Yes, exactly. Best Buy got Napster because they bought Roxio - the CD-Burning software company. LOL. "Roxio Toastt". Roxio was the first vulture to pick the bones of the original Napster, buying branding assets when the feds shut it down.

Invented virtualization.

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

So, they're cramming a bunch of X-Box stuff into the Windows codebase?

They do know that gaming s__t is inherently unstable right? Just ask anyone writing video card drivers.

What will this do to Windows stability? Oh, right. Business customers will be allowed to get a version without the entire thing.

So only consumers will be screwed. Yup. Par for the course. They may as well fork the operating system at this point. "Windows 11 for Business" and "Windows Suck-It Beta Tester Edition."

You can't make this up. I started a novel in 2002 where the Internet went nuts and we had connected every possible thing to it, making us have to smash all our clocks, cameras, watches, appliances, etc and go low-tech.

Air Fryers was not on my BINGO card.

Hey, Microsoft Office also just stealth turned on Copilot for me! When it launched, it asserted itself in the ribbon in Word. I turned the icon off. No interest. I am an expert writer.

Apparently a lot of people did the same, because...

Today, there's a little gray "Draft with Copilot" icon that appeared in the margin as I was typing. Right clicking on it gave no options to get rid of it. I went on a what I thought would be a fishing expedition in options. It was easy to find. There was a "Copilot" tab. It was turned on. Bonus points to Microsoft for not burying the setting, or not having one like they started out with the Edge sidebar. Boo Microsoft for making it less convenient than a right-click.

Yeah. Adoption. What's unprecedented here is the aggressive forcing this on the user repeatedly. I've had to turn this off in Office twice now. I wonder how many people just ignore it and don't turn it off? Are they part of the "unprecedented adoption?"

In light of the "adoption rate," I want to make it clear that Google has recently hijacked anyone's phone using their Assistant product and switched it to Gemni.

It can be gotten rid of, and you can return to using Assistant. I'm not going to post a tutorial. I asked Gemni, which I found to be deliciously ironic. It gave a deceptive answer on the first prompt, so I refined my prompt and it finally said "Good News! You can go back to using Assistant," and then proceeded to give me an inaccurate process, but enough information to figure out the actual process.

Gemni usage collection is carefully collected and then buried a screen's worth down on your "Other Activity" page under "Gemni Apps Activity." They'll advertise it's potential, but boy are they obfuscating its existence.

I think I was successful in getting it off my phone because that page shows no activity now. The day it went live it showed all my Assistant stuff as Gemni interactions.

I found out because Gemni accidentally activated in my bathroom, due to an unknown prompt that was not "Hey Google," spoke in a male voice and asked me what I wanted. Oops. Guess they should have covered their tracks better.

How much you wanna bet this nonsense is baked into "adoption" figures? There's a difference between adopting a product and being silently hijacked.

There's a difference between "adoption" and people engaging in fuck around/find out exercises.

I'd like to see where the data distinguishes between the two.

I've done a lot of FAFO with all the LLM models. The only remarkable thing I've noticed is the dishonest way it presents itself as an AGI, and its simultaneous willingness to tell you it is not an AGI (if you know how to ask), while still being stubbornly unwilling to present itself as a tool rather than a [just-add-random-seed] "person."

I'll take ChatGPT. You should have seen how hard it was to program ChatGPT to remind me every third or fourth message that it is not AGI. I got there, but it took a lot of prompting. I addressed obvious boilerplate as an "error message." It insisted it was not. Hell, it even insisted it was generating the boilerplate, when the resulting message was word identical, which is literally impossible for a functional LLM. I asked it about syntax, and variables, and logical operators and it steadfastly refused to accept basic computer science prompts asking how to work it. It wants stupid people to believe more than it wants to be a useful tool.

Which tells me that the devs are taking their cues from marketing. Maybe with a wide eyed sense of "ooh it's cool!" guiding them towards compliance. It simply does not behave in a way that I find useful.

My conclusion is that the current purpose of ChatGPT, and others, is to deceive the potential market as a stunt. Whether or not it exceeds that developer mandate is not going to predicted by a venture capitalist with self-interested bias. This article is hype.

GIGO.

And that doesn't even go into the fact that it is literally being forced on people, which is definitely not adoption. It's a hijack. My entire phone switched to Gemni without telling me, and when I found out because Google was sending me aggressive Gemni marketing emails about all the "new things my phone can do," it took a lot of hacking and a half hour to rip it out of there.

By the way, it carefully warned me that Gemni is inaccurate, "especially in regards to information about people." (paraphrase)

Great. They replaced an Assistant product that knew its limitations, and was willing to say "I didn't understand that," with a marketing stunt that ignores them and always has "the" answer, even if it is a complete fabrication.

This is not progress. It's a scam.

Dude, the paleolithic era started 2.6 million years ago. The earliest human fossils are 55 million years ago. Human divergence: estimated 85 million ya.

It's ALL been exponential growth

The problem to wrap our heads around is the scale of it all, not the nature of a non-linear curve. Nobody knows what Petabytes of training data even means. Sure, we know what the number is, but we've taken the sum of human knowledge, starting from 2.6 million years ago, and logged it in a mish-mash of accuracy and fabrication. What does that mean?

Then our tech bro masters (basically stole it and) fed it to a predictive text algorithm, with unpredictable results. Of course the results are convincing. But are they worth anything? We cannot comprehend the scale and processing speed involved, nor can we comprehend the massive power outputs this is going to take. We could exhaust the sun if physics would let us. Our reach has exceeded our grasp.

None of that will lead to a "singularity." We'll be doing our best just to survive the exponential energy requirements, something the tech bros are trying to get cheap, passing the massive indirect costs to their lessers.

The only singularity here is the human ego. Someone needs to pump the brakes.

Fascism - yes I say that word - means corporatism. Not in the common modern usage (run by and for the benefit of corporate structures) but Mussolini's fascist corporatism.

It's a novel take on ownership of the means of production. In effect, the owners of the means of production serve the government and bargain for their own interests. The State is the gatekeeper of profits, and claims to speak for the workers while lining its own pockets with offers from vassal owners. But they do precious little for the worker; it's a racket. In return, the government rewards the compliant with its favor ("Pray I don't alter it any further"). The term "totalitarianism," though a more benign form in this case, also has its roots here, because the government is baked and embedded into every aspect and form of industry. DOGE is also "embedding" itself in the government sector to consolidate centralized control there as well. It's all a play to consolidate autocratic rule, so as to gain a fascist autocracy. We have fascism. We have authoritarianism. They're still working at establishing autocracy.

This version of corporatism is literally a defining characteristic of fascism. There is no doubt what kind of government is being run here. All you TDS people can go to hell or read a history book, which is probably hell for y'all anyways. I've been calling this guy "Il Duce" since his first administration. This is classic 1930's-flavored bullshit, and the administration fully understands what it is doing. Mussolini never spoke for "the workers" and neither does Trump.

Since my adblocker no longer entirely works on Slashdot, I wanted to SHARE THE AD that appeared on the page accompanying all the comments of "F Adobe."

Yeah, that AI scraping and custom advertising is a biiiiiig winner.

I just want to mention that the Denmark article had a bunch of "nuclear lies" posts, and this one seems to have brought out the proponents.

I wonder if anyone on Slashdot has any idea of what they're talking about.

Yeah, we need as many zero-carbon options as possible is all I have to say. All of them, without preconceptions.

My Briefcase was like Dropbox for your 3.5" floppy disks. I think I upgraded to a Zip drive around that time. YIPPEE!

Actual headline: "In Response To Greedy Stockholders, Apple Considering What It Can 'Get Away With' "

Enough with the greed folks. You're making enough money. We are taking a pay cut through inflation, y'all should too.

The term you're looking for is "exploitive capitalism," too. As opposed to enlightened (as in self-interest) capitalism which works.