Mr. Torvalds is truly a generous man, giving the current AI market an analysis of 10% usefulness is probably a decimal or two more than will end up panning out once the hype bubble pops.

The counterpoint being that a centralized organization introduces checks, balances, and recovery methods for some losses. If your credit card gets stolen and charged or your bank suddenly becomes insolvent, you have a significant chance that your money will be able to be recovered. Compare that to cryptocurrency, where your wallet information being compromised or a crypto exchange you have assets in going under leaves you at a complete loss and entirely devoid of recourse. Centralized systems have many issues, obviously, as Visa seems to be on an endless crusade to make everyone supremely aware of, but at the same time cryptocurrency being an alternative doesn’t make it a valuable or viable alternative.

I have the most incredible news for you about this crazy new thing called… cash.

More seriously, there’s no reason government bodies shouldn’t just create a central digital transaction system with real money, instead of pouring resources into the stupidity of a blockchain system. Save everyone a lot of trouble and wasted compute cycles and just make the source of trust in the system the fact that it’s administrated by a trusted central authority running a database, instead of the various shell game wank of blockchain systems.

But it’s not a “major browser.” It’s a niche fork that has valuable adjustments for power users, but would be unusable for your average non-technically inclined user. I use Librewolf myself and appreciate it, but it’s not something you can just drop on an older relative’s machine and expect to work fine. Firefox has plenty of issues out of the box with sneaking in ads and telemetry, but at the same time you still have to understand that it’s an important player in the market despite its flaws because it’s the only real mainstream competitor to an entirely Chromium-based ecosystem, and despite the issues it does have, it’s still lightyears ahead of Chrome.

You’re aware that LibreWolf is a Firefox fork, right? The quote is literally “major browser”, which obviously precludes fairly niche forks.

The microtransactions are one issue among many. To be frank, putting microtransactions in a $70 USD title would still warrant negative reviews in and of itself, but the the game is also having catastrophic performance issues and crashing on PC for what seems to be the majority of players, to the point of many Youtube channels covering it that did not get press copies being all but unable to play at all.

It doesn’t matter if a game has a lot of good elements, if it has bad ones and people cite those bad elements in negative reviews it’s not review bombing, it’s consumers giving an honest review of a product.

There are in fact a huge number of reliable counters to drones, including but not limited to anti-aircraft gun systems, anti-aircraft lasers, RF jamming devices (especially effective against cheap/makeshift drones), and several more. Drones are currently an emergent threat without a robust countermeasure scheme, but given their massive role in the Ukraine war that is not going to go unaddressed for long. From a purely mechanical standpoint, small drone munitions are also physically very vulnerable, making them readily destroyed by anti-air autocannon fire or even laser weapons if you assume RF jamming will not solve the problem.

Meta has had plenty of chances in the past as a massive leader in the social media market. Those chances have been used to conduct illegal violations of user privacy, monopolize multiple market sectors, and ultimately go as far as actively abetting crimes against humanity. It is entirely reasonable and I think fundamentally imperative not to give them any more chances.

This is the crux of it. Should people expect actual unlimited data? Maybe not, if you’re tech savvy and understand matters on the backend, but also I’m fairly sure there’s a dramatically greater burden on Google for using the word “unlimited”. If they didn’t want to get stuck with paying the tab for the small number of extreme power users who actually use that unlimited data, then they shouldn’t have sold it as such in the first place. Either Google actually clearly discloses the limits of their product (no, not in the impossible to find fine print), or they accept that storing huge bulk data for a few accounts is the price they pay for having to actually deliver the product they advertised.

For people authoring original content who may end up having the only copy of a given piece of news-relevant data in their possession, using a lossy compression method to back it up sort of defeats the purpose. This isn’t stashing your old DVD collection, this is trying to back up privileged professional data.

There’s a very obvious distinction between satire, I.E. imitating a public figure to make a joke about them, and using their likeness for marketing, I.E. making it seem as if that public figure endorses a product/service/etc.

One is legally protected free speech, the other is illegally misusing a person’s likeness, and regardless of whether or not they are a celebrity should be protected against because it is deceptive to the public and violates the person’s inherent right to control of their own likeness.

Regardless of your views on celebrity in general and the merit of famous figures in society, it’s quite clear that this kind of AI mimicry needs to be stomped out fast and early, or else we will rapidly end up in a situation where shady scam artists and massive corporate interests will freely use AI zombies of popular personalities, living or dead, to hawk their wares with impunity.

Then you can ignore/turn it off? It’s also a function to protect users from malicious online behavior, dunno how that could be interpreted as a nanny, unless you also insist browsers shouldn’t warn you when accessing known malware links or similar. If you really insist on having the absolute freedom to not be advised about it when you’re being scammed then go off I guess.

Microsoft has a long and storied history of doing the worst and dumbest possible things with Windows as a platform, so, it’s pretty easy to see why people find it very easy to assume the worst here.

I’ve found a very simple expedient to avoid any such issues is just to not use things like ChatGPT in the first place. While they’re an interesting gadget, I have been extremely critical of the massive over-hyped pitches of how useful LLMs actually are in practice, and have regarded them with the same scrutiny and distrust as people trying to sell me expensive monkey pictures during the crypto boom. Just as I came out better of because I didn’t add NFTs to my financial assets during the crypto boom, I suspect that not integrating ChatGPT or its competitors into my workflow now will end up being a solid bet, given that the current landscape of LLM based tools is pretty much exclusively a corporate dominated minefield surrounded by countless dubious ethics points and doubts on what these tools are even ultimately good for.

My brother in Christ, building a bomb and doing terrorism is not a form of protected speech, and an overwrought search engine with a poorly attached ability to hold a conversation refusing to give you bomb making information is not censorship.

This is something I think a lot of people don’t get about all the current ML hype. Even if you disregard all the other huge ethics issues surrounding sourcing training data, what does anybody think is going to happen if you take the modern web, a huge sea of extremist social media posts, SEO optimized scams and malware, and just general data toxic waste, and then train a model on it without rigorously pushing it away from being deranged? There’s a reason all the current AI chatbots have had countless hours of human moderation adjustment to make them remotely acceptable to deploy publicly, and even then there are plenty of infamous examples of them running off the rails and saying deranged things.

Talking about an “uncensored” LLM basically just comes down to saying you’d like the unfiltered experience of a robot that will casually regurgitate all the worst parts of the internet at you, so unless you’re actively trying to produce a model to do illegal or unethical things I don’t quite see the point of contention or what “censorship” could actually mean in this context.

Bold of you to assume that wouldn’t have just resulted in a coal burning power station every couple kilometers…

Social media sites, infamously known for saying “We may collect all this data” and then totally not doing that and selling it to anyone and everyone for a shiny penny, right?

The fact that Microsoft’s constantly more aggressive use of their OS platform to artificially push their search and cloud platforms hasn’t triggered multiple huge antitrust cases is a pretty dire indicator of how little regulators are willing or able to safeguard the public from monopolistic behavior by large tech companies.

They are not being “honest”, they are representing flawed and problematic data patterns integrated into their models, because the capabilities they actually posses are dramatically less than companies and the general public seem to be happy to assume. LLMs aren’t magically going to become pop culture evil robots that want to kill us all, but what they have already become is tools for unethical corporate exploitation and the enablement of more advanced scams and disinformation campaigns.