That’s an awesome one! Great backstory for the villain guy.

Stronghold was another good one - it had a synth that was indistinguishable from the real xenomorphs that could go into the areas where they were farming the things. Not as dark as Labyrinth though.

Where I was going was: effects can be different even if all choices and results are unethical. If one cares about the possible impacts of ones actions, consideration beyond “well it’s all unethical, so whatever” could be warranted.

are all unethical choices equal? Surely there are better and worse things?

It does smack of hypocrisy but I’ve been feeling more it’s a paradox of tolerance thing. Which itself a sort of hypocrisy now that I’m thinking about it. Huh.

If I don’t show you a video because I don’t think you’d enjoy it, that’s different from not showing it to you because I don’t want you to see it.

I wouldn’t disagree those are different reasons for not wanting to show a video but both are curations based on biases.

I guess I just have a more neutral connotation for bias than “biased against you for others’ own interests” and so I didn’t find bias to be a useful term here to distinguish the reasons behind curation choices.

Nothing really in disagreement here, just fiddling with common usage.

How is bias not inherent to curation? Preference for one thing over another is bias. Curation is literally showing you things it thinks you’re biased to like. These groups aren’t revealing their secret sauce for curation algorithms so we’d never know anyway.

nose hair trimmer attachment works well around the ears I’ve found (but it’s loud!)

cold cuts? Have you seen the price of a bag of chips? Ridiculous. I don’t need to spend 5 bucks to hate myself later after I’ve eaten too many.

$30 to buy an old mechanical pencil on ebay you remember having in highschool? No problemo.

does range come into play here?

I don’t think you can reply to a text message using a third party watch on iOS but you can with your Apple watch. I’ve seen that cited as an exclusive API.

Something is stopping another messaging app to have sms fallback and be the default messaging app on iOS. It’s iOS.

your self driving car will just drive itself back to the lot when your payment is late

I don’t disagree with anything you say. I think it’s worth mentioning that the cost of enforcement directly informs the cost of a lease/rental situation. The cheaper they can enforce the contract, the less they can theoretically charge. If they had to get a court order to lock your phone or repo your car, they’d make it more expensive or be much more selective about who they lease/rent to. This maybe enables more people to have phones or get cars?

I swear I’m not rooting for team “aggressive manipulative business behavior widens opportunities for the less well off”. Gross. Kind of how I hear about globalization of manufacturing stuff - “they get paid pennies!” “yeah, but that’s more than before the factory came? look what they can buy now” I know that’s a overly broad generalization but you see those arguments.

The meta bit is that specifically here, it’s sort of a derail of the main topic. Some downvotes I’m sure are for that. As for why this essay might generally attract downvotes? I’ll follow your locomotive off the track.

I mean, 1. It’s a frickin’ essay. 2. Comes off as a little cold and sorta “I know better than you do”, and 3. seems to completely miss the point of what I interpret as most folks dislike of AI in the current incarnations we are seeing (which isn’t a real sci-fi type general AI that gets society to the end point of your essay). I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone worrying about “what will I do to find purpose in a fully-automated-gay-space-luxury-communism?” (overemphasis mine of course). It’s now and the next so many years, not some far off future that (I interpret) folks seem to be worrying about. It’s income stability now, careers to go into now, disinformation now, degradation of the internet and media now. I think the zeitgeist here is that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. I don’t think anyone on Lemmy really has high hopes for major players in current economic systems to use AI-as-it-exists-now to make anything better of the world in aggregate. It ain’t the tools, it’s those who wield them.

What about the equivalent of foveated rendering? They’re only simulating the bits conscious observers can see, the rest is …not simulated to the same level? I guess you’re kind of going there with your model within a model thing. If we are the point of the simulation, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to simulate much beyond the planet besides what little astronomers can work with? Gonna crash this thing with enough players!

There’s a weird SF story that has blood cell sized intelligences and reality starts to break because there are so many observers on such a small scale that reality can’t change without being observed and then they all “poof” into another dimension or something and humans are left alone again. Anyway, the number of players crashing the simulation made me think of it. Blood Music by Greg Bear.

hypothetically cool, and very hypothetically legal

that’s a no on the cruciform for me, dawg. Yeesh. I’ll take everything else from there though, Poulsen, hawking drive, farcasters (maybe without the yoke of the AI techno core though), etc.

Is that not a compressed stream though? Genuinely asking. A 4k blu ray rip and a 4k stream from a service (or whatever it saves for offline viewing on an app) a pretty different. I think things are getting conflated with capturing live 4k television and capturing a 4k blu ray as it plays, which both might be using an HDMI cable.

How about some consent and payment for my info? Swingy peephole cover thing over the camera. Offer a discount if the machine can take a picture of you. Oh that’s right, it’s only worth something when you amass a ton of the data. 0.004 cents off isn’t that appealing is it?

It’s not just what sells, but who buys what. “Demographic X buys this one product more than others so how can we advertise this product to them where they will see it?” Growth is their “valid” reason, you know, like malignant cancer cells.