Hosted – so from a company perspective, still Cloud. Still subject to similar potential risks.

Non profits likely can’t afford a team of tech workers to maintain opensource infrastructure. Avg tech worker salary in the states is $100k, you’d need two or three staff for coverage/to avoid key-person risks, so you’re looking at $200-300k to retain internal teams to use opensource tech, in salaries alone. Opensource doesn’t mean ‘free’ too, as many businesses will generally require some sort of support/enterprise agreement for risk management/audit reasons – so they’ll pay lic fees on top of the salaries.

The technology supports the business, but it isn’t the business – sorta like a pizza shop may need a brochure-website to advertise their services/take orders, but their actual business is pizza. Someone who’s specialising in pizzas, shouldn’t need to learn how to maintain an opensource server stack. If you get a ‘golden goose’ staff member, who’s some university student genius that loves pizza and will happily maintain opensource infrastructure on the side, then your business is totally fucked if that person leaves because finding a replacement with similar skills is nearly impossible / very expensive.

They can outsource it to a third party, as most businesses do. And then that third party goes through the same general calcs, and settles on big box tech solutions for similar reasons.

I don’t think its as clear cut as you seem to imply.

Can’t Locate Our User Data. Cloud.

Not sure how that matters specifically. Boomers are just now approaching 80 – 80 year olds today, are still part of “The Silent Generation” which came before the boomers.

Boomers are 1946-1964, so they’re 62 - 80. They likely won’t start encountering mobility issues until their mid 70s/early 80s if they’ve remained “reasonably” active and healthy. So, I don’t think my comment’s out of line in that sense. The earliest of the boomers are approaching that age / have reached that age – and now we’re seeing more products/solutions brought forward to assist, just in time for the rest of the boomer cohort to buy it / use it.

Further, the wealth disparity between the older generation and the younger is significant, and worth highlighting. My retired parent earns more money than I do per year. Here in Canada, their stocks, retirement investments, and govt pension plans earn them more annual income than I earn from working full time in a relatively decent job in the private sector – well above the national averages in both cases. My parents weren’t particularly wealthy growing up, just regular middle class. I have no particular reason to think my parent’s situation unique, but rather to think it more the norm for that age range, especially as all their peers are in seemingly similar situations (if they’re still alive, admittedly).

The media focuses on stories of old people who are destitute and need help for social services narratives. But remember, Trump’s 80. Bill Gates is 70. A ton of senators, judges, and so on are WELL past the age you’d think they’d retire, and they’re still earning like 100s of thousands/millions of dollars per year. The Kochs in the states are well into their 80s, still throwing hundreds of millions at politicians to control how the country’s run. In Canada, this demographic also contains the ‘snow birds’, a large enough demographic slice to have its own colloquial nickname, they’re the people who have vacation homes in florida that they go to for months out of the year because… they’re so economically strapped! They can only afford their regular home, their vacation home in florida, and a cabin for weekend get-aways! How will they ever afford something like a mobility device! Oh, wait, you’re right, they can drag out the same old narrative to push the cost onto younger generations! They’re too house-poor to afford it, so they’ll get the government/insurance programs to cover the cost!

Being old doesn’t mean you’re poor and hard done by, except when the government wants tax payers to pay more to senior care programs, at which point they churn out the marketing message that all old people need to be protected. Are there old people who are poor and destitute? Yes. But it’d be absurd to type cast them as such.

Mobility type tech will likely see a boom in the next few years, is my guess. Same with any other tech that helps/benefits the Boomer generation as they enter retirement/old age.

Tons of business trends and even political trends have followed the boomers life cycles due to the disproportionate chunk of the market they represent. Eg. When boomers were in their late teens/early twenties, it was the 1960s, and it was all psychedelics, free-er sexuality stuff, peace and love. As they got older and started having children, suddenly it shifted to “protect the kids from drugs, lets declare war on our old pass-times!” while also having an undercurrent of cocaine for big business career sorts. As they’ve gotten older, more programs and initiatives have focused increasingly on seniors and senior supports.

Mobility tech like this, is following the same trend.

I can just imagine the public obituaries including peoples steam gamer tags in order to meet this requirement. Rest in peace 69TIGOLBITTIESLOVER69.

And/or the outrage as Steam starts doing Know-Your-Customer compliance things, requesting gamers submit ID so that the public obituaries can be matched to their accounts.

An outlier case, which doesn’t justify changing the setup and introducing even bigger issues/abuses to solve.

If accounts allowed transfers, I’d personally have no issue with doing something like:

• Have my own personal “main” steam account
• Use secondary accounts to buy games
• Transfer any game I want to play longer term / figure I’ll revisit over to my main account; sell the secondary account on Facebook Marketplace/similar sites to recoop funds for myself on a quarterly/annual basis (removing that potential revenue from steam)

That sort of abuse would be far more common, than the outlier case you’ve listed for a young parent passing down games to a kid that’s fairly close in age.

eh, idk, I think people worrying about passing down their antique game collections to the younger generation are sorta like all the old people thinking their kids are gonna want their stamp collections or old timey ‘country rose’ antique dish sets. Even worse, because it’s not like you can even re-sell those games to make a tiny profit at a flea market or whatever.

The US dollars dominance is largely tied to deals made with places like saudi arabia, which basically make oil trades settle in USD, as far as I’ve heard at least.

I’m surprised Trump hasn’t forced the Trump Cryptocoin to replace it for international settlements. Maybe that’s a year three fiasco that they’ve got waiting on the sidelines. The US’s push for approved ‘stablecoins’ to enter markets is basically along the same lines, pushing for a thinly veiled “independent” virtual currency to become the default, while still maintaining control over it in the USA.

I’d guess that GCP, AWS, Azure have infrastructure in Australia and many other western nations, and the AI companies would use that as a proxy.

You could potentially block those IP ranges. But then you’re also likely going to be blocking Windows updates, and basic Windows functionality. So you’d first have had to, idk, focus on sovereign tech chains / OS’s. Not to mention, the Aus government is likely hosted inside the sane cloud ecosystems that AI companies are using to launch their attacks from.

Oh, I’m not saying to shorten it or clean it up. Have them read the whole thing, word for word, as best they can.

I think it was in his first term, for example, when foreign news translators were getting in trouble constantly for translating what he said directly – his drivel was such nonsense that people just couldn’t believe it, it all sounded so stupid. And without Trumps cadence, the stupidity stands out even more. If you add on to that an actor that’s the “wrong color” for Trumps pride, and make them stumble over his nonsense word choices, with the occasional “woops I’m shitting myself midspeech” facial expression thrown in for good measure…

I mean, I’d be laughing pretty hard. And I’m sure Trump, if he saw that on multiple stations, would go totally off the deep end. It’s petty, and low brow, so I’m pretty sure he’d be able to understand it.

If I lived in an apartment that had rats in my unit, and I was too lethargic / apathetic to deal with it – and then those rats started infesting / destroying all the other apartment units in the building – it’d be my fault shits getting rat’d, and there’s no amount of “nah, not my fault, I didn’t elect the rodents, I didn’t formally invite them in, I didn’t even bother to get out of bed” that would realistically make my neighbours go “oh, ok then, continue on with your rat infested shit hole lifestyle”.

They’d rightly find ways to fine the fuck out of me / kick me out of the building.

America has a whole lot of very wealthy people, people who claim to be progressives and to care about things like human rights – who basically lied/didn’t really care about those topics, and preferred to just kick back on things like luxury yachts while preaching on about how no one takes climate change seriously. But even more, America IS a democratic system. In other regions of the world, where people live under dictatorships, like in Iran, North Korea, parts of China, Russia, etc – you can make a fairly clear differentiation between their “people” and their “government”. The reason for that is that the people don’t have a “representative” democracy/government, where they’ve gotten a chance to vote for who runs the country. Americans DID have that choice, and opted for Trump - be it through apathy or idiocy. They collectively decided, through a representative democratic process, to have a convicted fraudster, rapist, and alleged child molester, diaper shitting orange octagenarian be their representative / leader. Twice.

It’d be hilarious if CNN and other news agencies did something that’d totally skewer and enrage the president in response to his bullshit: stop showing live footage / coverage of Trump, and instead just have either News anchors attempting to read his quotes word for word, or have something like a black lesbian actor portray Trump recreating his word soup speeches. Or maybe have it be cartoony animated re-enactments, similar to what we sometimes see come out of Asia. “Subtlety” emphasize things like his sleeping, shitting himself, hair issues, simp’ing for Harp, etc.

A narcissist, having his public appearance clipped.

Or maybe just officially partner with SNL to do skits for presidential news coverage. America’s a fuckin joke these days anyhow, may aswell embrace it.

It’s what the Trump’s want to see too, families tend to have similar values – and Jr just married a Russian plant from Putin’s circle, wedding paid for by her dear russian oligarch buddy. It’s also what the majority of Americans want to see, based on how they voted.

The city likely provided the same funding for marketing / outreach as was provided to all the other people who got that contract – and those other places generally performed a lot better than talkspace. If the one variable that changes is the third party contractor, it’s difficult to see how it’s the city’s fault on that front, other than buying in to talkspace’s claims that virtual therapy was a thing kids were clamoring for.

And outrage is still a weird bar to me. Not all news needs to generate outrage. It can be a mundane groan of “ffs, the city’s wasting a bunch of tax payer dollars again on a third party partner that already failed to deliver results… maybe we should vote in new people next time around”.

*edit to note: from a ‘technology’ perspective, it’s also a somewhat interesting article, as it highlights the disconnect between some tech company claims, and reality. Especially in regards to the tech companies claims, and the reality of what the intended users actually want/need.

Well, hopefully you have more emotional options than “confused” and “outraged”, and can manage something sorta in between, or off on a tangent from either of those?

I think the main point the article is highlighting, is that there was a gross miss-spend by the city on this service, based on the data that came out about it. The city bought the company’s marketing pitch that students didn’t want in person services, and that students would greatly prefer to get therapy online / virtually. Data came out showing that to be very inaccurate, and interviews with actual students highlight the point – might’ve been an idea to ask them before hand, but whatever. The more “Eh???” point that the article raises, albeit buried near the end, is that even after such a horribly wasteful investment, the govt is doubling down with this company and offering them more money/contracts.

Like change some company names / products to simplify it – the government paid $1m to a private company to supply burgers to students, believing the company’s claim that thousands of students would eat their burgers. Almost no students went for the burgers, and the few that did generally said the burgers sucked balls. As a result, the government is now giving that same company another pile of money to provide burgers to everyone else, because the company claimed that everyone else will eat their burgers.

Meh, I was having an argument with a coworker recently about AI’s evils, and all the doomsayers and apoca-hype profiteering that the big AI companies do. I think this article lays out more plainly what the risks of AI are in terms of ending the human race, than any of the claude-cult stock pumpers that come forward.

It won’t be some AGI super intelligence that ascends and then does away with humanity. It’ll be some random military sorts who get a prompt, and trigger a huge conflict / disaster based on bullshit fed to them from an AI. The AI won’t even do it ‘intentionally’, it’ll just be a convincing enough marionette’s lie, fed to a low enough IQ, to open fire.

sloppy.

The US doesn’t care, and the rest of the world is unable to hold them accountable, which is also why the US doesn’t care.

Trump literally joked about committing war crimes in Venezuela in his first state of the union speech this time around. A room full of American politicians laughed alongside him. A few democrats wrote an angry letter.

It isn’t until the very end of the article that they even bother to discuss the obvious approach to the fee on transactions – a flat rate fee. Like I know some of the flat rate fees in Canada are around $0.04 per transaction – no matter the dollar value of the transaction. Which is a huge profit margin, really, for banks – cause they’ll charge people like $3 if you’re not their customer at an ATM, even though your withdrawal only costs them $0.04-$0.10 in network fees.