In which ways did you find Nord worse? I found Nord faster than Mullvad and better at spoofing my location in different countries for streaming services.

Proton VPN is probably the first other one that springs to mind as offering privacy comparable to Mullvad. Its CEO was criticized last year for making approving comments about some things Trump was doing in the USA, but it was mostly about opportunities to challenge big tech companies, and he claimed not to be a MAGA supporter in general. There was no evidence, as far as I know, of him donating to right-wing organizations.

…Minus the payments already provided, right?

It’s very vague. If you could use this as a rent-to-own it’s perhaps not so bad, but if it’s just rent-to-still-not-be-able-to-own it sucks.

I hope you’re being sarcastic.

I had the same experience. I was doing a little home project to improve my Rust programming skills and my understanding of a couple of algorithms. I asked the AI to wire up the command line arguments so I could move on to the more interesting bits. It got carried away, rewrote my code, fixed the bugs and finished the whole project. I just sat there feeling disappointed. It was like someone telling you how a movie turns out just as you’re settling in with your popcorn.

Well, employee morale is going to be great at whichever company they hand to an AI to run. But who cares about employees?

Their shared bet is that companies will automate individual jobs piece by piece until humans oversee the work rather than perform it.

For CEOs maybe this sounds great, but for anyone with a skilled job who knows the satisfaction of practising and improving your skills every day, it sounds hellish. All humans will become middle managers for the foreseeable future, possibly the least rewarding job there is.

It reminds me of when that CEO of an AI music company claimed musicians don’t enjoy making music. It gives you a little glimpse of how joyless these techbros’ lives really are, and they want to bring that to the rest of us.

The USA could compete by doing the same thing. If it chooses not to, China gets ahead in this race.

Outright hoaxes remain rare and are often easy to spot, said Lees – nobody is falling for a toucan sighting in Siberia – but he says birders often use AI to edit and improve an image, and the algorithm can then introduce parts from different bird species to create the new image.

My phone offers an “AI enhance” option after you take a photo. Mostly it tweaks the framing and colours, but it can also do some surprising things and produce a quite different image from the original. I played with it a bit when I first got the phone, and I saw it change people’s eye colour, turn their head to face a different way, and add extra strings to musical instruments. So I don’t use it, but it sounds like the problem is mostly people using AI image enhancers like that carelessly.

They missed Canada? Canada has a bill C-34 in the works which bans social media for under-16s and just happens to require everyone to submit their ID to non-Canadian corporations.

You mean ordinary Americans will. It’s not like he’ll pay anything.

I suspect the thoroughness of the vetting is inversely proportional to the size of the kickback to Microsoft.

Indeed. I use Linux most of the time, and MacOS a bit of the time, but the old Windows desktop is still there for the infrequent times when I need it to work on old music projects. I have it too dual-booting into Linux, so even it spends most of its time in a more sane OS.

I’ve used an LG monitor for about 5 years, and never install the manufacturer’s software unless it looks genuinely useful. When I saw the Gamers Nexus video I went to check my installed apps, and sure enough there was LG’s monitor app, installed silently without my knowledge. I used Bulk Crap Uninstaller to get rid of it.

To prevent this kind of thing in future, run gpedit.msc and enable “Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata” under Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → System → Device Installation.

As a programmer I’ve been doing this, but only because a friend lent me a very powerful computer that I could never afford myself. That’s the problem right now: local LLM use requires a huge upfront investment in equipment that most workers can’t afford. But it does feel a lot better (and cheaper, once you have the equipment) to run the LLM on a server at home than on a server owned by some nasty tech company. If everyone could run open models locally some of the main objections would fall away.

So I disagree with the poster who said anything you can run at home isn’t worth it, but the catch is you need an absurdly expensive computer. The one I’m using would cost about 6 times what I used to pay for a powerful development PC. The model and agent I’m using can do some complex things and get decent results. But right now no affordable computer can run them. On regular affordable computers the models you can run are indeed limited.

Economic damage, environmental damage, concentration of power with multi-billionaire fascists, cultural damage due to huge quantities of slop crowding out everything else, mass unemployment and the exploitation of remaining workers, disempowerment of everyone who doesn’t have the resources to control this technology, destruction of ordinary people’s access to suitably powerful computing machinery so that we’re all forced to either rent access to AI from its corporate gatekeepers or not use it, total surveillance by the state and its favoured corporations, profiling and predictive policing, marketing, etc. That’s quite a lot to object to, and I’m sure there’s more.

Intel’s nanometer-ish numbers are BS. They call their 14nm process “Intel 10”, their 10nm process “Intel 7”, their 7nm “Intel 4”, etc. As far as I know, other companies are more truthful.

It takes a lot of practice and patience. Even for experienced programmers it can be a slow process and full of missteps. One of the main skills is to be patient and methodical enough to figure out why something doesn’t work. Don’t be discouraged or impatient, and don’t be tempted to get AI to do it for you or to find your mistakes. You can use AI later but it isn’t a good idea when you’re trying to learn the skills. Try to do it yourself and, when it doesn’t work first time, take time to figure out why. Then do this lots more times.

As far as I can see it doesn’t improve that situation. The Google Play Store may be forced to list alternative app stores, but by default the only apps that will install on Android, no matter which store they are downloaded from, are those whose developer has registered with Google and Google has approved both the developer and the app. So Google can still censor any app or developer they (or the US Government) consider inconvenient.

Google promises a slightly laborious workaround for this, but they don’t say how long the workaround will remain available.

And the “fix” was to add an option to hide the spinner, it seems. I guess understanding why stuff is happening is too old-fashioned for today’s vibe pioneers.

Continuing that unbroken streak of bad artistic decisions towards an inevitable Star Wars Special 50th Anniversary Slop Edition reissue.

They watch Black Mirror and they see a world in which ordinary people have to obey the wishes of the rich and powerful or they suffer. And they like what they see.