On the plus side, TV has hit rock bottom decades ago, and films aren't far behind. Using AI to make shit faster is kind of fitting really.

Shoot, most of the new stuff doesn't interest me anyway. Pluto, Tubi, Plex, are enough for me.

Said no one.

Look at the insane virality and popularity of OpenMolt / MoltBot, which was made by a hobbyist over a few weekends. Yes it has security issues - but if it was actually built and provided by a company like Microsoft or Google, they could easily address those.

Why is it so popular? Because it is an AI assistant that can actually do stuff, and is useful, as opposed to the stupidity of having AI in a text editor mostly used as a cliipboard cache..

Microsoft needs better product managers. The current slate seems to have no sweet clue what people actually want out of AI.

I worked 911 and did a lot of ride alongs with deputies. In our downtown area, the traffic lights had this long tube above the light and if you shined the spotlight into it, it would change the light from red to green. It was obviously suppose to be for fire trucks etc, but once high powered flashlights started showing up and people would trigger them, they disabled their function.

Correct, Mistral.

I was evaluating AI coding assistants for my company a while ago, and of course Claude Code was on my shortlist. But after discussing Anthropic's collaborating with the fascist US regime, our company decided to practice economic withdrawal and take our money to a European supplier.

In the USA, it takes typically 20+ years after sentencing, for an execution to be carried out.

I think it plausible that 99% of new energy this year come from renewable sources because many of those sources come from renewable types with relatively short construction times.

Up until recently, the US adds about 50 GW of capaicty per year. There's a huge uptick in generation capacity because of energy demands from data centers, so recently it's more like 65 GW/year. The challenge is you can't exploit *this year's* high market prices by starting a nuclear power plant that won't come on line for a decade. Even a combined cycle natural gas plant is going to take five years. But you can have a wind farm up and running in months.

It's not the renewability *per se* that's driving this; it's profiting from the high prices before the AI bubble bursts. Nobody is rushing to bring new hydropower or geothermal plants online, and they're just as renewable as wind or solar.

This move to renewables is not about changing the world. it's about short term financial optimization. But these short term, local optimizations *will* change the world, and planning to handle the transformations driven by short-term market forces is going to take coordinated, long term national action. At present there are regional mandates that will stabilize the local grid against variations in electricity supply. But carving up the nation into small regional markets means higher prices and economic inefficiencies where electricity is transfered from high price areas to stabilize low price areas. Market economics don't work if there are non-market forces (stability) that trump profitability.

Strictly speaking, Gates' name appearing in the files as a "note to self" isn't dispositive of anything. Epstein was a sociopath, and while he was profoundly and disturbingly weird, not a dummy. He'd already been publicly exposed and convicted of child procurement. So he knew he was radioactive. He might well choose to salt his own records with poison pills.

But that's the context we shouldn't miss: Epstein was publicly known to be a child trafficker years before Bill Gates initiated his contact with him. And Bill Gates has people to look out for him and extensive contacts with Epstein's clientele. He must have known. So the parsimonious explanation is that he was seeking out what Epstein uniquely could provide.

As for Gates, he's really smart in a certain way; he's probably usually the smartest guy in the room. But not one-in-a-million smart. I bet a lot of us know people who are smarter than he is. What his history shows is a willingness to act ruthlessly and transgress legal or ethical rules for personal gain, while being aware of reputational risk. I'm not reducing him to a cartoon villain — he may genuinely care about issues like malaria. But he understands the value of curating his reputation. Epstein is a perfect match for him: high school math teacher smart, sociopathic, but obsessed with amassing social capital through connections with academics with tech-bro appeal that opened doors.

It is indisputable that Gates had a relationship with Epstein — Gates himself doesn't deny it. Gates is contesting the veracity of what Epstein wrote in his files, and you know what? I think ithose things are likely false. If Gates needed to score some antibiotics on the DL, he wouldn't need to beg is pedophile buddy. But if Occam's razor serves here, the STD story is just a distraction. Getting or not getting and STD would just be a matter of luck. It wouldn't change the fact Gates sought association with a known child sex trafficker.

And here’s the other big piece of context we shouldn’t miss: while appearance in the Epstein files isn’t strictly dispositive of anything, the unprecedented structure of Epstein’s plea agreement and the resulting absence of federal prosecution constitute a smoking gun for deliberate non-enforcement by law enforcement. From this, we can reasonably infer that powerful individuals were being shielded from scrutiny. Epstein received an extraordinarily lenient deal that explicitly immunized unnamed co-conspirators — an inversion of standard prosecutorial practice, where defendants are typically flipped to expose broader conspiracies. It is reasonable to infer, in the absence of any credible explanation, that prosecutors were motivated to protect those co-conspirators for some reason.

Can't blow anymore hot air into it?

Translation: Silicon Valley is the Schrader valve overinflating the AI tire.

GenAI has been able to bypass reCAPTCHA for a long time.

They are useless virtue signalling at this point.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989...Now wait just a minute! I was told that Al Gore invented the internet! /s

I remember when they started the Amazon stores. Thought it was the DUMBEST thing Amazon came up with. Apparently I was correct.