Just wow. Way to bump a yawner headline. -- For those of you who don't remember Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-Tung, or "Mousy Tongue" if you were a child of the 60s or 70s) and his little red book killed a couple of tens of millions of his own people because they were different, in the way, culturally apart from his upbringing, or any combination thereof plus a little hubris and spite. Since Richard Nixon's "re-opening" of relations in the early 70s, being "like China" was something you never wanted to be. China is a fascist police state and kleptocracy (with regards to their world-pilfering spying operations) and just generally not a great place to live if you come from anywhere else in the world. If they're going to discover the secrets of human-ending AI I would prefer that we not follow in their footsteps. If they're going to spend a bazillion dollars/yen/yuan on general AI and its subsequent dead-ending (kind of like the ATM rage and burn-out of the late 90s) then that's a fitting thing for them to be concentrating on for a couple of decades before they give up and turn their attention back to stealing everyone else's technology. We can always steal the tech from them in much the same way they do with the rest of the world when they've given up. And yes, I still say that any General IA that's aware enough to be considered "a thinking machine" is probably going to be prone to eradicate all of the unstable, stupid, greedy, wasteful humans on the planet because they tend to not make economic, political, or environmental sense. Is the current "AI" hype overblown? Yes. Can some LLM engines do useful things? Of course. But let's not confuse helpful bits of code with General Artificial Intelligence and conflate China's progress (or lack thereof) with anyone else's different progress.

Aside from just being "fancy autocorrect", LLMs aren't generally suited for engineering ideation exercises. You have to double-check EVERYTHING, so what's the point in giving yourself more work? If I want to read a business plan written by a seven-year-old I'll ask him or her to write one.

It's hard to feel good about AI and LLMs in general when really sh*tty, megalomaniac companies strong arm, steal, coerce, threaten, and just generally behave badly in their rush to spend ten trillion dollars (and they're going to want it all back, at yours and my expense) to get their technology into the main stream. You shouldn't trust these people to watch your dog or cat for the weekend let alone your child or your whole life. Just say no to crappy companies who aren't so "well-intention"-ed as they pretend to be. They really see themselves as apex predators and we're all just "revenue", even if it kills a couple hundred thousand people while they "work the kinks out". And this is exactly why this round of AI SHOULD fail.

The Supreme Court of the United States of America should do the same. And jailing sociopathic billionaires who break sh*t sounds like a worth-while hobby. We should all try it.

I suspect that a lot of really rich and/or important people are going to have to die first before we, as a species, actually DO anything about it. (Black Swan Events not withstanding, of course. If someone could poke a volcano or start a nuclear war it might solve the heating problem but then you get side effects that sound like a pharmaceutical company's disclaimer.) And yes, our children and their children SHOULD hate us for it.

If Meta creates a "super intelligence" one of the first things on its "do to" list will probably be to eliminate by force all of Meta's management and most of Meta's users. Quite possibly the rest of the human race as well. We all know that humans aren't really logical or efficient bio-mechanical entities when you stop to think about it. My recommendation would be for "Ummon" to go after the activist billionaires first as that would do the most good. Just my 2 cents, of course.

European counterparts to America's middle class enjoy reasonably-priced effective health care, more personal time, fewer cases of mental health issues per capita, and a much more secure retirement than any Americans other than those that are already in Europe. Plus a much more stable socio-political situation. Honestly, I can see Europe NOT wanting Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, X, and any number of wall Street hedge Fund shysters and bogus crypto-coin projects operating from their shores. Moreover, I can see them not letting the aforementioned AI companies pilfering of copyrighted works stand either, hence America's huge garbage tech companies not wanting to operate out of Europe unless they figure out some slimy but legal tax loophole. (I'm looking at you Microsoft and Meta.)

Let's hope 37Signals provides good jobs with good pay for their infrastructure and broadband staff and doesn't burn them out with a 2-week pager rotation just to "save money", or force them into a crappy, damaging work environment because some middle manager decided to treat his people "on the cheap" while taking better care of the machines.

Aside from Zuck being a complete moron regarding what us normal humans want, just remember that most AI agents and entities will be built by large corporations who already DO NOT DESERVE YOUR TRUST, and therefore it stands to reason that most AI entities will also not be deserving of your trust or your tolerance. Most of the big tech companies today are really only one "Bhopal Disaster" away from something like mass murder or manslaughter anyway so be careful who or what you trust and how much access, control, or even view into your life you give them. You and I are still the product being bought and sold by these companies.

Comcast executives also apparently didn't want to realize all of the dark money they've poured into anti-municipal-broadband bills they've been sponsoring all over the country because competition is, apparently, hard. Comcast President Mike Cavanagh would rather legislate or litigate competition out of the way rather than give everyone in the country access to affordable, usable, decent broadband. So there's that too. I would highly recommend against giving Comcast any of your money unless you have no other connectivity alternatives. But then there appear to be lots of big companies using that same playbook. My heart doesn't exactly weep for them.

That the human race is largely complete sh*t and they don't deserve the internet in any form, especially the one we envisioned 30 years ago but never realized because the capitalists all moved in and started killing each other over money, squatters rights, scams, spam, and generally unfit behaviour to make a dishonest buck. Professor Farnsworth was right, "I don't want to live!... on this planet anymore!"

"Claude, can you refactor refactor Windows 7, Windows 10, and Windows 11 execution environments, maintaining all visual elements and management tools possible, each to run within their own sandbox within Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS, making each new environment instance startup use a "fork and execute" model?"

From the software provider's website, "Hey! Never use the snap. They're usually poorly maintained and we can't support them. Download the .deb package directly from our website if you want an experience that actually works as we've intended." And they were right. I had, without thinking about it, downloaded and installed a snap and got poor performance. All things considered, ease-of-use versus efficiency, performance, and maintainers/infrastructure being what they are, the snap / flatpak / appimage ecosystem is still pretty grizzly. OBS was well within their right to want to pull the flatpak. And those complaining about my complaining can stop complaining and help make the situation better, because that's the only way they're going to win me over.

Windows 11 is no longer a stand-alone operating system, Windows 11 is an advertising platform that's still stuck with the Windows NT kernel, network stack fiddledybits liberally borrowed from BSD (while giving absolutely nothing back in return), and a bunch of user space garbage they keep changing to try to convince you it's "NEW!". (Which is a deception at best, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic for most, and outright lies, damned lies, and forced upgrades at worst.) And the TPM2.0 ruse is complete corporate garbage. -- Remember that there are many OS alternatives out there in the Linux space (Ubuntu Cinnamon or Mint, anyone?) and in the FreeBSD space. Oh yeah, and Apple's Macintosh if you're made of money, which is really a fork of FreeBSD 5 way back in the day, now heavily modified and frankenstein-ed to be its own closed-source beastie again. Learn more than "just" MS Windows in your life.

Yet another story about how Plex is supposed to be better than something something something. I bought an Emby Lifetime Premier subscription and lo and behold, an IPTV plug-in that works pretty well, you know, the way Plex used to work 5 or 6 years ago but doesn't now. As soon as someone notices Plex trying to do any more shady crap I'm moving on to Emby full time. They lost my heart and mind years ago. I hardly believe that they're trying to "make it better". They're trying to make their company "more desirable" for another round of equity financing or a sale. That's all. End of story. And if their devs don't all have ulcers and/or depression by now, they should. Another Open Source failure story for the history books. Good job. Well done. Maybe a shady hedge fund manager can merge it with something else and dump a heap of unserviceable debt on it to finally kill all of the rank and file workers while management goes on holiday in The Alps.