At the dawn of the third age of mankind?

SPOILER ALERT (although it was 28 years ago):

The President's suicide note on the desk said "THE ASCENSION OF THE ORDINARY MAN" repeated, line after line, with the letters circled to say, "SCORCHED EARTH."

Does anyone doubt for a second that Trump would nuke the country if he was promised godhood by an advanced alien race?

Babylon 5 is my favorite work of fiction. I've watched it many times throughout my life, and it has taken on different meanings for different seasons of my life. It is a remarkable show.

If you haven't ever watched it, give it a try. The first season takes a little while to get going, but the overall story is just incredible. It was a lot of firsts: the first television show to use CGI. The first US show to be filmed for 16x9, knowing that DVD and HD were coming (although that didn't quite work out, as noted in other comments). The first American show to write the larger, five-year story arc entirely in advance.

My favorite shows have three elements: a story with a beginning, middle, and end; interesting characters that grow and change over the course of the story; and they have to stick the landing. Many shows like Game of Thrones and Lost were fun rides but never quite sealed the deal.

Babylon 5 does the best job at these I've ever seen. The Shield, The Expanse, The Wire, Six Feet Under, and Buffy are other personal favorites. If you like those, give it a shot!

There hasn't been a “must have” innovation in mobile phones for a long time. They're a solved problem, like laptops.

Start releasing different types that appeal to different segments on a multi-year cadence. Release a new Mini version every four years. Do the same for the Max on a different year, the dumb skinny fashion accessory one the year after that, and so on.

The conversation with my friends isn't monetized.

My friends don't pause every 30 seconds to promote something, or bug me to subscribe to something, or like something, or join some stupid email list.

Conversations go two ways, these AI slop machines are talking at you, not having a conversation.

10000000000000000000000%. The biggest grift in history is on, baby.

That's not really a fair comparison. Netflix was being funded by VC in growth-at-any-cost mode at the time, and operating at a loss.

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.