You can switch back to the "Advanced" or "Standard" models by clicking on your user icon then settings, voice. There is now a drop-down list with: Live, Advanced, and Standard.

Each one is worse than the previous.
Basic:
* Good, monotone

Standard:
* Too much inflexion, uncanny.
* Knows how to pronounce foreign words in the correct accent. So you can use this to practice another language. It can fluently switch back and forth even within a sentence.

Live:
* Overly strong accents, like a young actor hamming it up.
* Doesn't get language accents right, so it is useless for language learning.
* Adds "Hmmm..." and "uh huh" and "Interesting..." as you speak. Sometimes it sounds like a Minecraft villager or Yoda thinking.
* Starts every response with boisterous exclamations and thinking sounds. "Ohhhh... Hmmm uhhhh, oh yeah that's (complex | interesting | fascinating)!"
(The text version does this too, but not nearly so hard and overdone)

I love how the technology advances, but I think OpenAI is overdoing it and the voices get cheesier and more annoying with each version. If a human being talked to me like this I would assume they are being an ass and making fun of me. Or maybe they were high?

Another effect is that "apps" integrate support for cloud services. So if you take a picture, your phone app is likely to have a "share" button with Instagram / Facebook / Threads / whatever, but it isn't like to have an "SFTP" button. Companies went out of their way to remove standard protocols.

Also notice that zero elected representatives have proposed laws to fix this.

As of 2026, I bet most people don't even know there is another way. Web sites are perceived as things that big companies do, not individuals. Nobody registers powercntrl.com and hosts their own site any longer. They don't even know that is possible!

But The-Ixian is right: You can't stop someone from using your online image anyway, even if you self-host it. But at least it would be illegal for them to do so. Maybe. Possibly.

Every web site needs your phone number, every online order... Businesses don't take cash any more. Every web site tracks you and sells data to the brokers. Only Linux installs without an email address and phone number for 2FA and password recovery. Video games, every chat app (maybe not mumble?), every birdhouse camera, even the freaking doorbells want an account! Eye glasses are doing face recognition!

This fight was lost decades ago, and now we have to live with it.

^^ He is right.

I didn't believe this. My retort was going to be a sarcastic "Oh yeah, that's why we see so many farms built sunshades over their crops :eyerool" but apparently it wasn't worth doing before. But now that your sunshade *also* produces power, it is suddenly worth the investment.

I still question what it does to the growing season though. While I can understand why Texas might have plenty of sunlight, New England is just on the cusp of having a growing season that is too short to be profitable. Some places are trying to grow tomatoes in the frost.

It should be, but it is not. Sooo many companies think they can hire a senior engineer in the US, then 5 cheaper engineers in India, and just hold a "morning meeting" and everything is fine. It's really crazy how naive companies are to the time zone issue. I've told them to hire in Brazil, Mexico, or Argentina instead of India but there are so many fewer contractors there. One company had a lead in Hawaii!! I had a team split between California, Ireland, India, and Kuala Lumpur and the upper management pushed this as a cost savings plus 24/7 development!

They only care about the prediction markets because it can leak military plans. They don't care if politicians are profiteering.

20 years ago I thought these agencies were incompetent. Now I know that it was actually their peak. The FCC of prior administrations would document their goals, send out a notice for public comment, write a proposed rule set, hold a hearing, the make a rule. Now they make a rule, and everyone goes "That doesn't even make sense" then they switch it. It's not just the FCC: It's the DOJ, DHS, EPA, etc.

Wish I kept the prompt, but I didn't give it much at all. I have also done solitaire as well. I gave it no hints on what the rules where or what the game looked like. It was something as simple as this.

"I want freecell for Mac. Make it as close to the windows version as you can. Write it in swift and make it a native MacOS application with an icon and everything that goes along with that. If you need to download any libraries or compilers ask me to approve them."

I already had xcode installed and I THINK it used that to compile it, but I'm not positive. I didn't need to download anything to get it done, took it about 10 minutes.

I got tired of my mac not having freecell. So I told claude to create it as a python app with a gui. And it did. But the graphics were a little kludgy. So I told it to try again as a swift app. Boom, I have freecell for mac now. I've never coded anything for mac, I haven't even looked at the (vulnerable) code it's created.

Is it still considered an investment if you're forced to do it?

I'd say Taxes are a compulsory contribution that might be used for public investment. But they also might not. Either way, calling them an investment is way to generous.

I have a need for thousands of VMs for a load test in Azure. But Azure requires dual-stack for IPv6 to work -- which completely defeats the purpose! The DevOps team tells me we are out of IPv4 addresses. If everything IPv6 also requires an IPv4 address, then IPv6 is useless. I am told that AWS VMs do not have this problem.

This is a valid retort. But let us not think that lawyers are struggling: once they get to be a "partner" in a firm they are likely making $1 million/year. And the entire context of the discussion is that they aren't relying on staff like they used to. Back in 1980, a lawyer had staff members who ran down to the court house to get documents, bring them back, photocopy them, staple them, file them, make phone calls. Now all of that is 100% automated, plus now they have AI.

I'm not sure the legal overhead is quite what it used to be.

Disclaimers like this apply to Excel, TurboTax, GCC, ChatGPT, and more: The user is ultimately responsible for the application. The manufacturers always disclaim responsibility.

You can get companies to stand behind products and accept liability or sign a Business Associate Agreement - but you are going to have to put it in a contract and pay extra for it. This is why the product you buy at Home Depot and the one the government/military/NASA buys has a very big price difference even if it is the exact same part.