> His laws assume a machine that reasons from rules. Modern AI learns patterns from data and approximates behavior. This means the LLM driven Asimov law will never be an unbendable law to follow. Instead, it's merely a suggestion.
And in the human world, laws that are broken and not charged, nor prosecuted, are merely suggestions.
Which is why we have
(1) files illegally withheld and
(2) wars without authorization or even rationale other than (1)
Capitalism is religion.
Banks are churches.
Bankers are priests.
Wealth is heaven.
Poverty is hell.
Rich people are saints.
Poor people are sinners.
Commodities are blessings.
Money is God.
-Miguel D Lewis
Thank you for bringing this up. I am 77 and techie through and through, but with several ios gadgets mostly on 26, it's a fright trying to swipe. The iphone SE3 has a home button. The Christmas sale ipad has a touch (raised) button. And nuttier than squirrel **, the volume buttons reverse up and down functions when you rotate the ipad. Some controls pull down. Some pull up.
And Apple+ wonder why people cling to older OS versions. It's not change so much as disorientation.
PS. I sharpie everything. Even with myopia, I can't read "best by" dates. It takes a powerful magnifier in addition to my macro lens eyes.(less the glasses) This is crazy. I sharpie the dates at home.
And a bit off-topic, only Trader Joe's provides big readable price labels. I need the phone camera to read prices elsewhere, even with the correct glass prescription. And ingredients? Fuggedaboutit.
UPC could be a starting point for fetching info, but nobody's starting.
My brother, the least computer savvy person, got fed up with windows breaking his drivers once a month and having to reinstall them. He ended up with a Dell desktop, Ubuntu installed and supported.
After a few questions about substitute programs, he hasn’t asked any more help.
He is literally Joe average user.
As Apple and Microsoft hand control of your computer to Big Brother, (May I demand your age?) Linux, variants thereof, will be the only OS without Big Brother inside, even if we have to create a black market in distros.
And the BSD family I hope. Kids should not be excluded from developer and educational opportunities because GitHub or other has “filthy dirty language” and who decides what is acceptable? THE GOVERNMENT!
Don’t forget that some state governments already forbid LGBTQIA+/LGBTQ+ and “unacceptable religious” material. OS vendors have gleefully taken orders from the now discarded Pam Bondi.
I check regularly to see if ICEBlock has been restored to the Apple AppStore, after a court ruled that its removal was a travesty.
Even with price increases, nothing beats external disk storage. One can even tape one to the back of a laptop.
I never used network storage because none of it worked as well as NFS did on ancient Sun pizzabox and lunchbox hardware.
When the kids were visiting, they must have been backing up in the background. The router locked up and the internet vanished. The ISP suggested supersizing my service (meaning monthly bill) to cover one-shot events.
I hate losing control of my own systems, and the alternative is more complex, flakier, harder to use (did you ever have to read a disk drive manual past the setup?) and more costly. Sometimes a nice terabyte drive a month.
How did I read this long essay on math, something in which my brain lost excitement a couple of years into college?
If "To Engineer is human," then To pursue mathematics is to imagine, to meet challenges and grow from the experience, emphasis on experience, and sometimes wander off in a new direction from the initial goal,like an early "routine" photo trek of mine for some forgotten purpose happened upon a flower, new to me, of stunning beauty and amazing complexity (Calochortus).
It's, naturally, like life, where "how I got here" is full of meaning, as well as how I benefitted from, and interact with others. The author appreciates others, something a machine "with a brain the size of a planet" can't.
Unraveling the mysteries of the universe may be an endless task, and perhaps there's a lesson there. If it's just a simulation, what fun is a closed-form "solution"?
Exploring the universe, or math or physics is exploring ourselves, and that also changes us in the process.
Machine-wise, that's off-target, and a waste of time and electricity.
Much as “Stories create meaning as they touch our knowledge, experience, and as we process them with our minds and emotions," we're writing stories with our lives, problem solving, "accidental" discoveries and diversions, and interactions with others, which are real and meaningful on their own, and not really measurable or storable on silicon or other (unless we really are a simulation).
I would comment on misuse of technology, but that's the dark human side of technology and everything. Suffice it to say that besides "destroying" mathematics, AI can be used to destroy everything, and if the use of AI to "destroy nuclear proliferation," the solution might be more deadly than the problem it is addressing, and likely will be.
I turned off "Optimize Mac Storage" on the mac. [1]
I back up all devices to the mac and nothing else [2]
[0] I found 10 being sent to iCloud on the mac, entirely by accident.
[1] Who in their right mind sends their home directory to Apple? I used to put Sun user home directories on NFS for some 300 users, because it was necessary, and I guarded them like crazy.
[2] I turned off iCloud backups when the kids visited. Apparently, they were doing background backups, and my dogshit ISP was returning "Internet Not Available" because uploads destroy the router (on purpose) and they said "Only solution is to get a more expensive plan".
And I back up the computer with the device backups with SuperDuper! (free) to do image/bootable backups, along with TimeMachine (after I move the Downloads directory with all its excess to an external disk)
My trust in computer companies is ZERO. I even keep two email addresses, just in case. And there are insane gotchas. I backed up an iPhone to a mac, and when I went to restore it to a new phone: "Sorry, Dave, You must upgrade your MacOS to do this"
FORTUNATELY, I had separately backed up all iPhone photos to the mac (use ImageCapture) and all files held by apps via "iTunes" file sharing.
And in the human world, laws that are broken and not charged, nor prosecuted, are merely suggestions.
Which is why we have
(1) files illegally withheld and
(2) wars without authorization or even rationale other than (1)
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