YourNetworkIsHaunted

""For once you have tasted flight you shall walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there shall you long to return" -Leonardl Da Vinci" -Civilization IV narrator.

Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic. Unfortunately it also looks like the distinctive AI art style was pretty key to preventing the usual set of AI generated image "tells". Mirrors, hands, teeth, etc are all very visibly wrong.

Looks like finger counting is back on the menu, friends!

Talk about ripped from the headlines!

Wasn't that just the plot of The Caves of Steel? Or Robots of Dawn, which combined it with some weird sex thing?

I did a quick scan of the titles just for old time's sake and ran into a very aggressive "oh my God shut up" directed at my younger self as much as at Scooter himself.

So many of the responses pointing out how bad this is for the local communities in Licking County (lol), but I feel like this has to be a case where the bezzle is collapsing more than a decision causing new harm, right? The bubble wasn't sustainable and those jobs were unlikely to manifest past the initial construction, especially since data centers aren't exactly labor-intensive to run.

That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt for those communities, especially in the midst of the economic ruin left in the wake of Hurricane Tarrif, but I feel like there's an important lesson being lost here.

If you don't have to directly interact with the underclass it's almost like you don't have an underclass!

I mean, with the instantly recognizable AI lighting design it would actually take a fair degree of skill to make something look that garbage as an actual tattoo.

The hero we need, but not the one we deserve.

No wait I remember this one from Asimov. Humanoid Robots ack-chewally make the most logical sense because we can reuse all the tools and control designs we already have for human ~~slaves~~ ~~wage slaves~~ workers. Why make a new tractor when you can make a robot to work on the one you've been using since the 70s? That's how this works, right?

I'm reminded of an old essay from Siskind that tried to break down the different approaches to disagreement as either "conflict theory" - different people want different, mutually incompatible things - and "mistake theory" where we all want the same basic thing but disagree about how to get it. Given the general silicon valley milieu's (and YudRat's specifically) affinity for "mistake theory" I think the susceptibility to authoritarianism and fascism fits remarkably well. After all, if we all want the same basic thing the only way the autocrat could do something we don't like is if they were wrong, so we just have to get a reasonable enough autocrat and give them absolute power, at which point they can magically solve all problems. See also the singularity God AI nonsense.

If I had my wish, it would be that this doesn't just remind people of how authoritarians can be/are evil or incompetent, but also that the general structure isn't actually more "efficient" because whatever delays the democratic process introduces are dwarfed by the inevitable difficulties of just trying to do anything at the scale of any modern state, much less the sheer scale of the USA.

In what world is crypto free and open? Never mind the fact that the public ledger is undercut by the difficulty of tying a wallet (or wallets) to specific people, which is possible enough to make transactions traceable for the average person while letting sufficiently motivated bad actors hide their behavior from observation in a way physical cash doesn't, the entire infrastructure is controlled by either whoever happens to have the biggest share of the crypto token or whoever has the most real money to buy server hardware and electricity.

Unless you want to talk about actual private block chains like they seem to be suggesting here, in which case you're literally dealing with a wildly inefficient but otherwise unremarkable database. If you think that replicating the ledger across multiple servers at different HUD locations is somehow more secure or open then I've got bad news for you about how modern IT infrastructure is already set up.