Sister Calderón: We’ve all lived bad lives, Mr. Morgan. We all sin… but I know you.

Arthur: You don’t know me.

Sister Calderón: Forgive me, but… that’s the problem. You don’t know you.

Arthur: What do you mean?

Sister Calderón: I don’t know… whenever we happen to meet, you’re always helping people and smiling.

Arthur: I had a son… he passed away. I had a girl who loved me… I threw that away. My momma died when I was a kid, and my daddy… well, I watched him die. And it weren’t soon enough.

Sister Calderón: My husband died a long time ago. Life is full of pain. But there is also love, and beauty.

Arthur: What am I gonna do now?

Sister Calderón: Be grateful that for the first time, you see your life clearly. Perhaps you could help somebody? Helping makes you really happy.

Arthur: But… I still don’t believe in nothin’.

Sister Calderón: Often, neither do I. But then, I meet someone like you, and everything makes sense

Arthur: Heh… You’re too smart for me, Sister. I guess I… I’m afraid.

Sister Calderón: There is nothing to be afraid of. Take a gamble that love exists, and do a loving act.

It’s sad that these arguments are still being shared. It was the same arguments years ago from people that would just assume that a free cert was inherently unsafe.

Is it web scale?

While I definitely agree, enough momentum going both ways, alongside perhaps people choosing to leave Mastodon and Threads to go to the “winner of the alternatives” could sway this to a point where BlueSky is no longer the minnow here. Given that we’re only weeks detached from Trump’s win, I can only see it getting worse for Twitter, to the point where I can see Elon just selling it and moving on - perhaps even to BlueSky if Jack wanted a cut price deal.

Eh, BlueSky seems to be actually gaining some traction now, enough so that celebs and brands are jumping ship, so maybe just give it a few months and let it rot.

Yeah, the person above isn’t being accurate at all.

While here in the UK we rely heavily on the US for control of Trident, the US dropping NATO support would just require additional defence spending and closer alignment with Europe. If Trump is bought by Russia, Putin would see this as a Very Bad Thing, and would want to keep the US in the fold because even with the US NATO would likely steamroll Russia.

The Trump dynamic is somewhat problematic, should it fester elsewhere in Europe. Globalisation was an important trait to maintain for the US, whereas most populist movements move towards buying local or supporting national interests above all else. Europe is largely self-sufficient, even in defence, so Trump would probably cut off huge numbers of imports/exports just to prop up Elon’s shitty cars.

I say this as someone in big tech, AI is pushed because it’s an easy lie to keep big companies viewed as innovating to shareholders. I say this knowing that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have contributed significantly to AI research in the last few years alongside the obvious contributions of OpenAI - the goal isn’t groundbreaking AI work, but to act as a smoke-screen to show that nothing else has been delivered.

Google has lost ground in advertising, and is losing customers on many of their services. Amazon is losing ground in cloud computing and in retail. Apple has stagnated with recent poor releases. Microsoft has made ground in cloud, but has struggled in advertising, Xbox, Office, and Windows. They use GenAI to keep their stock price high, otherwise they’d drop like a sack of shit because shareholders would say “what the fuck have you even done in the last half a decade?”

I imagine a lot of it is to remove current stock, and because the UK has several tobacco companies that moved into vapes, and also employ hundreds

Gigs and concerts are pretty grim for this now too.

A lot of people are giving Tesla shit here, but surely there should be regulations in place to ensure something like this isn’t allowed to be released for public use?

I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.

Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.

My dream is an “internet archive” for all video games, modded to run offline. If the game becomes unavailable for purchase, the archive opens that game and makes it available for all.

The next step is for this kind of release to become law, and supported by manufacturers.

Like most big tech companies, they’re actually several divisions all competing with each other. Lately, the AI divisions have latched on to the hype and they’re pushing their wares to other divisions, often with enough clout to keep those in security/privacy quiet. Integrating LLM’s is also a great way for a middle manager type to curry favour with the bosses, and to build little empires for themselves.

Uhhh…it’s had AI backing it for most of the decade

There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.

I’m surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it’s been since going public.

I’d love to, but in terms of pure availability I can get almost everything I’ve ever wanted to listen to, aside from some weird geoblocking or removal of defunct band’s back catalogues.

Way back in 2010 I did some paper reading at university on AI in healthcare, and even back then there were dedicated AI systems that could outperform many healthcare workers in the US and Europe.

Where many of the issues came were not in performance, but in liability. If a single person is liable, that’s fine, but what if a computer program provides an incorrect dosage to an infant, or a procedure with two possible options goes wrong and a human would choose the other?

The problems were also painted as observational. Often, the AI would get things with a clear solution right far more, but would observe things far less. It basically had the same conclusions that many other industries have - AI can produce some useful tools to help humans, but using it to replace humans results in fuck-ups that make the hospital (more notably, it’s leaders) liable.

When put like that, that’s absolutely mad! How can shareholders possibly think that this is good value?

I wonder if there was ever an entry-level model to begin with. It’s been on the cards for about a decade, and many people have looked at Tesla saying “wow, a good electric car, I’ll definitely get one once they’re affordable”.

I went to look around a nursery the other day, one that is attached to a school. We walked past kids that couldn’t have been older than 6-7 dancing (possibly filming) to a TikTok vid, on a brand-new looking iPhone.

I’m usually against governments getting involved in the internet, since they have such a piss-poor understanding of tech, but it would be good to see some kind of regulation that bans people of a certain age from operating a smartphone without a limited set of operations (i.e. to contact parents, to get school alerts, etc), alongside school bans for the use of social media on school grounds. My wife is a teacher, and cyber bullying is rampant, whether it’s the police getting called in over someone (underage) sending nudes and having them posted online once they break up, or fights being planned via iMessage or WhatsApp, and sometimes even people creating fake Tinder/Grindr profiles of their teachers (or to try to match with them).

Obviously, there are parents that’ll just say “fuck it, it keeps them quiet” or ones that’ll let them use a smartphone due to peer pressure, but a lot of it can be cut down before it becomes a problem.

In many ways, I’m quite glad I grew up with AIM and MSN Messenger. This kind of online power would have been crazy to me as a kid, and I don’t envy kids that have to deal with this landscape.