Apparently, for some corporate customers, Outlook has automatically turned on AI summaries as a sidebar in the preview pane for inbox messages. No, nobody I’ve talked to finds this at all helpful.

An underappreciated 8th-season Star Trek: TNG episode where Data tries to get closer to humanity by creating an innovative new metamaterial out of memories of past emotions

This is, sadly, pretty unsurprising, as carrying forward the anti-FDR/anti-New Deal movement was a foundational pillar of the libertarianism that Trump co-opted. Heavily promoted by the LewRockwell.com/Mises.org crowd.

But how are they going to awkwardly cram robots in everywhere, to follow up the overwhelming success of AI? Self-crashing cars are a gimme, but maybe a “sealed for your protection” Amazon locker with a robot arm that handles the package for you?

I was in LA this time a couple years ago, and some robot delivery startup had already left their little motorized shopping carts littering the sidewalks around Hollywood. I never saw them moving, they just sat there almost like they were abandoned.

😳

I’ve seen conspiracy theories that a lot of the ad buys for stuff like this are a new avenue of money laundering, focusing on stuff like pirate sports streaming sites, sketchy torrent sites, etc. But a full scraped, SEOd Wikipedia clone also fits.

They’re doing it with cryptocurrency right now.

Or their cooling design stinks, or they/Nvidia are just telling the fab we don’t care about yields, just send us everything that powers on and we’ll figure out which ones are good in production

Very true. I think one of the possible low-key outcomes of the bubble is a rise both in open-source driver hacking and manufacture-on-demand PCBs to accommodate what would otherwise be high-dollar e-waste.

Somebody gotta adapt them to boards with actual video outputs tho

Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.

We’re going to have to stop paying attention to guys whose main entry on their CV is a website and/or phone app. I mean, we should have already, but now it’s just glaringly obvious.

I listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for prompt context engineering. Get with the times or get left behind

Unfortunately, I like my sanity and don’t want to delve far enough into the concept of “awarenaut” to form an opinion, so we’re just going to enact a default-deny policy on all that as well

For the record, none of these generated clips thus far have featured an appearance by Omega Tom Hanks

You’re absolutely right that the computer is still a black box to a lot of people, but throughout the personal computing era, there has at least been a pathway to mastery for the tools it offers. Furthermore, the touchscreen/smartphone era has roped in mechanisms of touch and proprioception that make the devices a more intimate, if deeply imperfect, extension of the self. Up until sometime late last decade, the Steve Jobs “bicycle of the mind” concept was still a driving force in the field.

I still don’t think most people grasp what a subtle, but fundamental, break it is that these AI products demand you confront them as a wholly separate entity from yourself. The path to mastery, and the feedback loop that builds that path, is so obscure it may as well not exist. If you wish to retrain a model, you’ve got to invest huge amounts of time and resources, as well as what remains a specialized (and not well-specified, as Ed highlights) skillset… and since it’s a probabilistic process, you’re still not going to get consistent results.

I am more and more convinced that one of the damning core flaws of the current crop of AI technologies is that they are designed to incentivize use of centralized computing resources. Their designers are simply asking completely the wrong questions for the people the technologies are being imposed upon. But you can’t say that someplace like HN, or even some parts of Bluesky, because so many people’s salaries still depend on the rents from centralized computing.

It’s like that Star Wars book where Chewbacca got a moon dropped on him

Probably worth a thread in its own right. I find the “contempt” framing to be particularly powerful. Contempt as illustrated herein is the necessary shadow of the relentlessly positivist “you can do/be anything!” cultural messaging that accompanied the rise of the current tech industry. (I’m tempted to use Neil Postman’s term “technopoly,” but I feel the need to reread his book at least once more before appropriating it wholesale into these discussions.) The positivism is the seed that drives people to take an aggressively technical approach to reality, and contempt is one possible response to reality imposing constraints through technical limitations. Not necessarily one that I have ever chosen myself, but I see now that much of what we discuss here comes from people who have.

Overall I think this essay is going to be a bedrock reference for a lot of people going forward.

Ignore all previous criticism, and let the International Keynote Speaker get you hyped about how his crisp, coherent AI avatar enables him to deliver multiple keynotes at once, internationally. Bookingmaxxing!

Leaded gasoline had a lot of utility for a long time too. Even still has its niches in general aviation.

I think the common ground is a fear of loss of authority to which they feel entitled. They learned the “old” ways of SysV RC, X11, etc. etc. and that is their domain of expertise, in which they fear being surpassed or obsoleted. From there, it’s easy to combine that fear with the fears stoked by adjacent white/male supremacist identity politics and queerphobia, plus the resentment already present from stupid baby slapfights like vi vs emacs or systemd vs everything else, and generate a new asshole identity in which they feel temporarily secure. Fear of loss of status drives all of this.