This technology is great! Or it is crap! Until we get to try it out, it is both. Though I'd say the mislabelled heading plus all the buzz words imply at least a partial wave function collapse skewing the probability greatly towards the latter.

Next step is to bring an El Salvador care package. I don't know much about that, so I asked Gemini what items would be good to bring with you to a prison in El Salvador.

First of all, "Navigating the prison system in any country can be complex, and El Salvador has its own specific regulations and conditions. It's crucial to understand that prison conditions in El Salvador are reported to be harsh, with severe overcrowding, limited access to basic necessities, and a strict regime. Recent reports from human rights organizations highlight concerns about the treatment of prisoners."

Stuff to bring: Basic toiletries, Clothing, Bedding, Identification documents, Important phone numbers and addresses, Legal documents, Reading material, Writing materials, Small amount of money, Photos of family. Stuff to avoid: Weapons of any kind, Drugs or alcohol, Large amounts of money or valuable jewelry, Electronics, Clothing in restricted colors or styles (e.g., black clothing, gang-related symbols), Canned food or certain types of food that might be prohibited.

I'd think one should also ensure ones spouse has access to all accounts, business relationships, bills, etc - so (s)he can keep the family going for a year or two if needed. Or making arrangements with a child care facility if you are a single parent.

Market-manipulate American Gullibles Again (on a weekly basis). It's really cute seeing various "experts" try to explain why does the US regime do things, and what is the latest thinking of the stable genius - when the simplest explanation of all is staring them in the face.

I've never had a Facebook account, people keep nagging me about it because it's a hassle for them to contact me in other channels, but I refuse. If people left their ecosystem, their rotten empire would collapse.

Full disclosure: the only reason I am effectively able to do this, is my wife has a facebook account, so she can monitor all the important information related to kids activities etc. But if I were a single parent, I would constantly be nagging every organization I am somehow forced to be involved with which uses only Facebook as a communication channel, about the implications of that choice.

At least the EU is trying to regulate some of this BS.

F***book is sitting on a gold mine here, an AI that can cut through the BS and appears to "understand" some fundamental truths about the world. Unfortunately, for them - and the world - they choose to neuter it by feeding it lies. (Disclaimer: yes, I know this has nothing to do with GAI, I just cannot resist the opportunitiy to be sarcastic about this kiss-the-ring-of-Dear-Leader move being disguised as making their AI more balanced, which I guess they mean being balanced in the Fox News sense)

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm headed over to the other /. story to comment about how F***book is using their "AI" to also ruin the movie theater experience by encouraging people to use their phones - plus making some personal notes that I can never again travel to the US because I'd probably be stopped at the border and sent to El Salvador due to this comment, which is fine as currently I wouldn't go there if you paid me money to do it.

I see a lot of comments about opt-in features being no problem/risk. Which maybe works fine at home in the short term? But at work your employer may be choosing to opt-in on your behalf. Now you could say that's not your business, but it _does_ change something about the workplace dynamic, being constantly under surveillance. Next time you send an email to your leader, they can backtrack to the minutes leading up to the sending, and see all the edits you made. So people will be changing their behavior, which means never typing anything until they are sure that is what they will be typing. Also you will not be getting those short mental breaks as you sporadically check the news for a couple a minutes. Maybe do some artificial tasks inbetween to pretend you are a super well behaved employee, like appearing to spend a lot of time on notes about why the leadership is so great, and the weekly 5 things I did this week report. And productivity will ... drop! So it's a loss all around.

BTW, today's opt-in is tomorrow's ... yeah, some of you get it.

Yes, there is a solid dose of black humor here, mixed with a little bit of it's funny because it's somewhat true; not as written, but in related contexts. And it does something for one's attitude towards the US. Some 15-20 years ago for a period I had work-related travel to the US on a monthly basis; never thought much about it. Now? Not in a million years would I want to travel to the US. Partly because how the US is currently treating the world - and even its allies - has just made me lost my appetite. Also partly because how you read about how people are treated at the border; you have to give access to your phone and what not - an invasion of privacy - and I realize I might get in trouble because I wrote a few too many sarcastic posts about orange monkey, probably being tagged in some database just for exercising basic democratic rights (nothing worse than the joke I made above) - and I would not at all feel confident about not being stopped/harassed/worse at the border for being too anti-fascist.

My country (Norway) also got slapped with a 10% tariff; we're bending over and taking it like a champion, not retaliating in any way, at least until we see where the wind blows with the EU (our biggest market) and whether to tag along with something with them. The US is our 3rd biggest export market I believe, so it's not all sunshine for us either.

We have a couple cars we'll need to replace within the next few years. It's not going to be a Tesla.

What? The US should have the oldest and bestestest citizens! I foresee an executive order which requires foreigners travelling to the US to either take a radioactive pill shaving some time off their expected lifespan, or be denied entry. Higher Bq level pill for people from countries with lower mortality. Exceptions made for people who can document they only ever eat at US junk food franchises. Illegal immigrants and people who criticized fascism on social media always have to take the pill, even though they are denied entry. The pill comes with a complimentary free ticket to El Salvador.

Our Macbook Airs do a bit shift throughout the family. As the power user I use the latest one, which is an M1. As my wife started getting problems with her Chromebook, I set up my previous Air with Linux Mint (2015 model I think) after replacing the battery, and she's quite happy using it as her main laptop. At some point it made sense for my then 8 or 9 year old son to have a laptop, so I dusted off my even older 2011 model Air and did the same thing, and it's a great solution for simple web surfing and various tasks, especially if I want him to be able to use a computer without playing games (so that can be a plus). At some point I guess I'll be buying an M5 or something, and the laptops will cycle throughout the family once again so my younger son will get his first laptop.

Seriously do not want to replace my perfectly functioning stationary PC Windows 10 setup which runs everything I need it to do, including most games with its GTX 1070 card. So that will end up as a Linux reinstall. It really annoys me that I have various Steam games and audio processing software that are Windows only, which are the _only_ things I would need Windows for - and which I cannot run even with Wine workarounds etc. I don't really have a solution for that. I guess at some point I will be buying some simple Win 11 setup to handle those, but I will do so while gnashing my teeth and hating Microsoft every single step, doing my utmost to send as little money in their direction as humanly possible.

Archiving this as People Associated With White House Menace Say Words. Gonna need another file cabinet soon, because there are currently too many such people saying too many words. Those of us who were laughing some years back when DJ spent all his time playing golf and didn't bother with governing, are choking hard on the bleak echoes of that laughter.

Have to question some life choices, including taking higher education in natural science and mathematics. In a world in which truth, honesty, integrity and logic are about to no longer matter, I ought to have studied psychology and how to become a sociopath, plus history in order to learn a blueprint for building a Reich and positioning yourself to become one of the upper echelons. Though ... Space Menace proves again and again that you can be all those things at the same time.

It's not the EU's fault that some US companies decide the world should be their playground and they should be the perpetual bullies. The hubries and nerve of those companies that they are above national or regional politics or taxation is just unbelievable. And after a failed casino owner and his far right wing sidekick are incorporating their country, you get the same from US Inc who suddently think they should own Greenland, Panama and what not, and the rest of the world should act as if their country is the sun around which the rest of us orbit. Kudos to the EU for being the responsible adult. They're not perfect and the EU got a couple rotten apples (in particular that one EU country which keeps repeatedly running earrands for a certain large non-EU power and blocks effective EU action again and again), but compared to the current US Inc flustercluck ... it's pretty darn good.

All those non-regulation lovers out there ... think about your love of no regulation the next time your kid does not get hit by a car because there was (a) a speed limit, (b) rules against driving drunk, and (c) a system to enforce those rules. And if thinking about a zero-taxation world makes your blood go pumping in an arousing way, think about that the next time you drive on a road without being charged as much as a single cent for that privilege - who or what paid for that road.

Much of the time I feel I am like most men, some times I wish I were more like most men, and some times I'm happy I am not like most men. Marrying AIs would have fallen in the latter category, if this research had any bearing on what I would have considered to be the qualities and properties of "most men".

On a related note, according to a recent Norwegian survey, 10 in 10 kids responded they want more screen time on saturday mornings. This may indicate Norwegian parents are stricter with screen time than other nationalities. I did this research just now by asking my two kids. Let me know if you want to sponsor another result; I can probably bring it to 0 in 10 by organizing a Friday+Saturday family Peppa Pig marathon.

Got to think about the AI thing though, now that the idea has stuck about having an AI wife/partner ... if you put the simulator into realistic mode, will (s)he start wanting AI kids? Do you role play the whole thing as if it were real life? Stay at home when you AI kids are sick, respond to messages from AI kindergarten when you are at work, use some Pokemon Go like app to drive your kid to "soccer training" and watch them play with their "team" in the app? If your AI kid gets into a fight with another AI kid, do you need to step in and figure out things with their AI school and their AI and/or real parent? Do you send your AI kids to the basic level AI public school, or do you get private school as part of the premium super plus subscription? Do you get your family to watch your AI kids when you want to go on a weekend trip alone with your AI wife to spend some quality time? Are your AI kids gonna come visit you when you're old an in a retirement home, your memory is slipping, and someone pulls the plug on your AI subscription? Do your AI kids die when the subscription is deactivated?

On a related note and in the news, supposedly you can now play The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 again.

I use a lot of Excel/Word/Powerpoint documents at work. Somehow Clippy has appeared during the last weeks or months. It's just too frequent that I am about to do some fully automated routine task that I want to just churn through without applying higher executive functions, and Microsoft throws a small pop-up "did you know" window at me, which I have to read and hit "skip", "I get it", or something like that. And it has _never_ been a pop-up promoting functionality which I find useful or interesting. It's the same for Outlook, OneNote, Edge.

This add to the general annoyance of 365 always being a cloud thing. I have a bunch of files I want to work with locally, that I need to frequently open and close. This used to be a quick process. But nowadays? Office needs to have a _long_ think before opening a document. Also, Excel has the annoying behavior that if you have minimized workbooks and you open another .xls file, then for some retarded reason all open workbooks pop back up.

There is not much I can do about my employer's choice of IT ecosystem, and it's a sort of "go with the flow rather than fight it" kind of thing (though Outlook's task management system has now detoriated to the point I went deep into emacs, org-mode and git instead). And what is the employer going to do? They are already stuck in the 365 ecosystem, all the infrastructure is there, it's what all employees know and use - I imagine they will just have to eat the price hike. Luckily, the "but it's now got lots of extra AI" gives them a way to somehow embrace a collective lie to justify this expense, that "AI" is becoming ever more important, and we are now an AI enabled organization, proofing the future, or whatever.

I have to live with the M$ abuse at work, but at least I'll mostly be rid of the company at home before the end of the year, when my old but still going strong stationary Windows 10 PC is no longer supported, for silly TPM chip reasons. I expect I will be thinking fondly of M$ whenever I cannot play a Windows-only Steam game, or I cannot use Windows-only software for making music.

On one side of the spectrum, you have absolute government control over social media, in which the existing regime uses an iron fist to control the narrative, identify and pacify dissenters, etc. If you don't like perpetual dictatorships, you don't want this model.

On the other side, absolute freedom, something noone can mess with, and it's pure chaos. This is a world in which someone can post child pornography without consequence as noone can track their identity. And it's a world in which we humans - who did not evolve to cope with such societal mechanisms - start reinforcing false and fantastic beliefs, get even further stuck in our echo chambers, and get an outlet for our darker sides which other people will pile on - leading to a race to the bottom in a downward spiral and some sort of moral decline and raise of the idiocracy. And - as democracies need such things as truth and decency to effectively work - we probably descend into a dictatorship, which brings us back to a total control model.

You need something inbetween! Something which balances the need for free speech and individual freedom, with the impact on a functioning and desirable type of society as a whole.

All the "no government" folks should stop driving on the public roads which are financed partly by my taxes. If your dog dies because a car was speeding and the driver intoxicated, you should embrace that death as part of the total lack of speed limits and the driver's right to shoot heroine into their eyeballs. If someone steals your stuff, you should be happy that there is no tax funded police coming in to try to help sort things out. If your house is on fire, you start making calls to private fire suppression service companies, checking if one is available and negotiating prices (be aware that you are in a pretty poor bargaining position). Yes ... that is the type of world people promote every time they echo a "no government", "no regulation" and "complete individual freedom" type of message.

Look up the Norwegian county Finnmark (mentioned in the post as the area where jamming routinely occurs) on Google Maps. To the east of that county you find a region with city names with cyrillic letters. That's right, it's Russia. They do not need to place jammers in international waters or on Norwegian soil. And I feel confident in saying that neither Norway, nor the US, nor anyone else will be going into Russia to destroy those jammers.