I would say probably more likely to be a personal AI assistant, that handles all PC/cell phone interactions for you. Like Star Trek: “Computer, do my taxes!”

Of course that relies heavily on AI becoming more reliable then it is now.

No one wants an AI summery of their e-mails if it’s full of hallucinations, or their tax returns to get them into prison.

I normally have GPS and Bluetooth disabled, so my position would have to be guessed based on cell towers. We were not even on the same WLAN (because the WLAN was down in the vacation home, much to our dissatisfaction).

While I can’t rule out somebody in our group stealthily googling the tablets, phones while playing is generally frowned upon.

So yeah, being on the same cell tower as someone I know who might have searched for it might be the only other explanation.

The adventure itself didn’t have anything to do with the tablets, that was just our group doing strange stuff, like always.

No, I am not a AI fanboy. I just compared bad to worse.

Of course users get something from their smartphones, but not from the spyware on it. The spyware is not an integral function of a smartphone.

Just think about the scale of the surveillance: every smartphone user is being monitored 24/7 in hope to find something to sell them.

If you hate AI because it wastes so much energy, think about the cost for the this: Energy, water, battery life, bandwidth, … And in contrast to AI the ‘users’ don’t get anything in return.

Okay, so here is my story:

I was on holiday with my friends and we were playing a TTRPG. In the RPG our group needed charol tablets. I have never in my life googled or needed something like that.

After the session, I opened up Amazon to buy something I forget to pack and voilà: Amazon suggested me to buy charol tablets.

My smartphone must have listened in and given that data to Amazon.

No Alexa or similar products were in the vacation home.

Same in Germany: The center right CDU tries to get voters from the far right AFD. Never worked, but they keep on trying.

The German government is deathly afraid of anything that could be constructed as anti-semitic. Probably also bought, but that’s just a guess. Pathetic, and I say that as a German.

It’s worse: every time a country tries an alternative system, the US pushes for a regime change

Oh, this is great.

Users noticed that Google had too much bad results because of SEO and spam flooded search results.

Users added “reddit” to their search terms, so they get results from reddit, where spam and astroturfing were… there but manageable.

Now the SEO people and advertisers target reddit with AI tools, until it is so enshitificated that we have to find something else (rinse and repeat)

“No, don’t leave, we just finished saturating the space with ads!”

“Why do you think we leave?”

I have a similar theory about star trek. In one scene there was a blurry picture and to sharpen it Ricker said: “Computer implement recursive Algorithm”. That is equivalent to “Computer do something”. So now my theory is that there is an intelligent ship with a genius AI that carries around humans that have regressed to toddler intelligence because the AI does everything for them.

The ship is basically human daycare with lots of blinking buttons and moving pictures to keep the humans occupied while the ship does the actual (and probably boring) science.

Starfleet Academy is basically teaching them technobabble and looking great in a uniform while the AIs do the real work.

These AI PCs/Notebooks aren’t even able to run the really big models. For those you’d need a 5000$ card. And for the smaller models a good graphics card is often enough.

For a real AI PC we would need new technology or graphics cards with more ram (the last one would suprise me with current ram prices)

There is evil and then there is comic book evil. I guess they go for both.

Legally? Sure, but Russia is also known to kill people outside of Russia too. Although it’s probably not important enough to send agents.

There are two bubbles. One is the bubble made by every company under the sun trying to shove AI into their product without any sense of why or how. And wallstreet is buying it up.

Then there is the second bubble. That is the big AI players trying to get AI ready to replace large parts of the workforce. It’s still unclear if that is possible with our current techniques or if we need a scientific breakthrough that might be years or decades away. Still, the tech companies spend money as if that is just around the corner.

Who knowes if these bubbles burst at the same time?

And don’t be suprised if a lot of packages contain less than last year

He didn’t use an IDE, but I don’t remember what he tried. He also wasn’t a fan of googling stuff. Use the man pages and nothing else.

Here is my story:

There were console outputs after nearly every line. I asked about them: “Oh, I couldn’t get the debugger to work, so I print everything to the console”

This was everywhere. The whole program was like this. On a standard Linux machine. It wasn’t even remote debugging or something. Just a local C++ program.

The filenames where written in 8+3. Again, on a modern Linux machine. His answer? “You never know where we’ll port this software to”

Onto computers that were outdated decades ago? To embedded systems? Of course he had no answer for this except “just in case…”

I could tell you more, that software was the stuff for nightmares.

Is it okay to discuss this publicly? As funny as it I’d, I really don’t want Russia to get informed.

Ah yes! One step closer to servitors. Praise the Omnissiah!

It’s not that expensive if you use them as slave labor and ignore their human rights… Well, still expensive for the tax payers, but who cares for those peasants? /s