Posts by heyrick

"rational debate on religious grounds"

There's nothing rational about one doing the bidding of an imaginary sky fairy.

Re: Two questions for the price of one

I think it comes down, also, to a question of scale. A person with a memory way better than mine could perhaps copy Harry Potter word for word. But it takes time and effort to do so.

A machine can easily do it a hundred times per second, and throw in little variations to tweak the story, without skipping a beat.

It's like how many of us pay a levy on blank media. In the old days, copying a record was not feasible. Then came tapes and how the companies freaked out about that, despite the fact that it could take over half an hour per single tape on a high speed deck. Now? Dump an MP3 on a website and untold thousands can grab a copy instantly.

That, I think, is the danger of AI ingesting stuff. It can spew out near copies faster than anybody could keep up.

So, what cost creativity?

Re: Scepticism

DEATH RACE 2030

Drivers start on the east coast with ten million dollars. Everybody that gets run over is a hundred thousand deduction. You forfeit all if the car crashes (especially if you die). What's left if/when you reach the west coast is yours to keep. Better hope it's a positive figure.

Televise the whole thing. You'll get idiots lining up to participate. It'll be a great way to testing the technology and thinning the crowd a little while entertaining the rest. As for payments and sponsorship? Well, we have the technology to put big OLED panels on the cars to push endless adverts, not to mention along the route like those god awful boards around the edges of football fields these days. And if it distracts the robodriver, oh well...

Re: Expensive subscriptions

"pay in one place, and use multiple services from different service providers"

That would be good with the ever increasing plethora of streaming services.

Re: Brexit means Brexit.

"No fake news via web 2.0"

The Daily Express has a website...

Re: I'm not persuaded

Print media adverts are:

1, frequently relevant to the content of the magazine (or in the case of newspapers, to the typical readership demographic)

And:

2, rarely invasive, even a full page advert, it's easy to turn the page if you're not interested

Compare with, for example, a typical advert in an app, where the advert will play a video which often cannot be skipped for 5-10 seconds (and double that as it has to download the advert first) and once you click the skip button it's a static page for another 5-10 seconds, and frequently the parts to tap to dismiss are tiny and randomly placed in different positions and any tap outside of this area leads to you being thrown into the Play Store for the irrelevant crap that was being promoted (look, it counts as an interested tap). While this is predominantly an app issue, I've started to see similar behaviour in mobile websites. It's the way things are going. To download unvetted third party content for shit you're just not going to be interested in, with various dark patterns to interrupt your getting anything done simply because somebody somewhere dangled the lure of currency symbols in front of the developers eyeballs. Oh, and don't forget, of its an advertising platform God knows what information is being sent back, but those needs to know a UID and your location? That's for the adverts, not the app.

In short, it's far far more intrusive than old style advertising for far far less interesting things. It's effectively a giant Ponzi scheme that everybody is buying in to at our expense.

Re: So is it 'open' or mot?

Can't help but think that "writing some code for this thing that might find its way to places like Iran" is a whole different concept to "selling weapons to Iran". This just smells of a lousy attempt to throw FUD at something for their fifteen minutes of infamy.

I repeat, if doing "whatever" (*) is not illegal in my country, then why should I care what America's lawmakers think?

* - Which is not, let's be clear, directly selling weapons to a perceived enemy, I'm pretty sure there are rules about that sort of thing here, too.

Re: "... which has been adopted in principle by Fatah and the rest of the PLO"

I didn't downvote, but I do wonder how many of "the Palestinians" are actually in favour of what's going on right now, versus how many thought "oh fuck". Given what remains of Gaza, I can't help but think that many just want to get the hell out, and never wanted to be in this situation in the first place.

Re: Does not compute!

My lawnmower has a name. It'll still bite, though. And start if and when it feels like it. I think it is inhabited by the spirit of a cat...

Re: Big Tech

I think you'll find many who "like the EU" like the concept of what it is and what it represents. The actual implementation? Not so much.

But, then, it took Windows three tries before it hit the mainstream, and there's the expression "third time lucky", so here's hoping the EUv2 upgrade will be released sometime soon.

You should write a letter and send it to the highest person at Mars you can find the address of. Maybe if people start pointing out that internet advertising is not the same as TV advertising. It's aggressive, invasive, and often repeats the same thing over and over (that some company is paying for), maybe if people higher up the food chain than the advertising wonks start getting the idea that advertising may be actively alienating people, things might start to slowly change?

Re: Replacing all the current meters by 2033...

"Vs a 30+ year lifespan on traditional meters"

The meter that was taken out at home a few of years ago was installed in 1968. They wouldn't let me keep it either. :(

The Linky apparently has a soldered-in lithium cell with a ten year lifespan. Which means things could get interesting with power cuts after around five years from now given that it's the thing that lets the meter remember who you are and so on.

I don't think people are going to accept their electricity refusing to come back on line because too many cows were being milked at once causing a brownout long enough to give the meters amnesia.

I don't see why the thing didn't use a slot in button cell. Then somebody could come out once a decade, open it up, pop in a new battery, job done.

Re: Unfortunately this is how all of Hollywood operates

If you read all that guff that appears at the start of movies, you'll see a lot of weird company names like Tencent and Shining Rainbow (etc etc) that are Chinese production companies. If they put up the money, they get to pull strings...

Re: 2025?

Of course, the first victims of that sort of timescale will be safety and security...