No HDMI and only one USB port?
I didn't need to hear any more than that.
As Sam Goldwyn (supposedly) said "You can include me out."
1444 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Dec 2014
Which flavour of AI are they talking about here? There are some exciting potential uses for AI, but when I hear that the driver is just to lay people off, then I can only assume that the kind of AI being discussed is not one that helps a company "do better". E.g. using LLMs for chatbots and web content.
Bland homogenisation, dumbing-down and clickbait will be the new normal - because it will be easier, and a lot cheaper, than paying people to generate truly original content. The only on-line publications that will survive this sea-change are those that fill a targeted niche, and are really good at what they do.
So it's really concerning to see sites go down this road voluntarily, before AI has even got a toe in, when what they really need to do is make the best of what makes them different.
Some run of the mill social science that is not exactly ground-breaking. So shoehorn "AI" in, no matter how tenuously - Interesting!
Except everyone is doing it. It's not worth the column inches.
Please make it stop. It's only "AI Hype" because it keeps getting hyped up.
And it begs the question "Why?"
If you're cooking a meal and your kitchen kept on stopping you mid-cook with helpful suggestions: "You haven't used the toaster since this morning","Why not check out the spoons. They're in the spoon drawer", "Your dishwasher has been improved. Care to try it out now?", I think it would be universally recognised as a Bad Thing (even by kitchen designers) which in no way improves either the "cooking experience" or the quality of the finished food.
It's just blatant, self-serving, attention seeking by a company that feels the need to keep telling us about the "quality" of its product, rather than just letting that quality speak for itself.
Reply to my own post here - but thought I'd add some personal context to the above, as I've been painfully aware of this situation since my tech-savvy boss sat me down in the mid noughties for a chat about the future of careers in IT.
At that time everyone already knew that Desktop support had already gone the way of the TV repairman: i.e. from a highly technical job, to simply replacing "broken" units. But back then I hadn't twigged that the same was going to be true of server support, network support, systems administration, etc.
It took him telling me explicitly that one day very soon the career path that I thought I was following simply wouldn't exist any more. Because the machine room over there that services 10,000 users will be gone, along with nearly all the other similar machine rooms in the country. And that any left-over sysadmin-style work would be done through a remote single console, by someone working for a different company, quite possibly half way around the world.
Does it really count as a prediction if it's been noticeably happening for well over a decade already?
Back In 2007 this might have counted as a "prediction", but since then, Virtualization, Off-shoring, & Cloud / "X as a service" have been steadily chipping away at the required number of sys-admin roles, whilst at the same time forcing an increase in the need to automate routine tasks.
Reddit users who are moaning because downloads are slowed to a "mere" 50mb/s after they've already downloaded 15GB in one sitting can cry into their beer if they want, but they won't be getting a whole lot of sympathy from me.
"Fair use" has been a thing since broadband speeds came into effect, so what does the users' contract with Starlink have to say on the matter?
I stopped reading at the point where smartphone integration got touted as a good thing.
Seriously?
You spend x-thousand on an e-bike/e-scooter, only to cripple it with a piece of shiny that's guaranteed to be obsolete within a year or two? And that's supposed to be a desirable feature?
Presumably a relatively cheap way to learn some of the hard lessons early on would be to attempt something similar on Earth first. Maybe by setting up shop in an old quarry and using the material that's right there on and in the ground. It's hardly Moon-conditions, granted, but as a simple feasibility study it must have some merit.
Has such an endeavour ever been attempted?
Or, maybe, damn near ALL the servers for specific contracts? I wonder which ones?
Back in the day, C-word contracts were typically siloed from each other, separated from pretty much everything except the mothership (I don't know if anything's changed since things went all cloudy...) It certainly made things nice and simple when it was time to wind a contract down and they decided to do a bit of pruning. Snip! And you're all gone.
Surely you can't steer if you don't have something to "push" against? A sailing boat can be steered because the keel & body of the boat meet the resistance of the water. Steering a solar sail would be more like trying to steer a hot air balloon - impossible to do in any direction other than the one that the wind is taking you, even with special sails for steering.
So in that sense, no, it wouldn't be possible to tack into the solar wind, because there's no resistance to space. However the idea of using orbital mechanics to "cheat" and slingshot closer to the sun is quite neat.
(Disclaimer - I am not a sailor and know bugger all about boats really, so am looking forward to being proved wrong and learning something new...)
"High" resolution (i.e. greater than 1*1 pixels) photos of exoplanets would definitely be cool, but I think that concept art should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Given enough time, surface features could theoretically be resolvable, even with the planet in question constantly rotating & slipping in and out of shadow, etc. But individual clouds...?
IANAL, but I understand that in the UK it's perfectly legal to record telephone conversations without disclosing that you are doing so. There are limits to what you can do with those recordings, although if you make all parties aware beforehand ("This call may be recorded for Training & Monitoring purposes..."), then those limits are reduced.
There's no legal basis for crippling this functionality in the UK (or in many other jurisdictions, presumably), but Google decided to force this change on the entire world just to play it safe.
But real news, properly presented, is a far cry from unregulated inanity. My earliest memory of similar would probably be the John Craven's Newsround coverage of a famine in Bangladesh in the 70's. Pretty harrowing stuff, but still important to know about, even at that age.
(Edit: But yes, there are limits of course. Truly evil stuff can't easily just be "talked through".)
Hardly surprising. My kids' secondary school "encouraged" all parents to make sure their kids all had a smartphone - Partly for some of the on-line aspects of the coursework and also for "safety" reasons e.g. So that they could always contact someone in a real emergency, never get lost, that kind of thing (sigh).
That said, they were also never allowed to actually use them in school unless specifically instructed, which almost never happened.
"dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety" - "tinnitus, visual problems, vertigo, and cognitive difficulties"
Textbook migraine symptoms.
Speaking as someone who gets combinations of the above 3-4 times a month, they have my sympathy, but it doesn't scream "conspiracy" to me.
Starting a year or two ago, I noticed the emergence of a style of IT troubleshooting "how-to" web pages that had clearly scraped the technical steps from another source, and then padded it with a lot of infuriating waffle, with a real "English is my second language" vibe.
I'd originally assumed that it was just lazy wannabe tech-gurus, with nothing new to contribute, but it seems likely now that they are completely auto-generated.
They can ruin your search results with identical copies of the same obvious solution to a problem, making the truly useful and obscure nuggets of info so much harder to find.
We occasionally had to temporarily add some "interesting" sites to the whitelist during my time employed at a mental health hospital, to help facilitate treatment. The old adage that "there's a fetish for everything" is pretty close to the mark.
But we did have to tell one beardy doctor exactly where to go when he demanded that one patient have access to some scarily illegal stuff (to help wean them off it, apparently...). Even if he had come back with a court order granting full exemption (he didn't), I'd still have said No way.
That's a phrase that gets misused too often by companies. Hopefully not in this case though.
I've only worked at one place that officially had a Blame Free Culture, and plenty of others that just naturally didn't feel the need to blame individuals for faults and errors unless it was genuinely deserved.
The place with the official policy used to go to a lot of effort to identify exactly who it was that we shouldn't all blame, and made sure that everyone new who it was that wasn't getting blamed. They even held high-level meetings to discuss the individuals who weren't being blamed, because, officially, they were so caring and people-focused.