sounds like the plots of a cheap SF movie.

We're also discovering unceasingly dim objects that are closer. They just don't get the same news coverage. But I'm more interested in wandering planets and planetoids (and even Oort belt objects).

This is what inflation looks like in a single product category.

Something happens to break the former equilibrium; in this case, a few things happened - Covid, then LLMs, and now rapid changes in international commerce stability. This causes uncertainty, disruption and shortages, all of which spikes prices.

Then the opportunists see an opportunity. (And to be fair, prices are going up on everyone, even opportunists.) Prices are already going up and the bulk of buyers have no good reason to be knowledgeable or engaged enough to understand component-level price pressures. And even if they did, what are they going to do about it?

Then everyone else in the supply chain realizes not raising prices is a missed opportunity and they're the suckers if they don't.

Buckle up, this is going to be "normal" for a long time.

Zuckerbook's extruded wheeze was predictable based on the existence of the others - the cool kids down the hall were getting attention for doing it.

But this is a good thing. Meta patenting this means there's only one company we need to worry about pulling this shit.

Read his comment again. His objection has nothing to do with what's being patented; it's just a super-generic anti-recording complaint. This patent does not prohibit anyone else from pissing him off by recording things.

It doesn't help that the Facebook angle (that these are Meta's glasses rather than merely "smart glasses") injects all sorts of weirdness into the imagined application.

Facial recognition to identify people: has applications, such as the obvious "crap, I always forget names. Who is this guy, again?"

Highlight reels: WTF?! You call that an application? Extremely niche at best.

There's useful technology being discussed here, but apparently Meta doesn't want that to be the focus.

It's much worse than that; you would end up preventing anyone else from doing it for 20 years, until the patent expired. Of course that would make Slashdot!

Perhaps the answer is that the "Big Bang" wasn't the first, and these black holes are left over from a prior "universe". In that case, though, why are they so close together.

Yeah, my question is "What isn't prior art?". The summary sure doesn't list anything.

OTOH, it does indicate the direction he wants to push things. He wants these integrated into the lives of people whether they, themselves, use them or not.

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...

But that *does* require that you believe that they are honest to you about their future actions...and that they won't change their mind later.

Pirates were often hanged by the same countries that issued them letters of marque.

Why do you believe what they say when they continually misrepresent things. I'd say "lie", but that implies they know what they're doing.

It won't matter. We're destroying our universities anyway.

In a decade folks will get their pass/fail participation trophy by correctly answering questions like, "Should Americans be more thankful to Jesus or Don Trump for their record breaking average salaries of $16000/year for only 72 hours labor per week?"

It will qualify them to whip productivity out of their inferiors so long as the report enough subversives each week.

They shouldn't be trying such a desperate solution without trying chlorox and ivermectin first.