It looks like they’re still very much trying to build this stupid city, and are doing everything they can to circumvent local opposition.

About a year ago, some guy knocked on my door as part of a canvas to gauge the support of towns in the surrounding area, but he never once mentioned that this dumb Silicon Valley wet dream was the project he was talking about. He spoke in very vague terms about “building community” and providing “housing and opportunities for the working class,” which sounded great so I said of course I support those things. He smiled, jotted something down and then left. I called after him asking what organization he represented, and he turned around, handed me a postcard with a shitty AI generated image on it, and then he was gone. Turns out it was California Forever, the org behind the dystopian exploitation fantasy that is their juvenile idea for a new city. I felt violated, humiliated, and furious. They’re doing some seriously underhanded bullshit to try to force this down our throats.

Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.

Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.

It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…

Human and AGI collaboration might be interesting, if ever real AI actually develops. But I wouldn’t call augmenting or probing of existing works of fiction with rehashed LLM sludge collaboration, I’d call it glorified and advanced plagiarism at worst, and low quality cliff notes at best.

I would much rather read a work of creative fiction from a human being than to encounter autocorrect word predictions written into paragraphs. The idea that the text itself can be queried to gain additional meaning divorced from the author’s intention strikes me as unrealistic and not faithful to the person who originally crafted the words.

Though I’m obviously biased against LLMs being used for this kind of thing, from lots of experience seeing how crappy they are.

Ugh.

Most BO comes from the bacteria that grows on the armpit hair after sweating, so while he’d probably have issues with the “manliness” of this suggestion, if he just shaves his armpit hair it’ll take a bit longer for the BO to develop. As long as he’s showering regularly, that is…

But it’d probably be better to just tell him that cleanliness and showing that you have personal hygiene (by washing regularly and using deodorant) is most definitely manly. Having BO doesn’t make him manly, cause I’ve got news for him: women have BO too.

Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

In essence, DeepSeek — and I’ll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI’s reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of “unsafe thoughts” that might “manipulate the customer,” then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a “competitive advantage.” -Zitron

Reminder that Ellison is an 80 year old billionaire who wants to surveil all of us to keep us on our “best behavior.” Fuck this old and out of touch asshat.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. "We’re going to have supervision”

Source

Anyone who thinks this could ever be implemented in a way that respects peoples’ civil rights is delusional and/or lying. Ellison is not someone we should be listening to for advice on how society should function, whether it’s about stealing more intellectual property for useless AI crap or mass surveillance.

100%

I’ve had dreams where my long locks were dramatically blowing in the wind, only to wake up and run my hands through my…well shit, that’s just my scalp.

I started losing my hair when I was a teenager, so I’ve been bald for most of my life. I’ve been shaving my head for decades because it’s the only way my head and face don’t look absurd. I’m totally used to it, and long ago accepted that I’d never have hair on my head again.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my hair back.

If this turns out to be legit and works on most people, there could be a worldwide explosion of self-esteem in adults.

AI hilarity aside (they really nailed the article conclusion), the title looks like a kooky supernatural jdrama I’d totally watch…

I wish this was all true, I really do. But there is a time and a place to be calm. This is not that time, and this is not that place.

These systems are supposed to have COOP plans (Continuity of Operations), but not all of them do. Systems are supposed to have some degree of backups, but I can tell you from experience that this is almost never the case in any meaningful way.

I’ve spoken to a number of feds who said their work disappeared overnight. They didn’t choose to comply, and didn’t have sufficient backups in place because of a lack of resources. Their manager or an administrative assistant somewhere most likely went on a deletion spree, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Sometimes when this stuff is gone, it’s really gone. And we have every right to be furious about it.

100% agree about the media incentives, but sometimes outrage is not only warranted, but essential.

Perfectly. I’ve never encountered a codec my Apple TV couldn’t play smooth as butter. Been watching a lot of AV1 anime lately, never needs to transcode. I use Infuse Player for its Dolby Vision support, because that’s the only format the native Jellyfin app has trouble with, but Infuse is also just a really solid app in general, and for me is the perfect way to consume my Jellyfin server. But the native Jellyfin app is also solid, and there are some other players which would definitely meet your needs (MrMC for example is very good, but not as polished as Infuse).

For sure, that makes sense. This company just seems to be conflating quite a bit. Is it AI? No. Are they using a Large Language Model? Kind of. It seems like they put a whole bunch of chemical, soil, and market/tastes metrics into a GPT model, and ran it to fine-tune their process. So, sure, that’s cool, but this all just seems like a silly gimmick. I’d be shocked if this wine was anything special, but then again I’m incredibly suspicious of anyone who slaps an AI label on their product, so who knows.

Because if there’s one thing we know about algorithms, it’s that they have an amazing sense of taste…

I definitely understand that reaction. It does give off a whiff of unprofessionalism, but their reporting is so consistently solid that I’m willing to give them the space to be a little more human than other journalists. If it ever got in the way of their actual journalism I’d say they should quit it, but that hasn’t happened so far.

Corporate media take note. This is how you do reality-based reporting. None of the both-sides bullshit trying to justify or make excuses, just laughing in the face of absurd hypocrisy. This is a well-respected journalist confronting a truth we can all plainly see. See? The truth doesn’t need to be boring or bland or “balanced” by disingenuous attempts to see the other side.

I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha. It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.

I agree with you and your immediate loss of trust when seeing ai-generated images, especially in news articles. My view is that if you are an established media company, then it’s your responsibility to pay for legal illustrations/images. Whether that be hiring an illustrator to make something from scratch or buying the rights to an existing image, participating in that market keeps creatives employed and keeps the quality of the art high, or a least not filled with seven-fingered people. Once we give up on artists creating new works and rely only on remixing drivel without permission, we’ll lose quite a lot of creativity, and people can obviously tell the difference.

I’m a little more ambivalent about independent journalists or newly spun-up media companies that are still getting their bearings using image generators, but frankly my impression whenever I see one even on a small independent site is still “yuck, no image would be better than this crap.”

So yeah, there are definitely more important things to be upset about when it comes to AI being shoved down our throats, but this also bothers me a lot.

Fourth. It puts into words things I had long accepted as normal. Knowing this kind of behavior is atypical, unhealthy, and not your fault makes a huge difference. Definitely read this book, it’s a really short and easy read, though I personally had to put it down for a few days between each chapter to process everything.