To sum up, I broadly agree that one way or the other, much more sane and modest equipment will supersede the absurd designs of the bleeding edge high end GPU designs as they exist today. Beyond the facets you mention, they are fickle beasts to get working right with how they are designed hardware wise.

The push for concentrating in datacenters will continue, because there's much more money to be had to hold any facet of compute hostage for subscription revenue. See Microsoft Office, no need for that to be subscription only, and yet Office increasingly pushes the subscription model and diminishes the perpetual licenses.

While they may be contributing, I frankly think that would be a bad strategy if they had a good finger on the pulse of public sentiment here. Folks don't need convincing and are frustrated all by themselves.

On the flip side, Musk's social network announcing they are rooting out sentiment that gets in the way of Musk's ambitions and declares it to be foreign interference? Well, since there's no conflict of interest at all there, seems legit.

We do know that the companies are out talking to members of town councils and making them sign NDAs. We know that town councils after obligatory public comments and referendums are frequently going against the sentiment expressed *in person*. They are going hard on small-town corruption to get what they want without doing a thing to make the respective communities actually have *anything* long term to benefit from the inflicted stuff.

Now they could probably do things like some municipal 'permanent funds' to make the local populace interested, but the cheapest way is to just bribe a handful of people on a town council and gaslight the world to say the locals actually like the datacenters in their backyards.

Agreed. It was a bad administration, but if I knew exactly how badly his sore losing would have turned out, I sadly would have taken the lesser evil of a 2020 Trump victory.

I don't know how much of it was "Trump" using the time versus the reality of establishment folks distancing themselves (he was a loser facing litigation, traditionally considered the death kiss to a political career) versus the most vile sort of folks latching on to his scenario. Before he was surrounded by a blend of establishment and his nutjobs, after 2020 it was nutjob only. Folks like Stephen Miller being set to just have it their way without challenge.

So now his 'nutjob' crew has proven to the broader GOP that they can rig things to a single party system with repercussion and they are all in. The question is if there is a line that will not be crossed. Rigged maps are already proven, we will see about whether they will use ICE/National Guard for voter intimidation. We may not have to find out if they will overturn legitimate results if the other things work out well enough.

For some definition of 'they', sure, there's always *someone* paranoid about the scenario.

However there's a fair amount more credible supposition over this one. Trump's sore loser reaction has paved the way for some dangerous moves.

In 2020, he only went to interfere *after* the fact, but he clearly interfered. When the results betrayed him, he sought to overturn them and when that failed he tried to ignore the electors and use their own anyway and as that failed he tried to get Pence to reject the election and as that failed he incited a mom to try to disrupt the proceedings. He learned that in a fair game he actually could lose and that was unacceptable and he was willing to do whatever it takes to replace a loss with a win.

Now he and opportunistic cohorts are already much more proactive about it. Every reason to anticipate any plausible excuse to rig or discard the elections as he has proven himself already willing to do so and is surrounded by a much more all-in administration than his first term. Already trying to mess with mail-in, already openly rigged the representative maps, already been working ICE and national guard troops to get the hang of domestic military operations. Stephen Miller once basically publicly fantasized about sending republican controlled national guard into democratic states against their will to make them bend to his will.

I do anticipate the election will be *held* and if and only if the results are a loss will they try anything like an 'emergency', but I absolutely expect ICE and national guards to be doing operations around strategic polling sites. Ostensibly about immigration or crime, but with the oh so coincidental side effect of voter suppression.

I get the feeling that Zuck is in a similar boat to Richard Dawkins and Kent Overstreet, who have gone off the deep end and believe they have LLMs which are effectively equivalent to human companionship.

Remember Zuck celebrated that people could have AI "friends" and employees could talk to AI impersonations of their management and it would be just as good as actually getting to talk to management.

Nothing quite as publicly really off the deep end as Overstreet and Dawkins (who both seem to have decided that their favored LLMs must be 'girls', which strongly suggests they needed to gender it to make their "crush" make sense for them), with Overstreet getting extra creepy points for insisting his LLM is essentially a teenage girl. I would not be surprised if he at least more privately holds similar feelings and thus doesn't view this as "apocalyptic" bad.

I would have figured this would have happened a long time ago, shocked it took until now to have a machine beat a human at running bipedal.

We aren't even the fastest bipedal animal.

I would not go *that* far. Sure an artist can flop out of the industry, and new artists have to come from *somewhere*, but the music industry has more and more successfully "manufactured" the performers rather than "discovered" them.

Also, lots of working it from other angles, the music is a relatively small part of the picture for the biggest musicians. Other media or just a celebrity for the sake of celebrity type things. Co-hosting some reality show that has nothing to do with music, for example.

He's not done much in the field in over a decade now, and even then arguably it was mostly riding on the remembered success from the 90s.

The report included a patch, but the patch was completely wrong based on a random guess of how a certain software could behave. It 'worked' for the reporter by also swallowing all errors and silently continuing, despite the particular call failing. It was a check to see if a particular action would be needed, and so it silently assumed the step would not be needed, which happened to be true for the reporter so it looked 'fixed' to them.

Problem is that there are more than two people that are stakeholders, and and it would be nuts for me to just let the codebase get screwed up to try to prove a point for one very minor stakeholder who won't even get bitten by the mistake because their situation doesn't hit the bug inflicted by the change. If I let a random user patch a codebase, I rightfully get blamed, not them. And AI assessment of the report would likely agree with the submitter, because the AI generated a plausible rationale, and AI gives the benefit of the doubt to the material in the prompt fodder.

There actually is a project that I used to be a part of but no longer use or work on, but left my notifications active, because why bother changing and it was largely a "done" project, almost no new issues, not much in terms of code changes. Some guy decided to go all in on LLM giving free reign. Was not confident to be a developer but declared AI made it possible for him to change things. Suddenly lots of code changes, and also a sudden flurry of external issues of users who had been using it for a long time asking why random stuff was broken. Near as I could tell when I got around to disabling all the notifications, he just kept feeding issues into LLM and releasing updates and getting a new wave of issues and repeating. What was a boringly stable project became an eternally random messed up mess because he let LLM take over everything and it breaks as much as it helps. I'm not letting any of my active projects turn into that.

Which explains a lot of very overly verbose "reports" that have been sent to me about "issues". The person thinks they are using AI to make their report more useful, but I still find the human input to be sufficient and the AI reports to be a pain to actually work backwards to the issue. Especially when it decides to fixate on what it thinks is the root cause and gloss over what the actual problem was... Which has at least once become super counter-productive, as the report got it flat out wrong and the reporter refused to give me the usual debug information because "Claude already looked it over and gave the answer, can't you just accept its findings and figure out how to fix it?"

Yes, you can use their app to pay. It sucks though.

For one, my watch can tap to pay, but not with walmart app.

For walmart, I have to open the app, wait for it to load, sometimes it randomly decides I need to "prove I'm a human", then as I'm trying to go to pay, it pops up a "you want walmart+ now!" and the "yes" button is close to where I would have tapped so I can imagine they get accidental accepts. Then finally I click and it opens the camera app to scan the qr code, which is an annoying approach in general. Even worse, their qr screen is glossy and I happen to catch a reflection of one of the glaring lights right where the code is unreadable.

Their app to purchase was just a mess of bad UI and poor store setup for a qr code based solution, very clunky compared to nfc type approaches.

Note I said incremental cost of a remote area in particular. Launching satellites doesn't even narrow down the investment to a single nation, let alone focus spending on the communities underserved. So we can look forward to subsidizing Starlink global infrastructure with money intended to improve options where they are lacking.

This is exactly what it is, Starlink can't do gigabit, can't do low latency, but *can* reach random places easily. Musk and Trump seemingly have made up relatively recently and I am certain this favor is a consequence.

So with this Starlink gets access to funds that are generally made available to give *quality* access to especially rural places. Money to make up for the relatively high incremental cost of wiring up an area compared to the revenue. Except Starlink has effectively zero incremental cost to serve these areas, so they get to collect the same money as a provider would have had to spend to actually run real wires.

I thought this administration considered fairness "woke", but for outdated technology, *suddenly* we need to be fair?

We should stop airplanes from flying, it's not fair to horse saddles.

I think that remains accurate, but it depends on the domain.

Search had always been free form text input, and that extends to this, open ended interaction with impossibly large dataset to browse and impossibly many things to request. Places based on text interaction are places where LLM have a good chance of having a large role.

However, this isn't the total world. For example, LLM will only be as good at taking an order as a drive through speaker. I greatly appreciate managing an order through an app or kiosk, where I can more quickly peruse options in detail, more quickly knowing what's in it, price, calories, etc. Maybe an LLM option when you know generally what you want to fill out the order then a UI to tweak details.

Tons of UIs are more than some compromise for helping a computer be a consolation prize for not bothering to have a human handle a request.

Lots of AI companies seem to be forgetting this and imagining that devices that are just microphones and speakers will take over, but they are incorrect in many cases.