As the Firesign Theatre said so many years ago, "A power so great, it can only be used for good, or evil."

Pretty much sums up the entire social-media/AI/surveillance hellscape the tech bros have gifted, errr, grifted us with.

That knocks Jupiter right off my bucket list of places to visit.

If I had points handy, I'd mod you up.

Web views opens up a window from inside an app through which very bad things can happen, whether driven by an AI app generator or not.

One has to wonder how this could have happened inadvertently. Breathtaking incompetence might be a better description. Just sayin'.

Superapp... Superapp...
With beauty and grace,
fast as can be
watch it flying through the air.
It travels in space,
or under the sea,
and it can journey anywhere.

Superapp... Superapp...
It travels on land,
or roams the skies,
through the heavens' mighty rage
It's Mercury-manned,
and everyone cries,
"it's the marvel of the age!"

Superapp... Superapp... SUPERAPP!

The very last thing I'm going to do is share my goals, feelings, or inspiration with Google. Fuck that. Hard.

The PIO on the RP2040/RP2350 is pretty phenomenal. The RP2350 adds an HSTX module that enables doing some pretty impressive video tricks. One of the things I really like about these parts is their ability to stitch multiple peripherals together (think SRAM->DMA->HSTX,) making it possible to drive HDMI video without involving a CPU core. The RP2350 is rated at 150 MHz, but it can be safely pushed 2x or more. There are some impressive examples floating around, like a fully functional emulator for the original Mac.

If we're talking Pi Pico devices, I'd pick the RP2350. At runtime, you get your choice between dual ARM or dual RISC-V cores running at 150 MHz. The downside of these parts (RP2040/RP2350) vs. ESP is that you'll need to add an external Flash memory, external PSRAM, and external WiFi/BLE radio.

The ESP32-C6 may be the SoC you are looking for. RISC-V. Mature WiFi and BLE. Thread and Zigbee support. Low power down into the uA range. More peripherals than you can shake a stick at. Excellent toolchain, all open source. CircuitPython supported. Lots of devboards available starting at about $12.

While you're looking at the C6, check out the other offerings from Espressif.

Q.E.D.

There you have it, folks. Incontrovertible evidence that AI is every bit as wonderful as all the boosters say it is. Bite on that, haters!

It's true that CAD improved the quality of designs. However, all indications so far point to AI degrading the quality of work performed with its assistance. AI is not saving time, but it is helping to produce worse outcomes.

Given the size of the study, the difference of just a few minutes looks like noise. I'm thinking that because the sample chosen was composed entirely of people already using AI, that many of them are early adopters who would naturally take a more optimistic view of AI, skewing the results more toward "time saving" than is actually warranted.

For one, I'm impressed by the Neo. Not only does it hit a decent price point, it's also durable, repairable, performs well, and doesn't require the soul sucking OS that Windows 11 has become. I'm expecting to see these everywhere in the coming months.

I wish they'd do something about the Dr. Richard Feynman AI generated fakes that are almost continuously recommended to me in my YouTube feed. It seems like as soon as I block one, another one appears. What gives? Anyone have an idea of why he's such a popular target for AI generated fakes?