It may have started as a technical limitation, but turned out to have other, nice effects down the line.

Luckily, I'm both a retro gamer and a motorcycle rider :)

Scanlines and other CRT effects were technical artifacts, but artists adapted to them. As a consequence, games from that era were meant to be played on those kinds of screens, with those effects. They look better, sometimes mindbogglingly so, than on a pure, sharp, 1:1 pixel translation to a modern panel. There are some good YouTube videos and blog articles demonstrating this. These fake effects often restore details and effects that otherwise would simply be missing.

Maybe similarly, the whole clutch and gear shebang may have started as just a necessity with ICEs, but it turns out that controlling a vehicle like that is just massively, amazingly fun. As I suspect is the case for most riders in these parts, I don't ride motorcycles as a pure method of transportation. I do it for fun. And riding an electric motorcycle, without clutching and shifting, about 90% of what's so fun and exciting about riding is just missing for me. I don't think anyone without experience riding both could understand. It's not about nostalgia or habit, it's about a physical activity we love doing, and an electric drive removes most of the elements that make the activity fun.

Maybe compare it to drawing vs. generating a drawing with Nano Banana. You can get a nice picture either way, and the GenAI is definitely the more modern, faster way. Depending on your drawing skills, you may even get an objectively much better result. But you'll never have the same fun and satisfaction as when you draw it yourself.

I can't believe anyone still uses the "will fall behind" meme in earnest. At this point it's only really used to mock AI bros. But, apparently, not everybody got the memo. You could say that they fell behind. Badum tss.

Honestly, those idiots can go ahead and leave me behind with all the other luddites who would rather read a news story that's true because somebody researched it, than made-up LLM slop. It will be funny to see the reaction if/when the AI bros realise that what they "left behind" is all that is real and interesting about life.

Start making them again in the first place. I checked my dad's PC a week ago, when he thought his Blu-ray burner was broken (luckily was just a loose power connector), I had already looked for a replacement just in case and realised that (a) LG was the last remaining manufacturer, with all other brands being rebadged LG drives, and (b) LG has stopped production mid-2025. There's only leftover stock or used drives, both at inflated prices (the cheapest I found was $260, compared to the original store price of $80).

I know a lot of archivists use M-Disc Blu-rays as a non-magnetic additional backup media, as do I, so I'm worried about the future of that.

The Chinese Room thought experiment isn't about consciousness, though. It's about understanding Chinese.

It's a poor analogy, but to get it closer to the questions about LLMs: ask the guy in the room, in his own language, what he just said in Chinese. Tell him that the answer he gave was about how old he was, and ask him whether the answer he gave was correct.

That's the thing Dawkins doesn't understand. The point (or one major point) of consciousness is a working model and understanding of the world based on experiences. A token generator can never do more than fake that. Sure, if you ask the LLM about its understanding of the world, it will give you answers that read like it has one. But that's what it's designed to do, and doesn't change anything about the fact that there is no understanding behind the words. You can dig deeper and deeper, and the model will never be able to come up with anything else but a blend of what others have previously said about in a context where similar words have been said.

I think the discussion about determinism is a red herring, and for sure we don't know a lot about how consciousness emerges, but what we know for sure is that LLMs lack pretty much every precondition for even making it possible.

I think it needs to be somewhat targetted so that oxygen is actually pushed away from the fire, instead of more oxygen being pushed toward it? But yes, everything with an "if" or "switch" statement in its code is "AI-powered" these days. It even goes for the double-whammy with its "NASA technology", just like all those plug-in heaters, ACs and phone signal boosters from scam ads.

Yeah, I don't think people would lose a lot of sleep over billionaires becoming mere millionaires.

I have no clue about modern financial markets, but from everything I'm reading, some economies are almost entirely propped-up by these imaginary numbers, and people's retirements and insurances are tied to those economies. I'm hoping for the "AI" crash as much as the next guy, but also fear that what comes after will be a far cry from business as pre-2022-usual.

But you'll have a vendor to refer to, and that's a big deal. If it's a bug or something that the tool promised but doesn't deliver, you have recourse, potentially legal.

With in-house development, you need to trust your requirements engineering, your acceptance testing, and that your developers know what they're doing. The last one is crucial, and missing if you have vibe coders. If there's a bug or limitation, it's likely because the model can't get it right, and then you're at a dead end. No vendor to request a fix from, nobody to claim damages from, and no way to bugfix because all your "developers" know to do is play the slot machine and hope that on attempt 142, Claude against all odds finally gets it right without breaking something else. In other words, you're screwed and back at square one, plus all the damage that has been caused in the meanwhile.

My bet is that this will break many companies' necks in the next years.

And even if the results are "good" they will all have the samey feel to them. It's systemic. It's both how and why these tools work in the first place.

There's already quite a backlash against GenAI imagery in the public. I've seen "No AI" stickers appear around town, on ad posters with obvoius GenAI imagery. It's the bland look of averaging and people are already pretty tired of it.

Your examples remind me of Nano Banana 2, which is hilarious with its post-hoc explanations about what it generated. Some gems from my own experiments with it:

"You asked for an arrow to the right, but unfortunately I wasn't able to produce that, so the arrow points to the left instead."

"You may notice an additional person in the lower right corner that you didn't ask for, but that I was unable to prevent."

Not everything is entirely black and white all the time.

Covid was a new virus, and it took time to figure out how it spreads. Society also was no longer used to pandemics and it took time to figure out the possibility and effects of different measures. Society learns and adapts to new information, that doesn't mean people were lying before.

It's possible for a country to have an extremism or corruption problem, and then take a turn to start dealing with those issues. It's also possible to be of the opinion that some inhabitants of a country being Nazis (which is the case for every country) is not enough of a reason to then side with another country when it decides to unprovokedly invade that first country and murder and rape its population.

Your implication that there is always a static, underlying ground truth to everything that can be discovered and used to reassess everything that came before retroactively, is an extremely oversimplifying view on reality.

The difference with respectable, traditional media is that they have an incentive, and often legal obligation, to report on changing information as it emerges, and print corrections and retractions when something turns out to have been wrong. Which traditional media did during the pandemic or the Russian invasion, if you've been paying attention. Unlike the "influencers" and conspiracy blogs who can always cozily claim that they always knew things X and Y that fit their narrative, while keeping shush about new information Z that contradicts it.

Is that still true? As I remember, lacking NTFS write support on Linux was resolved some 10-15 years ago.

Thank you for this explanation! I was wondering why, when I got a new exFAT-preformatted 2 TB SSD, it had a cluster size of a massive 8 MB.

I assumed there was some technical reason for it to have been set that way so I left it, even though it's pretty annyoing if every little plain textfile note takes up 8 MB. (Don't npm install on that sucker!) I couldn't find a confident explanation back then, but this finally explains it.

Yeah, so many holes in this justification that it's completely transparent.

If attackers can now so easily scan for vulnerabilities... so could they. They have access to the same tools. Not to mention that these new approaches don't even really need access to the source.

He says they don't want to be a cybersecurity company, just quietly focus on handling the sensitive data of their customers. But you can't do one without the other.

If you don't want to build up the security know-how and processes in-house, that's fair. Outsource it to someone who specialises in it. But a company just trying to avoid a breach by flying under the radar and cheaping out on security has no business handling sensitive data in the first place.

Good, these calculations will serve nicely for when the same companies sue, and the same judge rules, on charges against OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, Suno, Udio, etc., who are guilty of the same crimes. Plus some extra violations on top because of the way they used the pirated works, above and beyond simply redistributing them.

Because justice is blind and the law is always applied evenly and fairly, I look forward to all of those shit companies being hit with permanent injunctions and driven out of business with fines of kazillions of dollars.

Tiny network? You might be confusing them with something else. They have about a dozen TV stations and about 50 radio stations which, more crucially, produce almost all original programming. They're also one of the few larger news organisations still doing investigative journalism. 20k people seems more than reasonable when you look at everything they do. I don't think the US even has a media company which produces even remotely as much original content.

This was a feature that relied on an Internet service in the first place, so an offline TV wouldn't have had it in the first place.