Everybody has to support the new new underdog Intel.

There are still phones that have it. Sometimes even pretty good ones. It’s just that they are not advertised so heavily. I recently learned about HTC U23 or 24 or something. Now I feel dumb because I never bothered to check because I always thought all good phones don’t offer headphone jacks anymore.

It depends.

It’s the reason I stopped making so much fun of people that recreate the “MAMIL” trope - “Middle Aged Men In Lycra”. Meaning men who start their midlife crisis buying an expensive bicycle with neon-colored bicycle clothes and bicycle glasses and all the other stuff.

Why don’t they just start riding their bicycle they already got? They can use their sunglasses and normal sport shorts. What’s the problem?

But I some cases or age-ranges people want to make a change and get out of their usual habits. A real phase shift. People think they want to work out more regularly. Or really start a new hobby. Buying a bunch of expensive stuff can increase the need to go through with this phase shift - at least in the minds of the people buying it.

As an adult picking up a new hobby often means that other things in their life have to make room. It’s usually not that adults in their (let’s say) mid 30s until early 50s have problems filling their day. So whatever new hobby or task they want to do has to push away other habits and stay there until these new habits can take root.

So starting with some expensive shit can be something I can understand - if one has the money.

If I would start making music again, I’d probably start by buying an expensive synth like the super-6 from UDO (that I always wanted to buy) instead of a bunch of bleep-bloop-machines that need a lot of initial time for understanding them and then only fulfill one specific function in my music.

Why do they have the data in the first place?

Your communications on telegram are not encrypted by default. You can have e2e encrypted 1on1-conversations, but group chats are blown for them to do everything.

They had a hilarious argumentation where they claimed that the key to unlock your chats is stored on a different server than your chats are and therefore they cannot access it. A company that argues like they (“trust us”) isn’t trustworthy.

Signal has been audited over and over again by internationally respected cryptographers. They cannot decrypt your chats by design. No need for “trust us bro”.

the everything app

Yes

… for now.

True! We need a margin of error for the margin of error!

It cannot “analyze” it. It’s fundamentally not how LLM’s work. The LLM has a finite set of “tokens”: words and word-pieces like “dog”, “house”, but also like “berry” and “straw” or “rasp”. When it reads the input it splits the words into the recognized tokens. It’s like a lookup table. The input becomes “token15, token20043, token1923, token984, token1234, …” and so on. The LLM “thinks” of these tokens as coordinates in a very high dimensional space. But it cannot go back and examine the actual contents (letters) in each token. It has to get the information about the number or “r” from somewhere else. So it has likely ingested some texts where the number of "r"s in strawberry is discussed. But it can never actually “test” it.

A completely new architecture or paradigm is needed to make these LLM’s capable of reading letter by letter and keep some kind of count-memory.

We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.

Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.

This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.

I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism’s arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it’s used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?

Edit: It’s also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they’re half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it’s like all the other apps. It’s also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.

Can Brazil rent out that judge to Europe for a Sec?

Which newspaper? Or: which area ? Can I still get this one ? It’s German, but I cannot find out more.

I finally watched Caché by Michael Haneke. It was a lot different and puzzling than I expected.

yeah that’s just ridiculous. omg

It’s also a great example why these mega corps should be broken up into smaller pieces.

If forced arbitration persists (and this argumentation from Disney is successful and then used as precedence) any service used from one company can be used to forever ban you from taking legal action against that company again even if the service and the reason for the legal action have nothing to do with each other.

Am I right in understanding that this case is about someone dying from eating in a Disney owned restaurant that by accident was a Disney+ subscriber?

If one company owns everything like Amazon, Google, Apple and in the future maybe even water supply, garbage collection, operates my car and is my insurer or bank account (and owner of one of the 4 remaining fast food chains in the country) how can people actually sue a company then ?

Well, but general relativity teaches us that all coordinate systems (also constantly moving, but not accelerating ones) are equally relevant. This means that the one with earth as it’s origin is as correct as one where with the center of the galaxy (or the sun ) as is every other. So the one where earth moves somehow through space is just as random as any other.

kinda. but compared to e. g. Twitter its much more splinteted. Twitter is more like one giant city. also your seeing mostly what Twitter decides. mastodon shows you what you subscribed to. things are less viral.

Now that you’ve got the idea apply it to everything in capitalist society. Especially if something is owned by shareholders.

Also “Yeah what are people’s minds really?”. The fact that we cannot really categorize our own minds doesn’t really mean that we’re forever superior to any categorized AI model. The mere fact that right now that bleeding edge is called an LLM doesn’t mean that it cannot fuck with us - especially if it is an even more powerful one in the future.

oof that was a let-down