No, this is different. They’re not saying “we’re allowed to,” they’re saying “we didn’t do it”:

In no circumstance did the test affect the standard functionality of the device nor did it limit access to its main features. The users could and can continue to normally use all HDMI inputs, external devices, consoles, subscription streaming apps, or standard broadcasts without any type of interruption or obligation to watch advertisements.

Which is totally believable. /s

I fundamentally disagree with both your premise and your example’s conclusion. I’m not saying that it can be justified, though; just that it must be contextualized differently. To wit: it would be right for you to criticize them even if you are being hypocritical. You have far fewer resources to dispose of that oil. Your business model is not predicated upon handling oil well. You are not enriching yourself at the cost of others. And yes, there may be others doing it as well, but the combined impact of every individual doing it is almost certainly a tiny fraction of the company doing it.

It’s not really beside the point, from most reasonable perspectives. A multi-billion-dollar company enriching itself on the backs of starving authors so that it can go on enriching itself on the backs of its users is significantly different from a small number of comparatively destitute individuals stealing some temporary enjoyment for themselves. They are both wrong, but the discussion is utterly useless if you don’t talk about the harm involved and who benefits.

There’s a pretty big difference in scale, and the perpetrator, and whether or not they’re benefiting monetarily, and much more.

I do almost all of those things organically and I hate that people are trying to reduce AI detection to stuff like this.

The real dead giveaways for AI are unmotivated choices.

Games already have this. There’s almost always a difficulty setting, and one of those settings in newer games is often “story only.” You make decisions, but your character executes the fast-twitch stuff itself.

Direction is all relative, my friend. There is no objective up or down or left or right or north or south or east or west. The best we ever have is landmarks and pointing.

On Earth, that’s pretty easy. We have some pretty stable landmarks: up is away from the gravity. North is toward the pole that’s closer to more people. East is toward the way the sun comes up.

We can also get some directions from figuring out one we already know and going the opposite way. Down is not-up. South is not-North. West is not-East.

Being able to see one another, to know which way we’re pointing, gives us more options. Left is that way, right is that way.

You’ve been given all that for free every day of your life (assuming you’re a human who has never spent any appreciable amount of time in space). You were probably taught about North and South and East and West in elementary school. You probably got left and right from your parents. Up and down is hard wired into your senses.

But in space, all of those landmarks are gone. You don’t have any gravity to define up and down, you don’t have any poles to define north and south, you don’t have a sun rising to define east and west. So as a species we’ll have to decide on new ones!

It’s useful to use the sun as our point of reference, since it’s pretty stable for our purposes. A lot of scientific discussion uses the ecliptic as a handy way to define a similar idea as the equator. The ecliptic is the plane that most orbiting bodies move along as they orbit the sun (think “eclipse”–planets and moons and stars will eclipse one another on this plane), and while it’s not exact it is close enough to be helpful. “Above the ecliptic,” then, is more or less analogous to “North,” with “below the ecliptic” being analogous to “South.” And actually, since Earth never changes its orientation to the ecliptic, “above the ecliptic” is also pretty close to Earth North and “below the ecliptic” is pretty close to Earth South. We also use the Earth’s March equinox as the zero point in this system; the “prime meridian,” you might say.

Since almost everything we do is Earth-based, this is usually good enough. All of our telescopes are in the Solar System, all of our spacecraft are in or near it, any navigation we’re going to do will be based on it. But if we’re talking to aliens who have never been here, how are we going to explain it to them? How could we direct a friendly extraterrestrial to our solar system in the first place?

Now things get tricky. There are some shortcuts; the Galaxy has an ecliptic, too (called the “galactic plane”). There are terms like “spinward” and “coreward” that we can use. There are also some steady landmarks that we can point to: specifically pulsars, pulsing black holes that blink in easy-to-measure patterns. Those are visible from pretty much anywhere in the observable universe, so anyone we’re talking to can probably see them. Defining our location by how far away we are from a few of those pulsars could work; kind of like saying, “yeah, I live halfway between Orlando and Cocoa Beach.” But as far as anyone outside the government knows, we’ve never tried to do that.

But in general, you just sort of figure it out based on your use case and the landmarks that are handy to you!

Maybe so, but there’s no profit motive for tech companies to aid users with piracy. There is one to continue providing general computing to users. So if we were able to win in the former, the latter should be a cake walk.

Well…I dunno. I don’t think you’re crazy or anything, I’m sure there are some who absolutely do want to do that. But they’ve been trying to get rid of digital piracy for thirty years and haven’t made any headway, so I’m dubious about how well that would work.

You mean, like…rounding up every computer and burning them?

I really don’t know what you mean by this.

including Linux

How would they enforce that on an open-source platform?

Ahh, there’s that spineless worm I’ve come to expect.

As a Hoosier, this is honestly mind-blowing to me. I had to read the list twice.

Solid choice.

To be clear, I do think they should make noise, yes please. Totally agreed. When they’re moving slowly enough that people can get out of the way (and the tire noise is a little less significant), they should be making an artificial sound.

Also, Space Invaders sounds would be an amazing choice; along the same lines, the Pac-Man “wakka-wakka-wakka” would be awesome, especially if you have a yellow car. Come to think of it, the Fozzie Bear “wokka wokka!” would be hilarious, too.

I just think allowing people to choose a sound that’s automatically blasted at loud volume from their car at any given time is something we’ve already had a lot of experience with, given that stereo systems have been standard on cars for decades now; and we can be certain that people can’t be trusted with it–especially when they themselves can’t hear it. There are absolutely people who will use that power to broadcast ads, or their own recorded voice shouting obscenities, or a high-pitched screech sound that harms people’s hearing.

Or, even worse, they’ll change the sound to silence or something super quiet. Maybe to be malicious, but probably more so just because they find it annoying in some niche situation (like in their garage or whatever).

Allowing people to choose from a certain subset of options, or having some sort of onboard algorithm try to detect whether the sound is an appropriate volume (and replacing it with a substitute if needed) might be a good compromise.

I want to be able to choose my own noise (being fully aware why that is a bad idea more broadly). Can you imagine driving through the grocery store parking lot making a TIE fighter sound?

I’ve always said I’ll listen to music more when I get through my podcast backlog and audiobook backlog. Neither of those seem particularly…imminent, lol.

Well, I stand corrected. Even less reason to not switch to Graphene.

Interesting. Thanks for letting me know.

I think of myself as a data hog also, but only on my computer; I’m mostly a minimalist on my phone.

I can’t accept the fact that there is no external sd card support.

OK, this is going to sound dismissive, and I really don’t mean it to be. But why?

For data transfer, you can still use the USB port (I do it all the time). Other than that, there’s more than enough storage available onboard for any reasonable amount of usage. I don’t even really keep anything critical on my device at all, so what there is is kind of overkill already.

I just don’t understand the need for an SD card with storage being as plentiful now as it is. I want to understand.