Speaking of Google being proactive, they proactively started charging me MORE for Gemini use even though I have it disabled on my account.

I don't want to use this and I don't want to pay for it. Fuck you, Google.

Expecting unpaid people to design it well or fix it for free. ;)

One of the reasons Prime Video Ads hastened my departure from Amazon Prime is that I was having an issue with them ... finding my apartment. I live in a pre-WW2 building and for reasons I still cannot figure out they can get their packages here but not groceries. It is not fun scooping up a bunch of bags of groceries from in front of the wrong apartment and lugging them all the way up to mine. Unfortunately for Amazon a broken foot enflamed it into a big issue.

What's that have to do with ads on Prime? I'm generally okay with paying for ad-free service, and normally I would have with Prime. But imagine a scenario where I'm like "oh.. they made it a hassle to accept the grocery order, but I really love the Boyz, sigh I'll just put up with it..." In short if I were to go that route I'd just be giving them leverage to tolerate shittier service.

I think your prediction is correct, I just hope others will start noticing the problem this sort of thing can cause when bundling is introduced. It's difficult to do these days but I don't have one vendor providing multiple services* anymore in my house.

* Examples: I used to have Spectrum for TV and Internet, one got me a discount on the other. I used to have AT&T for mobile and DirecTV, owned by AT&T for TV. T-Mobile for cellular and they also provided a Netflix account, etc.

So the system responded that it was an already claimed serial number and not an invalid serial number? Who the fuck would do that?

Let's say someone put in a claim.

Well what is to stop them from trying consecutive serial numbers to see if they can get even more?

Yes great to mention the linking aspect, that was key to the whole thing being really useful.

Without news sites to scrape, there will be no feeding the AI. With one key exception. When a site is driven by political agenda instead of advertisement revenue.

You have it partially right here.

But the one divergence from the pattern you didn't list is, that because most AI. (and Google's AI specifically) is very left leaning, it will feed you only left leaning news... so the sites that will remain, and keep earring revenue are more right leaning sites since people would have to go to them directly anyway to seek out news Google will never give them.

Of course that merely delays the full effect of what you lay out, when most for-profit left wing news sites fold the AI starved for information will in the end actually make use of right leaning sites as well.

What it does mean is that left wing news sites that remain in the next year or so will only be hyper-partisan info funded by some external source.

Go WoKe gO BrOkE

What did HyperCard even do?

It's kind of hard to explain, and honestly my memory of what you could do with Hypercard and how you actually did it is very fuzzy as it was so long ago.

But basically it was a visual programming languages, where the visual bits you drug around were then also backed by actual code that would do things. You would create a variety of cards, and in those cards could store data, move on to other cards, and so forth.

Some people used it to create games, but used it to create an inventory tracking system for a store, and probably some other stuff I have forgotten about.

In the end, it was a way to make programming a lot more approachable to people at a time when programming was VERY low level for the most part!

A key part of it was once you made a stack of cards it was very easy to share with other people as a kind of application (but one you could modify in any way you liked).

You might get a better feel reading this Tribute To Hypercard.

Everyone always talks about Woz but it sure seems like Atkinson deserves nearly as much praise.

Sad to see one of the great ones go, but accomplished so much for so many and that is better than a lot of people manage.

Nobody is really in favour of limited government because when push comes to shove those who profess being in favour of limited government remain so only until they get into power.

If what you say is true it means lots, not none, are in favor of limited government because they do not seek power over others and thus wish for possible power over them to be minimized...

Basically the age-old axiom, most people just want to be left the hell alone.

Being for limited government, I am also against the 10 year moratorium on AI regulation (and giant bills generally).

But also that is because what are regulations going to do? They can't stop you from accessing a web site in another country running some hyper advanced AI model, or downloading AI malware that can jack your system.

All regulations can possibly do is retard (in the classic sense of the word) tools in the states or countries of whatever places are stupid enough to even try to regulate AI. It's going to hurt enough companies that try to follow the law that it's a bad idea and would provide no benefit you are seeking through the regulation.

In fact if you really believe AI can even be dangerous at all then the only possible thing you can do is to advocate for as much AI as possible to counter the "bad" AI.

The summary claimed the company had $50m in revenue (the real number, not corrected).

I can't understand how it got any revenue, ever - if you ask any real AI to produce code you'll have results in a minute or so.

But if it was backed by people writing real code, answers would have taken many minutes to hours to produce! Heck just the time to write a summary of the request would seem awfully long.

Who would use that after any trial? Who was paying them at all?

Or was it 700 engineers each with a trial chatGPT account just pasting questions and answers back and forth between user and chatGPT?

Yeah I ran into that also, very sad to see. What a crime against humanity. Thanks for the link.

Sorry I'm late to response but you simply have to pay $25 more for the ticket and get Earlybird to auto-checkin, then you are either in A or B section and can get a good seat anywhere.

Even adding that Southwest tickets are still usually cheaper than other airlines.

I'm a little surprised we don't have "AI-powered ad-blockers" right now.