As a total aside: The baader-meinhof phenomenon at play. Just yesterday I was talking about Lain Banks because his work was quoted in a video game. And here he shows up again.

Just look at how ppl use their smart speakers. They ask it to set timers or ask for the weather. AI will be the norm once the benefit is obvious to everyone. When I can trust my AI with my credit card info and allow it to purchase stuff for me. Right now AI is basically a self-organizing dictionary which is often confidently incorrect. Not once has GPT told me it didn’t know something.

Just look at Smart Speakers. Basically the early AI at home. People just used them to set timers and ask about the weather. Even though it was capable of much more. Google and others were unable to monetize them for this reason and have mostly given up. (Protip: if you have a google speaker and kids, ask about the animal of the day. It’s an addition during COVID times for kids learning at home.)

But people also aren’t used to AI yet. Most will still google for something, some already skip that step and have ChatGPT search and summarize. I would not be surprised if the internet of the future is just plain text files for the AI agents to scrape.

“allegedly costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.” It seems he was already messing with the systems while he was still working there. This is not a case of malicious compliance or they fired the only guy who knew how something worked. He was actively sabotaging the company’s network.

“he apparently became disgruntled by a corporate “realignment” in 2018 that “reduced his responsibilities,”” So it’s not even like the company was being evil as they fired him while he was on PTO to take care of his daughter with leukaemia (or something). He would’ve been better off finding a new job if he was unhappy. Instead he made things far worse.

But 10 years is way too high. Especially for a victimless crime with alleged “values” of loss. But otherwise he gets no sympathy from me.

if ads were normal and unobtrusive. We wouldn’t need ad blockers. Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate. I had been running an ad blocker for so many years that when a friend (who doesn’t use an ad blocker) showed me a website, the unfiltered experience was horrifying.