Well wtf does he mean by speedtest then? If he's doing it from his phone or wifi connected laptop, then it's going to reflect the speed of his wifi. If he's doing it from his router, and complaining that the speedtest is wrong because his wifi is slower than his router uplink, I'd say that's a statement only a doofus would make.

Exclusive contracts in media have been SOP since forever. If some YouTube sellout signs a specific exclusivity contract with YouTube, then they, you and Netflix have nothing to say about it. It's possible some of this could be found anti-competitive, when no specific contract is in play, but that's a road to a protracted legal battle taking years: feel free to hold your breath waiting for whatever utopian outcome you think you're owed on that one. What I find interesting is YouTube management clearly being un-self-aware and unconcerned, despite being a subsidiary of a company that has just been convicted as a monopolist. I can only take that to mean that they're confident that they've purchased sufficient political influence.

Right. Because the last Google anti-trust conviction was such a huge success and made everything so much better.

"Now I'm currently using fiber at the speed fast than my wifi router, which makes my speedtest always wrong."

oh please expand on this - this is gunna be hilarious

One small piece of the interweb social media cesspool isn't conforming to establishment safe space norms. Study it harder!

The problem with this argument, from the shop's point of view, is that the UK is in the middle of a shoplifting epidemic. The policing resources simply aren't there to deal with small scale (or even flagrant and much larger scale) shoplifting. It now seems to be rare for police officers to attend reports of shoplifting at all. And so effectively shoplifting becomes legalised, which is obviously hurting the big chain stores financially and potentially devastating for smaller shops.

Shops are trying to find some way to respond to this to protect themselves. They typically tell staff, even security staff, not to get physical with shoplifters as they walk out, not least because the risk of something worse happening and the business becoming liable for it is significant. But then the shoplifters know this and some of them will just walk in and openly empty a shelf into a bag and walk out again without paying because they know no-one will try to stop them.

Shops also know that our court system is completely overwhelmed at the moment and there is little chance of bringing any successful civil action to recover damages from shoplifters who aren't even being arrested by the police and put through the criminal justice system.

So what do they have left? Basically, they're trying to spot the "usual suspects" and refuse them entry in the first place, which is a less risky proposition in terms of potential for physical violence and quite effective because a lot of shoplifting is done by the same people, or they're trying to make it more physically difficult to steal goods, for example by using locking systems or keeping high value items behind counters where customers can't just pick them up. But these systems aren't perfect, far from it, and what we're discussing here today is one of the significant problems.

Obviously this kind of technology can have very bad consequences, as we see here. I don't think it should be used if it's not highly reliable, given the potential harm done in cases where it gets something wrong. But I do have some sympathy with the shops who are looking for something -- anything -- to reduce the threat they're facing because the rule of law has failed in retail settings.

The success of Linux has owed a great deal to for-profit businesses for a long time now, way before Valve and Framework came along. Oracle, in 1998, porting their bread-and-butter database to Linux as a fully supported tier 1 platform, was a monumental moment. Then IBM got on board with major investments to bring Linux to their mainframes. Then Google, adopting Linux for their Android platform, in 2007-2008. Before all of those, there were countless ISPs standing up Linux on their low cost hardware to sell, I repeat sell , hosting. That evolved into Linux becoming the de facto standard platform of Big Tech search, social media and media streaming. The force of these commercial decisions is at least as important a contributor to Linux success and anything else you might credit.

Because these are ebil for-profit operations, we’re free to impugn their motivations with as much petty hate as we can muster. But if you’re thankful for Linux and have the least bit of intellectual honesty, you know you owe these businesses, whether you like it or not.

In two weeks (Aug 30) SpaceX will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2). In about half a decade, we're going expand knowledge about extrasolar planet population in this galaxy to an extreme degree using this instrument.

Michelle and Barak Obama produce Netflix content through their production company, Higher Ground Productions.

That's one of their their post-POTUS grifts.

He made a choice. If he had had the sort of gall typically exhibited by these grievance grifters he could be on the his martyrdom tour right now, jetting around to hob nob and make poignant videos with all his celebrity supporters, while they litigation financed his next decade of income suing everyone involved. One call to Obama and Netflix would make a 5 episode biopic, and spend a couple hundred million doing it. That's probably still going to happen, btw.

Apparently he lacked the fortitude for it.

Arday wasn't a dummy. He knew who he could get away with plagiarizing. He plagiarized minor academics; people that didn't have the power to shift authorities. People that were vulnerable to jackboots investigation "threats." He knew better than to plagiarize someone that mattered.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.