The federal government took upon itself responsibility for things like this, because it's impractical at best for cities or states to regulate these. It's too bad that politics and bloat has made governance of this particular issue more or less impossible. Self regulation is obviously a joke, the standard suite of choices mean the default options for consumers are obnoxious as hell.

It'll have to become a big enough issue to warrant attention and action by the President, either this one or whoever comes next, or nothing will ever be done.

Maybe a convention of states that runs all current politicians, judges, and bureaucrats out of their jobs (in a sane, phased way) and establishes term limits and bans on careerism and bloat. Citizens can bypass the feds and kick their asses to the curb - imagine a total reset, in which we put forth competent, responsible people.

This problem will never be fixed. Gonna have to wear adaptive sunglasses at night for driving.

Ravens are wonderful creatures.

-C.S. Lewis

The solution is simple. Block the EU from accessing any of your services. They can make their own search and social media and digital marketing and AI.

Good luck to them. VPNs will boom.

I can understand the UK struggling with their imperialistic traditions and so on, but you'd think Germans at least would have some humility in trying to project their global ideas and ambitions on the world at this point.

The book in question. What was the intent or purpose of coming at this sideways?

It'd sure be awesome if regulations and regulators in Western countries weren't stupid. This whole game is just insane.

Let's just pawn it of on China, arbitrage the regulatory and human rights differential, and pretend the value is the same as if it's locally manufactured. Then we pocket the difference! Number go up!

Malware is going to be crazy, people aren't ready for the revelation of how insecure and broken things are. Everything is held together by bubblegum, duct tape, and panicked engineers putting out fires.

Anything beyond that - even telling your AI to go use a "humanizer" skill in your prompt - creates a text distribution that is functionally indistinguishable from human generated writing. Throw in the fact that people who use AI will be influenced by the writing, often in positive, beneficial ways, and the software becomes a vicious, punitive tool. It's worse than waving a dowsing rod or pendulum, because the software comes with the implication of legitimacy and fairness.

It's too bad the teachers can't teach.

The only advantage they have is inertia; software works on windows that doesn't work on other platforms. Those are a tiny, tiny percentage of cases. Microsoft brings nothing to the table; you're going to have an easier time, be more secure, spend less money, deal with less hassle, if you use Linux. Linux hassles me less over the course of a month than Windows does in a single day of use.

So yeah, Microsoft has a lot of wealth and resources. They don't have a point, anymore. There's no innovation, progress in development, novel or unique products, etc - they're effectively dead, as far as the market goes. They're going to have to undergo an epic struggle and battle for relevance, or within 20 years they're going to be a lot like IBM or Yahoo or even Bear Sterns.

They're the 4th largest company because they underwent an epic struggle and seized on a purpose and were driven to develop the best in class enterprise operating system and went tooth and nail against Apple for decades. Now they're a second rate mishmash of adtech surveillance grifting, meaningless, flailing product development, prancing around and cashing out the reputation that was built, and supremely vulnerable.

But yeah, they're big. I'm sure that will suffice to keep them alive for a long time. There just won't be a point - unless they get leadership that revitalizes the entire organization. I don't see that happening.

IBM still exists. They're the perfect example of how far a corporate behemoth can keep rolling after it effectively dies.

Microsoft is effectively dead.

It's easier and less hassle to use Linux desktop environments than to wrestle with Windows bullshit. Their flagship product is a sad joke, their leadership is flailing for purpose, and their entire corporation is bloated and unable to focus on anything meaningful.

That doesn't mean they'll disappear tomorrow, or in 5 years, or even in 20. They've already lost whatever relevance they had, and will have to fight to get it back. There will be something called Microsoft still churning recognizably Microsoft slop, because they have a lot of money and resources with which to continue flailing.

It's the year of the Linux desktop, and Windows has fallen.

Make the local AI competent enough to do good image generation and editing, realtime voice and music generation, handle agentic tasks with a framework like Hermes, and you can take your AI places to do tasks in contexts that are inaccessible to or inappropriate for cloud.

Frontier big platform models will be the best, but there's a level of "good enough" for local uses that we're already seeing flourish, and "good enough" for the average joe is almost here.

It's too bad that's not what the institutions are doing.

Cryptographically verifiable provenance and chain of custody is going to be necessary to get to the human only stuff, before long, but the good AI stuff will be better. Just a matter of time, at this point.