II, IV, and VI are all worth a watch. They are a good movie, an entertaining movie, and a surprisingly good movie respectively.
I'll watch the odd numbered ones as well but I'm a fan and I know I is too long, III is mostly not good, and I enjoy V for its craziness.
I think the Sony hack is not a great example because there is a very good chance it was more politically motivated than financially. It's one of those cases where we might never know but there is a good chance it was orchestrated by North Korea in response to a Sony movie that made Kim III not look very divine. NK is most likely connected to other hacks as well that were really just a way to get hard currency/to evade sanctions.
Effort and reward are like supply and demand. If I want to steal your credit card number to go shopping, it might take me a long time to get to it. And then it turns out there is only $500 left on it. Too much effort for not enough reward. That's why phishing, Nigerian princes, texted IRS/DMV fines, missed FedEx deliveries, and all that jazz happens. Low effort to throw a net out and then catch the dumbest of the fish. If you are a person of interest to me though the math if different. Maybe I'm a stalker (look behind you, I'm there right now). Or maybe horny me is looking for your (perfectly legal) sexting thread. Or you're a pedo, a socialist, a cult leader, or all of the above. Private people get hacked. But it rarely makes a splash in the news like the Sony hack.
Also, hacker ≠ hacker. There are good guys who hack stuff to show what needs fixing or to hold people to account. There are bad guys who do it for money or because they like it. There are those with one foot on either side of that fence. Motivations differ wildly.
Do you let your network set the time or did you do it manually? Could be a hint that you're off by a minute or so (considering you've checked all the other reasonable things already).
Any other apps installed that may want to set alarms? Maybe a sideload? Calendar app you've tried and not uninstalled?
They killed Kenny?
Paging Dr. Strangelove.
If you want you get a good idea about the complexity, there is a sci-fi novel called "Three Body Problem" by Liu Cixin. It lays out a situation with 3 suns and it's very messy (not a spoiler).
The details are important. How big are the suns, how do they revolve around each other? I'm not going to pretend to be able to do the math if I had the details. But it throws into question if life on earth would have developed at all. And it it did it would be very different. Our planet has won the lottery. It got an atmosphere, is far enough from the sun but not too far away to benefit from its energy. A stable orbit gives us four seasons. A lot of life on this planet has developed around that and around one moon giving us predictable tides. All of that would be messed up, a livable earth would probably need to be further out from the bi-suns. The slow process of evolution likes relative stability. Two suns pulling on everything would provide the opposite. That's why I would lean towards no life actually. Greater mass at the center of the bisolar system would also raise the odds of getting hit by a rock. The moons might be slamming into each other and then the planet.
What I'm saying is it's not a good idea...
I take your point. It's just that any scenario you're describing with so-called AI could have been done by a search engine already. The slop of yesteryear was SEO ranking articles and fake links to make the algorithm prioritize your site over others. Well poisoning is how PR agencies get troublesome celebs out of the headlines again. The list goes on.
I share your concerns about the black boxed nature of so-called AI and by extension their search engines. I'm not saying it isn't a problem; it's just not a new one. Up until now we have had companies in charge with a vested interest not to bend the flow of information too far from, let's call it, the median truth. Now companies are letting models make these decisions and some humans afford these models more credibility than their common sense and that is all worrying to say the least. So I'm a worried as you are, it just started earlier for me.
All of these things would have been possible to restrict on good old Google searches. And they are enforced to varying degrees around the world to differing legal situations. You shouldn't be able to search for child porn anywhere, swastika merch in Austria, insults of the king in Thailand, etc.
Search on Google mainly got worse because of Google. They made their results more shit to get you to click on follow ups, the dreaded page 2 of results for instance, where they could sell more ads.
I do agree that so-called AI search is more of a black box. Although the Googles and the Bings want you logged in to personalize the results, you can find a way to test their otherwise mostly obscured algorithms in a neutral setting. The models may not allow that and/or testing their metal may have yet to be invented. But they will replace search as we knew it.
The growing faith people have in whatever LLMs spit out (over old school searches) is very concerning. It's like LLMs are the new Facebook conspiracies. Schools need to teach media literacy as its own subject. All people under 70 today should have to get a media drivers license.
Edit: And I didn't even mention the "right to be forgotten." That also exists in the EU.
This is not the final word on the subject. This is just a court's ruling. Somebody will appeal it.
And it ruled it's okay to train your AI with books under two circumstances. You paid for the book and the so-called AI doesn't imitate the authors' voices. They didn't initially pay for the books so they have another trial to figure out a penalty for that.
And I personally don't buy the no imitation thing. You can make a model that does nothing else but create sloshfic. I think that's what the plaintiffs' lawyers will appeal the decision about.
If these two companies are in bed with each other, they are hate-fucking each other though. Carnal pleasure but no love lost.
I don't find this that infuriating. And you have choices to run a different browser. Granted, most of them are chromium based. Edge's only use case is to download a Firefox fork and/or a better chromium that is neither Edge nor Chrome.
In no situation where weed is legal minors are allowed to buy it. I would be onboard on this propaganda train if all I saw on Netflix is 15yo's getting high. Which I don't see that much really.
Minors should not consume it. Minors have parents. Minors' parents' job it is to keep them away from that along with sniffing glue, tobacco, vaping, alcohol and eating laundry capsules, just to name a few dangers more.
The negative effects on brain development I read about were all linked to regular, if not heavy use. There is enough wiggle room for school/education and, once again, the parents to step in.
Idiocracy is happening anyway.
Who thought it is a good idea to let George Lucas edit Trek? It's like an Odo shot first kind of situation. And I think Odo never used a phaser.
Is this is the guy that Scotty shoots in the end? If so, I've only ever seen the version with that scene and the bad Mission: Impossible face mask reveal. And I owned this movie as a VHS bought in Europe as part of a set released before VII came out...