The big downsides are:

1. Yet another Internet tax on the poor
2. Everyone gets worse internet
3. Most people are woefully unprepared to shop for a VPN from a reputable provider, meaning most people are going to end up subjected to even more surveillance and potentially attacks on their devices.
4. Most people also are not prepared to manage when to and not-to use it, so will get slower internet all of the time.
5. This will create lists of VPN users at both the ISPs and the VPN companies that will be usable by later christo-fascist governments.
6. This will ultimately get laws passed against consumer-facing VPN services, making it harder for people to protect themselves from other attacks.
7. More honey-pot VPN services will start up to support that list-gathering for future christo-fascist governments looking to build dossiers on as many people as possible.

I could go on and on. And nothing about the above has anything to do with porn.

Big surprise, running 50 year old plants lead to lower bills than new infrastructure. Now do new coal plants.

Widely distributed solar + nuclear produces a generation curve that matches demand better than any other combination, minimizing battery or dirty on-demand generation needs.

That’s how signal started way back. Doesn’t work well - sms is terrible.

This isn’t about what you use, it’s about what the majority of the voting public uses and the influence on them.

Yeah, it’s insanely inept. They could have restricted the AI from answering “any question about a public figure and dementia” or even “the health information about a politician” or whatever if they were genuinely concerned. But they blocked only specifically Trump and dementia? It’s almost intentionally obvious.

I agree that it is certainly debatable. However, my experience has been that information extracted about, say what may cause a strange error message from some R output, has been at least as reliable as random stack overflow posts - however, I get that answer instantly rather than after significant effort with a search engine. It can often find actual links better than a search engine for esoteric problems as well. This, however is merely a relative improvement, and not some world-changing event like AI boosters will claim, and it’s one of the only use-cases where AI provides a clear advantage. Generating broken code isn’t useful to me.

This is the smoking gun. If the AI hype boys really were getting that “10x engineer” out of AI agents, then regular developers would not be able to even come close to competing. Where are these 10x engineers? What have they made? They should be able to spin up whole new companies, with whole new major software products. Where are they?

They are statistical prediction machines. The more they output, the larger the portion of their “context window” (statistical prior) becomes the very output they generated. It’s a fundamental property of the current LLM design that the snake will eventually eat enough of it’s tail to puke garbage code.

Those happen so often. I’ve taken to stop calling them hallucinations anymore (that’s anthropomorphising and over-selling what LLMs do imho). They are statistical prediction machines, and either they hit their practical limits of predicting useful output, or we just call it broken.

I think the next 10 years are going to be all about learning what LLMs are actually good for, and what they are fundamentally limited at no matter how much GPU ram we throw at it.

If it wasn’t for all the AI hype that it’s going to do everyone’s job, LLMs would be widely considered an amazing advancement in computer-human interaction and human assistance. They are so much better than using a search engine to parse web forums and stack overflow, but that’s not going to pay for investing hundreds of billions into building them out. My experience is like yours - I use AI chat as a huge information index mainly, and helpful sounding board occasionally, but it isn’t much good beyond that.

Seems like a weasel around the requirement to get rid of the actual benefit of 3rd party stores.

When the USSR collapsed, it made some well-connected millionaires into billionaires. When the USA collapses, it makes billionaires into trillionaires.

Standard is fantastic! The books are better quality than what they charge for on “marketplaces” and can be read for free or downloaded wholesale for a song. Add to that they host an opds catologue that fbreader can browse and you have incredibly convenient public domain books right to the ereader.

It may be pedantic, but I distinguish between the tech development, and the crazy investment/speculation happening. The latter is a bubble, not because the tech is completely useless (it’s not!), but because there’s no business model where nearly a Trillion dollars of investments are going to pay off on something that is a convenient digital assistant and write mediocre code. When people start to realize that AGI isn’t coming to any of these companies, they will start pulling money, and at this point, that bubble bursting could wipe out a large fraction of the economy. It’s going to be messy.

Economists cant tell you what time-frame everything must be slightly inflationary. They act like an economic quarter of deflation would be the end of the world after years of extreme inflation. Their models don’t make any sense.

It’s gambling on who might stumble on AGI, not building anything.

The dot-com bubble didn’t build the internet. The internet still would have been built up if pension funds were not buying toiletpaper.com for millions of dollars. Bubbles, pretty much by definition, are specifically about the part of the economy where huge sums are invested into things that are not worth anything (i.e., full of air).

LLMs would still be developed without a trillion-dollar bubble. Slower, sure, but all the crazy investment isn’t about developing tech, it’s about speculating on who will stumble on AGI and suddenly be able to run companies with 1% of the workforce of traditional companies. It’s gambling. When the gamblers figure out that a casino doesn’t pay out, they all leave at once.

Absolutely not. AI tech will continue to be pushed by C-suites convinced they can surplus a fraction of their workforce eventually. The change will be that most of the investments in AI companies will disappear overnight and most will go belly-up. It will erase a significant fraction of everyone’s pension funds, and federal governments around the world will pour public funds into propping up the larger companies so that they don’t go under too. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Precisely. I’d be more likely to switch to one of those pocket “hot spot” devices. Just a thing in my pocket that gives devices I control internet access and maybe has a shitty web interface I can log into for basic SMS when absolutely necessary. No microphone, no camera, no GPS, no access to my actual computing environment. Only 2 downsides are maintaining battery charge in multiple devices and the fact that those hotspots are generally hot garbage, and so unreliable.

Maybe, a flip phone if one existed that was 1) a full-time good quality internet hotspot (i.e., good battery), and 2) lacked a GPS and camera, and hardware disconnected the microphone when closed. Now that I think about it, that would be a fantastic device… if it existed.