I'm not a fan of AI.

Don't get me wrong, I think machine learning and neural networks and machine vision etc.. a lot of specific subsections lumped under "AI" have merit and value - and even LLMs in the right places could be useful.. but the whole AI hype train where every company just forces LLMs and chatbots into everything .. and the insane power (both political and electrical) grabs etc.. it's just such a total shit bubble waiting to pop.

In some ways, Apple's failure with Apple Intelligence shows us something: they pulled back because they realized that the local AI has so much information to everything about you and if it starts hallucinating/misbehaving (which it apparently did outside of the narrow confined window they used in their demo) it could have dire consequences in terms of their reputation as being champions of privacy (Note I am sure they care more about the appearance / vibe than actual, and if they decided it would be profitable to flip in the future they might)

Point being that apple screwing up on shoveling AI into their stuff made them fall back to less hyped implementation that might actually bear real fruit (pun intended) in the future

So, my thought is that maybe if the CCP sees AI as a threat, they'll similarly pull back from some of the hype and find ways to make less grandiose AI stuff - specific purpose narrow AI stuff that does useful stuff... and since they have such a prominent position in terms of making electronic stuff - end up making actually better AI

Or .. they could just go with their current Streisand Effect mode...

At one point I saw a lot of the US blocking /banning Chinese stuff as purely racism motivated "yellow scare" from the admin, but its complicated - Chinese state sponsored actors have absolutely been actively probing our power grids, there was a huge issue with finding undocumented cellular radios and sim chips in various grid infrastructure (grid level inverters for solar and wind for instance) as well as in things like public transportation (city busses in some countries)

So there's this weird thing where it's easy to see many reactions from the US admin as kneejerk racist insanity but then there's actual crappy stuff the Chinese government is actually doing or supporting... so I'm left not being sure what to believe

Except I'm pretty sure the current view of AI and the hype is utterly an unsustainable bubble that is going to leave a lot of folks holding the bag but probably allow folks like Altman to walk away with wheelbarrows full of money.

Damnit, I'm a Gen-Xer I watched the world go from analog to digital, I was a huge technophile all my childhood. I really used to love Dystopian Cyberpunk speculative fiction .. but now that I am living in a Dystopian Cyberpunk future I've realized that somewhere in there Orwell was an optimist, Idiocracy was conservative in their estimates of how bad things get, and now am firmly in the position that we are in fact the Pakleds from StarTrek... and Max Headroom was right about everything except instead of TV networks, it's the Interwebz.

The cynical view of course is that Perplexity will get to where it accepts ad revenue (bribes) to steer folks to certain brands, effectively cutting Amazon out of the lucritive ad market

I read somewhere that Amazon makes far more money from charging money for ad placement in their results than from actual direct sales.

They also make far more money from allowing the third party slop sellers and forcing them to use Amazon Fulfillment than they do from sales

Its basically that they used selling stuff and a great service initially to get their market cap and a captive audience then leveraged that into all this far more lucrative enshittified garbage.

I guess I'm cynical and jaded, but I just worry all this AI arms race is just putting the Pakleds in charge

I am truly dismayed at how long I had to scroll through this thread till I saw a comment that asked this

Seriously we live in The stupidest possible timeline

I honestly don't know what's worse:

The privacy implications / issue reported
or the fact that this even exists..

how is this a thing?

This is likely going to be the only way forward until they disable that option...

I know that Apple very tightly links MacOS with apple accounts, but it is still completely possible to set up a Mac with local account only.. whether you find MacOS useful without an Apple ID associated is entirely another story.

With MS I have never found a compelling reason to want/need/use a MS account directly tied to my windows login. Yes if one uses OneDrive and/OR Office365 or if you want to use your MSDN subscription etc.. but in my case I still just use local windows account and then individually connect to those things only if I want.

My work is moving to Azure/cloud Active Directory I think.. not entirely sure of the migration plan... but thus far I'm still using a "hybrid" where my account is a standard domain user that is using a local cached profile/account on my work machines.

I guess I don't mind if the account brings value as my AppleID does - the tight integration possible with my apple iCloud services is one that I do not mind. But even there, The account I use is a local account and then I just tie it in ./ log in with my Apple ID

Maybe if I had not been a windows user ever since Win 3.1 days Id feel differently about it, I don't know, but this whole you must be connected to MS with an MS account to set it up is annoying AF\ I mean what if someone is in a country / location where they can not easily or safely get online? Sure it doesn't apply to me but it just - I really like not being forced.

The more MS pushes the more I feel like rejecting them. I've drunk the Apple Kool-Aid. abit as I actually do like the integration that MacOS and iPhone have with iCloud (Especially since I use advanced encryption on my iCloud, so to get access to my photos and other stuff on desktop I have to use a Mac that is connected to the account..

But again, that was a choice I made; it was not forced on me.

Every day MS makes me more and more ready to just jump ship for MacOS and Linux /sigh.

So, interestingly, the biggest thing driving planned obsolescence right now as far as I can tell is MS pushing windows 10 out, and so many devices unable to meet the hardware requirements for Win 11

The article didn't mention if these machines would be set up with older Windows or with Linux, though I'm going to guess it will be the former.

I do developer support for an SDK, and thus I have a lot of customers in India, so I have some sense of one part of this: an incredibly strong "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude. I regularly have customers using a 10 or even 15 year outdated version of our SDK they're trying to work with - it worked well enough that they didn't need to update and so they didn't. Many of these folks are also using really outdated Windows. I'll admit it's been a while since I've seen someone actively using XP still, but I still often see win 7. We don't officially tell them "no we won't support you" but we will tell them "if your issue is fixed in a newer version, you need to upgrade, we can't backport fixes to ancient versions.", and over time, those ancient windows systems have been mostly replaced... I'd guess though that just like other OS versions, a huge number of folks will continue to use outdated / unsupported versions long past end of life...

Granted, this isn't just India - but I do think they have extra large motivation and that repair culture there (as mentioned in TFA) to keep older hardware limping along, and probably using out of support Windows.. I kind of shudder at the security implications... but I also kind of really admire the ingenuity and resourcefulness.

The whole windows 10 end of life due to hardware requirements is indeed going to drive a lot of waste of perfectly serviceable hardware - honestly, I kind of hope it finds its way to the bodgers / makers / hackers rather than landfills.. but I do kind of wish there was more Linux uptake to lessen the number of unpatched/unpatchable vulnerable machines out there.

IF (and that if statement is doing some really heavy lifting here) I could trust Meta, I'd gladly pay for an official "no ads, not tracking" experience.. however, that if has an and to it...

The and being "AND they provide a default 'no algorithm, just show me my friends feed' experience"

Yes I know you can use
https://www.facebook.com/?filt...

To kind of get that but like ... make it work.

The issues with FB are not just about the ads but about their constant need to "get you to engage" it leads to the algorithm pushing the most outrage it can to build engagement.

I use Facebook because I have a lot of meat-space people I want to keep in contact with - a bunch of friends who I might not be intimately involved in their day to day lives but with whom I share a connection and like to kind of "keep an ear out" when they have something important in their life..

I never felt connected to a community on twitter (before it was Xhitter) and or on BlueSky etc.. that is great as a "digital town square" where you go to interact with a more public sphere..

But the way I like to use Facebook is to have a nice private bubble of people I actually want to interact with.

Social bubbles CAN be bad but so long as it's an 'objective reality/truth permeable membrane' (as in so long as your bubble is insulating you from horrible people but not from objective reality/truth) then I think social bubbles can be good and even necessary - to keep one from constantly "drinking from the fire-hose"

So yeah, IF I could trust Meta, IF they'd honor the actual do not track and no ads, not boosted or sponsored content, and IF I could get an experience that isn't algorithmically directed toward outrage and "engagement" I'd gladly pay for it.

If it wasn't such a PITA, I'd probably look into using a VPN to come in via a European country and get a paid account under those rules - cuz you know they're not gonna offer it here in the US where we have absolute shite data protection laws

I think the solarpunk and cheap web folks are onto something

https://potato.cheap/

"""We are mostly leaving Europe as it lacks the environment we need to innovate in an AI-first era of technology"""

I'm thinking that this is not the flex they think it is, and that the EU dodged a bullet on this one

The screens, which displayed product information and ads, frequently crashed, showed incorrect inventory, and occasionally caught fire, Bloomberg reports.

... and occasionally caught fire

Hey this thing that is supposed to be cold.. why is it burning??

So, I've watched Linux get better and better over the years - it's been my preferred server OS for ages... but desktop distros never were anything more than an occasional "let me try this one out on this older box I have lying around"

I'm not in love with win 11 but if you use OpenShell and maybe StartAllBack or one of the other shell fixes - it can be tamed into usability... and for stuff I have to do on windows, it's fine..

but I have a couple of VERY serviceable but not able upgrade to 11 pcs that I'm going to have to either risk not getting updates or say screw it and install Linux...

I know that Chrome refuses to run on end of life OSes (pushing folks to FireFox) and if MS office refuses, Libre Office is really very good as an option (with Thunderbird for email) so yeah... I really wonder if they're banking on folks being that willing to just replace perfectly viable PCs

Its going to lead to so much unnecessary E-waste..

I wonder if there won't be a glut of decent spec slightly older machines suddenly showing up in thrift stores and other places

MS is really tripling down here..

Every time a major new version drops, it seems to want to put my desktop image to that damn windows spotlight... I generally like to set it to a nice dark gray.

I can't imagine anything more annoying than "animated wallpaper" eek

I support an SDK... The other day I had a customer make a case where they said they tried having AI generate code to accomplish a task but this particular class was "missing" a particular method.

Dude our class isn't missing the method, your AI code generator it the digital equivalent of a cargo cult..

Of course I phrased it more .. tactfully - but I may have in fact quoted his "I tried using AI to generate the needed implementation but it didn't work" and responded "I am not at all surprised" and then explained in detail how the AI code generation appears to have used method signatures for other classes in our libraries.. but that for what he was trying to do, the best practice would be along these lines... with the 20 or so lines of code that a programmer more familiar than they (again did not SAY this part out loud) would write to implement his use case.

IT really is like the programming version of a cargo cult. Just kind of throws out stuff that appears to have the form/shape without any understanding ... or actual functional result.

I justice use Siri. The dick feature works prefecture, and never mist interprets. My grandma or puncture nation.

"""A vaccine for the disease exists for horses, but because the illness is so rare "there is little incentive for vaccine manufacturers to develop a preventative for triple E in humans," adds the report."""

This right here says everything you need to know about late-stage capitalism.

I'm just completely stunned by the utter callousness, yet its also sadly unsurprising.

When asked why he robbed banks, Willy Sutton replied "that's where the money is"

Ransomware is going to continue to be a problem so long as the perpetrators make money - whether people pay to recover their data or to try and avoid embarrassment or even to keep the info from being sold on the "dark web" doesn't matter - they do it because they can make money from it.

I can't help but think that companies who pay such ransoms are just fueling the profitability, making it worth doing.