Ah yes, I definitely remember that time in 2018 when the FCC threatened ABC's broadcasting license in order to get rid of Barr; both sides, both sides!

Realistically, what will matter is what currently-clean-on-opset Pete will do to organizations(likely with Brendan Carr's slimy assistance). If they think that just doing journalist-level is going to work there's not much reason to just designate someone who can stay awake while holding a tape recorder to go collect the party line while everyone else skips the event. It's not like they are going to answer any but the most softball questions.

If anything, unless there's someone significantly smarter than Pete moderating the policy behind the scenes, this seems less likely to encourage compliance than the traditional measures; where you dole out little nibbles of exclusive and technically unauthorized 'access' to people you deem largely friendly precisely because the stuff at press conferences and releases is pure commodity(especially now that chatbots can, badly, munge it into other formats so there probably isn't even much future in rewriting or reading from the teleprompter those commodity releases).

I'm not surprised that Valve is dropping 32-bit support; the 'gaming on 32-bit windows' market cannot be all that large or all that lucrative; what does surprise me a little bit is that the announced end of support doesn't line up with anything I immediately recognize. End of 2025/beginning of 2026 actually puts them considerably later than most stuff using chromium for UI rendering(not sure if they've been doing a bunch of backporting or if they consider the fact that they are mostly rendering their own content a security control); but doesn't line up with the deprecation of any other 32-bit dependency I recognize offhand.

Anyone have a plausible speculation on whether there is something else getting deprecated that likely drove the decision; or if it's just a matter of having to pick a nice round number to pull the plug on something that could be continued but isn't really worth the hassle?

I definitely can't imagine any issues running a functional market economy under the theory that the first amendment allows you to make or conceal any claim you like about a product.

Will this change my tax exposure when providing 'gratuities' to supreme court justices?

It seems like an open question whether being repetitive and rule based is actually a virtue as an AI use case or not.

'AI' is an easy sell for people who want to do some 'digital transformation' they can thought-leader about on linkedin without actually doing the ditch-digging involved in solving the problem conventionally "Hey, just throw some unstructured inputs at the problem and the magic of Agentic will make the answer come out!"; but that's not really a a good argument in favor of doing it that way. Dealing with such a cryptic, unpredictable, and expensive tool is at its most compelling when you have a problem that isn't readily amenable to conventional solutions; while it looks a lot like sheer laziness when you take a problem that basically just requires some form validation logic and a decision tree and throw an LLM at it because you can't be bothered to construct the decision tree.

There are definitely problems, some of them even useful, that are absolutely not amenable to conventional approaches; and those at least have the argument that perhaps unpredictable results are better than no results or manual results; but if you've got some desperately conventional business logic case that someone is turning into an 'AI' project either because they are a trend chaser or because they think that programming is an obscurantist conspiracy against the natural language Idea Guys by fiddly syntax nerds that's not a good sign.

As a direct test of the tool that sounds pretty underwhelming(and it's not a cheap upsell); but what seems really concerning is the second order effects. Your average office environment doesn't exactly lack for emails or bad powerpoint decks; and both get chiseled right out of the productivity of the people expected to read or sit through them. The more cynical sales types just go directly to selling you the inhuman centipede solution; where everyone else also needs a copilot license so they can summarize the increased volume of copilot-authored material; but that only bandaids the "if it's not worth writing why are you trying to write more of it?" problem.

It's also not clear why we'd need investors if AI good enough to eat all the jobs exists. Even without 'AI' a fairly massive amount of investment is handled by the relatively simple 'just dump it in an index fund and don't touch it, idiot' algorithm; and even allegedly sophisticated professionals have a fairly tepid track record when it comes to actually realizing market-beating returns.

Obviously it's this guy's job to promote retail investing as a cure-all; because that's what he sells; but this seems transparently stupid.

If 'AI' has eaten all the jobs; why exactly would we have humans 'investing' for a living? Surely AI good enough to eat all the jobs could also match or exceed the performance of the average trader?

This proposal basically seems like UBI, but capitalism-washed with a pointless (and likely dangerous; given that retail noise trading is basically gambling for people who think they are too smart for gambling) financial services layer tacked on to avoid admitting that it's UBI by pretending that everyone is an investor instead.

We may not have had the safety culture to the same degree; but, given the number of insecticides that are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors not miles off the efficacy of their more alarmingly named colleagues among the g-series and v-series nerve agents; it seems pretty likely that 50s chemists knew full well that they were poking some very, very, troublesome compounds.

Probably not in a position to tease out some of the more subtle neuroanatomical changes at low prenatal doses or the like given medical imaging of the time; but with a bunch of these we are talking about either compounds we worried about IG Farben tinkering with during the war or close analogs thereof.

You'd think that beavers would feel a strong natural affinity for the Dutch; given their shared enthusiasm for hydrological engineering, and show more respect for their colleagues' dams.

If your CTO thinks that Legal can solve his problems you are either Oracle or in exceptionally deep trouble.

I'd be curious if there is some asymmetry in their systems because of the enthusiasm of retail type outfits for trying to keep potential damage from basically untrusted employees to a minimum.

You see it a lot in grocery stores, and big box/department store setups where there are either certain POS operations that lock up and require manager approval(seems most common if they need to void a mis-scan over a certain value or multiple mis-scans or customer-decides-they-don't-want-it changes of order; or if something is being returned); and in the fast foot setups where there are displays over the various prep stations telling people what needs to be made for a specific order number there often either aren't controls or the controls are not intended to be interacted with(which is sensible design if you've got french fry grease and food safety concerns in the mix; but likely means that the guy at the soda fountain being able to void a screen full of orders is either unsupported or intended to be a very infrequent case).

I could see that going poorly if you just grafted the bot on in place of either the human operator(who will just not take your 18,000 water cup order, so it will never exist as far as the system and its constraints are concerned) or the app(which has no common sense but is both tied to someone's account information and vastly simpler to constrain with boring, ancient, form validation logic) and immediately started dumping its interpretations of orders into the system as valid.

Probably not flood-the-store material; but plausibly quite disruptive if it's intended to be fairly uncommon for orders to need to just be disappeared once they are in.

What seems frankly depressing is that a C-level would think(and quite possibly have reason to think) that that sort of aw-shucks-lessons-are-being-learned-about-things-nobody-could-have-predicted tone is exonerating outside of a fairly tiny, low stakes, test program somewhere.

It's not like having somebody take a poke at connecting a system that is supposed to be pretty OK-ish at natural language processing and text-to-speech to an ordering system is particularly unreasonable; at the scale they are operating probably more unreasonable not to; but "well, it's live in 500 locations and we've learned that a technology synonymous with prompt injections and a lack of common sense so profound it's almost a category error to suggest it could have any isn't super robust..." makes you sound unbelievably dumb and risk insensitive.

I realize that 'generative' is all the rage; but did nobody at Redmond HQ have the nerve to speak up and say "perhaps less like a blob of semen..." before that design went out?