Actually corporations themselves are 99% of what people fear about AGI already in their inhuman decisionmaking to the detriment of humanity.

Open to All Income.

Well, apart from the people like me who thought they had always been one because they acted exactly like one.

As someone who lived with them for the first thirty years or so of my life I am very glad they are gone. I haven’t had to replace a single light in my last ten years since I moved to a home that is all LED while it was a constant thing in my childhood.

People advocating for the 99 shitty technologies that die always seem to like to quote the people talking about the one technology that survived from past generations as if that somehow made criticism of the 99 others a bad call.

From my understanding it depends on the area covered. Generally it is less of a problem if you e.g. just point it at the opposite wall in front of your apartment door or something similar restrictive and much more of a problem if you point it across the street. Commercial and residential use are also treated differently and there might also be additional problems due to usage of the recordings by Amazon or excessive storage durations.

In a business setting I assume you are in a country with a low level of privacy protection since I can’t imagine storing images of everyone walking past your door would be compatible with something like the GDPR.

You are one of those people who doesn’t get that that is absolutely not appealing to 95% of the population. It might be a fun tinkering project and if you enjoy that more power to you but what those 95% of people would do is at most move that light switch to a more convenient part of the room. I am a big fan of automating things in general in the context of my PC and it is not even appealing to me (mainly because hardware projects do not appeal to me and I don’t like to open my home up to security issues), so you are talking about an appeal to a small part even of the geekier part of the population.

The problem with the idea of smart light switches is that they are only useful if you aren’t already in the room and turning on your light when you aren’t there is a pretty niche use case.

No, the biggest problem with smart homes is that honestly, a switch on the wall that always works, even when you don’t have your phone on you and even in the dark when you are half asleep is a pretty optimal interface for things like lights.

In that it will appeal most to the people at the lowest end of the IQ range?

A few years ago I had a 12 disk RAID6 array and the power distributor (the bit between the redundant PSUs and the rest of the system) went and took 5 drives with them, lost everything on there. Backup is absolutely essential but if you can’t do that for some reason at least use RAID1 where you only lose part of your data if you lose more than 2 drives.

Not just programming languages either, the hardware side is dead simple too. You can literally implement it in a few lines of VHDL or similar language on an FPGA.

magnetic media can retain data indefinitely when stored without power.

That is not true. Old floppy disks often do not work anymore (old as in 15-20 years unused).

LWN had a couple of articles about it

https://lwn.net/Articles/991906/ https://lwn.net/Articles/993895/

This isn’t a problem with capitalism, it’s a problem with governments. If we eliminate government entirely (e.g. anarcho-capitcapitalism), there are no regulations, thus no regulatory capture

No, in that case you would just have large existing corporations hiring hit squads to kill potential competitors instead which is obviously much better /s The desire to do what regulatory capture does originates in capitalism, not in government, government just turns it from a violent action into one of bureaucracy.

Even asking for an example on how to use a specific API has failed about 50% of the time, it tends to hallucinate entire parts of the API that don’t exist or even entire libraries that don’t exist.

If they outsource their thinking and coding to an LLM, they might start getting ahead quickly

As a programmer I have yet to see evidence that LLMs can even achieve that. So far everything they product is a mess that needs significant effort to fix before it even does what was originally asked of the LLM unless we are talking about programs that have literally been written already thousands of times (like Hello World or Fibonacci generators,…).

The problems you see in government are the problems caused by capitalism through regulatory capture.

Not to mention that there are plenty of inherent problems with capitalism since it just doesn’t work for products bought e.g. only once or twice in your life or where the quality can otherwise not be judged by the buyer before buying.

Yeah, and that would only get worse if the only controls over currency were applied by those with a lot of currency (proof of stake) or able to afford a lot of computational power (proof of work).