Hey. That 23andMe hack, that thing where you gave them your DNA because ancestry and haha why not and they got hacked. You've heard about it? Yeah. Funny story.
You didn't just screw yourself over by trusting them. You've sold out everyone related to you. And maybe anyone related to them. Maybe anyone related to them.
They told you you'd learn about your ancestors, and now you've fucked up the lives of their kids.
Sleep tight.
I laughed for real:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/10/ai-firms-working-on-constitutions-to-keep-ai-from-spewing-toxic-content/
Every one of these companies had "AI ethics" teams telling them for years what would happen, they all got fired as soon as there was money on the table, and now that the models have leaked, the process is out of their hands and they've completely lost control, or even any competitive edge, now they want safety and guardrails?
The sad but hilarious thing about this recent "we will just return whatever results are more profitable for us, whatever you searched for" chicanery from Google is that it makes it crystal clear that the entire SEO "industry" is a meaningless waste of time for everyone involved.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
Me, looking in the fridge trying to figure out what is in all these little containers.
Brain: You can sing "half of a samosa" to the tune of "running with the devil."
Me: Ok, not useful brain but let's see what else we can figure out here, the kids are hungry.
Brain: Coleslaw is an anagram of Lace Owls
Me: _brain_.
A serious question: industries that are reasonably described as necessary to the function of society, but who are no longer for whatever reason engaging the kind of competition that is assumed to keep prices down for their customers - why should they not be nationalized?
In hindsight "Stanford business professor says these things just happen and nobody is to blame" should have been an obvious red flag.
Edit: I think this should be elevated to a general rule. Any economist or "professor of business" describing things in animal-behavior terms - instinct, herd, whatever - is prima-facie evidence a group of very rich people were up to some nefarious shit behind the scenes six months earlier.
This kind of experience must be either revelatory or terrifying for the original drummer. "Here is this monster talent hearing the song you played on, doing their own thing and just nailing it on the first take."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbUYVcaF_l0
Phone companies used to print out everyone's name, phone number and home address, literally everyone, in these big 2"- or 3"-thick paper books. They'd update the book every year and then print out the new editions of it for everyone in the city and deliver a copy to your house whether asked for it or not, like "here's your everyone list" and you just had that lying around the house.
I think about that sometimes.
I think that the biggest reason I believe that we need universal basic income is so that people always have an out. A bad relationship, a bad job, a bad situation, even discovering you've overrotated on something that's turning into a scam or a cult. You should always be able to walk away without fearing destitution.
Setting aside the whole "we hired a cop because they used a bunch of raspis to do cop stuff, hashtag heart eyes" problem, this new "it's a lot faster, costs more and you need to worry about cooling now" edition raspi definitely feels like they've lost the plot.
The libre.computer and orangepi people are still doing good work in this space, if that's your jam.
https://libre.computer/http://www.orangepi.org/
Yesterday was National Punctuation Day. Today, let me share with you a hill upon which I am gladly willing to die: there is zero meaningful semantic distinction between 'smart' quotes and standard issue quotation marks. None. All of the tools around them are so inconsistent or terrible in their interactions that if much of your life is text smart quotes are a net-negative busywork spigot best avoided. Find the toggle in your editor that turns them off and use it to make your life better.
"Automated translation of web content is now available to Firefox users! Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine."
I got to see the early demos of this and it is jaws-on-the-floor bonkers wizard magic. Entirely local - and good - translation with no cloud service and like 6MB of storage per language.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/
Secret made-up conspiracy theory: Spotify is the secret force behind the return to in-office work push, because nobody is going to listen to a goddamn podcast if they don't have to fill their terrible commute.
The incredible tragedy of Scott Jenson’s long and correct article about editing text on mobile is the conclusion where he describes why the great demo he has, clearly running, can’t ship. And the tragedy is, whenever he says important he means “important to Apple or Google”, and by ship, he means “ship as the OS default”. As though there are no other options.
Open source? Anything that people could use or build on? Not a question, not a considered possibility.
https://jenson.org/text/https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/127/933/776/452/884/original/da77b84dd7362c6f.png
I wish more people in large orgs understood how much of a burden you put on somebody by sending them a PDF and asking them to fill it out and send it back. The software you are asking people to find and learn is absolutely some of the worst software in the world.
Most CS degrees have students do a "traffic light" exercise at some point: build an model of an intersection, run the stoplights.
Those lessons sometimes ask questions like "Are there pedestrians in your model? Maybe bikes? How about buses? Exactly who lives in the neighbourhood, do they relies on public transit? Et cetera.
A question I like to ask students, that always gets a lot of uncomfortable silence is: at what point do these decisions stop being software, and start being public policy?
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