I needed to pick up some cheap headphones on vacation a few years back. Went to Best Buy and decided to pay a little extra for what must be the better headphones, the Skullcandys. They were some of the worst headphones I've ever heard. Not "bass-heavy", just tinny, metallic sounding, and uneven throughout the range. Dollar store quality, for a premium price. Never again.

I saw a thumbnail on YouTube from CBS or ABC, one of those state media apparatuses, of the jumping car. It was so obvious just from the thumbnail what this thing was, and why it was all over the media.

I vowed to quit asking myself questions like, "Do people really buy this?", But it still amazes me to see that they do. (Buy the hype, not the car)

You can find some used for around $39k now. Likely to crater further as the quick-n-easy loans come due, and they get repo'd.

I doubt they float or are bulletproof, though.

They apparently gave it some Muslim name, Ahmed or something, and dressed it up in what must be their idea of "gangster" attire: wifebeater, large chain.

So they thought it was funny not only to commit the sexual assault, but dress up as a lower-caste Muslim while doing it. Speaks volumes as to where the problems in that country really are.

I think they sense the end is coming, and these calls are signs of desperation. Seems kind of a longshot. But it may be all they can do to try extending the life of their companies by another year or two.

Are you sure it's the residents orchestrating this? Politicians have pulled the wool over my eyes with "think of the children" too many times to believe that. This smells less like earthen grass-roots and more like a smokescreen decreed from the top-down to make the politicians appear to be "reigning in Big Tech" without having to actually do that.

I think they'd prefer to do it in secret, where no one can see them. That's why the masks.

Freedom ain't free, sovereignty ain't cheap.

Hopefully they are increasing their military budgets too, shoring up the physical side of security.

All I could think of when reading the summary was "busywork". I would be more impressed with code that accomplishes its task with a minimum of changes, not how many lines your bot can shit out.

I think I still have some Discovery documentaries I recorded on VHS somewhere. No monthly fee to retain those. I would have to find a VHS player to watch them, though.

The enshittification of the Discovery Channel, I think, inspired the film Idiocracy. All the shows they have now, look like a bunch of extras from the film running around.

I have a family member who is a longtime Kroger employee. Store-based, not a corporate employee. A few years ago he told us how Kroger was trying to inject AI into the store's operations. The result was: the AI didn't help, and it was withdrawn from that application.

They might have ulterior motives for making this kind of announcement, but they are definitely experimenting with AI as well.

And that's the difference between it being forced on you, and it simply being made available, like it is to Torvalds.

It sounds like he's using it for hobby projects. Not the kind of assignment an employer would give you.

And of course, just as they are hitting diminishing returns, they start calling for regulation and a "pause" on model development.

It's to construct a narrative that evil big government is holding businesses down, rather than the product simply being a disappointment. "It's coming next year, we promise. See, we were on a 'strategic pause' this last year, all we do is lift that and we're superintelligent supergeniuses again."

With the Echo, it's pretty easy not to buy. In this case, the suckers freely chose to participate.

It's not a secret who Amazon is, and wasn't a secret when the Echo Dot came out.

Not just kill switches, much of the push for safety in AI has been theater. Even the proclamations by the AI wizards about how dangerous and rogue their technology is have been to the end of co-opting any real push for regulation. Screaming about safety allows them to control the narrative - defining what the problems are and how to fix them. Meaning, never the real problems, and never the real fixes.

The real "kill switch" for this stuff is the switch you throw on the electric chair, with an A.I. executive strapped inside. Stops it right away.