I just drove a Sealion myself for a week in the UK. It was overall fun to drive. Underpowered ICE, but the electric motor had some serious torque, though it seemed to limit power considerably at low speeds (might have been a setting for that somewhere) but accelerating to pass on the M roads was a dream. I didn't trust the ICC system off the M roads though. The first time I had to fight it to stay where I wanted to be, I was done with that. That said, I'd never buy one, or any other vehicle without physical buttons for climate control functions, though I might buy a second hand Seagull or one of the variants (subcompact $10,000 EV) if I could, though I would physically disable the camera pointing at my face. That shit is creepy. It would beep at me if I had my mouth open for more than like 2 seconds and tell me to take a rest, since (I guess) it thought I was yawning. Also the incessant "you're exceeding the speed limit by 2%" beeping would also definitely have to go, or it'd be a non-starter, especially since the in-dash GPS was frequently wrong about what the speed limit actually was, even in urban areas.

Signs that the bubble is about to burst. They are now claiming AGI despite being fundamentally away from it. An LLM can not ever achieve AGI. It may reasonably well PRETEND to be AGI, but at the core it's just a highly successfull letter-prediction machine. Or as a metaphor: It is "intelligence" in the sense that a toddler carefully placing one foot in front of the other while trying hard to not fall over is "running". Nope, isn't and never will be. You need a qualitative change to get there.

If they now CLAIM that they've achieved AGI, it's a sign we're nearing the end of LLM development and they're getting desperate selling the latest incremental updates. Which means the illusion is about to come crashing down.

Which is good news. Fewer data centers and lower memory prices will benefit us all.

Well, technically, we're letting Natalie do it, which is, of course, worse in every way imaginable, since she's immune to the sense of embarrassment that sometimes restrains him from acting on every little whim.

To be honest that was actually my first theory, since the bots didn't seem interested in exploring the rest of the domain. I suppose there's no way to know for certain. I concluded that it must be an imbecile's attempt at harvesting, though, because the queries weren't really exploring the string space in any useful way. Here's a sample:

"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&re&results_&results_pagenum=2980 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=5440&template=41&type HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=33500&templat HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=32640&templ HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&res&results_page&results_pagenum=39300 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_&results_pa&results_pagenum=12340 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_r&res&results_pagenum=6100 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=2920&te HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&nam&results_&results_pagenum=17940 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results&results_pag&results_pagenu&results_pagenum=37720 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=9360&template=41&type_r HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&r&results_pagenum=28040 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_&results_pag&results_pagenum=10400 HTTP/1.1"

The only thing this is fuzzing is the query string parser. It's not testing the limits of string buffers, it's not using interesting characters, it's just brain-damaged. The fact that it's also fetching different page numbers shows it's trying to follow page links and failing badly at doing so.

The site gets plenty of sniffing from garden-variety pests. e.g. this half-hearted attempt to find a framework or two that I don't have:

"POST /__rsc HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth/session HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth HTTP/1.1"
"POST /__nextjs_action HTTP/1.1"
"POST /.action HTTP/1.1"
"POST /_rsc HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth/callback HTTP/1.1"
"POST /_middleware HTTP/1.1"
"POST / HTTP/1.1"

(of course, none of these URLs exist other than /, and you definitely can't just POST to it)

All this said... I've seen that spammers regularly misconfigure their tools, they'll try to register accounts with names like #[X:\LISTS\NAMES.TXT] and it only makes sense that some other cybercriminals trying to get rich quick have a similar lack of interest in programming shit correctly. Generally people don't turn to script kiddie shit if they have a personality conducive to putting in an honest hard day's work perfecting their craft.

I believe the plan was to give that sobriquet to Lake Michigan, in honour of its decidedly flaccid silhouette.

I had a problem where AI scrapers were absolutely DETERMINED to fish out every possible query string from a search results page. Almost all of the query strings they tried were invalid due to shitty and dysfunctional string substitution. "&page=100" wouldn't be followed by "&page=101", it would be followed by "&pag&pag=1010" or something even more insanely half-baked, until the query strings were like 100+ characters long. It was the technological equivalent of watching HIV mutate in real time.

But the insane thing was that, aside from page number, they were always requesting info about the same other criteria: filtered by the same user, the same page type, and with no text string. So I just took those particular values and started banning logged-out users who requested that combination of criteria.

I figured I'd need to change my tactics in a couple of days once the botnet got bored of that particular page and moved on to requesting bogus entries for another user.

MariaDB> select count(*) from ip_bans;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 671671 |
+----------+

It hasn't.

I am actually thinking about my next BMW (my current one is getting old). Knowing this, the iX3 is off the list.

BMW had a great control system, intuitive, possible to do many things without even looking. "Young people prefer" ? Really? The young people that actually buy your cars? Well, they'll learn and not prefer touchscreens anymore on the 2nd car.

Cars last longer because of engineering competition to drive quality in vehicle design and assembly.

The ODB2 standard congealed a lot of emissions hassle, and ultimately forced prolonging service life in many product lines.

Although many shade tree mechanics of an older era are gone, there are many new ones that mod their cars, or simply repair them without the need of expensive dealer service costs; this is also part of the Right To Repair movement, where secret sauces hidden in the CANBUS. connected, multi-system firmware present in most cars.

Hackers have figured out what's what for many models.

And while convenience features are nice, any engineer will tell you that more features means more things that can go wrong. Owning some vehicles is like death-by-a-thousand-cuts as desired features slowly decay. Common parts become rarer and rarer.

The no-button approach also means a single point of failure-- the all-important console.Features become combines, all in a race to the bottom.

Increasing compliance costs and the need for profitability push car makers to make unwise choices. Button-based vehicles required ten seconds of familiarity to drive safely. Console-based devices require far more, and also cause visual distractions instead of intuitive look-and-feel controls.

It's just not as simple as you describe. Worse, international-market focused vehicle makers, especially the Europeans, make a center console because they must adapt to a left of right side steering basis-- it's cheaper just to build holes in the chassis and move the steering column left or right, thus not having two different dashboards and assemblies.

Consumers will choose among the offerings that suit them. The auto industry used to use specs to drive vehicle sales. Now, the motives and marketing are lifestyle-appeals.

Global AI tech spending is said to surpass 2.5 trillion this year.

Sorry, Gates is a small fish in that pond.

And... so.... why the need for extra memory, rumored GPU support, and etc.?

Um, no, the whole model isn't on the phone. I didn't suggest that. Instead, each app will grow into blimp-sized monstrosities, load phones down with MCP traffic, and drag phone performance to a crawl, all while increasing net traffic meteorically.

Prove me wrong.

Even if Windows was open sourced tomorrow, stem to stern, who would even want it? It's full of immensely cobbled code, patched 200x, and still barely works.

You can't see the code today. Open source at least give you that. You can only poke an amorphous code base, or alternately, pray.

Prayer never helped me much.

Visible code did.

It's for this reason that most models should be treated as a malware worm vendor looking for a spot marked X, where X is your turf.

No one wants this. AI on your phone is one of the worst ideas I can imagine. You have a 4K screen-- and now you're trying to do pixel edits on animation?

You want to find your way through Manhattan traffic at 4pm on a Friday in your Jeep? Imagine wickedly insane requests, seemingly unlimited by token costs, barraging your phone. Remember metered minutes and texts?

These models aren't compact. 5G traffic, which is sort of tenable in most areas now, is going to MCP'ing fifty requests a minute to answer simple questions. Have fun, folks, when your call gets interrupted because of model flow request on TOP of concurrent streams from fifty of your friends nearby. Even 6G doesn't cure THAT.

The two articles were probably written by two different ghost-writers.