This is obviously true, and the realization that AI was going to be the battleground for "truth" happened almost immediately. Even relatively smart people, if they go to Google and type in a query, will read off the AI-generated "summary" at the top as if it's the de-facto truth. I mean, they did this prior to AI as well, not taking the time to click into the articles. I find that AI summaries are even worse, as when I click on the supporting links, I rarely find the information that supposedly supports what it said. But if you argue with Google you just look like you're crazy.

The only way they're going to be able to monetize this technology to the masses, who won't pay a monthly subscription, is to use it for advertising. If you ask AI about the best vacuum cleaner, it's going to give you an answer that's manipulated by whatever vacuum company paid the most for promotions. Similarly, if you ask it a political question, the answer will be influenced by paid political pandering, and also by the whims of the organization that created the model. Grok's going to sing the praises of Elon Musk, and Gemini will sing the praises of Sundar Pichai.

This gets pretty scary when you consider the "ministry of truth" implications here. Sure, we'll have lots of different models available, and they'll be beholden mostly to various corporate interests, but you can already see where it's heading in authoritarian regimes like North Korea, China, Russia, etc. That's why all countries are racing for AI. It's a race to control the magical oracle machine that everyone thinks is the single source of truth.

The same people who complain that it won't criticize this or that still want it lobotomized so it won't criticize their own beliefs.

Labor is also cheaper than AI.

Companies need to burn thousands of dollars in tokens to get agents to do even vaguely equivalent work. Sure, the agent works all night and doesn't need breaks, but it also costs money literally every second you use it, and the end result STILL needs to be checked to make sure nothing insane happened.

Humans--even if you pay them a fair wage--are remarkably efficient at turning food (and coffee) into code and systems. The so-called 10x or 100x programmers (guys like Carmack) really DO exist. And while they're a nightmare to work with, generally speaking, they'll code circles around any agent. If you want something that nobody likes working with that will also give you hard to maintain code, hire a 10x programmer. At least you'll get a working system at the end of the day, and he didn't use a swimming pool full of water an a small gas power plant worth of energy to get it done.

Interestingly, literally the only person in my friend group that still drives stick is a woman. It's a relatively modern Honda (like, new enough that it has a backup camera in it). She's also one of the smoothest drivers I've ever ridden with. Her shifts are impeccable.

40% of Canada's land area is covered in forests. It is simply impossible to "manage" that much forest, and it's utterly fucking absurd to suggest otherwise. And to try to take climate change out of the equation is just a way of misdirecting away from the actual fucking cause; GHG emissions raising surface temperatures.

When will humans stop buying the most trivially fucking moronic red herrings? What a disreputable idiotic species.

It's almost as if allowing emissions to ramp up with little meaningful effort to control them is having the inevitable consequences predicted decades ago. But let's not deal with that, because it's hard. Instead let's have the President of the United States demand Canada hold back the tides.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Heck the first quantum computer in 1998 with two qubits was rom temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_quantum_computer#History

Well then this is definitely going to blow your mind... I'm not American and I don't live in the US.

If, like me, you didn't know who OnePlus was.

I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

Back in the early 2000's (before smartphones and social media) I used to work at a company where we'd go out to lunch almost every day as a group. There were people of both political persuasions (this was in the US) and we'd have real thoughtful discussions about politics face-to-face. Feelings were on display. People were a little exasperated at times. But everyone went back to work and worked together and got shit done, and were respectful to each other.

A few years ago I was back in the US on a job, and a bunch of us were going out to lunch, and I said, "is so-and-so coming?" and they said, "no, he won't come with us. He's a democrat." I guess they didn't consider Canadians democrats because I was still invited. But that's how bad it's gotten, and let's not kid ourselves... it's entirely social media that's changed how people communicate.

I was at dinner with a group of people (in Canada) a year ago. My mother and an acquaintance started arguing over some kind of politics. In my mind it was pretty mild and they did listen to each other. She apologized to me later, and I said, "No, don't apologize! I want people to spend time talking face-to-face! It's way more civil than what gets said online, and you were both listening to each other." It's not like they stopped talking to each other... they still have pleasant conversations now when they see each other.

I suggest getting to know people who disagree with you, and just spend some time together. Ideas only change when people feel listened to.

I cut back 90% on Facebook/Twitter after Jan. 6 because Twitter silently unsubscribed my account from following Abby Johnson because she happened to be in the audience on Jan. 6.