I'm kinda relaxed w.r.t. actual hostilities coming from Germany/Austria. The large pensioner populations and - still - a sizable part of workers understand that burning the house down doesn't improve anything. But it could become a political shitshow like in the US. Certainly we're going to get more deregulation, hopefully of the right kind.
The deindustrialisation -> rising populist right pattern is kinda similar in Lil' US (Germany); it started later and moves quicker. And we can't get by on software subscriptions.
The natural ("prehistoric") state used to be a low density distribution of mobile tribes, which sidestepped a lot of the problems that afflict civilizations, like pandemics and local resource exhaustion.
The obsession with constant content production combined with algorithmic, feed driven consumption frontends with terrible discoverability and intense bubblification lead to today's screaming contest that ruins our sanity. On average I find it much worse than the old infosphere (TV+print+radio) used to be, for producers and consumers. It's quite tragic, really.
Though I also notice awareness around this issue is rising (e.g. smartphone bans in school, initiatives like bluesky), which is good, I guess. All of this is still a society-wide experiment without control group.
Measuring beer is serious business in Germany to the point the EU commission had to comment on a rule change that supposedly forbade the usage of steins for foaming drinks (it didn't, but Germany wanted to be extra strict): https://www.bayern3.de/bier-steinkrug-eu-richtlinie
Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.
Yes, and customers are less informed than ever. RMS's "useds" (instead of users) comes to mind often in recent years. To clarify, I don't think one should considers it solely the user's fault, because user pedagogy is a shared responsibility, that needs to be offered and taken.
"Solving for product" is VC pidgin speak. Much contemporary software hardly solves anything anymore; it's getting shittier every iteration without fundamental progress in the field as everything turns into yet another dumbed down web-based abomination that robs us of more of our sanity (exceptions excepted!). There are good explanations for this, but I still don't like it.
And goatse is harmless compared to the shit that's out there, especially because it only affects the dude himself. Even 3 guys 1 hammer isn't the worst yet (though pretty bad already).
> Not only is this pure science fiction at this point, but injecting non-determinism into your defensive layer is terrifying and incredibly stupid. If you use an LLM to evaluate whether another LLM is doing something malicious, you now have two hallucination risks instead of one. You also risk a prompt-injection attack making it all the way to your security layer.
I've found fictional displays of "system compromise" kinda ridiculous in e.g. Halo. Now I know that Cortana throws AI slop input into AI slop infrastructure with thousands of subagents until she's in.