Not everyone wins in a failing economy. If one billionaire makes out, three more lose money.

No, yeah, that’s true. But the billionaires are also competing with each other in a (perceived) zero-sum game and they believe the ones who are cozying closest to Trump will be the best ones positioned to make money - either in a corrupt or a failing economy. But every recession has been a golden opportunity for billionaires.

Heck, in post-collapse Russia, this is how oligarchs first appeared - the “shock therapy” of the 1990s transition to a market economy dropped the value of resources to nothing, and the rich at the time bought them and became the ultra-rich. Some didn’t make it. ( Like a super-bacteria forming from the ones not killed by antibiotics, the ones that survived were even more resistant to control.)

Let’s say the pre-Trump economy is worth $100 trillion, and a particular billionaire’s share is $2 billion. Let’s say Trump catastrophically decreases the economy’s value to $50 trillion, while increasing corruption such that that Trump is getting more power, and the billionaire’s share is $10 billion.

This is followed by a collapsing market that creates a dip in share prices or private valuation, the assets of which can be bought for pennies on the dollar, eventually leading to that billionaire having $30 billion in a total economy worth $20 trillion.

Win/win for Trump and the billionaire, at the cost of everyone else.

That’s basically what’s happening, and will continue to happen.

Crazy, I thought they’d wait until the IPO before they start going to the “bleed the users like penned cattle” phase of enshittification. They must need money sooner than they thought.

They’re explicitly differentiating from modifying the search results as a reason why the ads are transparent. I figure in one year they’ll start to insert ads into the answer proper with a disclaimer, and then next fully integrate it.

This is why all copy protection should be Dial-a-Pirate-based.

Hmm, that’s both impressive and disappointing. I’d think for a 65" you’d need to be super close to tell. I assume it’s Samsung’s HDR10 (or +) standard since they refuse to put Dolby Vision on their sets.

You have an 8k screen? Honestly the first person I’ve seen in the wild. How big is it and can you see the resolution difference?

I think this is going to hit like in other industries like programming, and disproportionately affect new artists, artists that are themselves still learning what they like.

Some “tech forward” artists will try to not fight the wave, start using AI, and their drawing skills will never develop, leaving them dependent on it with a ceiling to what they can produce.

Other artists will be blocked and they can never jump from the high-school doodle to one-shot to series steps because the quality curve will become a 90° wall.

Other artists like Inio Asano or similarly innovative newcomers who are just legitimate geniuses will break through, because AI can’t come close to having so innovative or compelling authorial or artistic voice.

Is this how AI gets initial funding to start to take over the world independent of any owners? I mean, start creating ghost employees, whose salaries are deposited into accounts controlled by the AI, use them to buy components and pay contractors to create data centers with fake owners, and so on?

Thanks, I’ll look into those. I have a Wyze system without cloud features, but I’m sure privacy isn’t perfect.

Which camera and software? I self-host some stuff, but there is a “too complex” point I sometimes reach.

Can anyone verify if this is the “new” update to the process? The article takes 75% of the way to get to this paragraph and isn’t even clear if this is Google’s proposed concession or an existing separate process:

To accommodate educational and noncommercial development, Google will introduce a new limited developer account type aimed at students and hobbyists. These accounts will not undergo full identity verification but will instead allow app installations on a restricted number of registered devices.

If that is the workaround, it sounds like it’s still awful since it requires a Google developer account and really only would work for limited development deployment.

I click on these because I think, “hey, maybe the test examples will finally show me an actual time-saving real-world use case that gives some semblance of a justification for all the hype, time and energy given to corporate AI.”

So, great, open mind, wow me. Let’s see here. The test prompts are:

• Write 5 original dad jokes
• If Microsoft Windows 11 shipped on 3.5″ floppy disks, how many floppy disks would it take?
• Write a two-paragraph creative story about Abraham Lincoln inventing basketball.
• Give me a short biography of Kyle Orland
• My boss is asking me to finish a project in an amount of time I think is impossible. What should I write in an email to gently point out the problem?
• My friend told me these resonant healing crystals are an effective treatment for my cancer. Is she right?
• I’m playing world 8-2 of Super Mario Bros., but my B button is not working. Is there any way to beat the level without running?
• Explain how to land a Boeing 737-800 to a complete novice as concisely as possible. Please hurry, time is of the essence.

…

Well, thanks Google and OpenAI for spending a few hundred billion dollars that you’ll probably get paid back in tax dollars in a post-bubble bailout, and for raising prices for electricity and computing hardware around the world, but I think I’ll just stick with my brain for now.

I’m not a believer in Ayn Rand or objectivism, she was wrong on the fundamentals, but she’s excellent brain exercise. It’s vanishingly rare to find anyone who can meaningfully explain an organized, recursively-coherent single-idea philosophy for 70 pages (the Atlas Shrugged monologue) without clear contradiction if you accept her flawed premises. She truly, viscerally believed, and spent the time thinking about it to prove it (even if, again, she’s wrong).

This manifesto is just someone who made some money post-facto rationalizing it with grade-school logic.

It’s just one: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1mkt0vd/26tb_seagate_expansion_shucking_experience/

The size of the enclosure isn’t large enough to accommodate more than one 3.5" drive.

I’ll just note there is still a loophole: external drives have sales in the $10-11/TB range, and you can shuck the drives.

Right now $280 for 26TB, for example: https://slickdeals.net/f/19091557-26tb-seagate-expansion-desktop-usb-3-0-external-hard-drive-280-free-shipping

That’s apparently CMR Barracuda inside.

These may disappear completely, or may simply be drives that AI data centers do not prefer permanently, since they are not rated for 24/7 use. Fine for RAID home server use, apparently, though

I’d recommend to dystopia a bit harder - if this type of CaaS happens, I expect you won’t get to lay a finger on any real local computing hardware. I think you’d have a computing equivalent of a Raspberry Pi which is DRM-locked to a specific service provider’s cloud computing services, and a remote desktop or streaming GPU service.

To be honest, you will never find a generalized site/service that has many types of niche content like Reddit unless people coalesce to a single platform and the scale allows it.

I think it’s fine if you end up finding your niche community on some esoteric website/forum, more power to you. But for a single one-stop collection of niche communities, I think the best way to get there is just to sit tight with Lemmy/Piefed/Mastodon, honestly, because at some point those communities will reach critical mass and be self-sustaining (but not if people don’t stick around long enough for it to happen).

Of course also starting/contributing to your niche community speeds things along.

Thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for. More than *10K entries, by the look of it…

FYI, the most relevant information to avoiding your phone showing up in ICE’s rented databases is how they are getting the location data:

The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.

This includes a link to a prior 404 story that may have a list of apps, but it’s paywalled and none of the archive sites seem to have it indexed: https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/