Use them?! First: why would I want to be locked into Meta's proprietary APIs? And second: it doesn't even include a near-infrared swimsuits mode. I can't believe they omitted such a basic feature. (Zuck, you call these perv glasses!?!)

Besides, from a style perspective, they just aren't nearly gargoylie enough. Whatever perv glasses I buy will have erect antenna(s) (not integrated into the frame), much larger aperture cameras for astronomy, and lots of blinkenlights (including a cool-looking Locutus-style laser). It doesn't surprise me at all, that the more style-conscious sex isn't buying them.

Meta's specific product is ridiculous. But I nevertheless defend the overall tech.

Anything that takes time away from what you would rather be doing is a form of suffering.

Quite the opposite, you wouldn't need to work to survive. You may refuse to acknowledge it but the basic needs of people have been warped into weapons of enslavement. There are plenty of homes and yet homes are unaffordable. There is plenty of food and yet the cost of it keeps increasing. You used to be able to support your family and own a home on a minimum wage job but now to own a home you need dual incomes.

What about the child born to billionaires? Do they have to work? What did they do to earn it?

Why do you believe that you are receiving the benefits of your hard work? Make no mistake, those above you are the only ones really benefiting and they give you crumbs. To put that in perspective, while they take the entire cake, you believe I'm trying to take your crumbs.

I don't resent what other people have, I resent what they have done to other people in order to obtain it. There doesn't hurt me, it makes me a better person for recognizing how nobody should behave.

its advocates have already gotten so much of what they could have possibly hoped for

Except the one thing that actually matters: being able to really use it. I still (in 2026!) can't use Bitcoin to pay for things at my local grocery store, car mechanic, or even Amazon.

Bitcoin didn't take off. Unless it suddenly gets more popular by a few orders of magnitude, it remains a useless dead end.

If you were in Silicon Valley?...that tracks. Same with Seattle and probably a few other major cities with then current tech stalwarts. If you lived in middle America, the jobs sucked. They paid OK, but they were constantly laying people off. It was a high stress, low-security environment. Most programmers didn't work for tech companies, they worked in industry implementing software.

Most companies looked at software as an expense and few saw it as an investment and were eager to cut it whenever they could. They knew they needed it, but they wanted to have as small of crews as possible. My sister and all her friends were constantly getting laid off. The ones who remained were perpetually insecure.

When I entered the workforce, the greybeards would also tell stories about how they were mistreated. I was smart enough to move to a better city, but even in a tech city, it definitely scarred the generation before me. In the 80s, there were many, especially in Middle America, who got jobs for major corporations writing software. They loved it and were good at it...and they were laid off within 5 years or their company closed down and recessions were more frequent then for tech workers, so they often were competing in a saturated market. Quite a few just gave up and went into teaching or something else.

When I entered the workforce, the greybeards I met?...I am confident they couldn't get work outside the industry without a LOT of fundamental changes to everything about them. Now they're generally smart, so I am sure they could pivot to real estate, teaching, or whatever your choice of backup career is if they really really really put their mind to it, but it would be anything but smooth or pretty.

The job market improved DRASTICALLY after the dot-com boom because even the biggest idiot MBAs could clearly see technology as an investment with a clear line of sight to growth and not just an expense, which probably isn't paying for itself. This led to programming being a good choice for a career and not something you suffered through because you loved it.

You don't remember the 80s well. Programmers did smaller scoped work that accomplished less. It was much harder to do back then and their tools were limited. it wasn't their fault. However, it wasn't fun. Languages that managed memory, like Java...as well as easier programming languages, like JavaScript and Python attracted a lot of people who enjoyed coding. It brought in a lot of scientists and creative individuals that wrote amazing stuff. The majority of code before 1995?...those SHITTY text-based indecipherable client server apps that you saw in insurance companies, hospitals, and car dealerships. They SUCKED, did very little, and were so hard to use, you had to train EVERYONE who touched them for several days just to figure out the esoteric convoluted interface.

OK, so you didn't mind the ancient text-based client/server apps?...well they crashed often. GUIs were usually worse. Did you forget having your apps crash DAILY? Windows crashed daily and as an early Desktop Linux adopter, I can say the OS didn't crash much at all, but everything I ran outside a terminal did. So I suppose it's faster to restart Netscape than Window, but still...today? I only have 1 app that crashes often : Oracle's SQL Developer....a total piece of Larry-Ellison-grade-grift-and-garbage. Beyond that?...nope, thanks to frameworks and memory-safe languages...or just programmers getting better at their craft, crashes are very rare in my daily life. I never have to save my work often thinking my IDE or text editor or e-mail program will crash any minute.

Regarding personalities? Yeah, obviously not every programmer is socially dysfunctional in the 80s. But every one I met?...definitely so. My sister would let me visit her office when I was 12 and I thought it was the coolest thing going to a big city office for a big company. All of my sister's friends? They had cool toys, but were tough to be around and hold a conversation with, even when you thought they were super cool and I was into everything they were into. Even as a young child I met them and said to myself "I love that you have all the cool video games and electronics and a really fast car, but I can't see you ever getting a girlfriend with that massive belly, your girl arms, your ill-fitting t-shirt and gross beard that looks like it needs to be washed...and certainly your personality can't be helping."

Many were cool, I am sure, but let's be real, well over 75% would not have thrived in other industries. It would take a LOT of adjustment for them to thrive in sales or healthcare or any environment that required more interaction with people than machines.

There are many smart people in the 80s that could have been programmers, but unless they were in a few tech cities, they chose medicine, research, finance, law, or accounting for better pay and job security (layoffs were very common back then...software was seen as a nuisance overhead expense more than an investment by most outside the tech business).

I think the office is better with some diversity. Not just gender/racial, but background and thought patterns. I don't want to go back to gatekeeping and making programming for the hardcore only. I will thrive. I'm good at my job, but the people I enjoy working with the most will probably find something else less stressful/hostile.

Blaming Wharton School of Business for what Trump tried to do with the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario is absurd. By all accounts, he didn't learn anything in his time there and his professors didn't think highly of him. There's no way his university had anything to do with that.

Besides, lots of people graduated from Wharton. Which others, who graduated from there, suffer from Trump's derangement syndrome and a need to rename geography?

We have the resources to keep everyone alive with minimal effort. Why should the bulk of society have to suffer for the few who hoard resources but did nothing to earn them?

Counterpoint, Until the late 90s, programming was the domain of the autistic and severely mathematically inclined. In most areas, the pay sucked, and their output sucked even more. It was a hostile environment everywhere but in the bay area and Seattle...maybe a few others. My (much) older sister was a COBOL programmer...her life sucked. She was grateful to be laid off with severance and start a career elsewhere. Hearing about her experiences made me recosinder a programming job...I was great at writing code, but didn't want to live her life. Luckily the dot com boom pulled me back in.

Would you rather have the software of today or the software of 1995? Let's be real, most programmers before the internet couldn't find good work outside of working with programmers. They lacked the soft skills to work anywhere, but in front of a computer, FAR away from customers.

The programmers today certainly aren't as hardcore as those in the 80s, myself included, but we make MUCH MUCH MUCH better stuff. Plus I like diverse work environments. I've even got Asperger's and my version of hell is being trapped in a room full of hardcore autistic engineers who obsess about micro-optimizations (which happens to be a passion of mine).

We don't want shitty programmers, but we also don't want to scare off creative people with options. There's a nice balance. Plus it's nice to have at least a few coworkers who aren't white or Asian. We want to hire passionate people who put a lot of love into the craft.

AI is really killing programming. It's simply not fun. You write something by hand and put love and good work into it and you feel like a dinosaur failing your manager telling you to have Claude write it all...with a sense of guilt wondering "did I take longer than Claude and waste money?"

Then I do the opposite and have Claude write something simple (which is what my bosses want us to do). Today, it was writing a unit test for some underloved code I inherited. I wrote the skeleton and 1 test by hand to show Claude how it's done and told it to replicate the pattern for the other 16 endpoints. It took nearly all day, probably cost a ton of money and the output is SHIT. I keep refining things and pointing out mistakes and it just creates this indecipherable convoluted mess. Now I'm doubting myself. I had a simple functional project...here is an input, assert the output....why is it 10,000 lines of Java? I had to go helper method by helper method and tell it to use extremely common annotations in the classpath which we use elsewhere than write it's own bullshit.

Each minor optimization like "on method fuckMeUpTheAssWithABroomSideways(), the try/catch isn't needed. Use @SneakyThrows instead"...something an IDE plugin can do in 5 seconds, takes 10 minutes on Claude Opus 5.0. It'll copy and paste it's own code to an insane degree. It's SOOOO stupid that it makes me doubt my sanity and eyesight. Surely Claude isn't STUPID enough to copy/paste a boilerplate function into 5 classes within 1 single session?!?!....These 5 methods must be different somehow. "I" must be wrong because there's no way an AI can be THIS stupid..... Nope, I was right, so I told Claude to stop it....another 15 minutes to change 1 method to public, delete the 4 copy/paste and statically import the new remaining method 4x.

So the final product is of poor quality, took longer than it would have taken me to write it myself, and I feel ashamed to release it. But my boss is happy with me and thinks I did the right thing.

AI certainly hasn't made my life better. I can't recommend this career path as enthusiastically as I used to. When people ask me today, I tell them. "I really have no clue if your kid should become a programmer today. He/she needs to figure this out on their own. " But regardless, it would be nice to have coworkers who were talented enough to choose software development over other options...not just the duds who couldn't make it anywhere where human interaction was required.

On: "A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there is no evidence its software was at fault."

Is AI now an aspect of Mother Nature? Reminds me of:
https://2001.fandom.com/wiki/F...
  ""Let me put it this way, Mr. Amer. The [Palantir] 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake, or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the word, foolproof and incapable of error." -- [Palantir's] HAL 9000 to BBC reporter Martin Amer"

https://humanisticsystems.com/...
        "Dave: How would you account for this discrepancy between you and the twin [Palantir] 9000 [that did not kill lots of school girls]?
        HAL: Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
        Frank: Listen HAL. There has never been any instance at all of a computer error occurring in the [Palantir] 9000 series, has there?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. The [Palantir] 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
        Frank: Well of course I know all the wonderful achievements of the [Palantir] 9000 series, but, uh, are you certain there has never been any case of even the most insignificant computer error?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about that."

What do you call an AI (or human) that never asks questions, never seeks confirmatory evidence, never asks for clarification, never points out conflicting priorities, and/or never refuses illegal orders?

Onec again, the deeper issue is "the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
====
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?

Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?

Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?

These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ....

Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ....

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance [otherwise they would not be so powerful or capable of so much rapid destruction as well as rapid creation]. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...
====

When did this happen? Citation, please.

You are aware that Joe Biden, while seemingly a nice enough guy, was wildly unpopular as a leader, including among the left? It was the Democrats, after all, who convinced him not to run for a second term.

What's being alleged here is closer to price fixing, which is also an antitrust violation. Hypothetically, let's say four major automakers got together and said, "We all know we have access to the latest in brake technology, but we collectively agree not to deploy it until two years from now," presumably for business reasons. That kind of collusion is illegal.

Everybody seems to be complaining ... although that's nothing new. Some people hate Gnome, others hate KDE.

So I ask you (everybody): Is anything good? Cuz we ain't gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop without a UI. Do we all switch to Enlightenment?

Yes, limited local AI models certainly are going to be a standard feature in the future.

I run both local and cloud AI. There is still a huge difference, because my local machine has to use smaller and quantized models. It takes considerably longer for lower quality results.

The real question that should be asked is why the fuck are we in a slave society where the only options are work, go to jail, or die? Machines have solved our farming problem where you needed to work on your farm every day and yet things keep getting worse! It's not like, "well if you work, you'll have something to show for it" is true because a tiny fraction of the population owns everything and they are making it worse by the day.

The AI is only being made because the slave masters demand it. Nobody said, "oh fuck, I wish there were more AI to annoy me while I'm trying to use my computer," it's big corps controlled by the billionaire class. Wake the fuck up.