Beautiful comment. Thanks for sharing. "Homo homini lupus" comes to mind, used by Locke in De Cive ("on the citizen") [1]. Cive, root Civis, is where the word civilization comes from.
They're a government contractor specializing in identity and a monopoly who loves not being regulated. They're really a straw donor - this is the government donating money to lobby itself. All of this is money leaving the government proper and being put through barely two degrees of indirection to be sent both to politicians whose job is to direct the government, and to the media to misdirect the public.
This (an end to general purpose computing) isn't anything that people can prevent through civil channels. It will happen with or without public approval. You will have as much control over it as you had over the decision to go to war with Iran. It will never be on any ballot. People who help will get rich, people who don't, won't. Eventually, people who help will barely be middle class, and people who don't, won't. Their kids will own your kids.
AI companies are also donating tens of millions to these PACs and others that are promoting age verification laws, it lets them sell AI content rating systems using their models.
This doesn’t make sense, how do these fake accounts bring revenue ? I thought the end goal is to improve conversion rate by removing the “bots” and this would therefore lead to higher ad spend and more money to Facebook direct
I work in marketing and not nearly as much effort as you think goes into removing bots. They go after the lowest hanging fruit, the most obvious bots like scrapers and crawlers but most bots impersonating real people easily make it through. Traffic is traffic.
I’m curious why Meta would benefit. Meta seems wholly unnecessary, the verification can be done at the OS level, completely in the hands of Apple/Alphabet and maybe Microsoft.
If anything, Meta’s utility would seem to shrink if the OS handles proof of being a real person.
Regulatory capture through a higher barrier to entry. Any social media platform that wants to compete with Meta's portfolio will now also need to have an age-verification system in place (which is guaranteed to introduce higher costs). Meta can likely afford to eat the costs here as a tradeoff for the higher impact on smaller players.
It also gives them more information on users as a bonus. Further, verification with a real ID is also a quite effective barrier against excessive bots.
Look beyond the CA law, states have already passed laws that put the liability on app and website developers to ensure users aren't kids, there's no passing the buck to Apple or Google.
Meta's entire business model lives on ad deals that are not on the frontend. They are in the data business and this campaign is to get access to more data without an option to opt out. Who takes the data doesn't really matter.
1. It deflects any obligation that would have landed on Meta itself to do age verification (which is what the regulators have long asked for).
2. It gives Instagram/Facebook/Messenger the ability to deliver the right ads to the right audience. It's free targeting data.
Tangentially related: anyone has suggestions on an "automated" way to "print" pages with a typewriter? If you want to have papers that "look" as typed with a typewriter, as opposed to printed with laser printers and such.
If you also want a thing to do typewriting on, later-model word processors (e.g., Smith Corona PWP series) tend to have a feature that auto-types text entered and edited earlier. It'll have the imprinting insofar as the type impacts the paper, but it's not going to have the off-center / over-inked / patchy manual typewriter look. For that you may just want to find a font face that replicates it.
Not the original commenter, but you may have noticed a wee kerfluffle between a large nation-state's "Secretary of War" and a frontier model provider over whether the model's licensing would permit autonomous lethal weapon systems operated by said - and I cannot emphasize the middle word enough - large _language_ model.
So, let's try to guess: is Tesla going to be dominating robots and autonomous driving, and worth $10T, or at some point this castle of cards will fall to the ground?
1. Tesla does not dominate robots or autonomous driving, it fades away
2. Tesla’s stock price exceeds $10T after it is shoe-horned into being a part of SpaceXAIBoringTesla
Musk is almost certainly too big to fail at this point. The cult of personality and SpaceX give him a lot of room for financial engineering, he doesn’t need Tesla.
if democrats win midterms and then 2028 elections, they will be able to come back in full force and retaliate at least against the most egregious of Trump supporters. Will Musk survive in that scenario?
I loved this game so much. There was a "deluxe" version with small improvements.
I would love to play a modern version of this. Probably true for other strategy classics like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, Colonization.
Edit: ha, I remember that I used a really good tactic of playing with competitors' stocks, gaining majority, siphoning tons of money from them, and then selling the stocks. More profitable than running actual railroads.
Civilization 4 (currently on sale for $6 at gog) includes a colonization mode. I don't like it as much as the original but that's probably my nostalgia bias
I have been hooked on Transport Fever for a while now. My only gripe with it is that civilian vehicles will take roads intended for cargo/public transport traffic only. So the most profitable way is to disconnect entire cities by road and then use rail or road with disjunct depots to connect cargo to cities. This way you can force civilians to use public transport.
Using "civilian" to mean "a civilian who's not a cop" was already bad enough, but using it to differentiate private cars from trucks and buses? Public transport is practically the quintessential example of civilian infrastructure, you're really going too far now.
I think Transport Fever is of a slightly but significantly different genre.
Railroad Tycoon is a strategy game with competition whereas Transport Fever is pretty much a building and optimization sandbox. Even Transport Tycoon falls more in the latter category, IMO, despite superficially having competition even in single player. (I haven't played OpenTTD in a long time so I don't know if the AIs are nowadays competent enough to make the competition interesting.)
In RRT, with cut-throat competition enabled your company can even be opportunistically bought by the competition if you aren't careful. You can also be driven out of cities by rate wars. Some of the other strategy aspects feel perhaps a bit artificial -- you can't cross the other companies' track, for example, so you can effectively cordon off areas from competition. Nevertheless, those competitive strategy aspects add a significant edge to the game.
I've also played a lot of Transport Fever. The competitive aspect, even if against the old and cheating AI, is probably one of the reasons I still end up returning to the old Railroad Tycoon now and then, though.
Some of the technical limitations of the original are somewhat frustrating, though, so I find the reverse engineering effort really interesting.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_homini_lupus
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Cive
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