“It’s here right now and definitely working and producing productivity and revenue, but also we need to cut costs so we can keep spending money on it. Hmmm? Why not use the revenue it’s generating to pay for it, well, you see, we’re just scailing so fast it’s not enough. Oh, why not fund it with credit? The banks won’t let us put up the nvidia chips as collateral to buy more nvidia chips anymore.”

It’s always funny to me when people are like “yah we’ll just grow food using hydroponics and grow lights powered by a diesel generator.”

Like, honey, you could store a decade of food in the volume of space needed to store enough fuel to run those grow lights through one harvest. Like, the conversion rate of fuel to electricity, to light, to biomass is … pathetically tiny.

Closed circuit cameras are less of a concern than cameras connected to a network. Every corner store having a security camera hooked up to a tape in the back is whatever. It’s when it’s an internet connected camera that things get super worrying.

So spraying Windows with the assistant, regardless of how users felt about it, was somehow an accident?

Probably more that internal politics at the company lead a bunch of project leads to try implementing it. If leadership keeps emphasizing how important AI is, and people who have “done stuff with AI” keep getting promoted, then of course people are going to shove it anywhere they can, and of course the higher ups will approve it. It’s classic group/cult think in a hierarchical system.

Don’t let this become a “protect the kids” thing. The intentionally addictive and manipulative design of these platforms has been just as harmful to people across a wide spectrum of ages. The solution is not to ban kids from using these platforms, the solution is to hold these platforms accountable for their behavior and put regulations in to ban intentionally manipulative design. Adults are just as much victims of having their brains cooked by this shit, and it’s had larger scale societal consequences that we need to take seriously.

Perhaps, but, they can’t make any money on it.

And it burned money like no tomorrow with no real revenue generation. Now that it’s past the initial hype and not getting them in the news cycle it’s just a waste of money.

Oh absolutely, the rabbit hole of deception can just go a lot deeper when people don’t even have to report numbers at all.

Like, they can fudge line items, but, if the line items are growing at the same rate after they merge them, then it’s pretty clear the new thing isn’t driving growth. And changes like that are visible and can be scrutinized as well.

We can watch the hands on this kind of reporting.

ALL ai efforts are face planting, but microsoft is the most easily scrutinized. The important thing being that they’re publicly traded and their business model is built on selling subscriptions and products; So we can see where they’re making money and spending it, and they can’t make demonstrably false claims about the success of projects (they might get sued for market manipulation).

As supposed to private companies like anthropic and openAI who can say what ever the hell they want about their success or failure, or companies like Google and Amazon who make their money in ways that make it hard to scrutinize if the AI stuff is landing.

You can actually fill them with a lot of different things.

But paint is great if you want to make an avant garde art piece commenting on the prevalence of surveillance in a community, or rejecting the transparency of a given surface.

The ford was supposed to be in dock for maintenance and swapping out crew right now.

It’s having a lot of minor issues right now, and I wonder how much of that is that systems not getting the maintenance they need, and how much of that is due to crew ignoring routine tasks, or actively causing problems because they’re pissed they’re being forced to stay out longer.

Keep Hormuz closed pls. I want higher gas prices so there is a direct and immediate economic incentive to burn less of it, maybe convince people to scrap their pavement princess pickups.

Display on my glasses? That would be neat. Camera and microphone on my glasses? Why the fuck would I want that.

It’s a devil’s bargain. Except that the benefit is pretty slim next to the obvious cost.

Anthropic is just trying to cover their ass from liability.

Ether the user who put the bot in a position to do something illegal is liable, or the person who made the bot that did something illegal is liable. But 90% of the reason hegseth want to use the bots is to avoid liability when doing illegal stuff, and if anthropic is saying “hey it’s not our fault if you break the law using our product, we told you not to use it like that” then they’re basically denying the main use case for hegseth, who really really wants a get out of jail free card for breaking the law.

Most people I’ve talked to in real life have complained about how large phones are and wish there were still smaller phones available. Maybe I’m just some gravitational nexus of small phone likers, but I think there is some other factor at play other than consumer preference.

Perhaps the issue is that they sell too well and canibalize the larger phone market, which probably has higher margins, sales people at stores often also get payed a commission so they probably have an incentive to nudge people towards larger phones.

Any job that can be done by an LLM wasn’t a job that needed to get done In the first place.

any manager who tries to replace an actually useful job with an LLM is going to get bit in the ass as productivity slows to a crawl. Other people will hav to step in to clean up the mess and basically do the work that should have been done by the person replaced. Most of the jobs being “replaced by AI” are actually just routine layoffs or companies correcting from over hiring.

I’ve read a story the other day from someone who said they left Amazon due to what a mess it was becoming internally. How increasingly managers were hiring people they didn’t need so their team would be bigger and they would seem more important. This is a well known phenomenon. I suspect a lot of people who did this and created a mess are using the excuse of “embracing AI” to give them selves an off ramp from the mess they created by bloating their departments.

Yah there is a lot of nonsensical compression artifacts, and they’re of wildly varying scales.

Really we’ve been gradually approaching a convergence for a while, really we passed it a while ago, where smart phones are indistinguishable in terms of meaningful capability.

Intialy the barrier was memory and processing power, but really, we crossed that bridge a decade ago, if you count the really low end net books. For a while the main gap was in the fact that one set ran on ARM and the other X86, so there was just a gap in what software that could be run on ether. But these days that’s hardly significant issue with the myriad translation layers.

Hell, you’ve been able to plug a keyboard and mouse in to android and IOS for a while now, and external monitors are also workable. So input and form factor aren’t a huge issue. Really the limitation is that most people who want a laptop or desktop form factor… will just buy one of those and people who want a mobile will get one of those. Most people will just get both.

Honestly I think most people buying laptops for work would be better served by adding a mouse keyboard and external monitor to their phone (ideally in some sort of laptop shaped phone dock with an extra battery), but mobile OSs are cludgy with that kind of set up. Maybe android merging chrome OS in to it will bridge that issue.

But really I don’t think Google, Microsoft or Apple really want to do something like that because it might cause mobile sales to cannibalize thin and light laptop sales. I mean, maybe Google would because they don’t really have much skin in the laptop game.

On the one hand, I’m skeptical of the assertions that pen and paper is inherently a better way to take notes and learn.

But I do agree with the general aversion to a lot of ed tech. So much effort to shove kids faces in front of softwear and hardware that was sold to administrators by marketing teams from big tech companies. So many opportunities for those tech companies to exploit local school districts, ether to extract unreasonable profits, or for access to a mailable locked in user base.

If a school is going to go all in teaching with computers, they need to be carefully choosing what they use and not just adopting a premade package from some tech company.

Comparing brave and fire fox is like comparing librewolf and chrome. When people suggest using a privacy browser other than brave, they’re not saying “just use fire fox”.