They wanted so badly to incorporate key parts of the books that they were willing to change things around to get to them you mean?

Just a single example that bugged me: I will be the first to admit that Robert’s gender sensitivity wasn’t something to be shouted from the rooftops, although for the 90s when he started he is far from the worst.

However, he did have the plot point of a male chaneller in a female body with Halima. The show making Nynaeve a potential Dragon reborn candidate opens the door to the idea of peoples access to the One Power being based on their gender identity not their gender presentation.

It turns an unthinkable plot point in the latter part of the story into something Aes Sedai have obviously assumed can happen from the outset, and would surely be something they are alert to.

Almost like they didn’t understand the source material.

They seem to be really leaning in to having a very episodic format with the storylines having something to say about a specific topic and using a particular framing device to explore it. I gotta say that I can feel them aligning with TOS.

There’s 9 episodes left and they have to move a few characters along to smoothly lead in to the TOS remake that will likely happen to gain back an audience after the Ellisons push for Right Wing Conservative Trek and sink the franchise.

Should be amusing to watch all the grifters who have been bleating about Woke Trek proceed to not watch any of it once it’s been specifically made to pander to them.

I have watched the whole lot and honestly would have been better for them to make it a story inspired by some of the key events of the Foundation series. It’s a space opera like star wars, not a serious take on the events of the books.

That being said it is a spectacle. The whole Imperial rule of the Cleons is a really interesting concept when you let go of the way it doesn’t fit the books, and not just because of Lee Pace’s abs.

I rate it a hell of a lot higher than The Wheel is Time, that didn’t weave in an out of the original story line, it actively shat on Robert Jordan’s subtle and detailed world building. Every half arsed lazy strategy they used to write the dumbed down baby’s first fantasy tale version of the books made it more and more impossible to complete the story. The best thing that happened to that show was cancellation before they screwed it up any more.

If your prayers demand you be a bigoted anti trans piece of trash it’s time you rethought your diety. Any maximally good diety would be judging your hatefulness, so you are praying your God will strike you down, or you are praying to a hateful petty god.

I really enjoyed the last conversation I had with a Christian about this topic… He did not.

Can’t wait for the wave of people kicked out of stores because the AI shit the bed and confused them with someone else.

I just think the key to doing this stuff right is to make the executive level personally and financially responsible for any mistakes and any crimes, “Oh Coles shared too much info offshore and led to a data leak with identity theft… Hope the board enjoys spending the next 4 years in general population.” Oh and time to sell the yacht and the mansion to pay the fine.

Apparently they get paid the big dollars because they make the big calls, time for them to face the big risks too. That would keep the bastards honest.

Of course it will never happen, we like corruption in government way too much to make rich people face consequences.

It all used to be very easy in Australia, you bought the phone at a supermarket and gave bogus info when registering the SIM. Then the “War on Terror™” began and the government started taking things a bit more seriously started mandating the paper registration forms needed to be completed or the retailers could get in trouble. But your average supermarket worker wasn’t going to take the time to do that and it was way too widespread for the government to actually crack down on it.

Took a few years but the Telcos started actually paying attention to the fact that the majority of prepaid phones weren’t getting completed paperwork at point of sale so they just moved to make all sim card activations require online or over the phone ID checks.

Every bit of training I ever did made it clear it was all about catching terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles, which of course means “We want all that juicy data without citizens asking any annoying questions.”

Just like radium has (a very few) legitimate uses, so do LLMs. Stop using them as a thought/research replacement and use it sparingly. Natural language processing for instance is a good use. But it should never be feeding that into another LLM to action the speech it has interpreted and taking all agency away from humans IMHO.

My fault, I missed the “Stop AI” at the end.

He is right, accelerating climate change, wealth disparity and economic collapse is likely going to unite a lot of us, probably not the way he suspects though.

It is a really good filter for me, any company that wants to harvest the bogus information I will use to access them had better do a good job of convincing me it’s worth the effort.

I have a similar take on online stores wanting me to create a login to get a shipping cost, unless they are offering a truly unique item, or outrageously good price I just don’t buy anything from them.

If we all had a similar standards these bits of UX fuckery would disappear over time, unfortunately most people don’t even think about it.

Guessing that would be They Live. Haven’t actually watched it myself but cultural osmosis being what it is… Anyway here is some more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live

I’m comparing LLM based “AI” to radium. The data centres are just the paint factories in this analogy.

Imagine being someone who distrusted radium in 1900. Trying to understand this outrageous desire to shove poison into every product under the sun. Watching people literally brushing their teeth with it. Knowing how horrifically bad it was going to turn out.

Fucking capitalism never misses a chance to fuck people over. In a couple of years time when we are all in the AI hangover it’s going to be curious to see how many people “knew all along” AI was a fantastically bad idea.

I know the data centres can be repurposed for other tasks once they don’t need that density of compute, but what a waste.

Oh and before any sheep start bleating about how it’s just a tool, and you can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle…

Fuck off.

You willingly embrace the cognitive damage machine I will be maintaining my stance of “Fuck AI” and unless you have a background in neuroscience (and can post your credentials) I will likely be as unconvinced by your bullshit as the last hundred of your ilk who have fed me the same shitty rationalisations.

Given the other fucked up things she would do to the country if she got any power, cheap darts will be the least of our problems. If she even does it, rather than promising to and then being told after the election that promise wasn’t actually funded and Gina doesn’t want it, so tough luck.

When I was last looking for work one of my contacts told me she could get me a job in a couple of days, pretty much guaranteed and good money. The job was admin in relation to an NDIS provider. I asked why they were paying so well and she told me they have ridiculous staff turn over so they pay high to try to retain the people they can.

The causes of the staff turn over were apparently almost entirely externalities. People getting abused for the work they do, primarily but mixed with a fair degree of uncertainty about long term career prospects.

It seems to me this is one of the primary ways that this can be kept front and center. Make sure everyone who uncritically watches Sky News (or whatever they call that slop these days) is angry about it, make sure there is uncertainty at every potential point of failure, keep the money scared. I’m not saying the program deserves unwavering support, but having it as this constantly demonised and criticised topic feels a lot like setting it up to fail.

AUKUS on the other hand can fuck right off, that shit was a horrific deal from day dot, pissed off our more stable allies and painted a target on our coastlines in the event we ever actually needed to use the program.

Fully agree about taxing the mining companies though, if the owners can afford to buy both politicians and the media they are not paying anywhere near enough tax.

Yeah, but they have their favourite Sky News pundits bring it up regularly knowing that it punts the can down the road another couple of decades. Sky News pay masters are happy because they are firing broadsides at renewables. And I have to listen to the same old stale boring talking points again.

I wish we were in the timeline where nuclear was practical, but right now, in this moment, it is not.

Well how many people on Death Row are handing out juicy consultant work when he gets sick of being in local politics (or gets kicked out)?

Come now, I have had several FIGJAMs tell me that solar panels are essentially just junk at end of life, we basically have to bury them underground they are so toxic… So we might as well keep burning coal. I think they would know, they are self professed smart guys on the internet.

They are as insufferable as the nuclear advocates who regard every renewable as a distraction from building out more nuclear generation capacity.

So start making the penalty for data breaches executive fingers. It will really bring home the importance of getting it right.

Plus there are more than a few companies that will have to work out how to get signatures from people who have lost all of their digits within weeks of that rule being put in place.

As things stand you have together caught breaking privacy laws, then you have to be unlucky enough to get properly investigated, then you need to be even more unlucky to actually get fined, and truly monumentally unlucky enough to not be able to tie things up in court long enough for the consequences to hit faster than the golden parachute can open.

Fines are just a cost of doing business and there’s so many avenues for “accidentally” having data leak after all.

Tongue, bloody autocorrect