DarkWiiPlayer

> If fire was invented today

You know you're starting to be personally affected by the decline of civilization when your brain can conjure up the notion of fire being "invented".

Why just the psychopaths? What about the risk of perfectly healthy, reasonable armed people targeting AI executives?

I believe the world should accept the "bad things" that result from allowing me to take other people's property, because of all the good I'd do with the money I'd take from the rich.

Hear me out, I know common sense says theft is bad, but just think about the hungry children I could feed if the world just agreed to let me take whatever I wanted.

...except AI won't even feed hungry children, it will only make the rich richer and flood the internet with slop.

So you don't get any disappointment or regret from the article at all? It reads to you like someone merely lamenting that it happened to be them while fully aware that they chose the risk and are fully responsible for this outcome?

Don't be silly, tech companies market themselves to people as reliable. They do their best to give people the impression that they don't need to weigh reliability against convenience and that they can have the best of both worlds.

Articles like this one exist because people need to be reminded that this isn't, in fact, the case. What they fail to do is present any proper alternatives to really give people the chance to make that decision.

And hey, if someone knows these things happen, knows how easy it is to set up a family nextcloud plus some backup system, and still choose to take their chances with the corpo slopware, then at that point it's really just their own fault.

Nah sorry but that's bullshit. Storage doesn't have to be in the cloud; that's just convenience. If you want to be safe for cheap and easy, use an external HDD and enjoy your life.

If you want the convenience of having your stuff stored in the cloud without backup, which is already asking for trouble, then yea, that's a luxury that doesn't come for free.

That being said, one person can easily self-host for a whole family, friend group or entire neighborhood.

And your response gets even dumber with bringing up AI. I won't bother explaining why, it should be self-evident if you stop and think for a second about the AI business model.

Yes, the problem here is that people see these services as the sandwich rather than the person handing out sandwiches for free.

The sandwich is yours and you should be able to trust it, but you shouldn't rely on the expectation that the same guy will be handing out sandwiches for free at the same corner every day. They might just not be there one day, or simply tell you "I don't like your face, you don't get sandwiches anymore".

Facebook is the sandwich guy, as are google, microsoft, etc. Enjoy the free sandwiches, but plan in a way where you wouldn't just starve without them.

It's 2026 and people still haven't figured out that big platforms are not their friend. It's both amazing and sad.

I wonder if there's any way of getting it into people's heads that they need to maintain their own data under their own care, but I fear the big platforms sink way too much money into propaganda to convince people to continue trusting them.

Oh this is a funny topic; I just found myself looking for a decent music player on linux like a month or so ago and the situation was... disappointing.

The nicest looking one I could find was amberol, but that was a bit too minimalistic for me. I like minimal UIs but that doesn't have to translate to minimal feature sets as well.

But in the end I didn't find any simple but hackable players that I liked; in the end I just settled on audacious because it's just simple enough in terms of UI and good enough in terms of features. I do like the playlists as tabs idea though.

Cyberpunk meets opium wars...

Actually sounds like a not so bad setting for a book/game/movie ngl; sure sounds like a garbage setting for a world to actually live in.

Same here; I'm all for a "ban" but it doesn't have to be all social media, just force them to use a simple rules-based algorithm for minors.

But meh, it's a broader issue anyway. Just look at the puritanical obsession some people have with pornography too.

Young people these days are getting infantilised way too much imho and that's just not healthy. There needs to be a safe environment to transition into adulthood with gradual exposure to all kinds of things, rather than turning 18 and suddenly being a different category of person entirely.

...or that anyone who thinks "I'd start a company if I could become the next Apple, but otherwise it's pointless" is someone you want running a company.

With cookies disabled I get a blank website, which is a massive red flag and an immediate nope from me.

Can't imagine someone incapable of building a website would deliver a good (digital) product.

You can tell I'm European, but I think in this case, at the time when consumers accepted these conditions they might not have had any way of understanding the ramifications, so effectively there is no informed consent.

In other words, now that people have had a taste of it and know what they're actually consenting to, companies should have to get renewed consent (positive consent, that is) instead of relying on "you agreed to this before it was even a real thing".

It kind of comes down to the you can't put a "you sell your soul" clause in the terms and conditions of a coffee subscription service mentality: at what point do you simply say "this is obviously in bad faith" and declare it void rather than just say "it's silly, but you signed it".

And I think there's massive cultural differences regarding where that line is drawn.

I wouldn't count on the US anymore, considering today's political climate. But in theory, EU+US could probably make a very compelling argument to China that if all three agree to play nice, nobody gets an advantage because of it, while everyone can benefit from a slower technological development leaving more time to figure out the societal problems.

Ultimately us random people on the internet can't say if China would want that or could be convinced with some other concessions unrelated to AI, but what we can say for sure is that, if China has the will to chill, the west has the negotiating power to match them.

> Even if you can enforce this somehow

This is super simple to enforce.

For starters, we only really care about the companies developing big commercial AI products, not the people running said models on their home PCs or anything along those lines.

If a company starts offering a new AI model commercially, you simply send someone to audit it and make sure they can provide proof of consent, have their input data, etc.

In most cases, this should be enough. If there's reason to believe an AI company is actually straight up lying to the authorities, you simply have them re-train their model in a controlled environment.

Oh and no, you don't need cryptographically secure random numbers for AI training and/or operation, so you can easily just save your random seeds along with the input data for perfectly reproducible results.

This isn't an enforcement problem, it's a lobbying problem. Lawmakers are convinced that AI will solve their problems for them when reality is that it's still mostly speculation on someone at some point finding a way to make it profitable.

In reality, training and even running AI is still way too expensive to the companies selling them, even without considering the long-term economic impact of the harmful ways they are trained (artists contribute to GDP directly, open source projects do so indirectly, and free services like wikipedia are an important part of modern society; AI is causing massive costs to all of these)