probablygonna

I think the current risks column could stand a couple more entries: Impersonation is something scammers are already doing, using elevenlabs, but before then it was already possible to change someone's face and voice in a live broadcast, if you had access to the expensive proprietary software needed to do so. Here's a story about someone faking the voice of someone's daughter to try and make it sound like she was kidnapped. https://nypost.com/2023/04/12/ai-clones-teen-girls-voice-in-1m-kidnapping-scam/ Another risk is greater automation in scamming, allowing one scammer to scam way, way faster than previously possible, thus scam more people at once, but in theory that leaves a bigger paper trail allowing the scammer to get found out easier....assuming anyone with permission to stop them even cares. But I don't think the mainstream social media companies are above putting words in your friend's mouths to try and sell you something or sell you on some idea. Both of these might technically fall under "misinformation", but it's worth pointing out that we can expect pfishing to get a lot more sophisticated. At least, if you're a social media user. Technically, you can avoid the datamining necessary to achieve that by communicating via email with PGP (and not using gmail or outlook!): Not only can your mail not be read by anyone except intended recipients, but you know the person it came from can't be anyone but who it says its from. You know, provided you exchanged public keys in person. And can handle backing your own data up. And everyone you know can even handle learning how to use it correctly. Also, I appreciate the greater concern for misinformation spread by mainstream media instead of random losers like me. If there was a social panic surrounding the word "misinformation" in 2001, the notion that there weren't nukes in Iraq would have been called "misinformation" for sure. But technically, everything can be misinformation until enough people are sure it's not. Disinformation I think is more threatening and a more appropriate label for that spot.

Well, I was going to try and phrase this more politely, but Eliezer Yudkowsky is someone I've come to regard as controlled opposition for the rich people who are after total AI hegemony. Even if you agree with him entirely, you should never cite him as the source for any of your information. He was simply given an article in Time Magazine to draw attention to him. That attention lets the guys who, for some reason, imagine AI will lead us into utopia, point at him and say "oh yeah, well, this is you!" to people who don't really want even scam democracy replaced by some AI-run, micromanaged, social credit infested nightmare that you can't predict at all. Still, you want people to talk to you, you gotta be polite, even if that means calling someone like him an "AI Expert". I hope that's what the idea was, anyway.

Hi, I'm from 2017's future! Things sure are still looking like that economically. The go to response is to blame Capitalism, but that's a response for those who don't understand the problem, but can see there is a problem, and want to fit in. However, what most people don't realize is what's happening is the results of debts piling up as a result of mistakes piling up. People make mistakes, and lead corporations to make mistakes, and those mistakes result in not meeting speculated goals that they would have had to reach in order to pay off the debt needed to get the money to attempt the things that became the mistakes. Then, they have to squeeze something harder, either their employees or their customers or something, to make up the difference. Those customers might then have to squeeze their customers and employees, and so on and so on. Scale this up to an entire country, or the whole world, and everyone's feeling the squeeze. And the point is all just to keep making payments on debts, and that includes national debts. What's the solution? Well, certain people (*cough* worldeconomicforum *cough*) have just been floating the idea of selling society into slavery through programmable digital currency, one country at a time. Everyone knows that's wrong, but I'm the paranoid moron for thinking it can actually happen, which it certainly can if no one can complain about it. And of course the cool solution all the cool kids are talking about is abolishing the ability of anyone to accumulate enough of anything to do anything with (i.e. abolish capital), or giving that up in exchange for letting robots do all the work, because that surely won't leave humanity enslaved by the machines or anyone being bored out of their minds, and surely, unlike all the previous times someone's tried that, we definitely won't see the rich dickheads just taking everything and owning it all while saying they're just keeping it for everyone. Kind of like how "zero trust computing" really just means putting all your trust in Microsoft. But the real solution was invented thousands of years ago. Just forgive all debts every seven years. And not like what's been recently done, with student loans, that just added the student loan debt to the national debt! I mean tell people that every seven years a lender is told "now you'll quit harassing that guy about the money he owes you, or we'll put you in jail, deal with it". Not that this doesn't have it's own set of problems, the "seven year" time frame was meant for a pre-industrial society after all. But it would go a long way to stop everyone from being under this kind of pressure.

Music, documents, and videos "moved?" Man, I really don't like the way Doronichev said that. Like that's where "everything" is and if you're trying to get it somewhere else, like your data hoard on your NAS, you're some kind of freak. And I think a lot of people agree with that; I've been worried about it since I heard about Stadia. Choosing to feel hostility to others over the way they consume products for social reasons and not practical reasons isn't r, but that's why you saw so many comments talking about how bad Stadia's service was or how they were sad it was gone. Maybe another part of the reason you're seeing comments like that is because Google and Reddit deleted everything else. To many it really DID feel like a continuation of a trend of thinner and thinner clients accessing remote interactive computer services. It felt like it was what was SUPPOSED to happen. Going along with it was the RIGHT thing to do. (Of course it was social engineering that made them think this way.) And it was cheaper up front than a game console. And the service sucked in many places so Google was merely bad for not aiding this trend along its way. We're supposed to own nothing and be happy by 2030 after all. Of course anyone who thinks that doesn't realize that a computer being a tool for displaying whatever information its owners want, means the user should try have as much control over what the computer does as is humanly possible. And by the way, it is in fact entirely true that you can't have full control over your PC and use the Windows Store, but in the sense that it's entirely up to Microsoft what the updates do. Just try and stop Windows from sending unsolicited network requests. With an operating system that respects the users freedom you can modify the packages that come in updates however you want. If you've got the patience and skill for it. I suspect that part of the reason Stadia shut down right now is due to energy prices. If that's the case other services might shut down too, but maybe not, because Stadia didn't run on normal servers, they had custom silicon made for it, and they might not have run anything else very well to the point that it was cheaper to just trash them. Plus the others have different business models. Amazon's Luna I feel like is actually likely to start running exclusives sooner than Microsoft, because Amazon has a large focus on exclusive content already in other media, they were starting to develop some of their own games while Luna was in beta, and they have a much stronger focus on not needing a computer with an Amazon OS to use Amazon services.

These days it seems journalists do more psychological warfare than journalism. So I think maybe they report on dying games with sad acceptance to try and normalize just sadly accepting it and doing nothing else whenever it happens. It's not like you can socially engineer "being upset about not being able to do something anymore" out from the human condition. That's an extension of a survival instinct. So when Ubisoft wants to shut something down (because if people don't stop playing old online game they won't buy new online game), they pay the journalists to deaden the impact as much as is possible without looking like Ubisoft is paying them. They know they can't make you not care. They can however keep you feeling as if it might be socially unacceptable to care any more than that. If this one's getting more exposure than the others, it's because Google's datamining (or something) told them too many were starting to wish this practice would stop and they need to be reminded of the normality of sad acceptance. People who work in media these days also tend to be postmodernists who think that history and truth is open to the strongest bidder and might makes right and you'd better join with whoever appears to be the strongest side in any issue even if it means holding contradictory principles, like acting this way and also hating capitalism. Is this the road to madness? Absolutely, but that's no reason to think someone in the media wouldn't be this way. If madness pays the bills they'll be crazy all day.