It's a combination of post-9/11 security paranoia, companies not wanting to do anything that doesn't directly make them money, and the loss of manufacturing and heavy industry in the West, all together. It's sad.

The servers themselves are in cages, of course, and presumably the tour wouldn't actually go into those. Plus, yeah, what the other comment said.

Think nuclear power plants in the 60s or 70s, many of them were open for tours or school field trips or such to try to make them more appealing to the populace around them. I haven't heard of a single DC doing the same thing, unless you're a potential customer. Isn't this stuff kind of basic?

But it kind of fits?

But how exactly could they be "easily avoided"?

The author of the article seems to claim the same and yet doesn't propose a single actual action or solution.

The author spends several pages complaining about how the evil masterminds behind AI haven't actually thought through what it'll do to society, haven't proposed any real way to handle its impacts. And then proceeds to not propose any real ways to handle its impacts.

Making fun of billionaires for being fake philosophers is all well and good, but the technology is here, like it or not. So is the proposal to get rid of it? Butlerian Jihad? If it is, just say that. That's genuinely fine! But as is, no such action is actually proposed.

I'm not expecting random bloggers to just solve what might be the defining issue of our generation, but come on, I'm really starting to get tired of this format of post that doesn't even try, while simultaneously complaining about and making fun of any existing "solutions". Yeah, I don't think UBI or the "leisure economy" is going to happen soon either, and if it does it's certainly got all the flaws that were mentioned, but it's better than literally nothing.

Can we at least admit that it's a genuinely hard problem, and beyond either managing to pull off the aforementioned worldwide Butlerian Jihad, or getting lucky and it turns out AI actually sucks and can't replace anyone's job, we don't really have any good solutions for it? Or would that be too uncomfortably close to admitting that between the "fake philosopher" tech bro bloggers and the ones that, I guess, did philosophy in undergrad, neither have any workable solutions to the problem?

I'm not exactly Google's biggest fan, but what does this refer to?

They still just... show ads on search results, no? (Not that most people I know ever see them, thanks to adblockers.) The disclaimers have gotten less prominent, but I think anyone could have expected that. Are there other major things they're doing that couldn't have been expected at all in the 2000s?

Sure, I'm usually on hotspot, but I personally appreciate when businesses have wifi. Either way, there are always going to be shared networks somewhere.

Huh... How is it set up where you live? I've ridden buses in Europe and I remember them having cables, or at least buttons.

This is what I was thinking as well, TBH. I'm not particularly tied to any of my banks, I already did mostly switch off of BoA because their website was so bad.

Good to hear everyone's responses in the thread though, some stuff I definitely didn't consider.

I know banking apps are the typical example, but I've always wondered why. I use my bank's app maybe once or twice a year when I need to Zelle someone, which I only need to do when they don't have Venmo. (Unless we consider Venmo a banking app.)

I only have one bank's app installed, the rest of my banks I only interact with over their website, on desktop.

As for insurance, I've never had an insurance company's app installed.

Am I just an outlier here? Honestly, if I switched to a non standard OS, I'd be more annoyed about losing, say, Google Maps, Uber/Lyft, or various chat apps. Banking and insurance just don't come to mind at all as something I need my phone for.

I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.

https://long-lines.net/ and the coldwarcomms group are always interesting as well.

For anyone who wants a fun entry point into the rabbit hole, I'd recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Offices

Likewise, and I find it quite annoying too, but I don't think it's really Discord's fault. They default to one text and one voice channel, after all. The ability to add new channels easily is a good thing, but people do go a bit crazy with it.

> Statuses, emojis for the status, now flairs from a server, profile pictures, etc.

The server flairs are kind of odd, but aren't the rest of those pretty bog- standard features for a messaging app?

I do agree the notifications are annoying, though. At the same time I get it, they do need to make money somehow.