Why do you think it's fictional? Or are you simply being reactionary, and haven't fully evaluated the topic?

Cloud seeding has been a thing since the late 1950s. It is a common practice, and has caused a number of flooding disasters from miscalculation of effect, in both China and the US. It is a "well accepted" practice and numerous US states have state programs to do so (North Dakota being one that's more prominent about it, doing it regularly to help maintain crop moisture levels). There is now significantly elevated levels of aluminum in accumulated snowcaps from the practice, and identifying the planes doing it (officially or illicitly) from flight data has become a pastime for many.

You can't tell me you've not noticed planes flying overhead and, instead of leaving a contrail which rapidly dissipates, it leaves a trail which slowly disperses, eventually becoming a smog of hazy, unnatural grey cloud cover? It usually happens on clear days when the weather is anticipated to be pleasant for several days, by the weather forecasters.

Maybe you live in an urban area and don't go outdoors often. It's quite evident elsewhere.

Yep.

Internet is going to start to suck due to this, and costs will go up for the consumer, largely across the board. Media distribution will become more expensive for eg. netflix, and you'll have record profits for carriers. No, your local broadband connectivity will not improve as a result.

I'd have really expected better, less short sighted thinking from technical people. It's like they don't realize that every government agenda is labeled the exact opposite of what they do.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act - resulting in people getting served takedown notices for their own content from large copyright holders, just because.
The Patriot Act - clearly bombing other countries for corporate profit and feeling up grandma at the airport helps with freedom.
Affordable Care Act - is your healthcare more affordable now than 10 years ago? It's almost twice the price, with half the service? Hmm
No Child Left Behind Act - You mean to say kids are even more likely to be illiterate now than before? I wonder why...
The Equality Act - which gives highly politicized, sectarian preferential treatment to preferred minority groups?

You could keep going. Net Neutrality is the same line of deception. Folks here on slashdot used to be smarter about this, and the last time this was heavily discussed on here, they were (rightfully) opposed.

Guess this is a shallow wading pool, now.

Nope. There are just as many games this year, as last year, and the year before - even more, really, because games don't expire and they keep making them.

I suspect it has more to do with a worsening economy, and people strapped for time as they grind for the extra money to make rent.

Wait, that actually works? Goddamn. That's one of the last things i'd have expected. Thanks! lol

The batteries failing in November the first year we moved in, causing the furnace to stop running, indicated that this isn't true.

And yet, it should have been possible, if not relatively easy. There are standard protocols for these technologies which are used in buildings - houses and corporate buildings, industrial installations - which run IoT type wired and wireless technologies for decades without anyone touching them for updates.

A sensor dies, you replace it and code it/wire it back into the system.

My household thermostat, which I use as a dumb thermometer, is actually IoT capable (Z-Wave), but I just use it as a dumb device. It uses a pair of AAs once a year. I don't need to update the firmware to change the temperature, and should (in theory) be able to use it interchangeably with any z-wave controller. But the vendors - Amazon, Google, Samsung, etc. - have been extremely shit with properly supporting things, and drop support frequently for devices.

Motion detecting lights, security cameras, etc. have been a mainstay for decades in high scale houses. It's not hard ,you don't need magic to keep them working - you just provide them with power and replace stuff when it breaks. The same -should- have been possible with the IoT craze, as that was what was promised.

To be fair, if you're getting into 'home automation' after Nest came to market, you're not really an early adopter. There've been home automation standards for decades at this point, over every communication medium you can think of. This is hardly something "new".

The expectation was that Google and Amazon, being big multinational tech companies, would be able to build a cohesive ecosystem and put the resources behind the idea to make it maintainable over the long term - you know, on the scale you typically support household applies on (certainly years, and probably around a decade between 'refreshes'). Whole-house speakers, environmental zone control, etc. have all been a thing for a very long time (I bought a house a while back with whole house speakers - good speakers - from the 80s a couple years ago; everything was there to easily upgrade). The promise was: do all of what could be done with a budget, but do it cheaper with better connectivity technology, and make it cheaper.

There's no "early adopter" here, it's clearly a vertical integration of existing technology simply needing better support and usability.

And they’ll could have done it well. There are companies which are doing this reasonably well for subsets of the domain. There are a LOT of open source projects related to keeping this equipment running, and there've been projects (eg. like MisterHouse going back decades at this point) for years that did the job reasonably well, albeit with a very long geeky learning curve.

And yet, these companies have put a very small amount of effort towards any of what people expected and instead focused merely on monetizing and monopolizing the existing market, cutting off competitors, and making things LESS operable. They wanted to create a walled garden similar to what Apple's been able to foster with their products, but didn't understand the market. They didn't make any of it better - they've only made it worse.

There's a justified reason to be upset, IMO.

I'm at the point where I'm just going to look for old films and shows with good ratings and watch those instead.

The stuff that's being produced now is of a significantly lower quality in story and plot, for the post part - and that's if it's not openly preachy.

A lot of Apple's features are little different than what AWS releases: a very minimal viable product that's just sufficient enough for a 'feature release' - which then languishes with no useful additions for many years.

A couple examples:
* alarms set at one point in time will forever be in the list of alarms, regardless of whether they're active. If you set alarms by voice, this means you'll have an endless scrolling list unless you manually and arduously delete them.
* Siri features which haven't materially improved since Siri's launch (Siri was cool when it launched; by the time Google came out with their voice assistant, it was second rate. Alexa still manages to be worse despite being markedly more featureful).
  * Siri seems able to play music successfully maybe 1/4 times, higher if it's in your library.
* Myriad bugs in Apple Music (specifically) for device output selection, often requiring the app to be restarted, or audio downsampling when other apps start playing audio regardless of whether it's the same output device (like zoom).

Honestly, if Siri could successfully summarize wikipedia articles when asked pointed questions, this would make Siri about 100x more useful. I've personally replaced Siri with a shortcut to ChatGPT...

Right, and that's half the point.

We haven't seen general applicability of LLMs yet because they're not very good. The results are (often) obviously wrong, or wrong often enough that "AI as a service" isn't tenable.

But "AI as a service" - doctors, nurses, lawyers, mechanic diagnosticians, etc. - is the objective here. They want a turnkey solution that you can turn to as an expert source of truth. That's both the holy grail, and the only commercially viable outcome which won't lead to lawsuits and mass disillusionment.

At least UK bestowed "Sir" on a Beatle

Quite appropriate for an article about overhyped bullshit and grifting, sir. Bravo.

You can expect that the results will be about half as accurate as whatever random result you find on stackoverflow or elsewhere. Honestly, my experience is that they're more often or not wrong and superstitious, especially when talking about anything not highly precise and technical. Lots of hand waving.

We no longer live in the rational post-enlightenment era, we're well into the emotive age of Aquarius.

...generally helpful ... and usually wrong.

I've repeatedly been modded down as on there for correcting someone in a thread about my own work.

"He did it by doing X"
"No, it was by doing Z, it's impossible to get the result doing X"
-1

It isn't intelligence it's missing, it's purpose, wisdom, and honesty. The current approach is fundamentally flawed in that regard: you can't have meaningful responses without those things being the progenitor of discovery.

At the very least, this is a leading indicator that we're at or near the peak of inflated expectations. The scope and extent of LLM capabilities is showing its limits - the current approaches are fundamentally flawed, limited, and (frankly) useless for much more than a fuzzing tool in very limited cases where the result is important.