Well… Given that the average person neither knows what data they are effectively giving US and Chinese companies, nor does anything against it, this poll is asking the wrong questions. Massive amounts of data collected for every single individual via ad-based surveillance (US) and IOT devices phoning home (China) is the reality we live in today. But the average person does not know about it and therefore can’t even grasp what is done to them. They don’t trust them, but they hand over the data anyway. This is basically a poll amongst cows in the slaughterhouse.

I have a suspicion they are focusing on short-term goals, because that is what those people usually do. For example, it’s probably hard to explain who should watch all the ads and buy all the advertised products when Facebook replaces their content and interactions with bot slop. They didn’t think this through. This isn’t some kind of visionary 4D chess. But it does not matter to them. When wasting 80 billion on a VR project that was doomed to fail from the beginning does not matter, nothing does.

“opprobrium”… an element in the periodic table? Right next to copium I suppose?

If we’re not talking about the super rich, because there is only a few dozen of them, and they have their own parallel universe… it’s usually mannerisms, language clues (in articulation and content), but of course also signals like expensive clothing and accessories. Also the places where they meet. This opens the door for all kinds of grifters who emulate behaviour and style to get into those circles. Jeffrey Epstein is an (in)famous example for this.

It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.

…and no, I have no clue about what a police surgeon is either.

The scenario begins with AI agents undergoing a “jump in capability”.

Might as well stop reading there. Another fluff piece about how useful and capable AI supposedly is, disguised as a doomsday scenario. I’m so sick of reading this bullshit. “Agentic AI” based on LLMs does not work reliably yet and very likely never will.

If you complain about bugs in traditional (deterministic) software, you ain’t seen nothing yet. A probabilistic system such as an LLM might or might not book the correct flight for you. It might give you the information you have asked for or it might delete your inbox instead.

As a consequence of a system being probabilistic, anything you do with it works or fails based on probabilities. This really is the dumbest timeline.

Can someone explain to mr why these people are buying Mac Minis to run this in a “safe” environment and then they go on and connect it to the internet and give the AI credentials to all their cloud accounts? This seems excessively moronic to me? Am I missing something?

Yeah the Antrophic guys are also firmly in the “believer” group.

I think that Satya Nadella and a lot of other CEO types genuinely believe in AI, as misguided as it seems. This is more about who they choose to listen too than having an actual understanding of the technology and its limits. And probably some FOMO sprinkled on top.

Sam Altman knows what’s up though and so does Jensen Huang. In this gold rush one is peddling the fake gold and the other is selling the shovels.

Do you have a source for that backtracking about AI? I think they did not mention that explicitly. Instead they were talking about unrelated improvements. The CEO is still in denial about AI bloat. He seems unable to comprehend that people don’t like to be force fed AI everywhere across the OS.

It’s more of a risk assessment than anything else. The US has proven to be erratic in honouring treaties and contracts, which makes them unreliable. Gas supply is a critical infrastructure and failures in delivery have grave consequences.

because they can sell it for more money and as a bonus controlling people’s data gives them power. Supervillains love technology.

This orb surveillance thingy looks like Wheatley from Portal 2, an AI which eventually turned evil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheatley_(Portal) I’m sure that’s a good sign.

Yeah, I think SEO is pretty much dead by now, and probably because web search as we knew it is kind of dead as well. You’ll probably need to spend ad money if you want visibility. But I’m no expert on SEO and I could be wrong.

It’s not that wild of a conspiracy theory. Hard to get definite proof though because you would have to compare actual search results from the past with the results of the same search from today, and we unfortunately can’t travel back in time.

But there are indicators for your theory to be true:

• It’s evident that in UI design the top area of the screen is the most valuable. AI results are always shown there. So we know that selling AI is of utmost importance to Google.
• The Google search algorithm was altered quite often over the years, these “rollouts” are publicly available information, and a lot of people have written about the changes as soon as they happened.
• Page ranking fueled a whole industry which was called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A lot of effort went into understanding how google ranks its results. This was of course done with a different goal in mind but the conclusions from this field can be used to determine if and how search results got worse over time
• It’s an established fact that companies benefit from users never leaving the company’s ecosystem. Google as an example tried to prevent a clickthrough to the actual websites in the past, with technologies like AMP or by displaying snippets.
• If users rely on the AI output Google can effectively achieve this: the user is not leaving the page and Google has full control over what content the user sees.

Now, all of the points listed above can be proven. If you put all of that together it seems at least highly likely that your “conspiracy theory” is in fact true.

solve this by upvoting what I like

This doesn’t solve the privacy issue. It still enables bad actors to create a very detailed profile of who you are, just by looking at the content you upvoted. Your interests, political alignment, medical/mental health issues, sexual orientation… just to name a few.

Not the OP, but i find it concerning because this enables creating a very detailed profile of a users interests, political alignment, medical issues, sexual orientation etc. Even if they never post anything! We should all know by now that there are bad actors actively using this kind of data in the worst ways imaginable. In the US this can already have life threatening consequences (ICE raids etc…)

This is not a good privacy oriented design and it exposes users in a dangerous way.

EDIT: About lemvotes.org. I like this site because it makes it obvious how dangerous this really is. For example I accidentally upvoted a really disgusting NSFW post misclicking on my phone. This will forever be visible to the world. I’m a documented pervert now. Good job.

I’d argue that Java is not bigger than ever, it’s more of an established legacy language used almost exclusively in business applications today. Comparing it to COBOL in that sense would be mean but there are similarities. When I started with Java in the late 90s it was something completely different. It became popular because it was open and easy to learn. Java gained a huge community quickly. Now there are some technical reasons why Java lost its popularity among the general tech community over time but as I witnessed it the major downfall happened when Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle and the new licensing model was just horrible. Many of us didn’t want to use a language that wasn’t open and moved on. Others created open source forks like you said. I remember we were forced to move to OpenJDK in the company where I was employed. At that time OpenJDK was was neither fast nor complete. It was a shitshow and I can assure you we did not have a good time. Eventually we phased out Java entirely and built the next version on a new stack. And today there are a lot of open and modern general purpose languages available so there is no need to use Java for new projects unless you want to integrate it into an existing Java ecosystem.

And it was basically the same story with MySQL. You actually said it - “people do their best to get his stench off of it if they can”. In most cases that means moving on to something that isn’t owned by Oracle.

The good news is that everything Larry Ellison touches dies slowly and painfully. Oracle’s touch of death is well known in the tech community… Java, MySQL, etc.

It will probably fail silently, if it doesn’t pick up enough momentum. * Sad failed platform noises *