It needs to be more trustworthy. If I have to double check everything, I still have to figure out how to do whatever it’s doing, then figure out how it’s doing the thing, then verify if it did it right. By then, I could have just done it in step 1.5 probably.

I just think this is patently false. Or at least there are/were orgs where cloud costs so much more than running their own servers that are tended by maybe 1 FTE across a bunch of admins mostly doing other tasks.

Let me just point out one recent comparison - we were considering cloud backup for a couple petabytes of data, with a few hundred GB changing or adding / restoring every week or less. I think the best deal, where we held the software costs equal was $5/TB/Month.

This is catastrophically more expensive over a 10 year lifespan of a server or two and a small/mid sized LTO9 tape library and tapes. For one thing, we’d have paid more than the server etc in about a year. After that, tape prices have always tended down over time, and the storage costs for us for tape is basically $0 once in archive storage. We put it in a cabinet in another building - and you can fit A LOT of data in these tapes in a small room. That’ll cost basically $0 additional for 20 years, forget about 10. So let’s add in electricity etc - I still have doubts those will be over ~$100k over the lifetime of the project. Labor is about a wash cause you still need people to manage the backups to the cloud, and I think actually moving tapes might be ~.05 FTE in our situation. Literally anyone can be taught how to do it once the backup admin puts the tapes in the hopper or tells them which serial # to put in the hopper.

I also think that many companies are finding something similar for straight servers - at least it was in the news quite a bit for a while. Now, if you can be entirely cloud native - maybe it washes out, but for large groups of people that’s still not possible due to controlling hardware (think factory,scientific, etc)or existing desktop software for which the cloud isn’t really a replacement and throughput isn’t great (think Adobe products, video, scientific, financial etc data).

Though it’s more work with current AI at least compared to another team member - the AI cannot have access to a lot of context due to data security rules.

I feel this also misses something rather big. I find there’s a huge negative value of people I have to help through doing a task - I can usually just get it done at least 2x if not 5x or more faster and move on with life. At least with a good intern I can hope they’ll learn and eventually actually be able to be assigned tasks and I can ignore those most of the time. Current AI can’t learn that way for various reasons, some I think technical, some business model driven, whatever. It’s like always having the first day on the job intern to “help”.

The other problem is - unless I have 0 data security rules, there’s just so much the AI cannot know. Like I thought today I’d have Claude 3.7 thinking write me a bash script. I wanted it to query a system group and make sure the members of that group are in the current users .k5login. (Now, part of this is me not knowing how to prompt, but it’s also stuff a decent intern ought to be able to figure out.) One, it’s done a lot of code to work out what the realm is - this is useful generically, but is just code that could contain bugs when we know the realm and there’s only one it’ll ever operate in.

I also had to re-prompt because I realized it misunderstood me the first time, whereas I think an intern would have access to the e-mail context so would have known what I meant.

Though I will say it’s better than most scripters in that it actually does a lot of “safety” stuff we would find tedious and usually have to have something go wrong to add in, so … swings and roundabouts? It did save me time, assuming we all think it’s method is good enough - but this is also such a simple task that I think in some ways it’s barely above filling out a lot of boilerplate. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to see on stack overflow back in the day.

EDIT: I actually had a task that felt 100% AI could have done… if there was any way for it to know lots and lots of context. I had to basically fill out a long docx file with often AI like text describing local IT security standards, processes, responsibilities and delegations. Probably over 60% I had to “just make up” cause I didn’t have the context - for higher ups to eventually massage into a final form. But I literally cannot even upload the confidential blank form, forget about have some magic way for AI to get a brain dump from me about the last 10ish years of spoken knowledge and restricted wiki pages. Anything it could have made up mostly would have “been done” by the time I made a functional prompt.

I don’t think we solve this till we can run frontier models locally at prices less than a human salary, with integrations into everything a human in that position could access.

Personally I think most of these sorts of things should have a 3 year warranty - but very few offer that. If you can’t handle the 1 year you need to plan on the reality in the US IMHO. This isn’t a Valve thing, its a USA thing. So ranting against Valve feels a little disengenuous. AFAIK there’s no competitior that’s better. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would say the same thing.

So - in the future buy with a card that extends the warranty by a year or buy an extended offering from the company or square or whatever, if you can’t self insure the 200 repair or 600 ish replacement costs.

Mostly because the browsing experience IMO is much much worse with Firefox. I tried extensions to get functionality back, it made it worse - slower, buggy, extensions would stop being developed etc. I wish Firefox was better, I really do. But IME it’s frozen functionality like it’s 2010 or so. Like, they have tabs, who hoo. I really find save/restore, multi window control, tab stacks, sessions, workspaces, and easy UI config pretty important in day to day use. That said, I also think ads are a deal breaker, but I really wonder if this won’t bring back some of the ad-blocking proxies you run locally or something.

Or, someone forks chromium to keep Manifest v2 or whatever.

There’s actually a service called jolly rodger that you can forward calls to that uses AI and such to try and do this. It’s pretty cheap, under $20 a year (and also does voicemail and transcribes the calls to a text). I think it does cut down on junk calls, they tend to just hangup.

I would guess America is so wildly diverse, like most countries, that there’s no real “Average American”. Sure, median income isn’t great and recent inflation has screwed with poorer people all the way through to probably upper middle class.

However, I don’t think there’s “one reason” for people being / feeling poor. It also depends on what you mean by “life changing”.

Anyway - I’d say there’s are very poor people. Some of this is generational poverty, some of it is no family support, some of it is addiction, some of it is mental illness, some of it is bad choices. A social safety net would really help here. For whatever reason the US is against much of one.

There’s working poor, where supposedly the value they bring to a company isn’t sufficient to pay a living wage. I guess elsewhere this is government forced to be a higher minimum wage way more than in the US. This I think is also leading to lots of apathy now in service workers, which means atrocious service at most places, which is finally starting to impact people higher up the income chain. Though it’s usually scoffing that no one is doing a good job anymore.

Middle class people get squeezed by inflation a LOT, and children are incredibly expensive. As you get into middle middle and upper middle classes there’s also the spending problems. This is either driven by lack of or failures of public options, so people are paying for home schooling / private schooling, paying ever more out of pocket to get access to medical care at ever higher rates, and really any service needed can be astronomical or else often worse than doing nothing unless you know a guy. There’s also all the credit card debt that with higher interest rates are squeezing people even more. Some of this is unnecessary spending running out of control, but some of it is lack of wages keeping up with inflation mixed with many things having way more ongoing costs than they used to. Either they have planned obsolesce (Back in the 90s no one had to buy a new landline phone, or wireless phone every 2 years), they have subscriptions (again, in the 90s you bought a car or a radio, you bought a computer, you bought a game, whatever - it lasted with no ongoing payments), and many things just don’t last at all. Then there’s the interest in experiences - which is a transient thing, so you’re always paying for a new one. I’d also say there’s a huge burden on everyone related to college - and it is getting less obvious by the year if that hit in loan payments “forever” is worth the supposed economic boost. My parents grew up when college was like $8,000 max for 4 years and room etc - you could work your way through it, and the boost to lifetime expected earnings was pretty easy to overshadow the effort or loan if any needed. I might have been the last generation to get through with $20k in debt from 4 years, which while I’m still paying on isn’t enough to overshadow the earning benefits. Today (and for the last 15 years or more) it’s more and more for a 4 year degree, while the expected positions aren’t going up in pay very much at all. But if you do go to college that’s going to hit you and your parents for a long time also.

As you get to upper middle and upper class - upper middle is scared shitless by the inflation, wage increase demands, etc that might cause them to fall out of that class, so they can feel “poor” even though they’re far from it.

TL;DR: there are a lot of poor Americans, and many who are “doing OK” either drowning in debt or just feeling insecure even if not technically poor.

Crypto is entirely an extremely expensive gambling system. It serves no actual explainable purpose for the vast majority of people. It’s trivially provable to be worse than existing alternatives in every way that isn’t scams and or money laundering.

I’m pretty sure in the US this is already answered as “no”. The reason is - non-persons in the legal sense cannot hold copyrights at all. This was tested with photographs I think taken by a monkey and maybe a bear. The AI isn’t a legal person, so cannot have copyright.

That’s not to say humans can’t take an AI image, and manipulate it / clean it up / etc and have copyright in the final result if they do a minor level of touching up or more.

Of course, I find the idea of copyright and IP rights in general as usually expressed pretty insane anyway. The AI “conundrum” is just another point showing how nonsensical IP laws are when you actually think about them and the supposed things they’re meant to accomplish.

I actually use waterproof earbuds because I don’t want to blare my podcast or whatever to everyone in the house.

I have no idea why Mastodon does what it does, but I also have no idea why anyone would build a weird auto reposting group thing for Mastodon. I honestly don’t understand how I’m supposed to use it, or preview what a group is. The listing I saw doesn’t tell me anything. Very odd.

I feel like this is similar to being a non drinker, or atheist, or not into clubs, or not into drugs, etc. You will sort of limit your social circle because of what you’re not interested in doing. Privacy is the same. The question is - do you want to make new friends who are into those things? If so, then your have to moderate your views and be part of that scene.

I feel like this is similar to being a non drinker, or atheist, or not into clubs, or not into drugs, etc. You will sort of limit your social circle because of what you’re not interested in doing. Privacy is the same. The question is - do you want to make new friends who are into those things? If so, then your have to moderate your views and be part of that scene.

I sometimes like commenting on YouTube videos, and reading the comments. The videos I’m on do not seem to have anywhere near as bad as the received wisdom of the comments being a cesspool. but that might just be me.

I only compliment people if they’ve done something impressive in some way. Rarely do I interact with strangers in any situation for that to occur. The limited situations like someone’s appearance or clothing beings stylish or something just seems like it would come off creepy to say so I won’t do that.

With people I know I tend to be pretty brutally honest so it’s rare I compliment them, but when I do they know it means something.

• Spooks
• Torchwood
• City Homicide
• Life on Mars (UK)
• Stan Lee’s Lucky Man (I think this is british)
• Hudson and Rex (early seasons anyway were fun)
• Doctor Who through Peter Capaldi, though the Tenant years were the best IMO.

Probably many others I just don’t recall

Well, it’s harder now. Back in the day I migrated people to text secure then over to signal. So it was just an upgrade to their texting. Now that Signal dropped texting it’s harder for regular people to use it. There was a large debate and the people wanting to bring in more new people lost.

Today I “sell signal” for people who want to share pictures (SMS never works with AT&T resellers and cheap phones), people who want to get my pictures when I’m out of the country, and people who want my “technical support” for media.

But there are some people who won’t get on Signal and they just miss out on my trip pics they want to see. That’s on them.

The question here is just is a self organized posse better than the state police? I guess there’s a reason that kind of went away in the west as it became less “wild”. And we see what self protection or self enforcement leads to in many reports in the US. It’s differently crappy / violent but not obviously better.

The biggest issue I see is self serving fuckwads don’t go away. They’ll import themselves a la Putin if they think they can get away with it. They’ll create their own institutions a la the Mafia if there’s nothing else.

The second problem is there are large groups of people who want to be under some Authority to the extent they get populist / fascist stuff going or invent ones like in Religion.

I just don’t think people “freed from institutional authority” are inherently going to not just recreate it, probably worse…