Well, there’s plenty of standards-noncompliance out there, but breaking the firmware of a peripheral you manufacture so that it can’t be properly supported by the OS driver you wrote and needs a workaround requires a special type of corporate boneheadedness.

Well, at least this way they know for certain that something is listening to what they say. Most deities are awful when it comes to offering feedback.

The dot-com bubble? A whole bunch of investment money was poured into businesses operating over the Internet from around the time dial-up became widely available. A few years later, investors realized that “on the Internet” wasn’t necessarily the key to making a crapton of money and the stock market crashed. A bunch of companies (many of which never made it to profitability) went under, and a fair number of people lost their jobs. Pets.com was one of the more notable victims.

This doesn’t, however, mean that no business is done over the Internet today.

Speaking as someone who never has carried a smartphone, there are a bunch of tradeoffs. I do my banking in person, for instance, and that can be mildly inconvenient. I don’t take a lot of photographs (when I do, I use an old-style single-purpose camera). “Portable media” is a CD player, and I carry a paperback book if I think I might have to wait somewhere for more than ten minutes or so. And so on. Just continuing to live the same way as I did a quarter-century ago.

I expect, however, that it’s a lot easier not to miss what you never had in the first place.

Um, the transmission path for email isn’t sender client -> destination server -> destination client. Mail doesn’t go over HTTP, it has its own protocols, and takes the route sender client -> sender server -> some number of intermediate servers -> destination server -> destination client. You don’t know for certain what intermediate servers will be involved, who they belong to (often they go up through parent companies or backbone providers, then come back down again), or how they’re secured (if they’re secured). All the servers along the chain, some of which may be in a different country, have to be secure in order for the transmission method to be compliant, and that ain’t usually gonna happen.

Hmm. Get the major parts made by one of those places that does on-demand laser sintering 3D prints in metal, then wire them together yourself? I doubt the parts in isolation look anything like the end product, so the laser sintering firm would most likely have no idea what you wanted them for. No idea how much it would cost, though, and you’d have to do some 3D modeling.

I suspect most people had rather not engage with anything when shopping for products they’re embarrassed to be seen buying. If they’re in a position where they have no choice but to have interactive contact (can’t imagine why, unless dealing with some unusual allergies and needing to confirm what’s in the product), they probably think the chatbot is less likely to judge them, which is . . . not entirely untrue. It just leaves out the issue of a human possibly reading the chat transcript afterwards.

There will be a lot of cases where the data gets accidentally encapsulated (then fragmented due to incompatible protocols) in a cat.

No effort could have evacuated the entire population of Gaza without free movement across land borders. It was never a practical option.

Even if it had been, parents making a dumbass decision doesn’t justify killing their kids.

For those curious, the characters are katakana (the syllabary often used in Japan for foreign words, onomatopoeia, etc) and they’d be read as “ma-ri-u-su”, which is possibly intended to represent “Marius” under Japanese spelling conventions.

Betteridge strikes again.

A chatbot is a tool, nothing more. Responsibility, in this case, falls on the people who deployed a tool that wasn’t fit for purpose (in this case, the sympathetic human conversational partner that the AI was supposed to mimic would have done anything but what it did—even changing the subject or spouting total gibberish would have been better than encouraging this kid). So OpenAI is indeed responsible and hopefully will end up with their pants sued off.

If it were an enforced cap, I’d be wondering who it was that had the shares in a desktop/laptop/“real computer” manufacturer—forbidding smartphones ≠ forbidding screens or Internet access.

Whether or not that’s a defense depends on the details of the French legal system. In most countries, there are rights you’re not allowed to sign away. No idea whether security of the person is one of those rights in France.

Thing is, to the people who don’t follow tech news and aren’t really interested in this stuff, AI = AGI. It’s like most non-scientists equating “theory” and “hypothesis”. So it’s a really bad choice of term that’s interfering with communication.

I wouldn’t put it past them.

The result would have been the same if there had been a human behind the catfishing instead of an LLM, and events could have played out in a similar fashion if they’d been snail mail pen pals. The outcome of this story is tragic, but it doesn’t have much to do with technology when you stop and think about it for a moment.

For the same reason that “send me your advertising” ticky-boxes on website sign-ups should not be ticked by default: because the “feature” is detrimental to many (if not most) users and you have to spot the control before you can disable it. Worse, in this case many ignorant users won’t make the connection between this misfeature and the fact that their laptop is suddenly burning through its battery in double-time—they’ll just assume Firefox is now broken.

The problem is that it’s opt-out and not opt-in, and it should be opt-in.

If it’s your only computer, you may not have a choice, and we’re talking about kids here, who are stuck with what their parents do or don’t buy them. I can easily see a teen in a lower-income household being stuck between a rock and a hard place here.