blind3rdeye

I don't think it is as simple as that, but I certainly do see your point of view. And I'd probably agree if I didn't feel like society is accelerating towards a very problematic future. (The problems I'm thinking of are not directly related to what we're talking about here; but I just see this as part of what it might look like to start changing direction).

I'd just advise that we think about what the end-goal is meant to look like. What are we hoping for here. What does it mean to have a good life. In many stories and visions of the future, people seem to envision utopia as people spending their time on artistic and creative pursuits; as in, that's the thing we were meant to free out time for. So the automate that part away might be a mistake. We're likely to just end up freeing time for something destructive instead.

Agreed. And I want to go a bit further to talk about why else this might be bad.

Some people believe that losing jobs to AI is fine, because it means society is more efficient; and that it gives people time to do other things. But I think there are a few major flaws in that argument. For a lot of people, their sense of purpose and sense of self, and their source of happiness comes from their art and their creativity. We can say "they can just do something else" but we've basically just making their lives worse. Instead of being paid and valued for making art; they can get paid for serving coffee or something... and perhaps not have as strong of a sense of purpose or happiness. Even if we somehow eliminate inequality, and give everyone huge amount of free-time instead of works, it's still not clear that we've made it better. We just get people mindlessly scrolling on social media instead of creating something.

That's just one angle. Another angle is that by removing the kind of jobs that AI can do well, we remove the rungs on the ladder that people have been using to climb to other higher-level skills. An artist (or writer, or programmer, or whatever else), might start out by doing basic tasks that an AI can do easily; and then build their skills to later tackle more complex and difficult things. But if the AI just takes away all opportunities that are based on those basic tasks, then people then won't have those opportunities to build their skills.

So... if we put too much emphasis on speed & cost & convenience, we may accidentally find ourselves in a world where people are generally less happy, and less skilled, and struggle to find a sense of value or purpose. But on the plus side, it will be really easy to make a picture of a centaur girl or whatever.

According to this post, 2016 was the year of the Linux desktop. ... But yeah, we're on about 3%.

On that one hand, that's kind of cute and cool. But on the other, I find it a bit depressing that the main difference between this and CD wallets of the past is that the CDs actually did store the data.

With the CDs, you literally were holding the information, and you could use it as you wish without reliance or permission from anyone else. Whereas the cards, as you say, they just point to where the data is. You still need to rely on a whole chain of different services to get access to it. Access can be revoked at any time, either deliberately, or by some error, or by some critical service shutting down. It's just like the past, but worse. Isn't it?

Perhaps one of the biggest advances in human knowledge is in how to make ultra-slick slippy-slopes for abstract ideas. It seems to me that the most common reason people give for accepting some new bullshit is that we already have some other bullshit which is worse. But it is the accumulation of additional bullshit that has gotten us into this mess. I'm referring mostly to sacrifices of privacy; and to loss of freedom of use in products and software; the ownership being replaced with ongoing fees and subscriptions. That kind of thing.

I read a youtube comment once which said that comments on youtube are always accurate and trustworthy. So there you go.

Being in a car or aeroplane is totally different from playing a game, VR or otherwise. The motion sickness is a result of a mismatch between the sense of your own motion from what you are seeing, and the sense of your own motion from your inner-ear (which is basically an accelerometer).

In a car or an aeroplane, as long as you are looking at the window then there is no problem. (But often people get car-sick if they try to read a book or something, because then they can't see the motion - they can only feel it.) But in a game, you can see the motion but not feel it - so that can also give motion sickness.

Many modern first-person games have an option for 'mouse smoothing' (or something similar), and that generally help reduce or eliminate motion sickness.

Best not ask about that either.

My response to this is that I refuse to use apps like that. For example, the only app I have on my phone is a OSM+ (maps). (As well as core basics: clock, contacts, camera, phone app, etc.).

I've never once scanned a QR code, I don't have any phone apps that require an account for anything whatsoever.

...

And I can say that as time goes on, I feel more and more like I'm in the minority. I'm seeing restaurants where you are meant to order with a phone; and I'm seeing people paying for stuff with their phone; and during covid contract-tracing times, there were a lot of different things that assumed the use of a phone... I just hope that there are enough people in the world with values similar to mine such my life doesn't get harder due to phone apps being required for more and more things.

Money makes pretty much everything worse.

AI art often has signatures in it... usually unreadable. The art they train on sometimes have signatures, so the AI thinks the signature just part of the style, and so it copies that style.

(The image in this thread is not AI art though.)

I often don't find what I want in DDG; and I then try !g to look for it with Google... and Google doesn't find it either.

In my experience it is very rare for Google to help me with a search that DDG failed with. As for the converse, I wouldn't know - because I never search Google first. Why wouldn't I? They're evil.

That said, I will point out that I don't use a google account, and I block most google-related cookies. I know that some people find Google gives better results due to its personalised results; and obviously I'm not 'benefiting' from that. So it is believable that you get better results from Google than I do, due to it knowing more about you, and thus guessing what you might want to see.