I remember Volkswagen doing pretty much the same thing back in 1973-74 with the VW Thing. "Customize it. Make it your own." I hope it finds its niche.

Why can't Yves be more like Claude?

It was good while it lasted, but you can't "enshitify" any more efficiently or completely than the Fox brand enshitifies. I wonder how long it will take before I have to start buying different hardware?

Google says it won't be evil. Will renege later when it becomes too expensive to carry out their initial stated intentions....

Douchy BSA wonk doesn't like the EU guarding the golden goose a little bit more carefully these days. Problem is, they need to. Most American businesses are not trustworthy and dont subscribe to any sort of legal framework or ethos that MAKES them trustworthy, so here we are. You do you, EU.

American big tech is untrustworthy at its core. In the boardroom, in the back room, and in the data center. They have no guard rails, no good law (at the present) that makes them play nice. I think that not just Europe needs to be looking at digital sovereignty. Japan, Australia, Canada, are you listening? Most of the big tech companies CAN'T be trusted, so now it's time to start rolling your own, so to speak. Good luck.

...the same standard garbage that many, many companies before them have done to try to figure out where they can "add value" (meaning make more money doing exactly what they're doing now) without bothering to innovate again. Think AVG, Avira, MalwareBytes, Office, blah blah blah. More benign or useless features masquerading as a face lift while their memory footprint quadruples ...or worse. Microsoft has been re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic since Windows NT got a bump from v3.51 and Windows ME hit the scene. This is just another one of those. And I'll be turning most of that crap off so that the stupid thing is usable again because I don't want their "personalization". I'm surprised they haven't crowed about adding AI features yet.

People with my genetics start dying around age fifty - polycystic kidney disease.

I'm ten years older than that, my blood pressure earlier this evening was 120/70something, my last fasting sugar was around 85, I weigh ten pounds more than I did in college, and I've walked 1,393 miles in the last year. My last vice is caffeine and I will go off it periodically, in one instance for seven years.

I got dealt a terrible hand, health wise, Lyme at forty that triggered a complex immune condition, but I refuse to feel (or look) bad. A lot of it IS in your hands, you just need the will to change. It's not easy ...

While universal basic income is a useful policy tool and I think we WILL reach it eventually, there are economics papers out there that demonstrate that, sans Pigouvian transaction tax, AI is a race to the bottom.

The AI Layoff Trap by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas is still sitting on my desktop. A quick Google search reveals they are not the only ones who are pursuing this line of thinking.

BUt here in the U.S. "muh freedumb" will ensure that we run that race till the bottom falls out. Hopefully Asia and Europe play this transition a bit smarter, so something of our society continues.

I am getting SO tired of hearing the stories about the excesses of AI. OpenAI wants all the water and all the power and all the data centers and all the capital markets (ALL of them, ALL $5 TRILLION) in investments so that they can make a thing that's going to cost every man, woman, and child on this planet $550-ish a month AT A MINIMUM, just so they can break even. Microsoft wants all the things. nVidia wants all the things. Apple just wants to borrow all the things from someone else who knows how to do it evidently. The Magnificent Seven want all the things. By my count the whole AI ecosystem wants something on the order of 25xGDP of the entire planet for the next 10 to 25 years to make their aspirations a reality. And I'm tired of it. Imagine sitting in your hovel waiting for AI Power And Water to turn on your power for a couple of hours each day so that you can charge your phone so that you can use their AI agents. It's disgusting and perverse. So why do we keep tolerating this kind of talk? I CAN'T WAIT until the financial idiots come crashing down to reality.

Someone finally said the quiet part out loud. And nVidia's software underpinnings come from Silicon Graphics / SGI back in the day. Can you say, "OpenCUDA"?

American tech companies in general (and the huge tech companies in particular, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and the "Magnificent Seven" AI companies) have all proven that they don't deserve your trust. Europe, Canada, Australia, ...all of South America..., you all need to be paying attention and separating your church and state from our "state", because our state is pretty f***ed up at this point. And the federal government in the United States will never try to bring these companies to heal. So, impose fines and restrictions where you think necessary. They're not going to limit themselves for you, or act in any sort of honorable way. I wish we could apologize for their behaviour but, honestly, we suffer under their stupid and greedy yoke as well. GDPR it, Europe. Get serious about it.

The market IS white hot right now, but the Hormuz hit is just starting to land. Demand at the edges is what sets the price - if all southeast Asian gamers are spending the GPU money on gas, that cools the rush. And I have no confidence any of these datacenter announcements are going to lead to actual builds. Companies talked a great game, but the political heat is on, the electric and water constraints are real, and advances like TurboQuant, which conservatively speaking offers a 4x boost to existing GPUs ... now layer the U.S. economic hit from Hormuz, which will only be a little bit behind the Asian blowout.

The AI/datacenter/GPU self dealing circle looks more like the derivative traders of 2008 with each passing day. Just like CDOs, that "money" is all conditional, and when conditions change, it's all gone. Society got some nice frontier models and advances in manufacturing out of it, now if corporate America takes even half a step back on the rush ... the market won't just vanish, because there IS a lot of benefit to using LLMs, but the demand may only match what's already been built. We'll take the hit from it, then the economy will rebound from a bunch of startups pillaging the existing firms that are politically incapable of making the needed culture change.

I spend my days working on the system for my startup. Since I had a computer science education and a bunch of time in grade running ISP systems, I bring that distributed systems engineer vibe to my vibe coding. It'll need work once it's funded, but the MVP will be functional and secure.

I was using X tokens/week via Claude Code. They stumbled on the Opus 4.7 rollout and I got busy tuning my setup. I added LSP Enforcement Kit + Serena, CodeSight, and OptiVault. This made Claude more or less behave ... while cutting my usage about 80%.

Companies that are using token burn as a metric, if they are not providing top quality tooling for the people using it, are basing their performance reviews on who can tolerate some highly random LLM over an efficient, well thought out harness.

Meta foisted a digital cesspool on us and it would not hurt my feeling a bit to see it completely desiccated. I do feel badly for the legions of humans that are going to be forced to wade through the increasingly crusty muck while the company attempts to figure out what to do about AI. There are rumblings out there about what is happening to the advertising based internet we all know (and despise). Meta clearly can't execute with AI and they may well get bowled over by it.

GM needs to be made to disgorge every dime they made selling that data.

They need to disclose who purchased the data and what the price was.

Every victim of this privacy violation needs legal recourse and class action seems like it would be best for the masses.

Anyone who can show significant harm should aggressively pursue all parties involved.

The only way this behavior will stop is when engaging in it brings bitter pain.