Forget about the personality for a minute. They have a different thing in common. Uselessness. I tried AI for a bunch of general use cases and it almost always fails to satisfy. Either it just can’t do the task in the first place or it makes mistakes that then cost too much time to fix.

There are exceptions and specialized models will have their use but it’s not the Swiss army knife tool AI companies are promising.

This generation of software companies really seem to have abandoned all previous goals for “Let’s see how shit we can make this!”

“Sir, if we can finish our robot it could help with any household chores and even take over most of the care work for the elderly. Then in future patches we could make it waterboard the user unless they get the waterboardless premium subscription. Then we’ll increase the cost and slowly reintroduce waterboarding even for subscribers.”

His comparison to snake on his Nokia is actually good because in its current state AI is like a little gimmick for many users. Sure there are use cases but it can’t reliably perform any truly critical tasks because it makes terrible mistakes.

Imagine Nokia shoving snake in customers faces as it is being done with AI. Every phone marketed as OPTIMIZED FOR SNAKE. A big snake button on the phone as a shortcut to open it. Snake integrated everywhere. Trying to send a text? Would you like to play a round of snake first?

That’s what AI currently feels like.

I don’t see many users upgrading the memory on a laptop like this either but would criticize soldered RAM based on the aspect of repairability. T14s are often used in business which means hundreds of machines handled by IT departments. Boards will die and technicians will throw them out including the RAM. Now granted most companies don’t bother with hardware repairs anyway but somewhere down the chain someone will have these machines on their workbench and the easier it is to fix them up the better.

Yeah they do though. His bet before the 2008 crash was similar. It’s where the market is pointing. Publicly available data suggests there’s a big ass bubble. The timing is essentially a bet. Last time it almost wiped him out because he was a bit early. We’ll see how it goes this time.

Then apply thermal paste generously

All crappy IoT devices ever made. They aren’t used in bot nets all the time because hackers like the challenge of hacking them so much. Security simply isn’t a priority.

Always sounds like marketing to me since all we really have so far are shitty LLMs. If they actually were close to AGI there’s no way any single government would stop the armsrace to it anyway. We’re currently pumping all our eggs into the AI basket and headlines like these encourage it. They imply this breakthrough that is around the corner that will justify the current state of the market while the reality will most likely be a massive disappointment.

This has nothing to do with children. It’s a proposal by technologically inept people who argue that encryption needs to be removed but encryption is so basic that it isn’t really feasible to do so. You can make the access harder but that is only an issue for your average joe. Individuals with criminal energy who this is supposed to be about will continue to encrypt their communication while regular users will give up their privacy.

The last 5% aren’t a nice bonus. They are everything. A 95% self driving car won’t do. Giving me random hallucinations when I try to look up important information won’t do either even if it just happens 1 out of 20 times. That one time could really screw me so I can’t trust it.

Currently AI companies have no idea how to get there yet they sell the promise of it. Next year, bro. Just one more datacenter, bro.

Are you trying to trick tech companies into being useful? That’ll upset them.

I like the course the french have taken when it comes to energy. They recycle their nuclear waste despite the high cost. They invest in batteries. In the short term it costs them more but long term they have an independant powersupply. Meanwhile germany will probably be back to suckling russian gas the moment the war ends.

I’m a sys admin in the public sector and the hardware requirements of W11 are a great blessing. I couldn’t have convinced thousands of workers to switch to Linux and get used to another GUI but this forces it on us because there simply is no money to replace all that hardware. Rolling out Mint clients and between this and mobile operating systems Microsoft is finally losing its monopoly on the OS market.

Just got back from asking them. They said they like cash moneys and don’t like blasting themselves.

No they don’t because they blast it on inflated exec wages.

It must be good though, otherwise TikTok would face mayor backlash if the platform shows more illegal content.

surely

It’s usually nonsense. I remember some carbon offsets being a guy owning a forest and essentially selling his inaction as a carbon offset. Give me a million dollars so I don’t chop all those trees down which I totally would’ve done otherwise. It’s just pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.

In this case I can imagine their calculations being wildly off. How much CO2/methane does a ton of poop actually release? How much CO2 is released to transport that ton and build the facilities that hold it?

Microsoft burying the steaming pile of poop that is teams will be enough to “offset” all their data centers.

But the donations are only necessary because of inflated salaries. It’s like saying we have to pay this pastry chef because the pastry chef loves to eat their own cake. They’re just feeding themselves.

The cost of server infrastructure is comparatively tiny so if they’d run it lean it’d have enough cash to last ages already. Also posting a banner on their site with massive reach isn’t exactly rocket surgery.

I know there are worse things but I strongly dislike nonprofits wasting donation money.

on the one hand they make some valid points on the other hand it’s a little disgusting how much wikipedia execs get payed and how sweaty they get when they worry about having to pay content moderators. currently they just pocket most of the donations they get but with increased running costs that would get harder.

don’t get me wrong, wikipedia is an important project and they deserve fair compensation but grabbing $700k per year for managing it seems a bit steep eh? it’s not like they’re forging new business strategies and conquering markets. they have a very simple concept and just keep it running. a post it note on the ceo door with “keep going lads” on it might outperform them and save some money.