"In some ways, the advance in generative AI has been lucrative for sites like Reddit, which has licensed its vast archive of human conversations to companies..."

Surely the leopards won't eat MY face.

About a month before retiring, my boss said to me "AI is going to make everyone more productive: it will make the good, smart employees more productive, and we want that. It will also make the bad, dumb and lazy employees more productive, and I'm retiring so good luck, buddy!"

Younger generations gave up on radio because it sucks.

I'm gen X, and I despise radio so much that every time I've ever replaced a head unit, I've left the antenna disconnected. If radio was just music I could probably tolerate it, but I can't handle the ads and pretend DJ's.

For emergency purposes there are portable wind up radios in the emergency kits. Completely unused, in original packaging, because where I live the closest thing we have to natural disasters is winter storms that shut down the roads.

Does this spell the end of The Economist magazine's "Big Mac Index"?
https://github.com/TheEconomis...

Are hammers hitting thumbs?

Are cartons of expired milk invading refrigerators?

Are cars double-parking themselves?

Tools don't spontaneously act, like Aristotle's insects spontaneously forming from dust. Just because the person who set these tools didn't have the foresight or wisdom (or made the effort) to see where the tool would go does NOT mean the tools have independent agency.

If running cgit is too expensive, disable it (or limit it to very shallow views). Developers can clone repositories and run cgit locally. Bots can clone repositories too if their owners think it's so important.

After 2.5 years away from walking, it felt good to run a two-minute mile in my car.

People taking the elevator now ascend storeys faster than ever before!
But now they get winded climbing stairs, or walking across the length of the campus.

you will need to convince people that civil liberties are more important than stopping crime

To be fair, most people think their civil liberties are more important than stopping their crime.

We just have trouble taking it beyond that point.

Where were you to help us navigate the blockchain economy? or the metaverse economy?

Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise.

That was my experience owning a hybrid. Ultimately, the controller part that mated the EV and ICE vehicle parts was what failed, and the cost of trying to fix that negated pretty much any fuel savings we'd ever get out of the vehicle.

A plug-in hybrid with a proper battery that can run as an EV for short trips and use ICE for backup makes a lot more sense. The range extender hybrids are just extra complexity for what's just a hack to reduce fuel consumption. But to maximize that fuel consumption, you kinda need to tweak your driving patterns to optimize for EV behaviour, which is also a technique that can get significant fuel savings on an ICE car.

Are they teaching LLM use in the abstract, or are they teaching how to purchase specific products? Literacy skills still work no matter who publishes the book; does Claude prompting work *reliably* for ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Llama, ... all others? Will Claude prompting work the same a year from now?

I hated it when I saw credit courses for "How to use Adobe Photoshop" in college, but at least those courses weren't mandatory.

despite the fact that no one asked for it

Not exactly true; Unity was first seen in the netbook edition, and it was darn near perfect for that environment. The netbook edition was shipped pre-installed on various netbooks until Microsoft got their thumb out, so I'd argue that someone definitely asked for it, and Ubuntu delivered.

Switching the non-netbook Ubuntu to Unity maybe wasn't the best choice, but at the same time, that's around when both KDE and GNOME kinda lost their collective minds and decided to rewrite just about everything, so I kinda consider Unity to be the desktop that got Ubuntu users through that mess until we had more sane alternatives.

From what I understand, Allbirds sold off almost all their capital assets two weeks before, so it was just an empty husk with debts and pre-made paperwork. The last thing it sold-off was that pre-made paperwork, to some other company with a very different mission and business plan who measured it was cheaper to buy someone else's legal homework than doing it themselves.

I was at ground-zero for another company that wanted to get on the NYSE but they weren't American. They found an American corporation that was just a sheaf of papers in a shoebox, arranged for that "company" to buy this one, and boom bang whizz now this company is technically American and has a paved avenue to New York and that sweet one-time cash injection of selling public shares. The second company didn't "pivot" into a new business plan, it was merely a shell-game.

It's not "disobeying." We don't say a software library -- .dll or .so -- disobeys when there's a segfault or gives you an unexpected response. It is practically impossible to disobey; you just don't know what it was told to do. So long as you are using someone else's LLM, built somewhere you can't see before you use it, you will never know what it was told to do. Your belief that the clockwork is thinking, and it's thinking what you're thinking, is dangerously naïve.

"It did a thing that harmed me" well, same goes for a worn tire blowing out on your car, but do you assign intent to the tire or the car? Hell no. "I filed my taxes, but when I was audited it was found I owed another $200" and do you say the US Tax Code disobeyed? Hell no. What if you were audited and found you had a $200 refund, would that be disobeying? Because that's the same thing here: you prompted the tax code bureaucratic process with your tax returns, and you got an unexpected answer.