slightwinder

> That's why I don't understand why there isn't a more aggressive response to flying drones illegally near airports. IMO they should just be shot down.

This isn't allowed in most countries, so they usually also have no equipment for this. Some countries seem to have changed the laws recently for this case and building up on defence more openly now. Which also leaves space for speculations if this wasn't maybe also sometimes a false-flag-operation.

> Actually some years they were very proudly showing birds of prey that they had trained to do just that. Whatever happened to that?

They are trained for small slow commercial drones, those which are around the same size as the bird, or smaller. Military long-range-drones are usually a bit bigger and faster, meaning the bird could probably for simply reason of physic not doing much.

This probably is also a main problem here, that most drone-defences in the last years were developed against private actors, not military threats.

> but now there's drones out there they can fly into planes or that can drop bombs they're doing... what? Mentioning it in the news?

It's never been a real threat so far, so nobody really was working on it seriously. There is an endless amount of theoretical threats, you can't protect everything against all of them, you have to go case by case. But reacting takes time. This is going for just some months(?), and still not even a real threat, as nobody knows anything for real (as far as we know). But many things seem happening in secret, outside the public view.

> Yes, and we have plenty of infrastructure to destroy. It's a target rich environment.

Yes, but how is that relevant? Everything is always open for terror. Russia itself is not safe either. Or are you assuming Russia is out for pure blind destruction? Degrading themselves to become lousy terrorists? Just spreading destruction for no reason?

I would assume they at least will have some aim and reasoning behind their targets, which would mean they will come with soldiers and tanks, and conquer land, or destroy the highest profile-targets. In the first case, they will have very limited resources to spare for attacks on middle European targets. For the second case, you only need to focus your defence on those targets.

> I've seen zero indication that this is true.

May you are following the wrong sources? Building up drones-defence is in progress for a while now. Whether it's going well is a different story, but I would assume that they will not talk very openly about those things for obvious reasons.

> Western Europe still thinks that if a war breaks out, it'll be tanks and soldiers going into the Baltic states, and we'll crush them with our advanced arsenal.

Drones are not for conquering, but destruction. We see this in Ukraine now, where Drones are not making the whole war, but are just one gear of the machinery. And Western leaders know this, they are preparing Drones, but refitting the western machinery takes time. Probably one reason why they seem busy to bind Russia in Ukraine.

Yes, this site reads like it's written by someone not enjoying games and understanding the concept of gaming. There is nothing dark about most of these concepts individually. The harm comes from combination and/or excessive usage. The dose makes the poison.

Though, learning them and being aware of them is not bad. But I'm curious how much the phrasing pushes the mindset of the readers in the wrong direction.

> The problem is more one of scale:

I think the source is the bigger problem. If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. There probably wouldn't be any complaints if they would use sewerage or saltwater from the ocean.

> Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool

Cooling and returning the water is not always that simple. I don't know specifically about datacentres, but I know about wasting clean water in other areas, cooling in power plants, industry, etc. and there it can have a significant impact on the cycle. At the end it's a resource which is used at least temporary, which has impact on the whole system.

> Does anyone want AI in anything?

Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time.

Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.

> but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule.

People are critical of farmland and golf courses, too. But Farmland at least has more benefit for society, so they are more vocal on how it's used.

Everyone is biased by definition. Knowing in which direction someone drifts and how strong they move supports your media literacy.

Similar problem with "Deutsche Bahn" in Germany. Probably also the reason why this German political NGO is writing this article. Are there any other countries with similar problems or history in their public transportation-systems?

> I don't think it's entirely the case. They are on franchises, but not the ones you think of

I didn't name any franchise. I only mentioned Battlefield to compare it with the mentioned Duck-Game, as they are both on Steam where everyone can see the numbers. I mean if we are talking about the real big numbers, then we would be with Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, LoL, which are all not on Steam; making number-checking a tad harder.

> Games like Battlefield are up there, but I don't think they're the games people mainly play over the years.

As a Franchise it seems moving Fifa, very popular, but also seasonal peaks. Each new version shoves in players for a while, until they are satisfied again. Though, I don't really play them, so it's just external observation.

> That's a lot of guesswork

It's not guesswork, it's reading the statistics. Gaming Reports are regularly showing that the majority of gamers and income is with only a handful of games/franchises.

> You can actually see gaming distribution on open steamdb[1] stats and every year the amount of games avg player plays grows higher and higher.

Yes, because the market grows. But look at the numbers, the top is always with the same games, with the same numbers, which are usually in a complete different league then the rest. The Top 5 Games have usually 10-20 times as many players as every other games. And, be aware that this is only Steam. The gaming market is much, much bigger than just steam. Steam is kinda its own bubble with a skewed view.

I'm not saying steam or indie-market is small, but people looking at PC and Indie-games develop a kind of natural filter for the real behemoths of the market.

> A linux native game called Banana got almost a million concurrent player peak

We have at the moment >3 Billion Players. 1 Million gamers for a shady shortlived hype-game is not bad, but it's not even remotely winning the market, or setting a trend. At best, it's setting a trend in a specific niche. Valve wiped out billions of value in CS-Skins some week ago. That's more market-influence than a free game with shady skin-business will ever gain.

That's a misconception. Majority of players are with the big Franchises, and they stay with them. The variety-gamers who are playing multiple different games are a minority, though they are a big crowd, loud and have for obvious reasons more attention, leading to this misconception. For example, Escape from Duckov, which you are speaking about, had at it's peak "just" roughly as many players as Battlefield 6 has on average every day. And Battlefield is the smaller one of the big games.

That not really a surprise, the website and documentation is awful, not really selling the project well. I also get the impression there is not really customization possible, no integration of external stuff, just a monolithic blob, doing something. This kind of software can't succeed easily without an open architecture, or a proper selling documentation of how to utilize it for your own demand.

Kinda sad, as this looks interesting.

> By living in a bubble, she became less knowledgeable on common matters that an average citizen

I would trust an average citizen in those matters even less. We are not talking here about the daily egg-prices or which is the hottest celebrity at the moment. That woman is the leader of the executive branch of a Pan-National Organization. This is by definition a job with problems, which are very far away from the daily dread of the average citizen.

> The proof at hand is the story of her landing in Plovdiv.

What are you talking about? Pretty sure she is not flying here own plane, nor making the technical decision when it lands. Whatever happened there, has no relation to whichever abilities she might have or is lacking.

> Ursula is basically a lobbyist without much expertise in anything.

She doesn't need to have any expertise, nobody can have deep expertise on everything. It's basically a politician job to have no clue and find reliable sources for an educated decision. And this usually fails hard on bleeding edge topics, because not many have an educated opinion at that point.

But as a side note, she did study something medical, so she does have some deeper expertise outside the political area.

> I think the whole EU should be reformed.

No reform can fix this problem. And always calling for reforms because of some detail not working how you want it is harmful.

What if this is the plan all along? People losing trust in media, so the rich and powerful can continue doing shit without getting exposed any more, because now they always can say it's just AI, and didn't really do this or that?

Decisions are not fixed. Changing the situation, could revert the decision. Why should someone silently accept a situation, when simple communication could improve the world for everyone involved? That seems like a very ignorant mindset.

> I mean, that question is already well answered within the first (opening) comment of marsf,

No, it's not. Half of the listed reasons are obvious enough, but the half is very vague. I don't know if they are something you would understand as an insider, but as an outsider there would be many open questions if it would be my task to make this work.

The whole communication seems like people on one or both sides lacking information, and one trying to fix this to start the process for solving the other sides' problem. Nothing wrong with this in a professional environment.

Would it be possible to move it to an add-on for those who still want it? Are WebExtensions supporting third-party-libs?

Humans first start with recognizing the problem, then search through their list of abilities to find the best skill for solving it, thus "autocomplete" their inner shell's commandline, before they start execution, to stay with that picture. Common AIs today are not much different from this, especially with reasoning-modes.

> you're not throwing guesses until something statistically likely to be correct sticks.

What do you mean? That's exactly how many humans are operating with unknown situations/topics. If you don't know, just throw punches and look what works. Of course, not everyone is ignorant enough to be vocal about this in every situation.

> understanding in a reasoning sense means classifying the thing and developing a deterministic algorithm to process it.

That's the learning-part I was talking about. Which is mainly supported by humans at the moment, which why I called it proto-intelligence.

> If you don't have a deterministic algorithm to process it, it isn't understanding.

Commercial AIs like ChatGPT do have the ability to call programs and integrate the result in their processing. Those AIs are not really just LLMs. The results are still rough and poor, but the concept is there and growing.

Turtles are old-school, farming is the new cool. Is there a dating-option? Just asking as a Stardew Valley-friend..

OK, jokes aside. I've started playing this, when 1.0 was released some weeks ago, and this is quite good for what it is. It's doing many things the right way, like allowing coding with an external editor, having a proper coding-experience even with the built-in tools, and collectable hats.

Everyone should buy this and learn the basics. It's cheap enough for most people.

Similar, not identical. Like a bicycle and car are both vehicles with tires, but are still not identical vessels.

True, modern Photocopiers are not really Photocopiers any more and just a pc with scanner and printer. Those could be described as "thinking", in the same sense as any computer is thinking. But from my understanding, the original comment was explicitly about a pure copy-device, without any "brain" involved.

I'd say, they are all doing the same, just in different domains and level of quality. "Understanding the topic" only means they have specialized, deeper contextualized information. But at the end, that student also just autocompletes their memorized data, with the exception that some of that knowledge might trigger a program they execute to insert the result in their completion.

The actual work is in gaining the knowledge and programs, not in accessing and executing them. And how they operate, on which data, variables, objects, worldview or whatever you call it, this might make a difference in quality and building speed, but not for the process in general.

No, because it is not intentional.

Emotions and suffering are "just" necessary feedback for the system to evaluate it's internal and external situation. It's similar to how modern machines have sensors. But nobody would say a PC is suffering and enslaved, just because the CPU is too hot or the storage is full.

It's probably the sentience-part which makes it harmful for the mind.

> It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with.

Neither can humans. We also just brute force "autocompletion" with our learned knowledge and combine it to new parts, which we then add to our learned knowledge to deepen the process. We are just much, much better at this than AI, after some decades of training.

And I'm not saying that AI is fully there yet and has solved "thinking". IMHO it's more "pre-thinking" or proto-intelligence.. The picture is there, but the dots are not merging yet to form the real picture.

> It does not actually add 1+2 when you ask it to do so. it does not distinguish 1 from 2 as discrete units in an addition operation.

Neither can a toddler nor an animal. The level of ability is irrelevant for evaluating its foundation.

Photocopiers are the opposite of thinking. What goes in, goes out, no transformation or creating of new data at all. Any change is just an accident, or an artifact of the technical process.

There could be errors happening outside their control. Planes are sometimes rerouted to different countries for different reasons, but mainly weather-related. I've heard stories of travel agencies f**ing up travel planes because of wrong data, and people suing them because of unexcepted stops. Or the good old "they planned for Australia, but ended in Austria"-story. Happens far too often.. There are many targets where people confuse a city or country with a different target.