The worrying thing is that both cat and nano (and presumably many other editors), by default, do not display the text that is present there...

That could cause merry hell for hiding things in copypasta, configuration scripts, logs, etc.

How the feck does that salmon one do that?

The output is nothing like the source code.

And they were probably $100,000 a pop.

Now they're commercial and getting much cheaper and more available as the tech becomes mainstream.

Like, pretty much, almost anything in high-end military, Formula 1 or rally driving, etc. etc. etc.

Expensive thing deployed as brand-new tech to get a slight edge in a billion dollar business becomes off-the-shelf cheap junk tech to help granny snoop on grandpa. It's really not unusual.

I like Reddit.

I've literally never even clicked its AI thing in the app or on the website, and I only discovered it was even there a few days ago. My eyes literally gloss over anything that's not the stuff I use regularly (I don't care about stickers, coin, trends, or all the other nonsense either).

Stick to what you know. I don't frequent a barber shop because I hope one day it'll also sell me travel insurnace. I can't see myself using Reddit as a search engine unless it quite literally turns out to be the most amazin search engine in the entire world, better than all the others, and everyone just moves to it like we moved to Google at the beginning. And I very, very much doubt that would happen.

A story as old as AI itself.

"If we can make the AI a little smarter, it'll suddenly know how to make itself smarter, which will lead to an exponential increase in intelligence, unguided, of its own accord, 'naturally'. "

Has never happened yet. People have been saying it since the 60's and don't really how much nonsense it is.

It's like trying to compress an already-compressed file. There's only so much you can do, and just because you can make it save a couple of bytes here and there in certain circumstances doesn't mean that the logical conclusion is it compressing all data down to nothing every time.

All we need is more computing power, storage, connectivity between nodes, time, training data, money....

Well... now, possibly for the first time in human history and maybe even the last, you have ALL of those things available to your AI. You have billions of dollars, incredible amounts of specifically-designed compute power, the entire Internet to train on and years upon years on which to train it on that, and even millions of individual inputs from humans constantly...

And the thing still can't add up. Maybe what you're missing is any actual intelligence in the system, and the design of the system, not another few thousand GPUs.

They're still just big statistical machines that plateau. Nothing's changed. They're just plateauing slightly higher. We "compressed the file" of the Internet/training data a little bit more but there's a limit to how many times we can do that and make any progress at all.

AI needs an entire rethink, not more nonsense about it spontaneously combusting into AGI just because we spent enough dollars on it.

And the article isn't literally discussing "superintelligence"?

Sorry, I'm not the one over-egging the situation here.

Any "developer" that takes two weeks to deploy what is basically Nextcloud... yeah, I don't trust their opinion at all.

Show me a patent.

A published peer-reviewed paper.

A business that the AI set up and operates at a profit.

Like the old meme... my baby was only X pounds at birth and is now X+1 pounds aged nine months, so they're on course to weigh more than the earth by the time they're 35...

Any linearly increasing progess - no matter how trivial and short-lived - is always interpreted as some exponential growth when extrapolating, and it's just not true.

AI is logarithmic. It plateaus. All the time. Over and over and over again.

If AI is that intelligent... give it control of a bank account with a million dollars in it and let it start its own companies, buying products for resell, gambling, investing, or whatever. Why would you need any other product at all? Just tell it to make you money and watch the cash roll in. Hell, a spotty teenager can make money at McDonald's, I'm sure a "superintelligent" AI can just start making profit for you directly given Meta's resources. Why would you ever need to sell a cash cow like that to anyone else?

Answer: Because it's not intelligent and can't do that.

My local "neighbourhood" social medias are full of people asking for dog-walkers, and full of people advertising dog-walking services.

Surely if one is effective, the other shouldn't exist?

The industry you describe is inherently local, and that can make it tricky to find anyone willing to cover your particular location. Kids aren't going to bus three towns over just to walk your dog for minimum wage.

So an app does kind of make sense, in some way, to capture those larger orgs that do cover that area. Same way that takeaway shops often can't arrange delivery themselves but UberEats et al will happily be a middleman, and other takeaways that just want to deliver may not be obvious (e.g. closed-off kitchens in random empty buildings out of any sight of foot traffic).

No, the problem is not an app-based dog walking service. That's actually not a bad idea. The problem is that it was never worth $600m in any way, shape or form, but people think that it's a far better idea than you or I ever would, throw money at it expecting to be the only nationwide dog-walking app that everyone will leap on. In the 1-in-a-million chance they're right, they'll make so much money it's hilarious. But mostly what happens is the company just can't gain traction and grow that quick, then the investors demand to see results, they overstretch, branch out into any other related nonsense to get money (e.g. the spinoff services mentioned here) and then realise that it now costs twice as much to use their services and they don't have staff in almost any of the country that actually needs them.

As always... there's room for ONE such app. If you're lucky.

There's no inherent problem with the idea - people will pay to save their time, as a dozen frustrated people a day will attest to on my neighbourhood social medias trying to track down a willing teenager to do the work. They just want the dog walked because they've gone away for the week, they don't want to spend a month looking for someone local, reliable, with customer attestations, etc. when they can just click a button.

We *ALL* pay for convenience in things we don't want to have to do ourselves, down to the silliest, tiniest areas. That's modern life for the last 100 years. Of course I could change my tyres on my own. Do I want to? No. Of course I could chase 200 insurance companies on my own. Do I want to? No. Of course I could my washing up myself. Do I want to? No. I bought a dishwasher for a reason, even though it's a large expense up-front, maintenance hassle sometimes, and an ongoing cost over and above buying some washing up soap. The point is... I don't care if it saves me time. Because my free time is more precious than the cost of a dishwasher.

Is a dishwasher a luxury that few can afford in modern life, and me owning one basically lording it all ovre the peons who can't afford one? No. They're pretty basic white goods nowadays that most people have.

Additionally... snow-clearing services are literally a thing. Because not everyone wants to spend an hour in the freezing cold trying to get their car out if they could just pay someone to do that one job in advance. How would you find people willing to do that? Either some lengthy search and ringing around a dozen companies, or specialist websites, or... an app isn't actually a CRAZY idea. It's just an idea. What would be crazy would be thinking it's a billion dollar idea. It's not. It's a decent little casual sideline for people at certain parts of the year and they'll be paid quite minimally and the amount you can cream off their income to put some more custom their way is quite low.

Exactly the same as here.

P.S. I have just located a dozen places in my area (UK) that do snow clearance. We don't even have that much snow. However you can bet for damn sure that the schools I work for have snow-clearing / gritting services on their bookmarks for when they're necessary and some kind of comparison website is only a step away, and then some kind of app to request an emergency snow clearance NOW from any company willing to come out and do so (e.g. when someone slips and breaks their hip and you try to panic to make sure you're seen to do something)... not a crazy idea for a business. Just not a billion-dollar one.

As for not communicating with our own neighbours? You're missing that in using such services, you're actually meeting people from wider and wider circles all the time. The teenager doesn't have to be limited to their own village if they don't want to. They can get gainful employment, meet customers they never normally would have, and offer and be exposed to a range more services.

We're "not talking to our neighbours" not because we're all just hiding at home and never speaking to anyone. But because our circle has widened to the entire world and we select those people we most are interested in.

As I had to explain to my parents 20+ years ago... the reason I have my laptop and phone on me (even at Christmas) is because my friends are in the US, spread throughout Europe, Asia at the other end of the country. The people I want to school with? They're all working in the SAME TOWN they were born, lived and will die in. I have so little in common with them that it's laughable. Even a school reunion has never happened because nobody can be bothered to organise one to meet people they haven't seen in 25 years and have nothing in common with, especially if means traipsing a thousand miles from where they now live to attend it.

My phone is my work, my entertainment, my friends, my family, my school, my bank, my shopping centre... it's all there. Whereas my street is - quite literally - 10 houses of retirees, elderly disabled people, one or two families that I don't get on with. Why? Because I don't get to choose my neighbours. I do get to choose my workplace and friends.

Rubbish.

ntsync relies on a very particular kernel module being present on Linux-only systems.

The other syncs will all have to stick around for the foreseeable, e.g. MacOS is never going to implement ntsync.

And actual compatibility is not an issue, that's just bug-fixing. But requiring a kernel module to operate AND actually only publishing benchmarks against "no sync at all" (in effect) is disingenuous. It benefits a few apps that are in particular cases of tight CPU loops on sync calls which presume NT-style sync semantics.

Sure, it's progress and a patch, but it does not deserve the press it has gotten earlier in the year, and still doesn't deserve it now.

Oh, look, now the limits start to come in, then the prices will go up, and eventually... hell... who knows... maybe the investors will actually see A PROFIT from those billions spent on training an AI to be a glorified autocomplete.

It'll only take about a hundred years or so to pay back their investment, even then.

Public/well-known VPN traffic lights up like a Christmas tree, and has to be paid for so it lights up in financial dealings too.

But what this stops is exactly what it was intended to stop - children bypassing it. Now you need a credit card, sign up with a VPN provider, etc. and pay money, or a decent amount of technical knowledge and a non-UK server running somewhere. Not something the average teenager will manage (but there will always be on).

Basically it achieved its aim, and now you know who's VPNing out to sites.

Of course most adults will just jump onto a paid VPN service but in doing so they're actually trusting EVEN MORE third parties with the privacy of their browsing, not less. And I bet they don't even know what country regulations their browsing comes under when using such a VPN. Hope you haven't chose a cheap, dodgy one that's routing through some dictatorial state that you later plan to holiday in (e.g. China, etc.). They literally know who you are and your credit card number now...

Given politician's histories and even things like adult content regularly being browsed in the UK parliamentary computers (I'm not joking), and I would imagine that VPNs are not generally allowed on such networks, this will likely affect two classes of people the most: The MPs who put it in, and the children it was supposed to protect.

Your views on quite whether that's desirable may differ, but as a guy who works in school IT, I will be expecting far more "VPN" searches and much less direct inappropriate content searches on our webfilters come September.

This nonsense again.

It's a very niche feature that benefits only a small handful of particular games, and the other existing and competing "syncs" already do a pretty good job (and the benchmarks almost always compare having none of those enabled to ntsync, rather than actually compete).

It rears its head every few months over the last couple of years, so I assume the person who wrote the patch has a good PR firm.

It's always sold as some miraculous huge leap forward for Steam / Steam Deck / Proton / Wine and yet all those places say "no, not really, it helps a little for some games".

Go read all the mailing lists about this and you'll see it's really not such a huge deal.

At best it'll end up as a switch somewhere that, for a few games, you'll enable instead of the various other syncs that Proton is using in the wild already, but most stuff will just carry on as normal.

It's really so much snakeoil that "gamers" with absolutely no understanding of Wine et al leap upon every time it's talked about as if it's the sole saviour of modern gaming somehow.

This is a step away from having your licence to practice removed entirely. It's pretty serious.

And her demand that they tell ALL THEIR CLIENTS, OPPOSING LAWYERS AND CURRENT JUDGES IN OTHER CASES.... wow. That's gonna hurt, because those judges, lawyers etc. are going to be poring over every bit of text they'd presented looking for anything similar and if they find it there... oh boy, that's going to go badly for them.

Any lawyer with half a brain watching this will be rethinking any use of AI models, and telling their legal teams including just the researchers etc. to stay well clear of it or check its output extremely rigorously.

My ICE car does 500 miles on one tank (it can do more, but that's the average).

I don't need it to. That would comfortably last me a week and a half of commuting, my own usage of the car, etc.

And every single time, the end of that journey is:

- a workplace with EV chargers.
- my house that I can put an EV charger on
- some other place that I can get back from on a single charge and/or people wouldn't object to me plugging in and paying them for the electricity while I was there (e.g. family).

To be honest, 150 miles is more than adequate, all other things being the same. Because, unlike fuel, I wouldn't mind putting an EV on charge every evening. It takes seconds. Finding a decent fuel station that's open, secure, cheap, and then pumping fuel takes a lot longer and a lot more thought.

I'm pretty sure that most people - especially in Europe - are just the same. Range anxiety is dead. It's from when the EV ranges were 50 miles, not 350 miles. I've used vehicles like that at work, on the second-hand market they are almost worthless and they were basically being used in the same fashion as golf trolleys (literally one was only used to take mail / goods from one site to another just down the road).

Nowadays? I don't even really look at the range of an EV. I'm in the market to buy my first one. My next car WILL be a full battery EV, not even a hybrid. You know what I look at first? The price tag. Then the size of the vehicle (I don't want a huge SUV like thing, I want a small hatchback with room inside it to carry a couple of friends comfortably if necessary). Then the extras. Then the finance (leasing, PCP, "optional final payment" nonsense can feck right off).

Range doesn't really come into it any more than me checking it has headlights and wipers and all the other things I'd want to check. It's a non-issue nowadays.

Sell me a CHEAPER EV not a more expensive one with a battery that I just won't use the capacity of and which in ten year's time will be even more expensive to replace.