Games suck now. Movies too. Culture in decline. We (millennials and gen x) got to see the art form (gaming and at least short form video on youtube and vimeo and stuff) evolve from studios owned by people who were passionate about the craft to the current state of big business making “safe” investments. It’s not that only bad games will ever come out from now on, indie studios exist and some big studios take chances, but there will always be a sea of remakes, remasters, endless sequels, generic safe garbage, etc

Also data is about 18-24 year old spending. I bet a lot of switch 2 purchases were by people 30+ for their kids

There’s a huge degree of separation between “violent music/games has a spurious link to violent behavior” and shitty AIs that are good enough to fill the void of someone who is lonely but not good enough to manage risk

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/tech/teen-suicide-character-ai-lawsuit

“within months of starting to use the platform, Setzer became “noticeably withdrawn, spent more and more time alone in his bedroom, and began suffering from low self-esteem. He even quit the Junior Varsity basketball team at school,”

“In a later message, Setzer told the bot he “wouldn’t want to die a painful death.”

The bot responded: “Don’t talk that way. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it,” before going on to say, “You can’t do that!”

Garcia said she believes the exchange shows the technology’s shortcomings.

“There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that,” she said. “I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.”

The lawsuit claims that “seconds” before Setzer’s death, he exchanged a final set of messages from the bot. “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” the bot said, according to a screenshot included in the complaint.

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Setzer responded.

“Please do, my sweet king,” the bot responded.

Garcia said police first discovered those messages on her son’s phone, which was lying on the floor of the bathroom where he died.”

So we have a bot that is marketed for chatting, a teenager desperate for socialization that forms a relationship that is inherently parasocial because the other side is an LLM that literally can’t have opinions, it just can appear to, and then we have a terrible mismanagement of suicidal ideation.

The AI discouraged ideation, which is good, but only when it was stated in very explicit terms. What’s appalling is that it gave no crisis resources or escalation to moderation (because like most big tech shit they probably refuse to pay for anywhere near appropriate moderation teams). Then what is inexcusable is that when ideation is discussed with slightly coded language “come home” the AI misconstrues it.

This results in a training opportunity for the language model to learn that in this context with previously exhibited ideation “go home” may mean more severe ideation and danger (if character.AI bothered to update that these conversations resulted in a death). The only drawback of getting that data of course is a few dead teenagers. Gotta break a few eggs to get an omelette

This barely begins to touch on the nature of AI chatbots inherently being parasocial relationships, which is bad for mental health. This is of course not limited to AI, being obsessed with a streamer or whatever is similar, but the AI can be much more intense because it will actually engage with you and is always available.

“Mattel’s first AI product won’t be for kids under 13, suggesting that Mattel is aware of the risks of putting chatbots into the hands of younger tots. … Last year, a 14-year-old boy died by suicide after falling in love with a companion on the Google-backed AI platform Character.AI”

Seems like a great idea

I mean this is shockingly easy to find. Literally his last point is “type name in ‘john doe’ in google search engine” and unless the person has a very common name or a strong online presence that alone will pull up tons of these sites

These sites are pretty gross and should probably have some kind of regulation. They ultimately are just compiling public records but they make things shockingly easy and are ultimately used for domestic abuse, stalking, and shit like swatting and doxxing more than any legitimate purpose. As others have said, maybe the fact that this has led to politicians being targeted will mean that regulation finally occurs but given the current climate and the fact that the targeted politicians were on the wrong team maybe not

This is already a serious problem imo

My counseling practice is geared at queer people so I don’t get a ton of sports gambling types generally but I do get some and the amounts they reveal spending is mind boggling to me. Like 20-30% of income

I have a colleague at a more affluent practice in the city I used to work in that is geared towards “men’s issues” and he sees this far more. We’ve discussed it a few times now. He tends to get more of the bro type

It’s silent too, very often hidden from partners. I increasingly hear about it as a source of stress in relationships too: someone comes in one day and everything was going okay but their shit is blown up because it turns out their brofriend is spending 1800 a week on parlays

Deregulation works!

A text file encrypted with aes-256/gpg on a usb drive with a hidden veracrypt volume that also have a decoy encrypted veracrypt volume is essentially uncrackable even by state actors unless you give up the passphrases or use some dumbass passphrases that are easily guessed.

This is the kind of shit where if you have critical evidence on the drive they’ll hold you: there was a police sergeant in Philly who (probably) had child porn on his macbook. They couldn’t prove it becuase his drive was encrypted and he refused to give up the passphrase. He was held for four years on contempt charges and they finally gave up. He wasn’t even using an esoteric approach, he just had macos filevault turned on

The approach I described sidesteps that issue because it creates a decoy encrypted veracrypt for them to find and for you to give up. The hidden veracrypt with your salacious details is a volume that is created within the free space of the outer volume so it essentially undetectable unless you give it up and by design you give up the outer volume that shows innocuous data. Of course, having veracrypt at all invites suspicion of a secret volume but this puts you in the above spot: catching a few years with no real charges for refusing to give yourself up. Much better spot than catching charges for whatever crime (or being executed for political activism/journalism/etc)

Meanwhile this guys journals were immediately found and well documented for his federal complaint. You could just burn them I guess but then you no longer have all your data

There is no allegedly, the dude was a total boomer and literally wrote out instructions on how to dox someone in his notebook which are shown in the federal complaint against him

Literally outlines which sites are free, which ones have free trials, etc

Like you you would think he would just use a text document or bookmarks or something

They absolutely do this. A drug with a lack of efficacy data is a great way to get shortlisted to insurance denials

It’s one of the frustrating things bc people can then easily manipulate the issue. A drug that can be prescribed a doctor and filled by a pharmacy being denied by an insurance company is very easy to write about online. Then it’s a slam piece, “x insurance company denied me my meds”. Basically 0 people will have any interest in the nuance that the medication is bullshit or possibly even harmful. Too bad insurance companies made their bed by being absolutely horrible for decades, I guess.

“Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire”

This is a misleading statement. 86% of Mozilla’s funding is from google. Modern web browsers are a fucked landscape designed to perpetuate googles dominance

In this instance at least the regulatory process is simple though

Say what you mean, mean what you say.

We can maybe have some nuance over lifetime being the lifetime of the consumer buying it vs the lifetime of the company although that has to be carefully worded to prevent situations like this. But it’s probably somewhat fair that if your company completely fails the product is done. This should be clear that the company has to completely fail, not a “apple sells lifetime subscription and decides the product isn’t viable so they kill it” situation or “subsidiary company of google fails and google could easily partially refund the lifetime subscription fees as the parent company” situation

But I would argue it’s not as much about legal complexity here but about regulatory capture. There are really two forces on this issue: businesses looking to keep a lack of regulation and continue utilization of vague misleading language, and consumers that would benefit from regulation against said language.

The businesses are aligned, obviously have vast resources, can influence propaganda on the matter, and can lobby lawmakers directly.

The consumers are fragmented because of the propaganda and a lack of education on the issue, they don’t have strong representation among lawmakers, they don’t have resources, etc. they are scattered unless someone decides this specific issue is annoying enough to get up in arms about and make some kind of action network over, gathering people and support. While it is a serious problem there are just so many serious problems facing consumers and Americans right now, so why focus on this?

And thus, our regulatory bodies yet again fail us

That shouldn’t matter

If we had the most basic of regulatory practices over businesses in this country, especially the tech industry, this practice simply wouldn’t be allowed. Even the bullshit doublespeak “life of the product” version

Lifetime means lifetime. If you can’t honor that don’t offer it. If you go back on it you should be harshly penalized.

Looking at you t mobile, rolling stone magazine, filmora, Dropbox, salesforce, mcafee, etc

This should also include if you remove features from lifetime subscriptions and make them contingent on paid monthly subscriptions (looking at you adobe, Evernote, and probably plex in 3-5 years)

If I am murdered please don’t do this. I do not care if you feel like it will help you process the events

gonna be wild to see what this thing costs with tariffs

My dad used one of these for work when I was a a kid and I used to play with it all the time. He hated technology so he kept using it far beyond its reasonable lifespan. I remember I was in college and he was still using it, so it was like 2006 at that point?

Eventually the something got messed up somehow (image sensor?) and every picture was written to the disk incorrectly in a way that the right half would have fucked up color data. He finally got a normal point and shoot that took significantly higher quality images and could now store more than like 20 images without having to drag around 20 delicate floppy disks through sites filled with things very hostile to floppy disks

I was considering purchase a Japanese switch 2 because my Japanese is decent enough for most gaming but then I saw it was region locked pretty hard so I can’t use any of my us e shop purchases. Plus fuck Nintendo, even without the tariffs the price on this thing is a bit much and their behavior is garbage

If I ever do get one it’ll be because someone broke theirs and I got it cheap as fuck and fixed it. That’s how I got my switch, had a busted battery management IC and a fucked usb C port. I think in total I paid like $90 for it with parts. It would also help if the console was exploited for piracy

The long term play is regulation but good luck with that

Why do you think the tech oligarchs are banding together to dismantle the government? They see the future you describe and recognize that we are at a key juncture to get there. Once the groundwork is laid they can go back to focusing on fighting each other for total dominance of the market

But what’s the net benefit if they overall lose a ton of market share? Sales of, absolute best scenario, 10 million dollars? That’s a lot of money but it’s also really unlikely they’d get that level of sales and is it worth having a shareholders meeting in 1 year where they have to address questions about market share continuing to slide noticeably? Apparently I guess

It seems like it would mainly be a good deal for oem pc manufacturers. If I was lenovo or whoever I’d be jazzed about it, let microsoft take all the negativity and sell more thinkpads

This makes sense, the tinfoil hat shit is one thing but it’s much easier to just explain it as tpm and secure boot will enable more data collection, which is probably a stronger revenue stream than keeping windows on 75% of pcs vs 72%

Of course some nerd will probably figure out ways to defeat it all eventually but microsoft is probably (correctly) banking on your grandma not knowing how to install extensions and whatever 3rd party shit that will require

The sad thing is at one point I would have said that’s a foolish way thing to bank on and eventually those computer illiterate folk will die out but it appears that that younger gen z and below have many people that are slightly more advanced than boomers in tech knowledge. They know how to use their phones but have no clue how to do anything interesting with them and have barely any idea how to use a pc.

I worked in a school for a bit a few years ago and the amount of kids that didn’t know about something as basic as Adblock was shocking, let alone how to navigate the file system. Modern phones as a primary computing device really fucked that generation

It’s crazy that microsoft, a company that once had 90+ market share of the OS market and is now down in the low 70% range and falling, would rather force this shit and potentially lose people to ipads than simply just make an upgrade path for older hardware (that isn’t even that old)

What could possibly motivate this? They have to see the folly in such a decision with all their market research and shit. Do they really have the hubris to think that people will just go out and buy new hardware en masse because they said to so they could check emails, go on social media, and do streaming shit? Tinfoil hat time: were they influenced by a three letter agency or something to include the need for secure boot and tpm? Is there an exploit or backdoor in these?

Chinese cctv systems with AI are dangerous because they let the government watch their citizens for control and repression

Not like domestic drones, traffic cameras used for surveillance, DHS CCTV networks, the sea of cameras that every citizen owns that can be subpoenaed, and the WAMI program with automation software for tracking that has been deployed since 2013. Those are tools of freedom to keep Americans safe