What makes this sound? Pressure waves. Pressure waves that could have pushed a piston but ended up exiting the exhaust system because of internal combustion engine's inherent inefficiencies. Heat, sound, smelly exhaust fumes are all byproducts of lost performance.

Irrational feelings of nostalgia and the comfort of habits are great selling points for people who forget that generations come and go, that oil prices often spikes, that EV’s are a lot cheaper to drive ((total mileage / mpg) * $/gallon), and that sacrificing one’s future for short term gains are a great way end up worse off.

Exactly what I thought. "Education is illegal in the US" is becoming less a meme and more a reality.

Why would someone need an AI agent to monitor deterministic data in a stable, reliable manner that can be tracked through time ?

Ai Agents are great for all sorts of stuff, but I can't see how they could beat a good old dashboard when you want to track your mains KPIs.

Screws are great, but houses are still held up with nails because of their sheer strength. AI Agents are just a shiny very powerful new tool in our toolbox, not the entire toolbox. AI's lane is not to flip switches of add compute taxes on a bill.

The real great "feature" in this system is for Microsoft itself. They want their devices to see what we see and hear what we hear because that would be a treasure trove of data to sell brokers and to improve their AI models. I don't dream of being tracked, I don't dream of being spied on, I don't dream of a world where the concept of privacy is completely gone.

They don't care about user experience, they don't even really care about convenience. Convenience is just the bait they dangle to lure us in, and then the convenience fades away as the trapdoor closes behind us. We've seen what happened with the Internet and Social Media. We've seen what happened with smartphones. Why would AI be different ? It will not.

Keep it open source.

Open Source is always the way to go IMO. Just like it is to work for the people instead of against them, and to develop technologies for peace instead of for war.

Open AI looks like a good idea, hence the company's name. But Open AI is no longer Open, and tech companies are walking back on their pledges instead of acting upon them. It feels like the current state of capitalism creates incentives that does not align with the people's interests.

You want to fight climate change ? Internalize the costs of pollution. You want people to earn a living wage ? Tax the hell out of profits made by businesses paying people below a living wage. Want the working class to pay less taxes ? Have the people who make billions off their backs pay taxes.

If our current political and economic systems fail to create incentives to do the right things, only activists will do the right things. If you expect the people to do the right thing for the whole, make sure you don't incentivize against it. Our current reinforcement system give extra points to bad actors.

I walk 1 km to and from work twice a day, I found that it really helps to activate my brain in the morning and after lunch. But I felt that the gains were less noticeable during winter, even though the effort of going outside is greater (the temperature felt outside was -33C here this morning).

I can't be sure that this would explain the whole thing, but walking in an industrial area of town during winter is less about breathing fresh air, and more about inhaling the exhaust fumes of diesel truck and machines that people keep idling because that was the good thing to do a few decades ago and they didn't update their habits to new engines.

The colder outside, the worst it becomes. It was pretty bad this morning as I made the last part of my trip coughing.

Other than the benefits of staying active and having my blood flow well before I sit at my desk for hours, I figure that inhaling all this pollution can't be that good for the health of anyone working in the area. I wish we cared a little more about making this world better than we care about not changing our habits.

I am with you on that. My 14yo car will soon need a replacement, and I am mad that no car manufacturer can keep a simple model without all the bells and whistles that keeps the same main components for a decade in order to offer a cheap and reliable option to people.

Smartphones work well and could be made the same for years, but they have to "upgrade" it. My noise-cancelling headphones work perfectly and I could buy the same thing over and over, but they put AI in it, to be connected to devices with AI in it, connected to an Internet with AI in it. That AIception for you.

It all feels like waste of resources and sprawling mass-surveillance to me, but anyone who asks for a device that just works is told "We don't make it because nobody would buy it." This is BS, they tell that to everyone. I'd certainly buy the same exact model of headphones as the ones I'm wearing right now when mine dies, and it'd be dirt cheap and durable since all the manufacturing tools would be paid for, there'd be no R&D and marketing added to the price, and every bug and pain points would have been fixed by then.

Capitalism is a very wasteful and expensive machine that didn't provide anyone much value for our money in the last few years. Whatever happened to the KISS principle.

When I lit that fire, there was even more wood in it, and the house was cold. Now there's much less wood in the fire, and the house is warm ! We must put more wood in that fire ASAP! Wake up sheeple !

There is now a consensus between the two alternance parties in Canada about rolling back the carbon fee and dividend system.

I wish we could sue these people out of power so bad they'd think twice about seeking power against general interest. At this point, legislating against scientifically back effective climate action like that should be unconstitutional and disqualifying.

Translation : They don't care that the lack of antitrust and government action has let capitalism enshittify into a dystopian oligarchy of cyber-surveillance and corporate propaganda posing as consumer products and social networks. They're only concerned about the fact that some people push back when you say harmful and hateful stuff against others.

We would put someone who acts inconstantly in a high level position, except maybe for 45 and 46 POTUS. We would trust humans that say false stuff with confidence, except if they are a CEO or a consultant.

AI is built to empower those who can say stuff with confidence without knowing what they're talking about. Anyone else will doubt the AI so much that the productivity increase it provides will be less, even less so if we account that actually competent people produce a quality of work that is harder to replicate with AI.

Many workers and managers are actually just copy-pasting their way to the top. We all gotta work BS jobs to pay the bills. It's not like a society where absolutely everybody needs to work is build to be efficient in any way.

AI will empower the con artists among them, and put the people who earn a living by actually mastering their trade and working for real out of a job.

It might free up a lot of people who can show how the king has no clothes. But who cares if the king has clothes nowadays ? They say he has the greatest clothes nobody has ever worn. I don't know, but people say that.

Edit : Trust is a concept that opposes impunity

Trust is a concept that requires impunity, unless you can use force, then you don't need trust.

You are absolutely right that the only incentive that could force the organizations in charge of protecting our data to prioritize security is if failing to do so is almost guaranteed to cripple them with fines, and that these fines can't be evaded by bankruptcy or other legal loophole.

But then, what would be the incentive for lawmakers and those who finance their campaigns to adequately enforce consequences for people who steal public money or abuse the trust of citizens. You know, like a democracy where the people were really in power would do to protect themselves.

I am very suspicious of any nation that calls itself a democracy but isn't incentivized to put the interest of its people at the forefront. How is that possible ? If we only call democratic governments those that fiercely protect the public good and the interests of their citizens, there hasn't been many democracies in the history of mankind.

I get why Twitter users move to Bluesky, or Mastodon. They are similar products. But doesn't the fact that TikTok users specifically search for Chinese alternative prove the point that China is using these apps to gain soft power against western citizens ? My main concern about TikTok has never been as much about data collection and privacy as it is that their algorithm, like on any other platform, can be imperceptibly skewed towards a nefarious goal over time. Most western apps skew towards advertiser's needs, and presumably towards surveillance state, which is already very bad and leads to an enshittification where products are built for the needs of shareholders and advertisers instead of their users'.

But what happens when your 'For you' that was formerly used to get you addicted to a platform slowly switches to content design to destabilize your country or push adversarial propaganda during a conflict ? This is a whole new level of enshittification.

I consider myself left of liberal and quite political, and I only used TikTok for a few weeks before I realized its algorithm was pushing me farther to the left and pushing more and more ideologies that aligned with China's authoritarian communist regime. I can't be the only one. This, plus the fact that this app is very addictive and serves no utilitarian purpose, led me to uninstall the app after just a few weeks. I am very wary of any TV where a foreign government holds the remote and has control over what people know, what they see, and what opinions they are exposed to as they see it.

They have no incentive in using it too heavily until their users are hooked, and it is worth blowing their cover. What about when the time comes ? The fact that hundreds of thousands of users are made to seek Chinese alternatives to TikTok tells me that the first part of this plan is in place.