There is a very interesting dynamic occurring, where things that didn’t used to be called AI have been rebranded as such, largely so companies can claim they’re “using AI” to make shareholders happy.

I think it behooves all of us to stop referring to things blankety as AI and specify specific technologies and companies as the problem.

There is a difference between opting out of a default feature and having the option to install a plugin.

I can go replace the horn in a car with an air raid siren, but that’s very different than every car coming with an air raid siren you have to turn off.

Maybe some of the obviousness is a sort of camouflage in that if it looks like a fishing scheme, people at YouTube won’t look any deeper. I think the actual goal of the bots is to manipulate the algorithm. Like, most of the time, the obvious bots just get ignored, especially on videos from bigger creators, no reason to put effort in to making them believable.

Like, maybe they comment on video A to show “engagement” with that content, then they go and comment on video B. Fool the algorithm into associating people who engage with video A as the same kind of audience who would engage with Video B. Thus getting the algorithm to recommend video B more often to viewers of Video A. For something like that you wouldn’t need the bots to look real to other commenters, and having them seem like innocuous fishing scam bots might reduce the scrutiny on their activity.

I could see a lot of different reasons to do that. Could be as simple as some shady “Viral marketing consultancies” trying to boost a client’s channel in the algorithm. Could also be something more comprehensive and nefarious, like trying to manipulate social discourse by steering whole demographics towards certain topics or even away from specific topics. I do wonder how much the algorithm could be nudged by an organized bot comment spam ring.

I don’t think you sound paranoid at all, at least not compared to me. Bots are everywhere on social sights and there is a well documented history of different groups using various tactics and strategies to hide the bots or distract from what the bots are doing.

I think there is a pretty big difference between an optional plugin and it being built in by default.

Often times reviewers will get cards before release day without going through the manufacturer, as cards will ship to wear-houses and stores in preparation for launch day, and reviewers can get access to buy the cards early through contacts at those places.

One of the things nvidia did this time was they blocked reviewer’s access to drivers until release day, despite them having the cards through third parties.

Oh yah, for sure 90% of people shouldn’t be wasting the money on Nvidia cards at this point. There are very few situations where they make sense.

Intel and AMD both have way better price to performance cards.

To some extent it comes down to nvidia’s software. Like, some people like their upscaling, and I’ve heard from streamers that they need them for NVENC.

On the other hand, their Linux drivers are an pain and they’ve been less than cooperative on that front in the past.

Until Microsoft decides that enterprise customers should be using it and enable it by default with an update.

That seems like a fairly credible threat.

Realistically, most of the users are on smartphones, so, they could do that without seriously hurting their user base, and they’re also not a for profit company obsessed with maximizing the growth of their user base

issues around these kinds of legal liability situations are why so many companies hung on to systems like fax machines for so long. Or why so many banks still run on cobol.

If a company’s machine does something illegal, the company is liable for allowing the machine to be set up in a way that allowed it to happen.

“Your honor, I didn’t know the computer would do that” is not a viable legal defense.

The issue is that there are a lot of situations where a file can not legally be copied, saved or shared, and a screen shot by these systems would be considered that. It’s not that the files would be impossible to save or copy as is, but it’s not legal to, and having a system that might do it automatically without human input is a massive legal liability.

Even if companies in such a situation turn off recall on a system, there is no guarantee that microsoft won’t, at some point, push an update that activates recall on systems that had previously opted out of using it, or even reinstall it on systems that had physically removed the program from their system. Such as was done with programs like edge and Cortana.

It’s so crazy they’re still trying to push this.

Like, even if the screenshots are stored locally, even if they’re encrypted, even if they get deleted after being scanned by the model, even if it’s turned off by default. Even if there is a DRM feature that supposed to keep it away from sensitive information. There will always be edge cases and exploits.

Any company that is handling sensitive information that they can’t legally save and/or share won’t be able to use windows if this is even an option to have on. Like, their business OS monopoly is going to get knee capped by this. To what end? To get training data for agents? For better advertising targeting? To force people to buy new computers, and thus new licenses, by obsoleting and ending support for older ones? It just doesn’t even make cold corporate sense.

Judging by the fact these are launching on long march 20s. It’s probably not going beyond LEO, so it doesn’t need proper deep space hardening like the RAD750 or the like.

It’s probably closer to off the shelf parts like what’s used on the ISS.

That’s still not very much compared to most data centers. Like, 7000 terabytes is a lot of storage for one person, but it barely even registers compared to most modern data centers.

Also, 2800 desktops networked together isn’t really a super computer or a data center.

such a network is interesting as a scientific tool for gathering and processing data, certainly, but not a data-center and not a super computer.

These are likely only using a few kilowatts, calling them data centers or super computers is an absurd hyperbole.

it seems a bit disingenuous to call these “data centers in space” or “super computers”.

30 terabytes of storage across 12 satellites? So 2.5 TB each and 744 tops (which is like, a modern mid range graphics card for a PC, the RX 9070 XT does 1557 tops for reference). Like that just sounds like they’re launching a powerful PC in to orbit. Like, that’s a lot of power for a satellite, for comparison the curiosity rover is using the same kind of CPU as a 2000 era imac G3, but it’s not a data center.

The idea of doing more processing of the data on the satellite rather than processing it on the ground is interesting and neat, but representing these as anything more than that is… weird.

it is the nature of personalist authoritarian regimes. Anything that presents them with information or outcomes that don’t serve the leaders goals gets turned in to an enemy, even if it’s the dumbest strategic choice possible.

They have an incredibly favorable Supreme Court, and rather than working with it to consolidate power, they are throwing rocks at it for not letting them do what ever they want.

It’s a pattern across a lot of dysfunctional organizations, when a leader doesn’t accept “not possible” for an answer. Doesn’t care about the dissent presented by subordinates and dismisses it as disloyalty. If you don’t want to get fired, you just go along with the boss and never present him with the reality.

The real messes occur when this kind of behavior scales. When the subordinates of the leader start doing the same to their own subordinates. When people start lying to their superiors about what is happening because they know the boss doesn’t want bad news or to be told their idea didn’t work. You get a game of telephone where information is distorted as it moves up the chain.

I think cases like this are a great look at the internal thought process of trumps team. Like, this isn’t them developing a masterful plan and executing on it. This is the first fucking idea that someone in the room proposed after a few drinks.

Like, they don’t understand the laws they’re bumping in to, or even if someone understands it, they’re pretending they don’t so they can tell the boss that they have a plan to make the thing happen. It’s trumps method of running an organization failing because the incentive structure is to tell the boss you can get him what he wants, even if what he wants isn’t possible. So they keep wasting their time and resources chasing stupid plans.

The thing is, I don’t think valve wants to become a desktop OS provider. Becoming the provider and maintainer of an OS for hundreds of millions of users is so far beyond their scope as a company. They’ve got a third the employees of Canonical and a fiftieth the employees of RedHat, the companies behind Ubuntu and Fedora. Maintaining a limited scope console/handheld OS that runs on a handful of hardware set ups is one thing, but supporting a fully fledged daily driver desktop OS meant to operate on any system is something else entirely.

Right now, most of their users are on windows, which makes them nervous because Microsoft is a known monopolist and has been slowly creeping deeper in to the PC games space. That’s why Valve has put so much effort in to software to support compatibility on Linux, so there is a viable alternative if Microsoft try’s to push them out. I think the steam deck and steamOS were a means to that end, create a business reason to develop and support those tools, not a first step towards becoming an operating system developer.

A better route forward for them would be to use their reach and public trust to help people make the switch to other extant distros. For example an all in one utility on the steam store that helps people select the right distro for their use case and set it up, have a hardware scan and a little quiz to choose a distro, a hard drive partitioning tool to set up dual boot, a tool to write the ISO to a USB drive (or maybe even just set up a bootable on the disk using the partitioner IDK), and migrate important files over using their cloud system.

If the issue is that people trust stuff with the valve branding on it, but are not willing to try Linux on their own, then Steam acting as a guide is much more practical than Valve taking on all the work needed to maintain a proper distro.