I am surpringly annoyed about Americans somehow finding a way to make this about themselves.

In reality I'm much more worried about the likely counterreformist pushback that is likely about to happen. We're about to find out if a remarkably powerful organization's leader was able to seed enough support to secure a politically aligned successor, and if the answer is "no" a bunch of organizations are about to get even more ruthlessly conservative at a time when a new strain of fascism is seeking moral support. The Catholic Church has been here before. It didn't go well.

I hate when people post hyperpartisan reporting because it makes me do homework. In this case, you made me listen to almost an hour of a three hour podcast with three techbros chatting about techbro crap in techbro ways. You owe me years of life.

Anyway, so the conspicuously missing context here is he's asked if they will let go of the subscription model and go after an ad business model instead and he responds "hopefully not" and clarifies that he thinks the AI differentiator from Google search is that it doesn't feed people ads.

He then transitions into saying that you'd need a super hyperspecialized profile for it to make sense and then maybe it could work but they haven't figured out long term memory well enough for that, which is when he talks about why they'd want to have a browser to build that hyperspecialized profile.

This is my least favorite type of misinfo, too, because he's actually kinda saying what they say he's saying, just out of context. But more importantly, because he says some other shit that is more outrageous, too. For example, when explaining why he thinks the subscription business will grow more than the ad business the way he puts it is that "people see it as hiring someone", so they're more willing to spend, and he ponders "how much do people pay for personal assistants and assistant managers and nannies?" and suggests that they'll provide similar services for cheaper to people who can't afford human help.

Which may not be as clickbaity and I get he finds it positive-on-the-aggregate, but is certainly some cyberpunk dystopia stuff that didn't need the out of context quoting to be a thing.

Just to fast-forward this dumb cat-and-mouse thing, the next step is people go back to torrenting their porn and deeper down the rabbit hole of garbage "free" websites skirting the rules.

As always, the UK is useful on the international stage because sometimes you need to be able to point at some idiot trying dumb stuff to explain to people why dumb stuff is dumb.

It's a good argument against trying sleeper/generation ships.

In practice, though, the actual sleepers would be so happy to arrive to find a nice McDonalds and a charming small town instead of shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.

Waaay better than the porn bans and online age verification schemes, honestly.

I question why this is just for "children who show mysoginistic behavior", though. Sex ed should be universal, and this should be a major part of sex ed.

I assume the fear here is parents complaining about their kids being talked about porn, which may end up being a larger underlying issue than the porn itself. I guess you just have to trust that education professionals handle the opportunity well and this doesn't become a stern talking to for problem kids, which is likely to do as much as stern talking tos have done historically.

Well, there you go. We looped all the way back around to inventing dial-up modems, just thousands of times less efficient.

Nice.

For the record, this can all be avoided by having a website with online reservations your overengineered AI agent can use instead. Or even by understanding the disclosure that they're talking to an AI and switching to making the reservation online at that point, if you're fixated on annoying a human employee with a robocall for some reason. It's one less point of failure and way more efficient and effective than this.

I keep having to repeat this, but the conversation does keep going on a loop: LLMs aren't entirely useless and they're not search engines. You shouldn't ask it any questions you don't already know the answer to (or have the tools to verify, at least).

And DS9 is the conservative one with all the religion and the baseball and the war crimes and stuff.

TNG was run by a Frenchman who thought allowing bronze age species to believe in God was a barbaric act and went to bat as a human rights lawyer for an android who in turn let his first child pick their gender at will. All that while his polyamorous first officer was busy arguing against conversion therapy when pushed upon his trans nonbinary partner.

I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it. It is in the window they've shared for the oxidation issue. At this point there's no reliable way of knowing to what degree I'm affected, by what type of issue, whether I should wait for the upcoming patch or reach out to see if they'll replace it.

I am not happy about it.

Obviously next time I'd go AMD, just on principle, but this isn't the 90s anymore. I could do a drop-in replacement to another Intel chip, but switching platforms is a very expensive move these days. This isn't just a bad CPU issue, this could lead to having to swap out two multi-hundred dollar componenet, at least on what should have been a solidly future-proof setup for at least five or six years.

I am VERY not happy about it.

I... well, yes.

I mean, normally these "adult hot take" things on children stories are forced to present a cynical joke, but... yeah no, that's the entire point of the story. Like, that's the plot. It's what the movie is literally about.

I keep hearing racist nationalists say stuff like this worldwide, and not matter how hard I squint it remains a non sequitur.

I mean, "we have a population crisis" and "don't let people come here" seem entirely contradictory unless you are... well, a supremacist.

Which they are, it's just the leap that gets me. So obvious, so rarely called out and never addressed.

Man, the hysterical, unhinged US market just has no chill.

Someone came up with a better chatbot-- "OMG, superintelligence is here and is inevitable, all hail our robot overlords and their broligarch creators!"

Somebody outside the US had an idea to train a chatbot for cheaper-- "OMG, US tech is doomed, they have no recourse against this and all the hardware is now worthless!"

Maybe if the markets weren't constantly freaking the hell out about any semblance of technological innovation in search for the next Google or Apple they woldn't have to deflate like a balloon each time reality sets in.

I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.

“You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future."

See, this would ring a lot more true if the issue wasn't being literally litigated right now and going forward. As in, somebody just got sent to jail. Court documents about Trump's outstanding criminal trial just got released.

Yeah, people want you to litigate stuff that happened four years ago. And then for those responsible, Trump included, to go to jail for... you know, all the crimes. "I want to talk about the future" doesn't play quite as well when the judge is asking you about those.

Holy crap, people have been reposting takes on this interview for like three days and you can track the degradation of the actual content via the game of telephone in the headlines.

It's kinda depressing.

FWIW, having read the original interview everybody is reheating, the 18000 waters was a random example the Taco Bell exec WSJ interviewed used to explain that part of the issue is that people feel less guilty about messing with automated orders than when they're talking to a human. They are also not backing out from automated orders, which is why the headline is using "rethink".

The core of the issue is correct, though, the guy does spend a significant amount of time giving corpolese synonims of "it's a mess". "We've certainly learned a lot" has to be my favourite.

Nah, I don't mind small talk. Small talk is fine. It's easy, you just smile a bit, and say hi and make a joke about whatever the other guy said.

It's the mid-size talk I can't deal with. The kind of talk where the other person is just giving you clichés of normie chatter about politics you disagree with or car culture or reality shows and you're supposed to just... keep providing valid responses and appear interested. I don't see what's small about that and it's excruciating.

How do you "ban VPNs"? That's not how software works, and VPNs are... you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean "ban them to bypass restrictions", but the entire point of a VPN is you can't tell from the outside what it's being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can't enforce it.

That's... not how inflation works.

Inflation is a measure of price increase. If inflation goes down prices keep going up, just slower.

If prices go down that's deflation and its own whole separate problem.

But just to be clear, I believe it.

I just don't do it.

Oh, wow, we're there now?

Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?

You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?

It's happening and you're not ready.

Well, either that or Thunderdome. We'll see.