Where I was going was: effects can be different even if all choices and results are unethical. If one cares about the possible impacts of ones actions, consideration beyond “well it’s all unethical, so whatever” could be warranted.

are all unethical choices equal? Surely there are better and worse things?

Just criticises? Not “slams”, “destroys”, or eviscerates? Weak. No rage click from me.

nose hair trimmer attachment works well around the ears I’ve found (but it’s loud!)

cold cuts? Have you seen the price of a bag of chips? Ridiculous. I don’t need to spend 5 bucks to hate myself later after I’ve eaten too many.

$30 to buy an old mechanical pencil on ebay you remember having in highschool? No problemo.

Breaking news from the astronomy community!..

I don’t think you can reply to a text message using a third party watch on iOS but you can with your Apple watch. I’ve seen that cited as an exclusive API.

Something is stopping another messaging app to have sms fallback and be the default messaging app on iOS. It’s iOS.

DOJ wants to get in on some of that hot euro DMA action

your self driving car will just drive itself back to the lot when your payment is late

I don’t disagree with anything you say. I think it’s worth mentioning that the cost of enforcement directly informs the cost of a lease/rental situation. The cheaper they can enforce the contract, the less they can theoretically charge. If they had to get a court order to lock your phone or repo your car, they’d make it more expensive or be much more selective about who they lease/rent to. This maybe enables more people to have phones or get cars?

I swear I’m not rooting for team “aggressive manipulative business behavior widens opportunities for the less well off”. Gross. Kind of how I hear about globalization of manufacturing stuff - “they get paid pennies!” “yeah, but that’s more than before the factory came? look what they can buy now” I know that’s a overly broad generalization but you see those arguments.

The meta bit is that specifically here, it’s sort of a derail of the main topic. Some downvotes I’m sure are for that. As for why this essay might generally attract downvotes? I’ll follow your locomotive off the track.

I mean, 1. It’s a frickin’ essay. 2. Comes off as a little cold and sorta “I know better than you do”, and 3. seems to completely miss the point of what I interpret as most folks dislike of AI in the current incarnations we are seeing (which isn’t a real sci-fi type general AI that gets society to the end point of your essay). I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone worrying about “what will I do to find purpose in a fully-automated-gay-space-luxury-communism?” (overemphasis mine of course). It’s now and the next so many years, not some far off future that (I interpret) folks seem to be worrying about. It’s income stability now, careers to go into now, disinformation now, degradation of the internet and media now. I think the zeitgeist here is that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. I don’t think anyone on Lemmy really has high hopes for major players in current economic systems to use AI-as-it-exists-now to make anything better of the world in aggregate. It ain’t the tools, it’s those who wield them.

hypothetically cool, and very hypothetically legal

that’s a no on the cruciform for me, dawg. Yeesh. I’ll take everything else from there though, Poulsen, hawking drive, farcasters (maybe without the yoke of the AI techno core though), etc.

Is that not a compressed stream though? Genuinely asking. A 4k blu ray rip and a 4k stream from a service (or whatever it saves for offline viewing on an app) a pretty different. I think things are getting conflated with capturing live 4k television and capturing a 4k blu ray as it plays, which both might be using an HDMI cable.

How about some consent and payment for my info? Swingy peephole cover thing over the camera. Offer a discount if the machine can take a picture of you. Oh that’s right, it’s only worth something when you amass a ton of the data. 0.004 cents off isn’t that appealing is it?

It’s not just what sells, but who buys what. “Demographic X buys this one product more than others so how can we advertise this product to them where they will see it?” Growth is their “valid” reason, you know, like malignant cancer cells.

Absurdity indeed!

Like a kid with a restriction. 1 minute to comply or an hour to figure out how to technically comply but get around it.

… But it was the organizers self censoring their entrants based on just the idea that the Chinese govt would take interest in/offense to some of the stories from what I can read. Haven’t seen any reporting suggesting the Chinese govt was actually involved at all. My thought is, why would the organizers hold the event in China if it was going to cause them to act the fool like this?