Wow! --there's a lot of rose-tinted spectacles going on in this comment thread! Flash was a security nightmare, acessibility crippled, non-searchable, flashing bleeping abomination.
Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if people had just stuck to making games and animations with it.
>with its psychological and visual impact, the calculator adds an entirely new dimension to such entertainments, transforming them into some of the most refined, stimulating, gratifying, inspiring, enjoyable, and spectacular entertainments ever devised...
* Michael Gove announces ban on "standing up too quickly".
* BBC links to a series of scare-mongering articles on how a "standing up too quickly head rush" can lead to dizziness and feelings of paranoia.
* A mother whose son died after standing up quickly under a descending demolition ball warns other youngsters against the dangers of standing up too quickly.
Meanwhile at Conservative Party HQ, Michael Gove snorts another line of cocaine off Rishi Sunak's belly button.
If you're happy with your government; being able to know everything you spend your money on, being able to seize your assets, being able to freeze your bank accounts, being able to prevent you moving your money around, being able to invade your privacy to allow you to access your money, being able to control who you can and can't send your money to or receive money from... then crypto does probably seem like a scam and a ponzi scheme.
And, yes, of course, there are as many scammers and shitcoins out there as you can shake a stick at. Any "scheme" which can potentially generate cash will attract such people. Cryptocurrency is no different in this regard.
But, as I said, the basic concept is sound and something anyone who believes in personal freedom can get behind. And, if crypto is such a "bad thing", why are so many governments suddenly interested in developing their own digital currencies? It's almost like the whole "USA / Huawei, TikTok... etc." scenario all over again. This technology is evil.... up until "the man" invents his own version and takes control of it.
Governments have seized cryptos, they do not give you protection, they do not help you escape taxes. In the end, they have more guns and can enforce the law, in addition to most people in society having expectations about rules around money
They've seized cryptos from exchanges and from impounded computers. They can't seize them if you haven't got them on an exchange and you have your secret keys well hidden.
From my dabblings in interacting with ChatGPT and Bard, I think it marks a very important leap forward in technology. But not in any kind of "intelligence" as we'd generally understand it.
After using any of these chatbots for a while you realise that there is no real "intelligence" there. What there is, is a very impressive text-parsing engine combined with a very efficient search facility. But there's no nuance to the replies you get, no "personal" [or machine] opinion. It's just rapidly collated [and often tortuously balanced] data, quickly presented and nicely formatted.
The thing that suprised me most about ChatGPT et al is just how quickly everyone seemed to have one on offer. It seemed like one week we were all shaking our heads at the moronic stupidity of Alexa / Siri / etc.... and the next we had all these superficially much more intelligent and responsive AI chatbots to talk to.
Most of the "AI Powered" sites and applications that are springing up everywhere are based on ChatGPT [and I presume will be based on Bard too in future]. So are all essentially sharing the same dataset and programming biases.
One concern I have about this whole development is that it even further reduces the access to alternate views and non-mainstream controversial opinions. Microsoft has already integrated ChatGPT into Bing and I've been using standalone ChatGPT as a sort of pseudo search engine for a while now, as it's really handy for the kind of questions that you just want a quick answer to, without having to pick through a list of search results.
I do worry that, in future, pretty much all search on the web will take this form and these AIs will become the gatekeepers to knowledge in an even more prescriptive way than the current search giants are. I'm very uneasy about a future where our access the sum total of human knowledge and opinion is pre-filtered through the political and social biases of a clutch of pro-Western, pro-Capitalist west coast USA billionaires.
...or it could be the usual "plausible deniability":
* Offer X, Y and Z. But if it ever comes to light, you weren't speaking for us.
Personally I find it difficult to believe that someone would be allowed to "go freelance" on something this important. It's typical British government spin. They have to keep up the 'We never negotiate with terrorists' front. Even though everyone knows they were in direct comms with the IRA / UDA etc. for decades.
And, if such things do eventually come to light, it's much better to spin it as 'One of our spies went freelance without permission' than to admit to carrying on secret talks a couple of days after the Warrington bombing --which wouldn't go down well with your electorate.
There's also the question of who pulls the strings; the party in government, or the security services. The Prime Minister can stand up in parliament and make all the populist soundbites he likes. But if the "power behind the throne" is working along different lines, they're not going to pay any heed.
I think it's worth sharing the announcement from DPReview itself [0] just for it's puke-making spin on "We've all just been sacked"
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Dear readers,
After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year.
The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content.
Everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we’re grateful for the communities that formed around the site.
Thank you for your support over the years, and we hope you’ll join us in the coming weeks as we celebrate this journey.
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I've been a DPReview reader for many years now. It's a shame to see the site go. But, to be honest, it's been pretty moribund [content-wise] for a while now. Smartphone cameras have swallowed up most of the market for point-and-shoot and hobbyist photography and there's only so many articles you can spin out on the latest eye-wateringly expensive pro-releases or custom Leica offerings.
PS: Why submit AN Other website's announcement that DPReview is shutting down, rather than DPReview's own announcement of same? Y'know "primary sources" and all that.
>More importantly, I see many more interesting if irrelevant things. I remember the early days of the web also had this kind of a feel.
>So , I'm excited. And it feels good to see this kind of excitement in others
I actually agree with that. I have similar "new frontier" feelings. Which is why I find the dross "I asked AI to..." posts so annoying. It's akin to when smartphones became a thing and opened up all those possibilities for carrying innovative applications & functionlity in your pocket.
And then the app stores filled up with "Fart Apps".
Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if people had just stuck to making games and animations with it.