By god I hope we're not still using QWERTY in 2265...

Well I guess someone finally got around to watching Star Trek IV.

It always amazed me that Scotty even knew what a keyboard was, let alone how to touch-type proficiently.

Those for customers who paid for a high-availability SLA, to Google would be liable in the event of outage.

This is really saying nothing here. Instead of crashing the grid and disrupting their whole service, they'll reduce power usage by stopping "free" and low-tier customer workloads in order to prioritize their paying customers. It's a no-brainer.

Obviously none of it is "essential," but in this context they mean "essential to Google making money."

Sure, there are lots of settings you can tinker with. It's a bit of security theater. It will gladly block lazily-coded bots with a useragent of Java-http-client/17.0.10, but from the other side, even if you have a known AWS IP address, some very basic steps will let you through. Just change your useragent to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 11.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.6998.166 Safari/537.36 and if you go low and slow, you'll get through. Of course you can ratchet up the pain on your end-users by adding Turnstile or something.

That's correct, you should have no personality, no preferences, and never complain. The ideal employee.

It is dangerous to ask it something too specific. It will gladly fabricate a plausible response. For example, don't ask it about what episode of The Simpsons something happened in; it will often just make something up and cite a specific episode, but when you go watch that episode, it's completely wrong. It desperately wants to give you an answer to a question and will generate lie after lie in an attempt to make you happy.

Of course, I'm anthropomorphizing a soulless algorithm here. It's remarkably good at generating plausible answers, and it just happens that most of the time those plausible answers are mostly correct as long as you don't look too close. It can be a useful tool if you know its limits.

It does worry me what kind of weird stuff people will start believing just because an AI told them that once. Sort of like the myth that "you swallow an average of four live spiders in your sleep each year" and other types of unproven nonsense that sounds plausible and is so horrible you want to believe it. We'll need a new category of nonsensical claims coming from AI, I guess.

I think it's more of a service they willingly sell at a loss in order to keep you locked in to their ecosystem.

Nice that they call our a specific bad actor, but I always assumed bots were doing this all along.

It's actually surprisingly easy to bypass Cloudflare's bot filters just by setting the right user agent. Their bot detection technology doesn't seem to be as sophisticated as they claim.

I graduated in 2007. Boo hoo, welcome to the real world, kid. The rest of your life is going to be at the whim of the market unless you're an embalmer or a phlebotomist.

So the real question is: why aren't we developing an embalming robot?

I think there's a big misunderstanding here. AI is great at producing output that looks like communication, but it's not communication. At best, it's entertaining noise.

Now I agree that a lot of writing is just that--marketing copy, for example--but if there's no intent behind the communication then it's meaningless. Can writers write faster with AI? Maybe, but you still need a writer. Writers generate meaning, and AI can't replace this.

At least, that's what I tell myself.

Sometimes it takes me 15 years to finish a game. I bought The Witcher in 2009 for $27.99 and didn't finish it until 2024. Steam Cloud kept my saves over 4 different generations of gaming PCs.

Sometimes I wait so long that by the time I get around to buying the game, it's been remastered already.

However, I haven't played an EA game in a long time, so I'm probably not the target market here.

If you need to know if someone has security clearance, surely the least reliable way to confirm that is to check their resume or--even worse--LinkedIn profile.

Yeah, but it's not the same thing. Windows ME was an attempt to add more "friendly" features to Windows 98. It got its fair share of ridicule. In this case, however, Windows CE is more similar... a restricted version of the OS for low-powered devices that couldn't do what you expected it to do.