BlueMonday1984

I’m confident Durov was arrested because the platform he was responsible for is a hotbed of illegal activity, most of which is not under the cover of encryption.

That was Durov's biggest mistake in retrospect. Man should've taken some lessons from Megaupload's demise and gone all the way on E2E - would've given him plenty of plausible deniability if he genuinely couldn't have known what any of his users were doing.

It would've arguably brought other problems, but it would've removed that golden opportunity for the gendarmes to nail him.

Would've likely also earned Durov some brownie points with privacy nuts, as well.

Probably several millions, give or take a few dozen.

YouTube rolled out a new dogshit AI feature and it near-immediately accused someone of being the meme behind the slaughter:

Ah, hell yeah, the much-anticipated finale.

Gonna give particular praise to the opening, because this really caught my eye:

Tech culture often denigrates humans through its assumptions that human skills, knowledge and functions can be improved through their replacement by technological replacements, and through transhumanist narratives that rely on a framing of human consciousness as fundamentally computational.

I've touched on the framing of human consciousness part myself - seems we may be on the same wavelength.

As for the whole "replacement by technological replacements" part...well, we've all seen the AI art slop-nami, its crystal fucking clear what you're referring to.

You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists?

No, but I'd say its a good sign we're getting close to an AI winter

What can I say - I saw solid ammo for some machine-gun flow, and gave it a good throw.

(Special thanks to Rhymezone - I wouldn't have pulled off this rhythmic magdump without it)

This is pure speculation, but this "autonomous AI" hype is probably only further souring the public's opinion on a thoroughly soured concept.

They've already seen AIs royally fuck things up left, right and centre, anything which suggests AI bros are gonna try to magnify their ability to fuck things up is only gonna piss them off.

Part of me suspects there's plenty of those kinda kits out there. The appeal's pretty obvious - just pop the fucker onto any random dumb ordnance you've got laying about, and boom, instant smart bomb.

Etsy: an artistic one-stop chop shop where slop pops up like catch crops - and that quick shot's no hatchet-job, so keep it from pops 'fore it leaves him in a strop:

(Full disclosure: the opportunity for some quickfire rhymes may have played a role in birthing this sneer.)

Not a sneer, but a deeply cursed dream from a friend:

In other news, https://creative.ai/ was put up for purchase because the original owner considers AI's reputation a lost cause.

(In other other news, its my 24th birthday.)

Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably won't be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:

• All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they aren't having their own unique dumpster fires)

• AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order

• Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now