Dave.

Love me a good <MARQUEE>!

Is the ✨sparkly emoji✨ the <BLINK> of the 21st century? Discuss.

But it’s definitely not perfect and tends to add unnecessary changes, I constantly have to review and add new rules.

This is the bit that bugs me. I spend a bit of time to create a relatively simple application in C# with it, and it’s constantly tacking on new features and four extra command line arguments and it’s frothing at the mouth to add Cool Feature X, “just say the word and I’ll do it”.

Just do what I asked. No more. That’s enough. There’s enough mangled code and logic errors lurking in there already, I don’t need any more “features” clouding the water.

Having a need for a “valid travel document” to cover for your perceived ethnicity stinks of “papers, please” and I am alarmed that you cannot see that connection.

It is a valid travel document for land and sea travel within North America and the Caribbean.

The way you’ve phrased it sounds quite dystopian.

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.

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 you decided that what it really needed was enough chilli on it so that all you can taste is burning.

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.