don’t think that FAANG companies realize how toxic their image is

Ain’t that the truth. Their behavior and the products they’ve been launching the last few years prove this to me. They’re completely out of touch with society and what consumers actually want. LLMs are another perfect example of that.

I pay $50 a month for 10 Gigabit fiber. Truly unlimited, no caps or throttling, and I can use my own equipment without issue. I can’t even fully take advantage of the ridiculous speed I have available with my current devices. But I can use a quarter of its potential and it’s still the fastest internet I’ve ever had. I used to pay three times this amount for way shittier service. It’s the one good deal out of all my bloated utility expenses.

Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.

Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.

Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.

It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…

Human and AGI collaboration might be interesting, if ever real AI actually develops. But I wouldn’t call augmenting or probing of existing works of fiction with rehashed LLM sludge collaboration, I’d call it glorified and advanced plagiarism at worst, and low quality cliff notes at best.

I would much rather read a work of creative fiction from a human being than to encounter autocorrect word predictions written into paragraphs. The idea that the text itself can be queried to gain additional meaning divorced from the author’s intention strikes me as unrealistic and not faithful to the person who originally crafted the words.

Though I’m obviously biased against LLMs being used for this kind of thing, from lots of experience seeing how crappy they are.

Ugh.

Most BO comes from the bacteria that grows on the armpit hair after sweating, so while he’d probably have issues with the “manliness” of this suggestion, if he just shaves his armpit hair it’ll take a bit longer for the BO to develop. As long as he’s showering regularly, that is…

But it’d probably be better to just tell him that cleanliness and showing that you have personal hygiene (by washing regularly and using deodorant) is most definitely manly. Having BO doesn’t make him manly, cause I’ve got news for him: women have BO too.

Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

In essence, DeepSeek — and I’ll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI’s reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of “unsafe thoughts” that might “manipulate the customer,” then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a “competitive advantage.” -Zitron

100%

I’ve had dreams where my long locks were dramatically blowing in the wind, only to wake up and run my hands through my…well shit, that’s just my scalp.

I started losing my hair when I was a teenager, so I’ve been bald for most of my life. I’ve been shaving my head for decades because it’s the only way my head and face don’t look absurd. I’m totally used to it, and long ago accepted that I’d never have hair on my head again.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my hair back.

If this turns out to be legit and works on most people, there could be a worldwide explosion of self-esteem in adults.

No, those stalls are reserved for people who actually need them. They’re not for your comfort or convenience, they’re a basic necessity for people who have very different daily lives than you.

Even if all the other stalls are occupied, you should still pretend that the handicap stall is also occupied, even if it isn’t. There’s always the possibility that someone who needs it will arrive after you’ve gone in. You don’t park in handicap parking spaces, do you? Same deal, just one is based more on the honor system and basic human decency, and the other could get you a ticket.

I wish this was all true, I really do. But there is a time and a place to be calm. This is not that time, and this is not that place.

These systems are supposed to have COOP plans (Continuity of Operations), but not all of them do. Systems are supposed to have some degree of backups, but I can tell you from experience that this is almost never the case in any meaningful way.

I’ve spoken to a number of feds who said their work disappeared overnight. They didn’t choose to comply, and didn’t have sufficient backups in place because of a lack of resources. Their manager or an administrative assistant somewhere most likely went on a deletion spree, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Sometimes when this stuff is gone, it’s really gone. And we have every right to be furious about it.

100% agree about the media incentives, but sometimes outrage is not only warranted, but essential.

I definitely understand that reaction. It does give off a whiff of unprofessionalism, but their reporting is so consistently solid that I’m willing to give them the space to be a little more human than other journalists. If it ever got in the way of their actual journalism I’d say they should quit it, but that hasn’t happened so far.

Corporate media take note. This is how you do reality-based reporting. None of the both-sides bullshit trying to justify or make excuses, just laughing in the face of absurd hypocrisy. This is a well-respected journalist confronting a truth we can all plainly see. See? The truth doesn’t need to be boring or bland or “balanced” by disingenuous attempts to see the other side.

I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha. It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.

Fourth. It puts into words things I had long accepted as normal. Knowing this kind of behavior is atypical, unhealthy, and not your fault makes a huge difference. Definitely read this book, it’s a really short and easy read, though I personally had to put it down for a few days between each chapter to process everything.

“Come study with us! As a pillar of academia, we’ll hide knowledge from you whenever it suits our political and financial interests. Higher education is all about close-mindedness and conservatism after all. We promise none of our students will be taught anything that makes them feel uncomfortable about reality. Welcome to college!”

Hormones, joy, fear, security, anger, empathy, jealousy, warmth, anxiety, comfort.

I haven’t been in a relationship for a long time, but it’s a combination of nearly every emotion you can think of. Then again I probably did it wrong.

This right here. My parents utterly failed to teach me financial literacy, and it wasn’t mentioned once in grade school or high school. But I learned how to stuff a pillow (why?!) and definitely got a C for frying an omelet the way I like it during a totally antiquated home economics class.

If financial literacy had been properly taught, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be a decade behind my contemporaries. It’s frankly a complete failure of our education system that this gap in critical knowledge hasn’t been filled.