Gotcha. Apologies.

algos / AI has already been used to justify racial discrimination in some counties who use predictive policing software to adjust the sentences of convicts (the software takes in a range of facts about the suspect and the incident and compares it to how prior incidents and suspects were similar features were adjudicated) and wouldn't you know it, it simply highlighted and exaggerated the prejudices of police and the courts to absurdity, giving whites absurdly lighter sentences than nonwhites, for example. This is essentially mind control or coercion technology based on the KGB technology of компромат (Kompromat, or compromising information, or as CIA calls it biographical leverage, ) essentially, information about a person that can be used either to jeopardize their life, blackmail material or means to lure and bribe them. Take this from tradecraft and apply it to marketing or civil control, and you get things like the Social Credit System in China to keep people from misbehaving, engaging in discontent and coming out of the closet (LGBTQ+ but there are plenty of other applicable closets). From a futurist perspective, we homo-sapiens appear just incapable of noping out of a technology or process, no matter how morally black or heinous that technology is, we'll use it, especially those with wealth and power to evade legal prosecution (or civil persecution). It breaks down into three categories: Technologies we use anyway, and suffer, e.g. usury, bonded servitude, mass-media propaganda distribution Technologies we collectively decide are just not worth the consequences, e.g. the hydrogen bomb, biochemical warfare Technologies for which we create countermeasures, usually turning into a tech race between states or between the public and the state, e.g. secure communication, secure data encryption, forbidden data distribution / censorship We're clearly on the cusp of mind control and weaponizing data harvesting into a coercion mechanism. Currently we're already seeing it used to establish and defend specific power structures that are antithetical to the public good. It's currently in the first category, and hopefully it'll fall into the third, because we have to make a mess (e.g. Castle Bravo / Bikini Atol) and clean it up before deciding not to do that again. Also, with the rise of the internet, we've run out of myths that justify capitalism, which is bonded servitude with extra steps. So we may soon (within centuries) see that go into one of the latter two categories, since the US is currently experiencing the endgame consequences of forcing labor, and the rest of the industrialized world is having to bulwark from the blast.

Oddly enough i heard that in my head with trump's voice. What has been heard cannot be unheard!

What I said is that smart people can be convinced to move to another platform. Most of my friends are not technically inclined, but it was easy to make them use it, at least to chat with me. What you did is change "smart people" with "people who already want to move", which is not the same. You then said it's not something you can choose (as you cannot choose to be rich). But I answered that you can actually choose your friends. Never did I say people who are not interested in niche technologies are not smart. My statement can be rephrased in an equivalent statement "people who cannot be convinced to change are not smart", and I stand to it.

sorry I meant it in a joking way, I should have worded that better

From what I know, those agents can be absolutely fantastic as long as they run under strict guidance of a senior developer who really knows how to use them. Fully autonomous agents sound like a terrible idea.

I was pretty lucky in university as most of my profs were either using cross platform stuff or Linux exclusive software. I had a single class that wanted me using windows stuff and I just dropped that one. Awesome that you're getting back into it, it's definitely the best it's ever been (and you're right that Steam cracked the code). It sounds like you probably know what you're doing if you're running Linux VMs and stuff, but feel free to shoot me a PM if you run into any questions or issues I might be able to point you in the right direction for.