your wife or daughter... is that ok? You were in public. I took pictures in public. What's the big deal?

Now if I buy 1,000,000 cameras and constantly take pictures of everybody, and then instead of following you home, i just tag you as you move into and out of each camera and build my profile on your and your households every movement that way instead.... Is that better?

You don't have to be the sharer of the photo to be in a photo. Do you accept that you have no privacy simply because you stepped out of your basement?

Some people do; especially singles living in condos or apartments; they get a comcast xfinity modile plan that gives them access to the xfinity public wifi being broadcast from the comcast cable subscribers modems in the neighboring suites, and just live on the free public wifi. It's not as fast or reliable as your own internet (but your phone has a data plan when you aren't in range of a free wifi), and you can only connect a couple devices to it at a time, so there are limits. But if all you've got is a smartphone and a laptop that you need to get online and there's decent wifi signal where you need it, then its workable. I've known people who do this.

The point here however is there is nothing stopping say LG or Samsung etc from partnering directly with comcast to let their TV adflow/telemetrics use the xfinity public wifi (or even cellular network) whenever it can't phone home another way. The price of building this capability in is dropping steadily. I saw a cellular punch-card system pre-covid for example, that just came with pre-paid cellular for the life of the unit. Its a time-clock, it logs punch in/ punch out events and time-sync, it could get by on a handful of megabytes a year. The writing is on the wall.

It's already well within the realm of economically viable to have a TV with pre-paid cellular to enable forwarding viewing metrics and serving image ads. And it might already be economically viable to download and rotate a view video ads per week / month or whatever too if you are buying bandwidth at volume directly from the provider or in some sort of data sharing partnership with them.

Sure that works in rural montana, but most people live in the city, so the TV can just connect to the neighbors modem instead of yours.

Or, wait for it, they partner with comcast and include a cellular modem right in the TV. Its getting cheap enough, and it doesn't to be all that good or all that fast.

They won't let you stream netflix over that connection of course, you can provide your own network for that.

But by selling/swapping your usage data that covers the bandwidth for a hundred MB a month of low priority data transfer which is plenty to upload some meta data and download new targeted ads.

Your solution? Put your TV in a metal box? Might work. Hard to watch TV though.

True, within the game that you purchased in the first place.

You have no redistribution rights to any of it. So "forcing the game open source" doesn't do much beyond let the people who already own it mess with the source code amongst themselves.

It's much like GLDoom and other ports of doom and quake that require you to purchase "Doom" or "Quake" to get your "license to the assets", to be able to use the upgraded "GLDoom" engine.

It is entirely *unlike* GLDoom though because where ID has consistently made some form of Doom legally available to purchase, if the original publisher pulls the game distribution or goes bankrupt WHERE does anyone buy the original game to get a license to the assets from anywhere to use with the modified source?

The most obvious blocker is pretty straightforward.

The developers of a game themselves may have licensed all kinds of things to build the game that they can't just give away, even if they wanted to.

From the game engine to the art assets to the music to the voice acting to the trademarks on the name itself. The developer doesn't necessarily own any of it. They may even contracted out parts of their own game code subject to terms that preclude open sourcing it.

I do think there is some balance that can and should be found for abandoned/end-of-life games to allow for preservation and continuation, but I can see where open sourcing it is not simple - even when the original developer and publisher has completely gone out of business, and no one even knows who owns the rights.

Whoops - sorry to self reply -- i ended up editng out a paragraph commenting on the structure of your posted ai response.

The first paragraph, opens with filler (defining what a trade imbalance is), before saying it doesn't know. The 2nd and 3rd are irrelevant. And the 4th is likely untrue.

"In the first possibility- you simply didn't execute the query you said."

I did execute that query. I used googles AI Overview (Powered by Gemini 2 i think).

The exact first line of the response I got.

And then it got worse from there. Interestingly, and as I mentioned in my original post the first clause did in fact claim California has a trade surplus with most US states. I don't know if that's true or not, but its really the only relevant fact in the reply.

Four paragraphs to tell me it doesn't know. 2 of which are essentially irrelevant non-answers*, one padded with filler, and one that I'm not convinced is true.* That's a lot of slop. I'm not sure why you think that is much better.

* I'm unconvinced its true because i can find very little information on any state trade imbalance to any other state in any report anywhere. It seems more likely to me this information is likely not being systematically collated anywhere.

What are the interstate trade deficits or surpluses between California and other US states?

Answer? One generic line saying its ("mostly surpluses") with no no details beyond that other than defining what a trade deficit is.

And then 2 pages about the US global trade deficits with China etc. Most of it irrelevant... i didn't ask what California's top exports are... I don't care what its top international trading partners are. And among the facts I don't care about its got lots of filler slop:

Marking the 2nd time it defined what a deficit is in its answer! And both times it was unneeded unwanted filler slop. And to call the imbalance of trade the "primary cause" of the trade deficit is arguably circular reasoning. Like saying the primary cause for the building burning down was that it was on fire. :eyeroll

(Just that line, It didn't go into any of them though.)

Why are we wasting our time with this slop?

Have you ever considered how much california imports from other US states?

Go ahead cripple the california economy, you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face. If Calfornia's economy is battered, it will be importing less from Idaho and Kentucky.

There is a reason everyone except Trump knows that there are no winners in a trade war.

Wait, you want us to explain why there are huge parking lots at a facility that produces: ** cars ** ?!

Looking at satellite view, the entire parking lot complex on the West side is a dealership. Just north of that is a massive parking lot used for shipping containers. To the north of that is another lot that is 50% shipping containers and 50% finished vehicles. Several of the lots along the train tracks, are also clearly holding finished vehicles.

Now that said, yes, there are still several other lots to hold employee vehicles. And a quick search suggests that approximately 11,000 people work there. But your comment was still absurd.

Where do you see any anger towards women? If I have any bitterness its about the use of AI to flood all human interaction with its unending streams of slop.

Right. Basically train an LLM to be a pickup artist. What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe you actually naively believe this tech is going to help you learn to be a better more attractive person while still being true to yourself, and make it easier to meet the woman of your dreams. But its not.

It's going to be co-opted by the PUA crowd to optimize their pickups. And then it's going to be automated by the PUA crowd to automatically hit on women for them.

The only sane response women can have to that is join the arms race with their own bots to try and detect and filter out the PUA bots.

Perhaps ironically, the better you learn from the flirting LLM the more bot-like you'll appear to the anti-flirt LLMs.

An AI tool designed by "experts" ? Experts at what exactly? You think a bunch of asperger AI model designers are the experts you should be getting your advice from?

Because that's what the women REALLY want, an endless stream of men all veterans of playing 'Sim-tinder-girl' coming at them with the same scripts that got them the most wins in the game.

We can have whole discords and reddits to sharing the scripts that win the most to create our tinder player meta, and of course actual women will start recognizing it and adapting so the meta will evolve over time.

Shit, you really asked me about my family 2 beats after sharing a self-deprecating anecdote involving a puppy... wait...i've heard that exact puppy story twice... that meta was like 4 months ago. Blocked.

Nah... who are we kidding, we'll just turn the AI on itself, and have bots flirt with the tinder bots until they score consistent wins, and then set the bot loose on real women to make its first impressions on women for you. You'll step in after they've agreed to meet, read the transcript so you know the state of the and decide whether to ghost or not... And hope you weren't just catfished by the bot-swarm the women are using to filter out the man-bot-users like you.

But you should be ok... you're paying big money to use the very latest flirt-bot, and they promised it's got the best chance to penetrate the filter bots.

Of course, if you get through and meet the girl... do you even want her... the fact your bot got past her filter bots means she was using slightly outdated tech...was that on purpose? Is this a meta play to only meet guys with the money to spend on the best flirt bots? At least you'll have something to talk about I guess.

Thanks for that nih link... good info... and for those that won't click on it... let me highlight the relevant bit, emphasis mine.

Obviously its the addicts fault for taking heroin when they were 13 to cope with getting raped by a family member, and then threatened with worse if they talked about it. It would also be the addicts fault If they started drugs to cope with getting bullied at school.... or even if they got addicted because they were a stupid 13 year old who made the wrong friends and thought they were being cool.

Are they all equal, because in each case nobody else injected the drugs into their veins?
What difference does it make?

Why is important that we blame them? Is it so we don't have reflect on the possibility that maybe society itself, of which we are part, contributes to the problems? Is it because if we can say these people are just moral failures who did this to themselves then we don't have any obligation to help? And if we do help, in any amount at all then its because we're faultless and good and altruistic.

Spending time assigning the blame to them sure isn't doing them any good. So, it must be for us.

Yep, I was looking at some code the other day that formatted a date a little unsually (it was being used as part of a file name so it was creating a string of "yyyy-MM-dd_hh-mm-ss"), and there was a whole 20+ line custom function used exactly once in the project to extract the date and time bits, pad them, and assemble this string.

Replaced it with one line of code using a custom date format string using a date time library the project was already using (luxon).

Truly. And nothing is a cheaper programmer than an LLM.