Very well written piece. I like his perceptions about the speed of how we access the internet being shaped by content being constantly pushed at us by feeds. I think it’s having a profound effect on people’s whole thought process. He mentions exploring a new website and an hour goes by - but that hour ends and he’s done, at least for now. You never get done with a feed, it’s an endless, self-refilling “in” basket. I think we perceive and handle feeds the same as a stack of work items we’re supposed to get through. We want that sense of completion, so we try to process each item as fast as possible - taking in minimal information, making a superficial value judgement, and swiping left or right on it ASAP so we can scroll to the next item. Then we apply this same false sense of urgency to how we process the real world, which lowers the quality of our decisions and even our enjoyment of life.

The main problem is walking on unpredictable terrain, which spidery or doggy robots can do with fewer balance issues than two-legged humanoid ones.

The head was never found

I tend to disbelieve this, mainly because a humanoid robot would be overkill. Custom-purpose robots would be much cheaper to design, build and maintain, with fewer potential failure points.

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I’m totally shocked that a progressive free society like North Korea would tolerate such authoritarian invasiveness!

Oh, nice idea! Maybe that’s kind of what Simon on Firefly meant by a “source box”.

20 of them? Just curious, how would you use 800 or 1600 TB of storage?

Waymo, which I think grew out of the original Google self-driving car project, has been operating robo-taxis for several years. They’re available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a few more cities. I wonder how they did on the schoolbus test. Not able to find anything online about that. They use different car manufacturers from China, UK, Germany, and it looks like one of them (Jaguar Land Rover) is owned or partly owned by Ford. So data about the individual cars is kind of hard to track down.

Realistically tho, until participation becomes mandatory you can ignore quests and orbs and just keep doing what you’re doing.

Online software development life cycle in a nutshell:

Startup - Geeks are in charge and you’re creating a cool communications platform.
Mature - Accountants are in charge and you’re gamifying ad clicks.

You can still pay for lookup services. I got a 1-month subscription recently to contact the mom of a friend who disappeared. All I had was the guy’s last name and the town he said his mom lived in. Cost 7 or 8 bucks but it was worth it. So anyway I imagine a stalker wouldn’t need a ton of resources to track a person down using pay services.

The phone company definitely did charge extra for unlisted numbers. The number lookup service, which was just called “Information”, was accessed by dialing 411 - the origin of “What’s the 411?” In the olden days you got a human being, then they automated it with voice recognition. In most places 411 doesn’t exist anymore but it was in service until only a few years ago.

I understand the story is about google adding a guy’s number to a business profile, which seems very odd. But I wonder if anybody here is old enough to remember phone books? I haven’t seen one in a while, but in the landline era the phone company used to automatically deliver one to everybody who had a phone. A large physical book with the name, address and phone number of everybody in the local area, except people who paid extra to be unlisted. If you didn’t want to look somebody up in the book you could dial a number and a helpful operator would tell you their phone number so you could call them. This was totally normal and didn’t bother anybody - how do people feel about that whole concept now?

It’s amazing what you can find if you don’t just look at memes - https://www.forbes.com.au/news/billionaires/billionaires-behind-bars/

Yeah I really think being afraid of AI making us stupid after 25 years of social media addiction is like worrying that the folks who grew up next door to the nuclear reactor aren’t putting on enough sunscreen when they go out to the mailbox.

Yeah the tone wasn’t OMG I’m being spied on, it was more like here’s what I found when I perused an old family album I forgot about.

More good news - if you ever use up the current toner cartridge, that printer takes generic ones that cost $20 or less. Assuming you even print enough to need one. Congrats on your great find!

You’re getting douchevoted for speaking heresy but you’re right, Amazon only records requests and commands - i.e. what you say after “Alexa”. Every article about what Amazon actually does and doesn’t record is quickly forgotten because sinister plots are far more entertaining.