Dave.

There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.

And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.

I wonder how it goes with AI-generated receipts.

the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn’t make sense anymore

Their assertion is that fancy graphics doesn’t necessarily equal good gameplay, and the major industry players are focused on ever-increasing frame rates instead of game quality.

Nobody cares if your game is fully immersive and rendered down to the atomic scale if it is boring or the game mechanics are shite. Sure you can wander around and look at stuff and gasp at the physics, but unless the game is titled “Look around and enjoy it” , that’s not the point.

Before the celebrity chef craze?

The craze that made the cheap cuts of meat expensive?

Ohhh, now it’s “traditional comfort food” and everyone wants it, so let’s triple the price of that literal offcut.

Agreed.

If I have to dislocate my jaw to try and eat the burger then at that point I’d rather use a knife and fork.

The “two guys burger shop burger”.

Maaaate, your burger is shit. It’s a precariously stacked abomination that’s 8 inches tall, has two ruined patties and half a cup of smoky bbq sauce and melted cheese on it, and then you decided that what it really needed was enough chilli on it so that all you can taste is burning.

…so a modest but significant improvement has been achieved, but nowhere near the temps required for melting ore.

Just stack six of these in series, problem solved. /s

Try harder. A simple request to filter out the nonsense in Gemini gives:

After filtering out the “nonsense”—the pop-culture references (Lord of the Rings, IT, Purple People Eater) and the random metaphors (poison, sandwiches)—the core message appears to be a critique of modern data processing or AI training compared to traditional publishing.

The “correct” message hidden in the text is:

The Core Message

It is inefficient and costly to pay humans to fix low-quality or “noisy” data. Instead of spending money to clean up automated nonsense, it would be more effective to invest in high-quality, verified sources (like books) and pay human creators fairly, as the system was originally designed to function.

Breakdown of the “Noise” Removed

“Poison and noise are the way”: Likely a sarcastic opening about the current state of data. “Making a sandwich for those you love”: Irrelevant personal imagery. “Off to take the ring to Mordor”: Lord of the Rings reference. “Clowns in the sewers… red balloon”: Stephen King’s IT reference. “Purple people eater… walking downtown”: Reference to the 1958 novelty song.

The Logic Retained

The Problem: It is “not fruitful” to pay humans to undo/fix “noise” to make it “useful.” The Result: This process ends up forcing people to “ingest fact” (raw data) without proper context. The Solution: “Buy the books and pay people correctly” according to the original “system.”

Would you like me to help you rewrite this message into a formal argument or a professional email?

it is really more useful than Katie from Sales getting skin cancer on a beach in Thailand or that…

A large chunk of air transport is also freight. And business. And regular domestic travel for people going from A to B, travel that doesn’t include holidays for Kate or that drunk dude in Mallorca.

And when you look at those uses, AI is still running a pretty distant second place.

It seems that every new release adds another layer of indirection (misdirection?) between you and the useful stuff you need to access. I use a third party utility to manage IP settings, and it’s one click from its menu to get to the network adapter page. It takes me about 5 minutes of angry clicking around in stock standard win11 before I get to the same place.

The main one I use is the network adaptor settings, where you can enable/disable protocols and most importantly for me, where you can easily add multiple IP addresses on a network adaptor.

The Win 8+ network settings page is an absolute trainwreck. I particularly like how it doesn’t warn about conflicting IP addresses now and just silently accepts your given address and provides an auto-assigned 169.254 address instead if it sees even the smallest hint of another computer out there using the address you want to use.

Guaranteed fun and confusion trying to access/ping things until you finally check the status of the network adaptor and discover the auto assigned address, thanks Microsoft.

Not everyone wants to use dhcp, which is clearly their preferred direction, and there have been bugs where Cisco devices trigger that flip to auto assigned addresses even if things are fine.

Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.

Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you’ll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.

the killswitch is in about:config

Ah yes, the easiest place to put a kill switch for the average user, as opposed to the complexity of a toggle in settings.

Which is worse?

• Entire driver written in a non memory safe language?
• The interface to the rest of the kernel is marked as unsafe and then the other X percent is safe from memory corruption?

Surely if X > 0 then this is still a net improvement?

If you read the phrasing carefully it’s quite clear that it will be doing things to the codebase, just “with oversight”.

How much oversight? Not sure, just some assurances that there will be oversight.

Vibe coding is essentially just a different phrase for that.

So, after sifting through all the other breathless articles from their website it seems that they’re going to :

• Use a LLM to attempt to sort out their documentation.
• Have a chatbot trained on the docs so you can ask it questions and possibly get coherent answers.
• Some sort of vague thing where the LLM provides guidance and suggestions on improvements to the codebase.

Lots of reassurance that they’re not going to let it do vibe coding but to be honest, they doth protest a little too much methinks.

entirely separate and much more sophisticated technology

Or some math nerd will come up with an algorithm for general AI that is embarrassingly simple, and before you know it the “but can it run Doom?” crowd are implementing AI in toasters and watching them have existential crises for the lulz.

As is tradition.

Search engines should have an off button for ai,

Techbros won’t let that happen, because they’re all terrified that consumers will just shut off all the AI being crammed into everything and all their money will evaporate.

The gains compound a bit too, 20 percent less weight equals proportionally less battery capacity required to shift the now-lighter vehicle from point A to point B.

So then you can cut the size of the battery while maintaining the same range, and that’s where you start to get significant overall weight and cost savings.