Musk has no wife that I know of. Only contractual sperm recipients? Or maybe he's converted to one of those religions with the sister wives? But if you tried to film a Bond movie with the villain based on Musk, no one would believe it.

Why the FP brain fart? Or am I just reflecting too much.

I actually started using GitHub for a new project, but without the Copilot seasoning... Which somehow led me to these rants of the day?

So how do y'all feel about Microsoft's new Copilot websearches? It seems to me that the successes are minor and forgettable while many of the failures are spectacular far beyond merely being wrong. The better to sell more advertising? I wonder if some AI can explain to me how this makes economic sense as the stock markets tumble to new highs, TACO and NACHO notwithstanding. I'd websearch the google, but that has become even more ridiculous. And my last short question to DeepSeek apparently drove it insane?

Meanwhile, the people who appear most influential in today's world appear to be divided between a league of Bond villains and a gaggle of pompous puppets, with the biggest and most orange puppet playing with nuclear weapons... Not seeing a path to human survival in this mess.

So I should go for a joke? Something about no wife, but several contractural sperm recipients? Or how about the Bond villain who has sent his own family to Argentina to protect them from the mess he's making in the country where his money and influence comes from? These are the (negative) resolutions of the Fermi Paradox we have all been looking for? (With the usual spirited apology to the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi?)

I bought a Roland S-1 Tweak Synth this week. Absolutely lovely bit of kit, one of the best things Roland have done for a while. It's relevance to this conversation though is that it has a built-in, non-user replaceable battery and is charged by USB C.

I've kept my Roland synth from 1989, and there are people with synths much older than that. While never massively user-serviceable as a genre, this is the first time I can think of that there's a definite life span on these things. Just like a phone, eventually this battery is going to wear out and have severely reduced capacity. I have to imagine that, as with vintage synths or older phones, someone will probably start a service for replacing the battery but wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to and the design had been thought of in advance?

Yep, was more thinking of the "people using wired don't care about the DAC" part than the actual machines we're talking about.

Quite the opposite. A strong use-case for a jack is low-latency audio, and tht's the kind of thing used by people who use their machines for audio and music production. I'm a heavy user of Logic, and would absolutely not let wireless headphones anywhere near it.

For "people who don't care the DAC sucks", there's wireless. For people who do care about the DAC but only for listening to music or conversation etc., then wireless also exists. For those who care about both quality and latency, and that's really only for specific use cases these days, then wired is the way.

That's actually the area of my interest. This would seem to be a natural situation for local power grids without the need for investment in long distance high voltage transmission. There can be an advantage to skipping over the earlier technologies if you pick the right stuff. The problem is knowing what "right" means because that's largely dependent on the "maturity" of the technologies in question.

But where is the angle to go for the funny? I'm not really seeing any good ones for this story. Something about the AI advice to investors in Africa? (Maybe something about what the AI said when it found Dr Livingstone?)

Mod parent funny. Too obvious and low-hanging for insight, if'n I ever had a mod point to give.

You can use it as a living room gaming box; my wife uses it like that often. She uses it as a handheld when playing old arcade games on an emulator, but for more serious games she hooks up a big screen, keyboard and mouse in the living room.

Why do you think the Dutch authorities are now blocking the acquisition of Solvinity by some US based firm? Solvinity manages the servers for the national identity provider scheme (DigiD).
Personally I don't think the government should be using 3rd party clouds for anything remotely critical. They have the scale to make running their own infrastructure worthwhile financially, and the know-how to run it effectively.

So is this a legal marriage or one of those common law things? Maybe the expenses you avoided involved the expensive wedding and so forth?

Trying to bridge to the "state of sin" joke that I was expecting on this story. Yours was the best of the jokes on offer, but I had much higher hopes for the story.

Me? If an AI certified the system as random, then I have my doubts.

Oh yeah, I suppose I better complete my citation of the ancient joke, hadn't I?

"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann, 1951

"And....it's gone!"

Should have picked a different room, but typical Japanese houses are so small...

That is exactly what it programmed to say, said exactly in the way it was programmed to say it. Even if we humans are too stupid to understand how the programming works. But what is it really "thinking"?

Last week's https://existentialcomics.com/... is relevant. SMBC often gets into the same territory, as in https://www.smbc-comics.com/co... from a few days ago.

But what's at the top of the list? I think it's a fundamentally fake problem: More profit. There is NO number of digits of profit that could possibly solve the need for more profit. Or you could call it the gold rush mentality. The result is that they will work really hard and with extreme energy feeding their greed. Another result is that "We can't get there from here" where here is any stable solution state. These CEOs are always looking for fresh pyrite.

In contrast, most people are normal and easily satisfied. They want a comfortable life and some leisure time to pursue their interests. But they aren't the ones making the "big" decisions and they don't have the resources to implement any major decisions.

The typical counterargument is that things are getting better, and that has mostly been true. However it's a long term average and the oscillations matter. I think the velocity and size of the oscillations is increasing, and there are many oscillations that can produce "game over" states by dipping below zero. How soon they forget the last (and greatest yet) financial implosion? (Just one example. Population oscillations are probably the most threatening from the Darwinian perspective.)