hmmm... Providing a link to something not yet published is questionable (at least without mentioning that.) But having the link point to the -wrong- page is just bogus.

The post itself has an error. The last link's URL points to the same page as the predecessor. There is no record for 43500

How do we find both Musk and Altman guilty, and sentence them to life in prison?

You are dead right. Agnosticism is much closer to a "null hypothesis" than atheism, yet many atheists like to present their view as "more scientific".

A really rigorous scientific examination pretty quickly comes to the conclusion that the existence of deities (in the spiritual, moral, and experiential ways that most deities are defined) is essentially impossible to prove or disprove with scientific examination of the material world.

In my own opinion it's because faith and religion are mostly about questions of meaning and purpose rather than physical assertions. One's reaction to the tenets of a religion are also experiential - if those tenets provide meaning clarity and improvement in one's being they make sense.

The other aspect of agnosticism is that I find attractive is a kind of intellectual humility. As a single, limited human being, who I am to say what is absolutely true in the metaphysical planes of existence?

I think his age is a big factor even without dementia.

Many older people I've seen have a much stronger "wow, look at this reaction" to new technology- they still see advances as minor miracles when myself and others see them as incremental progress.

I also think a lot of people in that generation have spent less time with psychology and are less prone to being aware of their own emotional and cognitive reactions. This means they don't spend much time reflecting on whether that "wow" reaction is a factual assessment or just an emotional reaction.

And of course the LLM vendors love having people debate this stuff, it keeps the "AI is magic" aura alive even when so much of what "AI" is making seems to be slop.

We will never truly know how many dimensions the Chess game has.

Say it with me, now. As we all know, the infamous saying goes:

A COMPUTER
CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER
MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

It's really incredible how marketing departments can radiate amnesia like this with such proficiency.

...and the Cybertruck range and launch date, and the Model 2, and the 4680 battery process, and...

Based on Musk's track record, you can pretty much count on this being a lot less than what is promised and a lot later.

I also just don't see the opportunity. I wouldn't call myself all that knowledgeable about WeChat and its ilk, but I think these "super apps" emerged as China's mobile revolution was taking off, meaning that people started out doing banking and ride sharing etc within these apps. In the US, all those services came out separately.

Admittedly the app landscape is fairly cluttered, but I just can't see the path to US consumers suddenly wanting to hail a ride inside of Xwitter. It's not how most Americans learned to hail rides, and the consumer value in having it all inside of Xwitter seems pretty minimal.

I think the 'usual suspects' lock on enterprises is MUCH weaker than it has been. Look at all the people carrying corporate issued or at least corporate approved iPhones and Macs. And the Neo punctures a lot of the acquisition cost arguments, for a lot of people (secretaries, sales people, managers), a Neo would be just fine.. (Getting through to the life-cycle costs is a harder proposition, mostly because of sunk costs in personnel. No CIO wants to reduce his/her headcount, that's a primary driver of budget and authority. Similarly, moving to longer replacement cycles because of hardware quality would also impinge on CIO budgets.)

For consumer networking, there are LOTS of choices, sure. But the -quality- of those choices is highly questionable, and chief among those quality attributes is 'security'. (I did try an Eero, couldn't get it to work as expected. But I have neighbors who are happy with their Eeros.)

I'd like to see Apple get back into the networking/router business. The only reason I gave up my old Airport Extreme was problems with buffer bloat on a slower ISP connection. Tim Cook would talk about "owning the critical parts of the infrastructure", and it seems to me that WiFi counts.

I replaced that Airport with an Ubiquiti Dream Machine about 5 years ago. The unboxing of that Dream Machine was a direct rip-off of the Apple Airport Extreme. The initial configuration of that was painful (even with a friend who had one at his house helping me.) Over the years, the Ubiquiti software has matured. It's still more complex than the Airport Utility, but that complexity is generally well managed. Apple could do worse than buy Ubiquiti, methinks...

I remember Java for years had a license restriction against using it for safety-critical applications.

It's interesting to consider restrictive licenses as a legal liability measure (as I suspect was true for Java), versus a technical or moral measure (i.e. 'we don't trust this well enough to use in some circumstances.')

But I wonder if the FSF position will change if/when AI vibe-codes non-open-license replacements for key OSS projects.... Would they claim that the LLM 'inhaling' GPL licensed software inherits the license terms of the input?

I'm not sure I fully agree. If you know what you're doing, LLM-based code can be quite helpful. I just built a Python scraper using Antigravity in a few hours that would've taken me many days of work and required a lot of effort to learn async function syntax.

It's not a super complex code base, so there's nothing architecturally complex about it. Even then, if I hadn't had a decent understanding of how playwright works, I would've had a much harder time debugging things and fixing some of the dumb decisions the LLM made.

The "anyone can build anything" hype is clearly bogus, but "people who can clearly specify things" can build a lot more than otherwise.

That's actually quite tricky for Google. LLM-based searches unquestionably cannibalize traffic to the web properties that make them the lion's share of their revenue.
However, they surrender their position directing traffic to websites to competitors like OpenAI or Anthropic, then they are far less able to make ad revenue period.

I think their hope is probably to outlast some of the hype cycle and then come in with decent products that leverage their current dominance in ad sales.

Got of those, too (the early USB 1 ones, with the exposed ATAPI connector. I ended up buying Iomega's Firewire expansion that attaches on the back of the slim USB and latches on that ATAPI connector, as Firewire 400 had much better bandwidth than USB 1, provided enough power and thus required only a single cable, and I had a cheap Firewire 400 adapter laying around from some video project (funily: the Firewire 400 card was a free bundle bundled with some crappy movie software that was selling poorly and was on heavy sale at the shop I bought it from. Threw the useless CD, kept the Firewire card).

Mine still works too. The most difficult was trying to find the barrel power plug (since back in the days I was mostly using the Firewire attachment and because Firewire provides enough power, I wasn't using the barrel jack much. Nowadays most of my machine are USB only.

Yup. The slim USB were also a good solution to carry data around.
Bring the slim USB and the cables at the university, download shit with the fast bandwidth, then bring the drive back home, plug into the Firewire attachment and load it onto the computer.
Later the university aquired computers (from Dell) that came with ZIP IDE drive built in, so I only carried the Zip250 disks and kept the drive permanently plugged into the Firewire attachement. And almost lost the power barrel adapter as mentioned above.

Only those with Need to Know/Read into the program will know the details, beyond what's being reported. So lots of Goole employees who might object to this will remain ignorant of what management is actually up to.

I suspect a lot here see that as a significant problem. (But in the grand scheme of things, I'm not losing sleep over this one.)