I use one of the large banks named in this article.

Last weekend I had a question about a service, it's something I already use, I just needed one piece of information about it.

Their web "help" was just stone stupid - asked a formulaic question, then offered the same set of options as found at the top of the page for the service in questions. I got curious and poked around, it was literally nothing but a "no matter what question give one of half a dozen links" and then ask if the user was satisfied.

I tried Google. It's utterly broken now, so no joy there. I will admit the bank provides the service in question, beyond that it's a different flavor of dumb.

Perplexity has largely replaced Google for me, but no joy on this one. It offered a lot of well stated, but utterly irrelevant advice, given my question.

I finally called a friend who uses the same bank and same service, they walked me through it.

The sad thing here? This is a HUGE bank, they could afford to do this job right, and 98% of it WOULD work with bots. I guess they laid off the people who can, ya know, actually DO stuff, and we get this late 20th century IVR style "service" despite their massive spend on AI.

Corporate America's race to replace humans with AI is going to backlash. Why engage with gamey agents, when you can deploy your own, and wait for the desired result?

This process is going to repeat, like the Europeans arriving in the Americas, until all the humans are gone, and there's nothing left but bots that do an increasingly good job of acting like us. There will be little reservations, see the Fediverse for an example, where actual humans congregate. There will not be corporate friendly global flat spaces like Facebook and Twitter, there will be neighborhoods.

Much like the natives of the 16th century, we are going to lose people along the way. There are those whose brains are so warped by the internet already that they will simply remain entangled in the increasing unreality. There's even an Amazon series about this - The Feed is pretty well done, and it chronicles what happens to society as it (The Feed) takes over.

The same thing will happen economically, a return to local dealing, but it's going to partial and MUCH more painful.

Tim Cook had a brilliant career, but he had to embarras himself by sucking up to the orange utan.

Enjoy your retirement TIm Apple, you nauseating man.

Yeah... let's not.

I'm old enough to have zero fondness for old computer shit. Vintage is for those who haven't had to suffer it to do actual work.

The changes we have set off in the world today are not unlike those that precipitated the Great Dying 252 million years ago. We're at 420 ppm CO2 now but the permafrost is done for and after that the clathrates in the shallow seas are liable to let go, too. The current ice age is only 2.5 million years old and we've ended it. We may have triggered something akin to the Permian/Eocene Thermal Maximum.

There was some chance we could have headed this off, had we turned immediately and aggressively on the problem around the turn of the century. We have proven politically incapable of addressing this existential threat, and now that we might be mustering the will, the window may have closed.

We've had a good run, we anatomically modern humans, but this ending due to a lack of foresight is ... embarrassing .

Lots of shortsighted hot takes on this.

Anthropic is involved in litigation against our inebriated SecDef because Dario won't cosign for algorithmic warcrimes. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, Asia is going to hit a wall on liquid fuel and natgas. The U.S. AI datacenter build frenzy has hit a wall in the form of public disapproval, and under that an electrical components availability problem that the trouble in Asia will NOT improve.

If your hot take doesn't factor the geopolitical things into the mix, your are wasting poor defenseless electrons that accomplished nothing with their potential.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Anthropic C suite conference room why they work through this. They are mobbed with customers, running a subsidized customer acquisition strategy they can't just quit, and several legs of the table supporting this are wobbling.

I'm glad the heat has passed me by, I saw a little friction during the conversion, but Opus 4.7, unimpressive as it may be, is steadily trundling along doing work for me the last twelve hours.

Per TFA:

These adjustments stem from Sonyâ(TM)s ongoing efforts to manage backend services and data feeds that support enhanced guide features on its Google TV-powered BRAVIA lineup.

It sounds like Sony is losing (or is not renewing) the contracts with their data brokers who providing the listing services for their TVs? In which case this is not necessarily expected, but it is par for the course.

There is no truly free source of OTA TV listings and other metadata in the US. The stations themselves do not provide this data over the air as an adjacent data stream (which is what a rational person would expect), so the only way to get listings is from third party providers such as Gracenote. Which as a technical solution works, but it means someone is always on the hook for paying for that service. And no one wants to pay for OTA metadata services, since the hallmark attribute of OTA TV is that it's free.

This is a problem that goes back to the earliest days of TiVo. Someone needs to pay for TV listings, but TVs and other STBs last too long; hardware manufacturers eventually tire of paying for an ever-increasing bill - it costs them money they don't get to make back if they give away the listings for free. And thus you eventually end up with required a monthly subscription just to have an OTA DVR.

The eventual death of linear TV should finally put an end to this nonsense. But until then we're all going to keep experiencing the same non-free listings issues we've had since the late 90s.

Ireland and Italy and Spain have its share of people who see angels. Oddly the number of UFO sightings and angel sightings are highly concentrated around areas with geological pressure Peltier related electrical oddities. Oddly New England has ghost issues around the similar geology.

I want thin frames and a color that sort of just disappears. I don't see putting a camera and battery into that form. Of course I don't see that form much any more and not in the proper colors. It may not help that there seems to be one company in the wold left that makes frames another that makes lenses and one is a subsidiary of the other.

Huh. I am surprised to hear that Microsoft SQL Management Studio doesn't run. The usual problem children are either programs that are using specific x86 instructions (e.g. games with AVX2), or programs that need kernel mode drivers. MSMS doesn't fall into either of those categories.

Being able to flawless recall a moment would perhaps be useful, but this is NOT how human long term memory works. When healthy, we revisit and reinforce that which is happy, and helpful, and positive. When we can't let go of the past, that's often tied to things we describe as mental illness. Just ask anyone who's ever been treated for PTSD.

I remember that wave of emotion the first time I ever kissed *THAT* girl. And since we didn't have email or text messages, and I hadn't met her parents yet, I can also take you to the precise place on that Iowa highway where I heard her funeral announcement. I drove a couple more miles in stunned silence, before I realized it was scheduled on my 20th birthday.

I'll turn fifty nine in a week or so. Every year she fades a little more, but stopping to write this brings that hurt back, as sharp as ever.

This is a double edged sword and we should think twice before drawing it ...

This is an especially bad example.

The SN850X has been rebranded multiple times as SanDisk has slowly split from Western Digital (taking all the SSDs with them). They still sell it as the SN850X, but the full model and SKU numbers have changed over the years. As a result, prices for the old models have been volatile, as some vendors treat the newer iterations as the same product while others don't. Which means that for the latter, they see the old models as an item they aren't getting more stock of, and raise prices on the remaining stock accordingly.

Oldest Model: WDBB9H0020BNC-WRSN (The original Western Digital WD_BLACK product)
Mid Model: WDS200T2XHE-00BCA0 (The WD_BLACK By SanDisk product)
Newest Model: SDSP81200TAH-000E0 (The current SanDisk product)

The SN850X has been a very long-lived product from a manufacturer who supplies their own NAND and controller, so I can see why The Verge would want to use that as a tracking point for SSD prices. But the brand/SKU changes make it a poor choice. Samsung's drives are probably a better point of comparison here.

The industrial world has a fertility centered around 1.25 - put four middle aged women in a room, they'll have five kids with them. The United States was blessed with a solid 1.6 and we were collecting the best of the best globally.

A year and a half of master race archetype Stephen Miller in charge of immigration combined with the end of Roe v. Wade and we're going to catch up to Italy in short order - a bit less than that 1.25 global norm.

The most warped thing is that, with ideologues doing jobs that ought to be in the hands of pragmatists, when hits like this keep coming, they will employ their belief system to rationalize doubling down, rather than recognizing a disastrous policy and reversing course.

The only thing that might correct this problem is a wave of refugees arriving when Asia spins out over losing its energy supply.

My contact information ain't hard to find, one of y'all drop me a line when America is great again.

Upper middle class means going on holidays twice or more a year. Lower middle class means holidays at least every 2 years.

My first Linux installation was Redhat 3.03 on a 16MHz 386/SX system in mid-1995. For those of you without an AARP card, that's a 32 bit CPU with a 16 bit bus, which Intel released to cannibalize the market for the 286, which did not have a memory management unit. That means no swapping, you run out of ram, it was game over.

I think the 486/25 that replaced the 386/SX arrived in ... 1996 ... and it had an astonishing *eight megabytes* of memory. I had kept a one megabyte LIM/EMS 4.0 physical memory card from my 286 when I got the 386/SX, and that actually mattered with Windows 3.x. I put it in the 486, but given that vast eight megabyte expanse of dram it didn't last long.

Then in late 1997 my employer went bankrupt and as part of the dissolution I brought home the dual Pentium 133 system with 32 megabytes of ram. I remember all my IRC friends were so jealous of that monster ...