Keeping social media from harming kids requires curbing the use of dark patterns in software. It would have to apply to the operating systems, web sites, and thousands of apps on every app store. Few politicians are willing to fight tens of thousands of software and gambling companies. The lobbies that would create would make combined militarism contractors, the drug industry, and the oil industry look like ants.

If I need to know something and I search with Google it kind of sucks. Half of the articles are clickbait, written by non-experts or a shitty AI that was given a garbage prompt. When I go to the web site I immediately have to jump through as many as three popups about cookies. Then, ten seconds after I start reading, a full page popup appears compelling me to sign up for a mailing list. If I am on a mobile browser with an ad blocker the page may refuse to load. On desktop I might get a popup telling me to disable my ad blocker. After all that shit it turns out that the garbage article does not even answer my question. So I have to keep doing this with every link until I either find an answer or give up.

But if I ask Claude it will usually give me a great answer. Sometimes it gives an entire essay. The writing is much better than the garbage I would get from a Google search.

But lately I have taken to just looking it up in books. This month I bought a big Merriam Webster dictionary along with the Oxford dictionaries of economics, finance and banking, and politics and international relations. It's great! Entries are short because Oxford is not cooking up five+ paragraph articles to put ads into. The writers were experts. And they were human. I still resort to Claude at times, and it can be faster, but I like ink on paper.

Ukraine goes out of its way to not target civilians. That is the opposite of terrorism.

Somehow I doubt that the Emirates are going to extradite a guy to a country that is currently moving drone and missile components from China to Iran where they are used to attack targets in Dubai.

It's both. The robots are going to be trained to do human tasks with machine learning. Instead of writing complex scripts for every task a robot does the AI can be trained to do ten thousand similar things ten thousand times in a simulation. Which is a pretty smart way to make robot hands pick up arbitrarily arranged objects in a box, or to sort different kinds of boxes in a UPS sorting center.

Of course Tesla will need ten years to figure this out and by then Chinese companies will be five years ahead. Thus this new round of import substitution.

My problem with telling Siri to play music in the car is that it just stops working. I say "hey Siri" and nothing happens. To fix it I have to stop the car and unlock and lock the phone. Sometimes I even have to reboot the phone. I guess the listening daemon crashes and nothing restarts it. This is really annoying when I have twenty more minutes of driving before my destination.

I remember the buildups to the dotcom crash and the 2008 crash. There were lots of signs and doom sayers and there were also lots of people pulling their money out of the NASDAQ and out of banks exposed to real estate bullshit, respectively. This time it seems like the whole world has gone insane and is drunk on meme stock cognac. Anything that involves AI and/or Elon Musk is making paper millionaires. It's like someone went back in time and removed every American equities disaster from the history curriculums and only one percent of us can remember. Hopefully China will be able to step in and save us all because they seem to be the only big economy with a real long-term strategy for anything.

Probably. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all have their own chips for AI and probably won't need Nvidia in the long run. Anthropic will probably have its own chips, too. So when OpenAI tanks the round tripping is going to be terrible for Nvidia. But if TSMC hoards cash they'll be able to buy Nvidia for peanuts and make a bigger profit off all those chips being sold to gamers.

Siri would be pretty useful if it could process language as well as Claude does. And if they use Claude to fix the garbage code base that's about as buggy as a Microsoft application circa 1998.

Not in many European nations.

It's been 21 years since the Sony CD rootkit debacle and Windows still runs random shit from external sources. Is this a new thing introduced by young dipshits who don't remember the Sony CD rootkit debacle? Or is it older people who are just so fucking stupid that the only tech job they could get was being on the Windows team?

NT was fucking garbage. It was unstable and security bugs abounded. Later versions were profoundly better. I remember getting new servers on Windows 2000 and it saved me from an incredible amount of firefighting.

When the version of iOS is released iPhones will be able to do everything this does, be more portable, and they have a camera for uploading photos to ask questions about. Google and Samsung phones already have that functionality. So do a lot of Chinese phones. Why would anyone buy a low end speaker that does less than the phone they already take everywhere? I cannot see how this appeals to anyone but industrial design geeks who idolize Jony Ive.

IBM is still in fine shape. The company is not losing money. Revenue did not fall off a cliff like the stock price did. If they're smart IBM can wait this out and quietly prepare for things to bounce back when the insane AI capex ends and people need something IBM is ready to provide. (But, realistically, IBM will just lay off 25,000 good people instead of putting human capital to good use as part of a long term strategy.)

I don't have time to keep track of security updates for my router, apply them, and check now and then to make sure it hasn't been compromised. Comcast has the infrastructure and people to do it all themselves. I don't have to think about it at all.

Of course it's probably the only thing Comcast can do right, but I think most people on Slashdot have heard that story a million times so I won't go there!