The general logic has been that it’s really easy for people to say they want to marry a U.S. citizen, get approved to emigrate, and then change their mind after (the common term for this is visa fraud). So the government grants a series of visas for increasing lengths as you move through that process and prove that it is a bona-fide relationship.

A K1 visa is the last step before getting married, and stipulates that you get married within a short time after entering the country, after which you have to remain married for several years, prove you’re doing things normal married couples do (like live together), and then you can get your permanent residency.

So, in short, it’s not as clear cut as a one-time yes/no decision. You very much live within a prescribed framework for several years until the government is satisfied that your relationship is real.

(Source: personal experience)

“AI doesn’t replace people, but it’s silly to pretend it doesn’t replace people”, says man planning to use AI to replace people.

The immediate example of something where good code DOES stand out to me is (one of my favorite games of all time) Factorio. There are lots of examples where I have been playing over the years and been amazed at the ability of the game engine to handle computationally complex operations at a really large scale. Coupled with a bunch of dev blogs explaining the little optimizations, its given me a ton of respect for Factorio as a piece of software.

That said, I am not sure it strictly invalidates your point. That’s the only example I can come up with, and it requires knowledge of the game’s design via those devblogs which the average user of a messaging app or something won’t have.

I think there’s probably a market for high performance consumer code, but the vast majority of what makes it to end users will just be good enough.

Autoland in plane requires a set of expensive, complex, and highly fine-tuned equipment to be installed on every runway in the world that enables it (which as a proportion is statistically not a majority of them).

And as to specificity, this system does exactly one thing - land a specific model of plane on a specific runway equipped with instrumentation configured a specific way.

The point being: it isn’t a magic wand. Any serious conversation of AI in these types of life or death situations has to recognize that without the corresponding investment in infrastructure and specificity of purpose, things like this blog post are essentially just science fiction. The fact that previous generations of technology considered autoland and algorithmic trading to be magic doesn’t really change anything about that.

In the case of the UK, some of the rituals (such as the one you’re referring to with the prime minister) are based on longstanding traditions, because humans are weird and we like those sorts of things, but the requirement to do that stems from the constitution, not from the King deciding if he likes the PM or not.

For example, if a user does not actively change the save location, at least for office apps, the default behavior is to save to onedrive.

The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.

The first red flag should have been Microsoft trying to push the weird metro/UWP interface that it had with news, the store, movies and a tv guide, and more versus a library of games, and then of course all of the bad PR around Kinect and the DRM. It didn’t have backwards compatibility at launch and most of the games were things that were already out on 360, but for some reason we needed to re-buy.

The game experience never improved and the home entertainment thing never materialized, so you were just left with something that did exactly what the 360 did and duplicated your existing DVR/cable box.

The X/S wasn’t better. First you had to fight scalpers to get one, and then my first experience with it was browsing the store and seeing that I had to pick between buying the Xbox one version of games or the X/S version. The entire thing was built around some new revolutionary concept of streaming cloud games, which didn’t work. Games are FPS capped and if you install them locally they require 15 of the 45 minutes you have to game to download updates that should happen while the thing sleeps. It got slightly better over time, but juxtaposed with my pc and steam it was such an unpolished experience.

What it really comes down to for me is that it’s a gaming console that tries to do a bunch of stuff I don’t care about and fails at the one thing I do care about it doing (playing games). There’s a larger commentary here about Microsoft, but this isn’t unique to them. I should have been a lifelong console buyer; instead I will probably not buy another one because for the past two generations the experience has been awful, and whatever they come out with next is going to be packed with a bunch of streaming junk and AI and other stuff I don’t want, and will not do the thing I do want in any way that competes with the old faithful PC and steam.

That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.

This battle for online privacy and control is just that, a battle, and you are correct that it is not a fair fight. But engaging and pushing back, through advocacy, speaking out, and acts of noncompliance does three things:

First, it slows the progress of these measures and thus limits the amount of control over our lives we give up, hopefully until some more politically friendly people come to power.

Second, it provides a barometer (via its effectiveness) for assessing the state of that fight, and how dire it is becoming.

Finally, people voicing their concerns about these laws gives information that helps inform more powerful and potentially altruistic advocates with more resources (such as the EFF) in how those resources should be allocated.

Maybe those aren’t good reasons for you, and that’s okay. Lots of people just want to browse twitter and see sports scores and they don’t really care if they have to show ID to do that. For anybody else reading this though, there are lots of reasons why your involvement and engagement in this issue should not stop with “that’s just how the world works”.

We spend so much time training people that if you hit update, it’s going to suck: you’re going to suddenly get ads in your favorite app, or some new feature is going to get paywalled, or the UI is going to completely change with no warning. It seems counterproductive to accept that our industry does this stuff and then publish an open letter finger-wagging people for not updating.

Your favorite services are adding “AI” features (and raising prices to boot), your data is being collected and analyzed (probably incorrectly) by AI tools, you are interacting with AI-generated responses on social media, viewing AI-generated images and videos, and reading articles generated by AI. Business leaders are making decisions about your job and your value using AI, and political leaders are making policy and military decisions based on AI output.

It’s happening, with you or to you.

I hope we get some interesting psychological studies out of this sort of story in the coming years. Maybe we can learn a thing or two about ourselves.

I don’t think it’s unfair to assume some non-trivial percentage of people use these tools in a very dumb way.

The irony is, at least in my case, I made the impulse decision to just cancel outright instead of accepting the lower price, which lost them what had been a 15 year recurring customer. I’m one person, but I wonder how many others did the same.

To what end?

We’ve interacted with the internet using the same text-oriented protocols, the same markup languages, and even the same layout elements for 36 years. What profit motive exists to upend that and standardize on a new format like conversational language?

And, based on the development trends of the internet over its entire history, what suggests that if the world were to commit to some radical shift in the foundational technology underpinning the web, it would move towards voice, or vision (what does this mean?) based interfaces.

I get that AI is cool, and it has legitimate use cases, but is it possible that we as technologists might be falling into that age-old trap of having a solution in search of a problem?

Is that all? It really is that easy huh.

Outside of a select number of A-list actors, are there situations where the other 85-90% of actors are able to express their truth today?

One of the common problems with creative industries (and the primary reason I switched away from pursuing game development) was that you're not expressing your truth; you're expressing someone else's truth in exchange for money. And unless you have lots of other intangible and often uncontrollable qualities, and are willing to play politics, you will probably never end up in a position to express your truth (with any degree of notoriety) through your own or other people's work.

I am not disabled or disfigured, and while I'm blocked-from-stardom that's just because I have a fairly uninteresting existence overall that wouldn't warrant it on it's own. So I can only guess at this stuff from an outside perspective, but from where I sit, I don't see AI as a sea-change enabler for the people you're referring to.

The other example that comes to mind is, I was in Toronto a few years back and got a “Nuclear incident emergency alert” stating that there was NO problem at the nearby power plant and NO abnormal release of radiation. Equally uninformative, hugely more alarming (and relevant).