As a fan of physical media, I recently bought another drive as a spare, currently is IMO a good time for that. They still make really good drives in large enough quantities so they’re cheap, but that could end any time. Once production stops, they will vanish silently. Learned that lesson back then when floppy drives were suddendly gone… kinda wish I had stocked up a few new ones (for retro computing purposes) when they were still available.
Sooner or later the only remaining source of reliable digital information will be 1990s multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.
various topics (e.g., AI news, crypto, fitness, personal finance)
That sure is a specifc selection of topics.
Same. They’ve been a staple in my RSS feed list for so long (and they are one of the few sites where the RSS feed isn’t just the headlines). But recently I’ve been thinking several times already about throwing them out.
“Shortly after 2027” is a fun phrasing. Means “not before 2028”, but mentioning “2027” so it doesn’t seem so far away.
I interpret it as “please bro, keep the bubble going bro, just 3 more years bro, this time for real bro”
Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea before. What an absolutely horrible decision from google to allow this. What are they thinking?? This is great for phishing and malware, but I don’t know what else. (Yeah ok, the reason has probably something to do with “line must go up”.)
So much wrong with this…
In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that’s it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.
Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it’s even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea “let’s make music making simple”. Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.
Ah, so Google Search runs on UDP, interesting, that must be why it’s so unreliable now.
Thanks for the heads-up. I couldn’t finish reading through all postings in that forum thread, it’s all just making me so tired… always the same shit.
It is very disturbing and scary.
They’re explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?
Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.
Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire… the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?
As for losing configs, I’ve started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.
Another exciting one: Spicerr, the AI-powered spice dispenser. One could think it’s satire, but apparently it can be seen at CES (article in german).
Oh and as a bonus, they seem to also go for a juicero-like business model where you should buy their spice capsules.
Maybe I was naive, but I didn’t expect all this to go that fast and that blatant…
Must be rich indeed, the disclaimer is pure gold.
Or they’ll be “AGI” — A Guy Instead.
Lol. This is perfect. Can we please adopt this everywhere.
As for the OpenAI statement… it’s interesting how it starts with “We are now confident […]” to make people think “ooh now comes the real stuff”… but then it quickly makes a sharp turn towards weasel words: “We believe that […] we may see […]” . I guess the idea is that the confidence from the first part is supposed to carry over to the second, while retaining a way to later say “look, we didn’t promise anything for 2025”. But then again, maybe I’m ascribing too much thoughtfulness here, when actually they just throw out random bullshit, just like their “AI”.
Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing “AI” is so tiring. Not suprising, but still… ugh. Claims of AI in everything.
My favourite so far: USB controller with “AI enhancements” because… uuh… if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so that’s why “AI” is in the marketing for the USB controller…?
Thanks, that was infuriating to read.
Whenever techbros use the word “storytelling”, some disaster follows…
With your choice of words you are anthropomorphizing LLMs. No valid reasoning can occur when starting from a false point of origin.
Or to put it differently: to me this is similarly ridiculous as if you were arguing that bubble sort may somehow “gain new abilites” and do “horrifying things”.
Not even buying things on blu-ray is safe anymore from being tainted with “AI” nightmare fuel.
Fear of a “bullshit gap”, I guess.
Oh, and: simply perfect choice of header image on that article.