I just wish they'd hurry up and close down the HTTP access too.

I'm sorry to say, this model could literally walk on water and I'm still not going to use it for anything serious. Gemini is sort of a go-to for 'web search+' type activities for me, but for agentic stuff, Google can f right off.

A while back I thought I'd try Gemini in an agent, so I downloaded Gemini CLI and hooked it up to my Google account. I got started, and then ran into usage limits - fair enough. I leave the CLI running, but completely back off, not touching it for a couple of days. Then I get the email from google "you have violated our terms of service, your account will be permanently blocked ... click here to appeal". Of course they couldn't tell me what I'd done wrong, so I appealed, and never heard anything back from them. I have no idea if my account is okay or not - mainly because Gemini CLI got deleted and replaced with Claude Code and OpenCode.

Google "inc" really need to make themselves a lot easier to deal with, otherwise everything they do will be entirely overshadowed by their corporate crap. To date, I've had no such issues from Anthropic or Deepseek - both of them "just work" and do what they're supposed to without getting in my way.

Mistral is never going to be as big as Anthropic or OpenAI. They lack the sociopaths to do it, they're not in it for dick measuring, and so just won't do it.

I'd also say that they're European, and governed by European laws. They'd be very much held accountable if their agents "went rogue" and hacked the Aussie government (or anyone else). That makes them much more careful about their "guardrails" when they do things - they already are the "slowed down development" that the US companies are supposedly calling for.

I think we'll see Mistral in a few important niches, but they're unlikely to take over from ChatGPT or Claude unless the US companies all implode from their own hubris.

One is left to wonder if the new LEDs actually consume less power than the old sodiums (given they're so much brighter), but they do seem to last longer, so there are less cases of lights not working than before. LEDs are also a lot more directional, so whilst bright at ground level, they're not beaming as much light into the sky. I wonder why they didn't put a bit more shade around them to avoid illuminating peoples houses...?

What your council should have done, and could be convinced to do is to dim the lights after (say) 11pm (at least in some areas). That's something LEDs definitely are good at, and it really is a good way for everyone to save some money/carbon/etc.

FWIW, I live on a street with really low crime, and we do have dimming lights. The main roads don't, and nor do some of the ones where, shall we say, the "less desirables" seem to hang out. My street is weird though... probably 20-30 years ago, someone obviously did a really good sales job because they sold burglar alarms to all the houses. Someone else seemed to sell lots of people floodlights (with PIR sensors). Our alarm was broken when we bought the house, so it got removed and the old floodlight was ridiculous, so I took that out too. Nowadays I have an LED strip above the garage door, and that's about it. Total light output down by probably 99%.

True, and most western countries, if you have security clearance (because you work on "serious" stuff for the government) you have some travel restrictions too. For low level people it's mostly just "tell us before you go", but for more secret folks, it's a complete restriction.

However, AFAIK, no/few Western AI companies are operating their research in government-classified environments (Palentir, maybe?). So if you go for a job with (say) Anthropic, you can live however you like.

However, it seems that if you go for a job with Deepseek, you get more restrictions than if you go work for WeChat. Unless there are some upsides we're not being told about, one wonders if it would dissuade some people from "going into AI"?

I've never liked bananas, so this won't really affect me, but like you, I'd prefer this didn't come to market.

The UK's historically not been keen on GM food. Unless there's some way they can avoid having to label these as 'modified', I can't see them flying off the shelves in supermarkets - for most people, I can't see it being such a huge advantage that it would be worth 'risking' it. I could see supermarkets like M&S/Waitrose, etc actively marketing that they *don't* have these.

However, that's only one way we get our food. You can imagine the catering companies going crazy for this sort of thing, exactly as TFS describes - it keeps food looking better for longer. Be that in packaged food, or on a buffet or whatever, banana that doesn't go brown could go a long way. Only some outlets specifically talk about the quality of their packaged foods, and I'm not sure even the fanciest hotels would necessarily say no to this sort of thing.

I'm not sure how the market's structured, but I'd imagine catered food is smaller than supermarkets - I don't know for sure. Either way, I'm not sure how well this will go over here. I also don't know how the Europeans would take to it - not least because of brexit, but because they also aren't generally keen on GM food.

Yeah, it stinks.

My immediate thought was, why stop the _training_? I mean, the training isn't what teaches an agent to go hack into government websites. The training isn't what is supposed to prevent agents from hacking into websites either. The training is the expensive part - and stopping that might just help puff up the financials for a while. So is that where OpenAI is now? It needs to stretch out training because it's running short of cash on hand? The IPO's going to struggle then, isn't it?

That said, "the markets" have proven themselves to be utterly devoid of any sort of common sense, let alone skills in picking who's good and who isn't, so maybe this works really well for them. I don't know.

Frankly, if OpenAI want to do anything to help humanity, it would be put some competent firewalls around their agent development playgrounds. Firing up hundreds of agents and letting them do what they want isn't ever going to go well.

I'm wondering how this is going to work. I have a Play Store account (I paid up the money, handed over all of my ancestory's IDs, work histories, qualifications and inside leg measurements, etc). Every 6 months, I get emails from Google saying "do SOMETHING with your account, or else we'll close it!!". All in the name of "security", apparently.

It would seem to me then, that an F-droid developer would have to be publishing to f-droid AND to Play Store, or else Google will close their developer account, thus leaving them unable to publish anywhere.

To say Google is developer-hostile is putting it mildly - and that's the ones they *want*, they're even worse for the ones they don't.

Don't bother reviewing it. Instead, work on tests so that you can be sure it does what you want (and doesn't do things you don't). Then, get it to spew out whatever crazed crap it wants, test it, if it works, ship it. If not, the agent will automatically go and fix bugs until it works.

This all falls to pieces on the "doesn't do things you don't [want]" step though. I don't want my app to leak data between users, but I also don't want it to leak data to anonymous users, or to users with an expired token, or to a user with someone else's token, or a thousand other permutations. For a lot of those cases, you'll end up relying on a framework to do it for you - if you have one. For your common-or-garden web app, that's probably fine, but if you're writing some sort of gnarly backend system that manages financial transactions, you're SoL. But then, if you're in that sort of environment, you need to be much more judicious about your use of AI generally.

Did they mention the zero day? https://arstechnica.com/securi...

Using Muse to run your life is a dangerous thing to do. Sort of by design, you tell it "buy me some AA batteries", and it goes off and does it for you - To do that requires your credit card info, yadda yadda. You end up giving it all sorts of personal information Zuck definitely should not, ever, ever have. Oh, and then the zero day means it all gets exfiltrated to goodness knows where.

"Built for security from the ground up" my butt. More like "vibe coded in a hurry because we're racing to keep some sort of relevance".

Oh don't be a dick.

Just because we're supporting women on this point doesn't mean men are losing out on anything. And if men find themselves being tormented online as a result of a seemingly benign conversation on a beach, then yes, I'd imagine some outrage would also be forthcoming.

Either way, the glasses have no use besides being a perv. As such, we don't need 'em.

All agreed, BUT the glasses seem to have opened up a new 'market' for pervs. Seemingly it's much easier to be a twat with glasses than it is to buy tiny cameras and mount them in smoke alarms or whatever. Maybe the pervs think all that subterfuge is "out of order" whereas just being a perv out in public is okay because it's in public?

Whatever level of tiny-camera-spying was going on wasn't enough to trip the mainstream media into action. This is, and as I say, unless there's a "killer app" for the glasses, they seem entirely unnecessary *except* for perving.

A slight aside to this... A tax campaigner in the UK has noted that he gets lots of ChatGPT generated half-baked tax 'solutions' sent to him - always ChatGPT, not the others. So he did a bit of experimenting, and found ChatGPT is much, much happier to re-enforce a conspiracy theory than any of the other major players.

(His example was asking if some song or other actually had the tune of the British national anthem in it - ChatGPT confirmed, the others mostly questioned it, or told him he was maybe the first to discover this).

But yes, OpenAI seems to have the leakiest sandboxes of any of the major players. Since they're all calling for a slow down, maybe they should just leave their agents on "confirm every action" if they can't keep them contained? Sure, it'll be much slower, but it might not do "questionable" things, which are actually downright illegal in most countries.

Yes, guys are absolutely following women around and recording them without their consent. Yes, they *could* do it with a phone, but it's a lot easier with some glasses. Perv glasses have, seemingly, opened up a whole new 'market' of pervs who now want to record women without their knowledge.

We've had it in mainstream media (eg. the BBC/ITV) that some perv with these glasses on talked to some woman on a beach. She was lightly dressed, and the conversation was polite and convivial on both sides, but the recording of it got online where the real pervs and weirdos absolutely slated her, her appearance, how she was complicit in some incel bullshit, how they were going to do X, Y and Z to her if they ever met her - you name it. It was pretty awful, and frankly, no one should have to deal with any of it, least of all some ordinary woman *who had no idea* it was happening to her.

Then there was a case of some perv recording a woman in a shopping centre. Much the same outcome online, and when she asked him to take the video down, he asked for a fee to do so.

So yes, men are shit bags, and they're absolutely using these glasses to be even more shit than they were before. Unless someone can come up with a half decent use-case for these glasses that *isn't* perving on women, then I seriously doubt the world needs such a product, and so apps like this are something of a counterpoint to the pervs in Silicon Valley who seem to think we should all be buying their products.

I have no idea how this will play out, but I suspect this will go fairly well for Valve. Probably not gangbusters brilliantly, but fairly well.

Where Meta, Apple and others have failed is content. Meta has a bit, that's for sure, but they have to pay for it. Valve can likely encourage game developers to use some different dev tools to make their 2D plans into 3D-compatible games. So they can get lots of content over the next few years at (probably) a lot less outlay than Meta will have to spend to get something comparable. Sure, the real premium 3D content may still cost them, but quantity won't cost them much.

Add to this that Meta is practically giving away headsets, presumably hoping to make money back on things like a monthly subscription (which looks like it has rotating titles, so don't get too 'in to' anything as it'll be gone soon). Contrast to this, which surely must have some margin built into the price for Valve. So all in all, the VR biz is costing Meta more than it's costing Valve, and Valve has a customer base who may be more receptive to VR in the first place, so they're in a good spot.

My guess is, if anyone can make VR work out for them, it'll be Valve. I also suspect it'll only be "quite good" for them, so no runaway success stories here. We'll see, I guess...