You are absolutely right about that. Passively detecting your location? Fuck that. We are getting into an era where bots are overwhelming and user verification is a valid topic to discuss. I think additional device permissions can be one element in that discussion. But this idea he popped off the dome is a miserable example of such.

That’s a fair point. Reddit has been openly hostile to its own users these past several years. It might help moderate that to have another alternative on the table, even if it too is a soulless corporate enterprise.

If you don’t show them better content, they can’t know the difference. Watch YT with them, but put on good stuff made by humans. There’s plenty of that. Also consider accounts - once they have their own account they will tumble down the shit hole that is the algorithm. If you let them use your account, they will have a better established base, and you will easily see what they are watching. If this doesn’t work for you, created a moderated, shared account that you use and populate with good algorithm juju.

When I was in college there was a big hike in fees as the university system started having financial problems. Naturally, students protested this. There was a general air of unrest on the campus. One day I was in Poetry class and outside the windows we could hear a lot of commotion and see a protest gathering. One of the students raised his hand and asked the professor if we could have permission to go out and join. He said “I don’t recall asking authorities for permission to protest when I was a college kid in the 1960s. You can go, or not, it’s up to you.”

Since even the world’s worst dictators still hold sham elections, I conclude that there will be an election, and they will focus on how to cheat to win. If they even need to that is. This is way easier to do and conceal than canceling the election.

Did Wikipedia mention that what it sees, Lo Pan knows?

I’m certain it’s possible to obscure your face beyond the ability of any machine to recognize it. At that point your enemy is gait analysis, but there are countermeasures for that as well. As for utterly pervasive surveillance that is so redundant and automated that the government can know anything about anyone, anywhere, retroactively…. I don’t know if we are there yet. I’m not going to spend too much energy worrying about the prospects of Chinese pirates.

No, I mean: “As Wikipedia cites sources, so do these AI tools.”

Ie: these tools cite sources, like Wikipedia.

I realize now that was unclear.

Wear a mask?

Oh… clip 1 it’s climbing a curb… optical illusion - I thought that was a long ditch cut in the pavement, as for pipework, etc.

Soy sauce is made from fermented soybeans.

In the first clip there is a tuktuk in the foreground and a passenger car in the background so I don’t know how you got to “clearly somewhere cars should not be.

In clip 4 there’s some pavement but it falls away into a large hole that has filled with water… call it what you will. “Trench” is one word for it.

I agree with you that education is not primarily workforce training. I just included that note as a bit of context because it definitely made me chuckle to see these two posts right together, each painting a completely different picture of AI: “so important you must embrace it or you will die” versus “what the hell is this shit keep it away from children.”

I fall in between somewhere. We should be very cautious with AI and judicious in its use.

I just think that “cautious and judicious” means having it in schools - not keeping it out of schools. Toddler daycares should be angelic safe spaces where kids are utterly protected. Schools should actually have challenging material that demands critical thinking.

It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.

When the first dotcom bubble burst, I predicted that big companies would buy up all the major websites for fire sale prices and put them behind subscription paywalls. “Pay $30/month and get access to all 400 sites in the Yahoo network.”

I underestimated how easy it is to spin up alternative sites. Most of the media brands I thought of as valuable then are shit now, or gone.

And, like everyone, I didn’t anticipate social media. Even Google was still nascent at the time.

US streets aren’t always great but what’s up with all these open trenches right in the middle of the roads in this video??

Automated cargo delivery is going to bring a new era of piracy. When you can easily trick the vehicle and there are no people in it, it becomes much more tempting to just knock it over and steal what’s inside.

The best AI tools will also cite references, like Wikipedia, so you can click all the way through.

We need to be able to distinguish between giving kids a chance to learn how to use AI, and replacing their whole education with AI.

Right under this story in my feed is the one about the CEO who fired 80% of his staff because they didn’t switch over to AI fast enough. That’s the world these kids are being prepared for.

I would rather they get some exposure to AI in the classroom where a teacher can be present and do some contextualizing. Kids are going to find AI either way. My kids have gotten reasonable contextualizing of other things at school, like not to trust Google blindly and not to cite Wikipedia as a source. Schools aren’t always great with new technology but they aren’t always terrible either. My kids school seems to take a very cautious approach with technology and mostly teach literacy and critical thinking about it. They aren’t throwing out textbooks, shoving AI at kids and calling it learning.

This is an alarmist post. AIs benefits to education are far from proven. But it’s definitely high time for kids everyone to get some education about it at least.

Haven’t touched that pile of shit in years.