Quality control was there because competition and customer agency were there.

Now your typical customer is an ape. They are less brain than what Apple stuff was intended for in the 00s. By far.

Quality and competition are reliant upon customers with agency. While customers are now the kind of people who are secretly thinking they are almost there in inventing a warp engine, because Claude told them so.

Played Tekken 3 with my friend and his brother on their PS.

Then we also played SW : RotS on our PS2.

The PS2 is still around somewhere, but its CD drive sensor is bad, so it doesn't detect when it's closed. And thus doesn't read discs. That was long ago. I need to find it, I think I'm grown up enough to fix one sensor or find a replacement drive.

I suppose the old game CDs all have scratches too bad to play, so some tinkering is expected to make it work.

And while there was an officially supported Linux version for it, of what I've read about it, it wasn't of much use even then and was an advertising move (if so, worked on my dad, I remember him mentioning that back then).

Growing up in Russia, my main exposure to 9/11 lore was that Tolkien's "Two Towers" (and yes, I know that in fact LOTR is six volumes, not three, and three volumes are publisher's decision to group them that stuck) in older adaptations was translated as, well, "two towers", but in newer ones as "two fortresses".

Because there was a lot of fashion to imitate being somehow connected to cultural and other events in the USA, that's also how older Russian TV propaganda focused on "terrorists" concerning Chechnya, basically doubling in tone news about USA in this or that about Iraq and so on.

It also successfully managed to show the ruling party as modern and western enough, and its opponents as a bunch of some mad old people from another age, bandits, neo-Nazis and out-of-this-world communists. Well, in the specific period of 2000-2007.

Which is also interesting in the sense of popular memory - it might seem weird that the general population in Russia really doesn't want anything from that emigrated opposition, well, because that's the exact kind of people who were the face of that government in 2000-2007, as a countermeasure to people like Starovoitova (already killed by then, just trying to explain the cultural image) and Sakharov or even Novodvorskaya.

And said general population is of all kinds of opinions and levels of education, and some of those layers and groups might even agree with those murders, but those were politicians and journalists, and these are whores. Whores are not a very respected kind of people.

I mean, that peace-loving bunch of fairies mostly consists of people who supported "pacifying" of Chechnya in the 00s. I understand they don't think that was a crime, well I do, so they can get fucked.

That's why the emigrant Russian opposition is not very popular in Russia. Well, after 2022 some more important things have happened on scale.

EDIT: Wrong thread, went on a rant. Just was very strange to remember that what's now the opposition and what's now the bloodied regime were once the same cultural entity, mimicking USA in all the wrong things.

Watch lists are so 1937. The whole point of building datacenters for that kind of thing is to not have the separation between people on watch lists and people not on watch lists.

So nobody should be ashamed by your measure. We live in a wonderful time when, instead of selecting few suspicious individuals to monitor, you can monitor everyone automatically and don't have that risk.

It's like lossless encoding, like FLAC, versus lossy encoding, like MP3. It's better to have the former if your resources allow it.

Watch lists have that downside of being a Russian roulette, what if your watch lists give you a wrong impression of the society outside the watch lists? You might think you have it under control, while you don't.

With everyone being monitored if you think you have it under control, you really do.

That just was a bit too expensive, but times they are a-changing.

That's really nice, isn't it?

No they can't, this is a good faith problem. Fundamentally. You can invent all the words you want and any law will somehow be a couple of terms short of covering the particular description exactly and without doubt.

You can't solve this with properly formulated laws, you can solve this with a sufficiently participatory legal system, and British legal tradition is better for that than Roman legal tradition in the first place, but it still is derived from popular power.

In other words, from societies forming the responses by networks of sufficiently pissed citizens.

The alternative was the government and big fish being interested in doing the right thing somehow, not the case here.

This, I think, is related to how all over the world laws have become very precise, literal and with plenty of special cases, which wasn't the case in the 60s even in socialist countries.

To replace good faith mechanism with literalism, which allows with sufficient power to create cases immune to law, because some special cases are not written into laws yet.

Also that naturally makes legal proceedings more expensive.

Yes, of course it's a surprise that people from a fighting military's most important branch won over a bunch of lazy peacetime professionals from a military of a country that doesn't have hostile neighbors by land.

That was sarcasm!!! I don't get where's the "new" in such news.

That's not what US military is doing anyway, with supreme logistics and air supremacy putting army into such a situation would be a deliberate choice.

Somehow people sharing your point of view in my experience are mostly men and mostly imagine it as lots of handsome young-looking people walking around in half-transparent elastic body suits in some future where everyone is "fixed" to be fit and look nice. And in that kind of sci-fi books somehow women are prevalent among characters, but the leading ones are men.

You get the general idea, yes?

I'm a very social awkward person, but honestly that worldview hints you should get out more. Again, I should follow my own advice, but.

That's the eco-friendliness we deserve, and from Japan no less.

There are two parts to this:

1. Ethics, a doctor would be expected to know better,
2. Reality, where eventually such things will just stop being 100% percent visible, and thus will happen again and again with impunity.

So, first, doctors shouldn't do that, second, ban or not, this will be happening all around us, no exit.

Isn't Skillet kinda fine?.....

Cool. Proper devops like in ads. Just those people I compare myself to when having impostor syndrome trips.

I mean, these things happen, that's just bitterness.

And that's one example of how one progressive goal (of reducing emissions, ecology, regulating industry etc) and another (of right to repair and tinker) can require a compromise.

OK, from where I am your problems in US are cool to read about, here that kind of customization is in the "fuck around and find out" territory with huge fines, but I see no concern about ecology either.

Self-critique is good, but as someone living in Russia I take issue with this claim.

I've just realized that this is much like having multiple identities.

A way to deceive market reputation mechanisms.

Should be made illegal, there should be one main brand seen on everything, then whatever secondary brand they want is possible, but you should clearly see that those 3 niche-optimized goods are from one corp.

So that the choice were, eh, real.

... lost in recent like 20 years, in my childhood dissent was far more normal than now. I think it's social media, but also the commonly pursued concept of what's socially respectable, solid and real.

And dissent is, by normalization, what allows peace in society.

So here in Russia there's such a thing as dachas, it's small plots of land with non-winterproof (sometimes not) small houses (sometimes more like a chickhouse for a human) on them, people go there at summer to have barbecues, grow stuff, have fun.

We have that, it's on a place with a lot of clay (good for growing apple trees, too) and I have always felt weird from eating and drinking anything with local water (from the well, boiled).

That is, I have ASD and BAD, and my mental condition is always different when being there a lot with that water, it's both more intense emotions, but also less like BAD symptoms. Also that somehow makes me feel full faster. And stronger.

Honestly it's as if in the city I had BAD, but there I had BPD. I become more touchy-feely there. Still it feels good and human, just not very safe.

But I've also read that water with such contents is not too good for one's kidneys, shouldn't overdo it. Better use filters.

The point is, I do feel as if my nutrition were better when using that water. Even a few portions of rice a day with lots of tea feel quite different there. But might also be the cleaner air, it's a relatively low place, though not a swamp, and a very pretty one.

I mean, the article actually says that they are not lying.

But the truth they are telling is that this kind of tools is like Yuuzhan-Vong assistants in Star Wars NJO era. It's just further in the direction of auto-complete and recommendations.

That's good. It also means that a real job can't be "done by AI".

It's another kind of data compression, in a very fundamental and general way.

It accelerates the most things that shouldn't be done at all. Boilerplate code that's written again and again because of wrong processes, which are taught as standard way of thinking and doing development. Other things that could be a higher-level programming/markup language or a library. Just a frontal way of solving things that were done by hand.

That's useful, one can't do everything by hand.

Just - things that require real human decisions, understanding, responsibility, choice, or semantic and semiotic context that has formed in the course of one's own life for like 20 years - that they can't do. And that's what forms a professional. They can extrapolate stuff that doesn't matter.

Electricity you can expect to always be there, and computers too, they are a staple technology by now, it's like paper. I'm talking personal computers, because with microcontrollers and specialized signal processors and so on nobody even thinks about them.

Food and shelter and medicine - by the measure people had 100 years ago, it'll never be bad in developed countries.

The last point, about discerning truth from fiction, is the important one, because for that purpose things are and are going to be just the same way as they were 100 years ago and 200 years ago and so on back. There have been a few decades when it seemed that we can do that without authoritative chain of proof, from, in case of a criminal investigation, police assembling facts following due process, them being registered and vetted and verified following due process, everything being documented following due process, then court proceedings and so on. Eh, as someone from former USSR, I feel funny typing this. Well, not entirely, for non-political things this was followed very rigorously even there.

So - we've had a timespan of few decades when techno-optimism was misused to erode common respect for due process and following chain of trust in establishing facts.

That's also a problem with mass media, both with freedom of press and press neutrality and ethics and reputation.

We'll have a bit of a rough ride until, very slowly through collective experience, we'll have it as good as before the Internet (the Internet is fine, it's more about people being eager to believe that technology can remove deontological and social and other philosophical components).

I get depressed after long periods of remote work, go to office, then remember why I didn't particularly value the experience, get back to remote.

Not even CEOs, you can see various (at some point failed due to low quality high expenses workforce, that can now be replaced with AI, you get the idea) entrepreneurs and non-techies on Facebook write long excited posts about Claude.

About a computer program and a dataset running completely outside their control and scrutiny. Like white colonizers selling rifles to natives, but not machinery to make those rifles. Or ammunition, but not machinery to produce it. Or colored glass, but not technical processes to make said colored glass.

CEOs are right to be excited, they might be able to afford the real thing - self-hosted and with the accompanying processes, like healthy datasets, experienced people, nuances of adjusting models, stuff like that.

But people who are being shown that they can be replaced sufficiently well by a machine, that has another little trait of being completely adjustable - that I can't understand.

Someone interested in humanitarian sciences and art being excited that there's a machine parroting them well enough to replace them, except that machine can also be made to produce those things to fascist ends, - I don't understand that.