s/Chinese authoritarian algorithm/American authoritarian algorithm/g

I've seen a lot of hyped up nonsense in my four decades in tech, but nothing comes close to the "A.I." hype cycle.

There are some interesting applications of LLMs, but nothing approaching the nonsense the zealots are spouting. With the insane amount of build-up this particular model has gotten from Altman and his ilk, it better be orders of magnitude more impressive than its predecessors.

I have a hunch it'll be on par with Highlander 2: The Quickening.

Just published today, "Microsoft’s big lie: Your computer is fine (and you don’t need to buy a new one)": https://technical.ly/civic-new...

A detailed look, arguing that upgrading from Windows 10 -> Linux Mint is easier than Windows 10 -> Windows 11.

Lots of people like to say the right thing, until it gets inconvenient.

The number of “progressives” I know who still eat at Chick-fil-A because “it's just so good”, and listen to Spotify despite them ripping off musicians to funnel money to Joe Rogan, says this has zero chance of happening.

I'm with y'all on the complete over-hype of LLMs. They'll be another useful tool in several toolbelts, but as a coder, the greatest boost to my productivity ever was... a second monitor. I've been speaking on this hype wave for years now, here's a talk I gave at DjangoCon US in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If Altman or Amodei say it, you can believe we're nowhere close to it. :)

I'm old enough to remember breathtaking headlines from the first decade of the millennium stating that “technology” will cause half of the jobs in healthcare to disappear.

Instead, it doubled over the decade.

Tech breakthroughs will always make certain jobs redundant through automation: the printing press brought an end to the age of the illuminated manuscript scribe. But history shows us tech breakthroughs have always lead to more job total than before.

I tried to switch to DuckDuckGo from Google search several times since 2012 or so. Initially, it didn't take. But on the third or fourth try, it did: I've now been a DDG user for three full years, rarely using Google search except as a rare fallback. This isn't so much because DDG got incredibly better; it is more because Google search got incredibly worse.

The switch to ProtonMail was even easier. I switched to ProtonMail to Gmail in 2012, and never looked back. It is just better. In addition to the privacy features, the interface is uncluttered. As da Vinci states, "simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication" - and Proton nails that in their products.

This is a long way of saying: there are other options. It's time to ditch Gmail.

I'm now looking at people with @gmail.com the way I used to look @hotmail.com and @aol.com.

Work in progress: https://project2029.site/consu...

In Brave (which has their own level of YUCK, admittedly), I love the location bar multiple search feature.

• I search DDG by default
• I use :g as a prefix to search Google instead
• :br for Brave Search
• :b for Bing Search

This allows me to use DDG by default, which is fine (or better!) 99% of the time. But there are rare edge cases where Google's deeper index and algorithm hurts, instead of helping; so I can just put a :g in front of the search to check Google. Also, some required reading, about exactly who and how enshittified Google's search. Spoiler alert: same dude who was in charge of Yahoo's Search from 2005-2012. https://www.wheresyoured.at/th...

B5 is my favorite work of fiction... but it wasn't until episode 13 that it *really* started to hit its stride. Some pieces were put on the table in Midnight on the Firing Line, Mind War, Sky Full of Stars, and to a lesser extent, Parliament of Dreams and Deathwalker. But episode 13, Signs and Portents, was the one that hooked me forever.

"AI" coding can be a helpful assistant, especially for syntax I don't use every day, but holy hell is it verbose, and creates a TON of technical debt to maintain.

Even Claude 3.5 needs major refactors of anything but the most basic pieces of logic.

1000000000%. Karma's a bitch, Altman.

Yeah, I feel your pain. I'm not a fan of M$FT, but if still need it for some reason, at least these methods are still supported. I'm just waiting for the Windows that starts requiring a monthly subscription, like every other piece of overrated crap on this planet!