That sig quote is a line from a song.

"which today is an end user tools business, will become, essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work."

It sure sounds like he's saying he doesn't want the desktop anymore. I think everyone should help them with that and drop Windows today.

This aspect is troubling to me too. You know they keep making changes because "studies show..." Yet so much of the time, what studies show does not pan out IRL. I am (was) a researcher (in a technical field), I am not anti-intellectual. I want there to be an evidence-based argument for designing programs that work better than before. Yet it seems like it is not working.

I feel the same about discipline (or rather the lack thereof) in the classroom, "studies show" being coerced is bad for them, but now one problem kid that can't be controlled or moved out of the general population classroom is destroying it for 24 others in that class. There are certain kids who don't respond to instruction, and once they realize nobody can actually do anything to stop them (and I mean that literally, even while they are physically assaulting other students) it's all over.

Argentina's Randian ubermench also got $40 billion of our money.

But if it makes you feel any better, a lot of that just flowed back to administration members and their friends.

You appear to be hallucinating.

I think because it is not dependable....it still quite often gets things wrong and gives wrong answers.

Hell, just the other day, it got the wrong songs on an album being discussed, info that is out there on the web for easy verification.

If you can't trust if for simple things like that, it's then a QC nightmare when you try to trust it for important code or design....where tolerances can mean life/death or at the very least....severe LITIGATION.

It's all well and good to play with math....

But in the real world what exactly does this mean to mankind.....?

Anything? What can we do with this or what does this work towards?

Robots lack emotion, they can take risks humans should not, and will not be stressed like emotional meatbags.

Why are you conflating robots with police abuse? Robots lack emotion which is the root of all evil.

People can set their privacy preferences centrally -- for example via the browser

DNT was proposed in 2009, implemented by most browser within a couple iterations. Microsoft famously poisoned-pilled their implementation to kill it by making it the default, which gave advertisers an excuse to claim people didn't really mean to set it, and ignore it.

It always needed the force of law to work.

Note that I am fully confident that the fine professionals in the EC will find some way to make this stupidly intrusive and annoying as well as cost a crazy amount of money to implement. I believe in them.

There's been ticket scalping since the days when I was a kid...

It was always, back then....illegal to scalp tickets, but they would do things like sell a Bic lighter for $200 and throw in a ticket free with it.

I imagine they'll do something similar to get around this law over there in EU.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

Somewhere, in a cramped 4th floor walkup apartment in Queens, the last remaining editorial intern is feeding an LLM an editorial calendar of which articles to rewrite on what schedule.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

A "token" is a substring. They're usually parts of words or whole short words.

"Processing" "tokens" is fundamentally what an LLM does.

Simplified, It takes input text, tokenizes it (splits it up according to the same rules as the corpus), maps that to a huge sparse network of vectors that serve as a lossy represention the tokenized training corpus, and then plays "pick the next most likely token" to respond.

If you choose to pay money to one of the robot timeshares, you are effectively buying the right to feed it this many tokens and expect back to get back that many tokens per month.

I know a couple long-time Redhatters who left at various points during the digestion process.

I heard both unhappiness about how the company changed and unhappiness about IBM shafting the open source world from both of them.

I assume anything RH-branded is simply demoware now, and am leery of projects with too many redhat.com email addresses in the repo.

It was an excellent example of doing well by doing good for a long time.