The rules may differ wherever you are. But I’m sure there is a safeguard against frivolous patent applications. This may be enforced through strict guidelines on how patents should be filed. That requires legal professionals. That cost money. Etc. All the bullshit patents you ever heard of went through that process at their own expense.

As “with AI” becomes ubiquitous, it is also questionable how long that will remain a noteworthy, patentable characteristic.

These are some more general thoughts on the subject:

I’m going to take issue with any statement that puts Facebook. And “just fine” in the same sentence. A terrible company run by largely terrible people.

The good old days of fan forums and communities that grew around shared interests in the dial-up age had a vital advantage: small user numbers and low cost. Mostly text based packets were cheap to send and receive. At very low speeds. It was inevitable that standards would rise, and with it, costs. And if money becomes a factor, whoever has or makes it rules. An inevitable and irreversible development if you ask me.

And if it’s the niche community nostalgia that hits you, you can still have that. It’s probably on a small fediverse server you’ll also need to support financially or on a Discord server. The internet people loved largely survived if you knew where to look and all the other stuff just grew around it. And only occasionally over it. No service is eternal. There will be a time when Insta will be a faint memory. Or reddit. Or Wikipedia.

The early internet also had a terrible impact on what it became much later. People put their content out for free/as supported, especially media offerings and the news, and instilled in consumers the expectation that one shouldn’t have to pay for shit online. This was the first domino falling in local newspaper death and an increased disillusionment with politics.

Another problem of the early internet is that it was built by mostly idealists who created the perception that connecting the world would democratise knowledge and participation and it would be a force for good. This hype carried us through its expansion and people saw the negative sides far too late if you ask me. The threat of surveillance was waved mostly away. That hype is not so dissimilar to what we are seeing with so-called AI these days.

Organised social media created a bias that the loudest voices there were a majority. The flood of bots may actually finally cure us of that perception. I call it organised because the early chat rooms around Star Wars or X-Files or something like that were a form of social media before we had a name for it.

You haven’t missed anything from the early internet. Unless you want people fighting over landline phone connections and waiting hours for a solitary picture of some boobs to download. The internet isn’t good or bad, it’s a tool and people use it for good or evil. Always have (remember the anarchist cookbook?), always will do.

If by ruling the land they are given dictatorial powers, it won’t be long until one of them finds a loophole to stay in that position indefinitely.

Until then, you probably get roughly two types of people. There will be the somewhat responsible ones who try to do a good job. And then there will be the ones who take the opportunity to do stuff that benefits them personally, who I think will be the majority. They will push and pull this state into different directions almost on a daily basis, which I imagine will bankrupt the state in no time.

Another uncomfortable question would be what “random” entails. Are children in there? The mentally challenged? Terminally ill? Immigrants? Narcissistic, convicted sex offenders?

Search is not an easy service. The non-AI search relied on server farms, indexing what is on the internet, and pointing you at what just likely is the answer. There was a sweet spot somewhere between maybe 2005 and 2015 when Google search was fantastic. With the data it knows about you it got you there maybe 19 out 20 searches.

And then things started happening. Google realised that they could sell more ads if their results were a little more shit and they required you to do more searches or click thru more results pages. At the same time, the content of stuff on the internet may have also reached a point where the idea of indexing everything started reaching its practical limits. And the longer time has elapsed since the graphical internet came about, the more deadwood has accumulated. Websites built in ancient days, now unmaintained, services that ended, expired licenses and certificates, etc. The answer you’re looking for may have been out there but for one reason or another can no longer be retrieved.

That’s all before the slop tsunami hit. And this food of content makes it harder still.

So-called AI is technology that’s being beta tested on everybody. I’m sure it’s getting better. At the same time there are plenty of valid reasons to look at it with suspicion. The bullshit it has made up, the additional environmental impact, the stealing of training data, etc. There is every chance that sAIrch will be better in the future than the sweet spot search of the recent past. But we’re not there yet in my opinion. We’re in the in-between time and we just have to muddle thru.

Google is betting big on this prospect. It’s self serving for them because they can downgrade their massive indexing operation and/or free up computing resources for other tasks. So I’m not sure if they’re more driven by financial motivations or conviction in the idea. Too early to tell. Nobody in the late 90s saw Google coming and eating everybody’s lunch in the search market. There is also a chance that a new company we haven’t heard from yet is waiting in the wings.

I think there are many sliding scales that apply simultaneously. One is age. I used to look forward to this sort of thing when I was a kid and the enthusiasm has decreased since then at the pace of a falling parabola. To a point where I moved far away. Number of certifiable assholes present is another one. If you can hide with the good guys, it’s okay. If there is no way to escape, it sucks. These days are held to please that part of the family which is closer to death of natural causes. So another sliding scale is how much do you want to please your elders. How is the food? That might be worth it alone. And as a last example, how much do you like your relatives? Configure these sliders and you get your opinion. Anything from absolutely hating it to loving every minute is possible and no opinion wrong.

Sloppy slop slop

Does he wear a watch now? Does he ever take it off? Snap a picture top down on its side and put a ruler in the picture for reference. Measure the watch circumference with a piece of string and then flatten it out on a ruler. Keep the string by the bed and wait for him to fall asleep and measure his wrist like that. Suggest using handcuffs in the bedroom and surreptitiously measure the wrist that way.

Somebody else suggested you measure everything about him. Waist, legs, cuffs, etc. That’s a good idea as well.

The flooding the zone strategy. Very good!

The simplest answer to this why question is that them’s the rules.

A tariff is also different from a sales tax. One doesn’t preclude the other. I’m sure there are places in the US where you would end up paying both. The tariffs are a federal instrument of regulating cross border trade. Sales tax or the lack thereof is a state decision.

Armed with that philosophy, you stand at a fork in the road. You can become a Buddhist, a hedonist, or an anarchist. Choose your path wisely.

From a sentimental point of view, why not both? However:

Define Nazism and how banning it might be alright with the 1st amendment.

There is already a law that compels the AG to release the files. The department is still under republican control. The only thing that will change is that the committees trying to shine some light on the matter have more teeth. Keep in mind though that there may be democrat corpses in Jeffrey’s cupboard and birds of a feather flock together, even among democrats.

They could get to work on stiffening penalties for sexual predators and their helpers. As well as going after those officials who in the past have turned blind eyes towards these cases in spite of evidence. A lot of that is on state level though.

Temper your expectations. This blue wave is great but anything they want to do runs into 47 breakwater until he’s out.

I think “believe” is maybe the wrong word. I’ve dealt with a few medical professionals and I’ve come to the conclusion that they are mostly just like you and me, unsure of what’s going on, but armed with more helpful niche knowledge and the pretense they know everything. They have come up through a process of learning that leans heavily on the scientific method. Shit needs to be verifiable. That is not to say that none of them act on hunches. But these are mostly hunches they have a body of experience for. Many psychological conditions are hard to diagnose. They can’t check the liver stats or x-ray the ankle as an indicator. They also know mental care is underfunded and understaffed in most places. So I don’t think it’s a question of believing these conditions exist, it’s more about weighing a lot of these factors in their heads and the result of that may be that fewer cases get recognised.

It can be a bit of both. Can’t speak to the UK but in Japan you’re constantly asked to become a prepper because we don’t need no stinking strait of Hormuz to threaten us, the earth we live on is doing that all by itself.

Japan is in a bit of a pickle because it relies on the US for defense to quite a high degree. Nobody here thinks the orange’s adventure in Persia is a good idea. But since he reacts like a toddler nobody really dares speak out in public. So the only thing the government can do is ask companies to find ways around the closed off strait. And then the PHP thing happened. And a big data breach. Our ongoing cost of living crisis is amplified by a weak currency. The crises are piling up over here as well. Naturally, the government issues guidance. They can’t do much else.

There have been weird developments in IT thanks to so-called AI. Along with a limited number of advantages at current, it presents a major threat. It provides a Google translate tool for normal speak to code with a reliability of Google translate from 15 years ago. The North Koreans who hacked Sony had to know what they’re doing. We’re now in a place where you can just ask your tailored LLM agent to hack a company and you don’t have to know how to do that. The agent will come up with ways nobody thought of. Offence in IT tends to be faster than defence. So the heightened threat level is not a farce. The impotent government response can be though.

That’s not necessarily a ding on politicians. Representative democracy requires a political meat grinder that few people get out of still mostly intact. Those are the candidates you get to vote on. It takes a certain kind of person to survive the meat grinder long enough to be on a ballot. There are 350 million people in the US, for instance. There are maybe a half million people seeking office from local to federal. That’s about .15 percent of the entire population. It’s a sheer numbers game that you haven’t voted for anyone you liked.

Many good people don’t want to enter the meat grinder in the first place, skewing the result further. That’s why democracy is mostly about voting for the least bad.

I fear if you tally up the environmental impact of war, which is more often than not the reason for the rising oil price, it may exceed the savings at the end consumer level.

Space is very cold. It’s -270something C. The temperature on Earth is much higher. The rays that make it through to our atmosphere bounce off the ground, warming it up from the bottom up. That’s why you need a jacket when you climb up a mountain because it’s getting colder the higher you go. Imagine a mountain higher than anything we have. Eventually, you’ll get to -50 C.

You are straining the credo of this community. Gauging general trust in engineers based on where the most popular PC operating system comes from is simply too simplistic.

Very few people use Microsoft products because they actually like them. They are just the market leader in desktop OSs and do their darnedest to keep people trapped in Office. Their market dominance is no reflection on trust.

None of this applies to all places necessarily:

Large distances in rural areas.

Stranger danger.

Everything is car focused in the US. The famous sentence “It’s 5 minutes on foot, let’s walk there.” has never been uttered.

Public transport may be shit or not suitably safe/reliable to get kids to school.

Big yellow buses have become a default, a cultural cornerstone, and many people rely on it and expect it.

Long traffic jams at schools are the sign of a more affluent population in the district.

I started getting uncontrolled erections whenever my sat nav told me where to go. Now I know that Knight Rider was to blame.