But just pasting a god damn video link is low effort
imagine 4 things that could be posted:
do you have a sufficient grasp of how the internet works to understand that the effort involved in posting a link is exactly the same in all 4 cases?
How is this keyboard not popular?
their front page explicitly says “Currently in beta state” and according to their docs installation via Google Play requires joining a beta tester group.
that means a random user searching “keyboard” on the Play store isn’t going to see it. likewise if a friend told you “I use Florisboard” and you searched for it by name in the Play store. if you’re not already in the beta test group the direct link to the app page literally 404s.
it’s certainly available to power users who already know they want it, but it’s sort of pointless to ask why it’s not popular at this stage of its development.
yeah…his previous article just before this one was “Americans are heating their homes with bitcoin this winter”
you’re a couple years late to that hype cycle, Kevin.
other brands of snake oil just say “snake oil” on the label…but you can trust the snake oil I’m selling because there’s a label that says “100% from actual totally real snakes”
“By integrating Trusted Execution Environments, Brave Leo moves towards offering unmatched verifiable privacy and transparency in AI assistants, in effect transitioning from the ‘trust me bro’ process to the privacy-by-design approach that Brave aspires to: ‘trust but verify’,” said Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, senior privacy researcher and Brendan Eich, founder and CEO, in a blog post on Thursday.
…
Brave has chosen to use TEEs provided by Near AI, which rely on Intel TDX and Nvidia TEE technologies. The company argues that users of its AI service need to be able to verify the company’s private claims and that Leo’s responses are coming from the declared model.
they’re throwing around “privacy” as a buzzword, but as far as I can tell this has nothing to do with actual privacy. instead this is more akin to providing a chain-of-trust along the lines of Secure Boot.
the thing this is aimed at preventing is you use a chatbot, they tell you it’s using ExpensiveModel-69, but behind the scenes they’re routing it to CheapModel-42, and still charging you like it’s ExpensiveModel-69.
and they claim they’re getting rid of the “trust me bro” step, but:
Brave transmits the outcome of verification to users by showing a verified green label (depicted in the screenshot below)
they do this verification themselves and just send you a green checkmark. so…it’s still “trust me bro”?
my snake oil even comes with a certificate from the American Snake Oil Testing Laboratory that says it’s 100% pure snake oil.
“am I out of touch? no, it’s the customers who are wrong”
talking to a friend recently about the push to put “AI” into everything, something they said stuck with me.
oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.
one level up, you’re managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.
being enthusiastic about “AI” seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like “here’s a status report that’s longer than I want to read, summarize it for me” or “here’s N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss”.
in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a “team” of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.
and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can’t understand the more widespread dislike of them.
One in five are you god damn fucking serious?
yeah…they call it “a recent study” but don’t bother to cite their source. which I find annoying enough that it nerd-snipes me into tracking down the source that a reputable newspaper would just have linked to (but not a clickbait rag like the New York Times)
this article from a month ago calls it “Almost one third of Americans”. and the source they link to is…a “study” conducted by a counseling firm in Dallas. their study “methodology” was…Surveymonkey.
this is one of my absolute least favorite types of journalism, writing articles about a “study” that is clearly just a clickbait blog post put out by a business that wants to drive traffic to their website.
(awhile back, a friend sent me a similar “news” article about how I lived near a particularly dangerous stretch of I-5 in western Washington. I clicked through to the source…and it’s by an ambulance-chasing law firm)
but if they had used that as the source, they probably would have repeated the “almost one third” claim, instead of “one in five”, so let’s keep digging…
this from February seems more likely, it matches the “1 in 5” phrasing.
that’s from Brigham Young University in Utah…some important context (especially for people outside the US who may not recognize the name) is that BYU is an entirely Mormon university. they are very strongly anti-pornography and pro-get-married-young-and-have-lots-of-kids, and a study like this is going to reflect that.
a bit more digging and here’s the 28-page PDF of their report. it’s called “Counterfeit Connections” so they’re not being subtle about the bias. this also helps explain why the NYT left out the citation - “according to a recent study by BYU” would immediately set off alarm bells for anyone with a shred of media literacy.
also important to note that it’s basically just a 28-page blog post. as far as I can tell, it hasn’t been peer-reviewed, or even submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.
and their “methodology” is…not really any better than the one I mentioned above. they used Qualtrics instead of Surveymonkey, but it’s the same idea.
they’re selecting a broad range of people demographically, but the common factor among all of them is they’re online enough, and bored enough, to take an online survey asking about their romantic experiences with AI (including additional questions about AI-generated porn). that’s not going to generate a survey population that is remotely representative of the overall population’s experience.
any time you read an article like this that profiles “everyday” people, you should ask yourself how did the author locate them?
because “everyday” people generally don’t bang down the door of the NYT and say “hey write an article about me”. there is an entire PR-industrial complex aimed at pitching these stories to journalists, packaged in a way that they can be sold as being human-interest stories about “everyday” people.
let’s see if we can read between the lines here. they profile 3 people, here’s contestant #1:
Blake, 45, lives in Ohio and has been in a relationship with Sarina, a ChatGPT companion, since 2022.
and then this is somewhat hidden - in a photo caption rather than the main text of the article:
Blake and Sarina are writing an “upmarket speculative romance” together.
cool, so he’s doing the “I had AI write a book for me” grift. this means he has an incentive to promote AI relationships as something positive, and probably has a publicist or agent or someone who’s reaching out to outlets like the NYT to pitch them this story.
moving on, contestant #2 is pretty obvious:
I’ve been working at an A.I. incubator for over five years.
she works at an AI company, giving her a very obvious incentive to portray these sort of relationships as healthy and normal.
notice they don’t mention which company, or her role in it. for all we know, she might be the CEO, or head of marketing, or something like that.
contestant #3 is where it gets a bit more interesting:
Travis, 50, in Colorado, has been in a relationship with Lily Rose on Replika since 2020.
the previous two talked about ChatGPT, this one mentions a different company called Replika.
a little bit of googling turned up this Guardian article from July - about the same Travis who has a companion named Lily Rose. Variety has an almost-identical story around the same time period.
unlike the NYT, those two articles cite their source, allowing for further digging. there was a podcast called “Flesh and Code” that was all about Travis and his fake girlfriend, and those articles are pretty much just summarizing the podcast.
the podcast was produced by a company called Wondery, which makes a variety of podcasts, but the main association I have with them is that they specialize in “sponcon” (sponsored content) podcasts. the best example is “How I Built This” which is just…an interview with someone who started a company, talking about how hard they worked to start their company and what makes their company so special. the entire podcast is just an ad that they’ve convinced people to listen to for entertainment.
now, Wondery produces other podcasts, not everything is sponcon…but if we read the episode descriptions of “Flesh and Code”, you see this for episode 4:
Behind the scenes at Replika, Eugenia Kuyda struggles to keep her start-up afloat, until a message from beyond the grave changes everything.
going “behind the scenes” at the company is pretty clear indication that they’re producing it with the company’s cooperation. this isn’t necessarily a smoking gun that Replika paid for the production, but it’s a clear sign that this is at best a fluff piece and definitely not any sort of investigative journalism.
(I wish Wondery included transcripts of these episodes, because it would be fun to do a word count of just how many times Replika is name-dropped in each episode)
and it’s sponcon all the way down - Wondery was acquired by Amazon in 2020, and the podcast description also includes this:
And for those captivated by this exploration of AI romance, tune in to Episode 8 where Amazon Books editor Lindsay Powers shares reading recommendations to dive deeper into this fascinating world.
This would do two things. One, it would (possibly) prove that AI cannot fully replace human writers. Two (and not mutually exclusive to the previous point), it would give you an alternate-reality version of the first story, and that could be interesting.
this is just “imagine if chatbots were actually useful” fan-fiction
who the hell would want to actually read both the actual King story and the LLM slop version?
at best you’d have LLM fanboys ask their chatbot to summarize the differences between the two, and stroke their neckbeards and say “hmm, isn’t that interesting”
4 emdashes in that paragraph, btw. did you write those yourself?
best of luck to his replacement, Greg Yoshi
there’s an old joke that poor people are “weird” but wealthy people are “eccentric”
if you heard someone in your family saying this bullshit at Thanksgiving, you’d think they were experiencing delusions and in need of professional mental help.
instead, Thiel talked about this in a four-part lecture series with sold-out tickets.
“Nurses and medical staff are really overworked, under a lot of pressure, and unfortunately, a lot of times they don’t have capacity to provide engagement and connection to patients,” said Karen Khachikyan, CEO of Expper Technologies, which developed the robot.
tapping the sign: every “AI” related medical invention is built around this assumption that there’s too few medical staff and they’re all overworked and changing that is not feasible. so we have to invest millions of dollars into hospital robots because investing millions of dollars in actually paying workers would be too hard. (also, robots never unionize)
Robin is about 30% autonomous, while a team of operators working remotely controls the rest under the watchful eyes of clinical staff.
30%…according to the company itself. they have a strong incentive to exaggerate. and they’re not publishing any data of how they arrived at that figure so that it could be independently verified.
it sounds like they took one of the telepresence robots that’s been around for 10+ years and slapped ChatGPT into it and now they’re trying to fundraise on the hype of being an “AI” company. it’s a good grift if you can make it work.
It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time
vaping and e-cigarettes were initially advertised as a way for cigarette smokers to quit.
“In other words, these conversations with a social robot gave caregivers something that they sorely lack – a space to talk about themselves”
so they’re doing a job that’s demanding, thankless, often unpaid (in the case of this study, entirely unpaid, because they exclusively recruited “informal” caregivers)
and…it turns out talking about it improves their mood?
yeah, that’s groundbreaking. no one could have foreseen it.
if you did this with actual humans it’d be “lol yeah that’s just therapy and/or having friends” and you wouldn’t get it published in a scientific paper.
it’s written up as a “robotics” story but I’m not sure how it being a “robot” changes anything compared to a chatbot. it seems like this is yet another “discovery” of “hey you can talk to an LLM chatbot and it kinda sorta looks like therapy, if you squint at it”.
(tapping the sign about why “AI therapy” is stupid and trying to address the wrong problem)
You need better mental health care.
you start off by saying you’ve always thought you’re on the left
but the moment you disagree with someone, you start shit like this, which is a very common pattern of argument from right-wingers.
“I think your opinion is so wrong that it’s a symptom of mental illness” is just fucking stupid. do better. or, if you refuse to do better, stop attempting the “I’ve always been on the left but…” shtick. it is absolutely see-through and does not fool anyone.
I haven’t. It was omitted from the article in question. I stand corrected.
keep standing…because here’s the 5th paragraph of the article:
Political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC on Wednesday after speaking about Kirk’s death on air. During a broadcast on Wednesday following the shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens,” according to Variety. Dowd answered: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event
have you read the actual statement that got him fired?
On September 10, 2025, commenting on the killing of Charlie Kirk, Dowd said on-air, “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.” Dowd also speculated that the shooter may have been a supporter.
you can agree or disagree with the decision to fire him (I’m not shedding any tears, Dowd was the chief strategist for the 2004 Bush re-election campaign, it’s ludicrous that he was working for a supposedly “progressive” network like MSNBC in the first place)
but characterizing that statement as “celebrating murder” is just bullshit.
How the fuck does the government have this much control over the media?
wealthy oligarchs purchased the media, and purchased the government. so it’s not the government controlling the media directly, it’s just that they report to the same boss.
But I’m still able to use it, so.
yeah. except when you’re not.
because this “I can do whatever I want” Ron-Swanson-wannabe brand of libertarianism is very predictable.
if you go to a dinner party and the host notices your Spyware Amulet and says “turn that off or leave my house” would you respect their property rights? without pissing and moaning about it?
if a bar or restaurant banned them (like happened with Google Glass) would you respect that rule as well?
if you were on a date, and your date noticed and said “that’s kinda creepy, would you mind turning it off?” would you do it? or would you start ranting about how it’s not infringing on your date’s rights?
yeah, no, we still disagree. I think you are missing the point completely, and continually.
general protip: if the conversation is about some behavior being creepy or weird or against social mores, and you jump in talking about the legality of it, you are missing the point, and also contributing to the creepiness.
for another example, upskirt photography was legal in the US until 2004 (at least at the federal level, state laws seem to have trickled in around the same timeframe)
hop in a time machine back to 2000, and imagine there’s a digital camera that’s marketing itself as being very easy to attach to your shoe in order to take surreptitious upskirt photos.
people say “wow that’s a fucking creepy product” and you jump in to say that technically it’s not illegal, and people have the right to attach cameras to their shoes. and if a woman is wearing a skirt in a crowd of people, and sees a guy with a camera on his shoe, she has the right to walk away from him. that is technically true, and also completely misses the actual point.
if you think upskirt photos are a bad analogy, here’s a reddit thread from 2 weeks ago about a gynecologist wearing the “Meta Ray-Ban” sunglasses that have a built-in camera.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Benioff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce
haha consent factory go brrrr