There’s a lot of magical thinking about how AI will actually help the labor market, but it seems clear to me that the entire reason for the billions being pumped into AI is the potential to slash labor costs.

It’s like they’re building human wood chippers while telling us that all these human wood chippers will actually result in fewer people being fed into wood chippers.

I’m just spitballing here, but maybe you should find out what people want first, and then build that.

OMG yes… I wrote a macro that copies thousands of rows and then closes a file and I had to add a step to copy just one cell before closing to work around this stupid message.

I think the point you are making is that “AI is useful,” which is slightly different than “AI is great.”

I’m an AI hater, but I’ve found some niche areas in my life where it’s useful.

But I still see the overall net effect of AI - well, at least of LLMs, which are a small subset of AI - on the world to be overwhelmingly negative to the extent that the niche positive impacts are not remotely worth the costs.

That’s true, I don’t mind people being paid at all. I’d rather that than some dodgy AI.

I still found it funny that Amazon was implying this was some kind of technology marvel when it really just boiled down to webcams.

Reminds me of the Amazon Fresh “just walk out” grocery shopping experience where the store is packed with cameras monitored by “advanced ai” that would tally up the total of the items in your cart.

It would take a few hours for them to email a receipt to let you know what you’d spent and the advanced ai turned out to be low-wage workers in India watching the video feeds.

So maybe this explains why Windows takes 20 seconds to find Notepad when I search for it on the Start menu.

Sometimes it’s like “Notepad? Never heard of it.”

The idea of LLMs putting coders out of work at a large scale seems inherently self-defeating.

The LLMs needed to ingest a massive volume of code to get to their current level of proficiency. What will happen if they put all the coders out of work and Stack Overflow is down to just a small number of hobbyists? Will the LLMs just stop advancing?

I’m sure Sam Altman would say they are just about to have reasoning capabilities that will allow them to improve. But Sam Altman is not credible.

I agree on the double standard. I also think there’s an element of Cory Doctorow’s point that “it’s not a crime of we do it with an app.”

Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we’re not criminals, we’re disrupting stagnant markets!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/

It’s basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws

Good. Don’t let the door hit you.

The funny thing is AI is not really mentioned in the rest of the article. I don’t think any of the new technology being introduced has anything to do with AI.

I guess “AI” is just a synonym for “new stuff” now.

Ears turn out to be a good way to recognize individuals. Ear biometrics is an evolving area.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7594944/

Right! They used to have a commercial airliner that broke the sound barrier.

I was confused about how the article kept saying “hypersonic” without defining it. Looks like hypersonic means 5x the speed of sound.

https://www.dictionary.com/compare-words/hypersonic-vs-supersonic

This thing is huge, it does 0-60 in under 3 seconds, has sharp angles, and its styling does not seem to target the sensible end of the market… It’s like an industrial strength pedestrian destroyer.

This quote from Posobiec is amazing:

“Republicans still haven’t internalized that the Left promotes abortion as a pro-feminism issue. They aren’t voting to kill babies, they’re voting bc of feminist movies like Barbie and pop stars like Taylor Swift influencing an army of voters,” Posobiec wrote.

If they are surprised about the connection between the abortion issue and women’s rights… wow. Are they really racking their brains to figure out why “killing babies” is a popular position? How stupid are these people?

Could all YouTubers everywhere please emulate this guy’s style… no obnoxious edits, no “destroying” someone else’s point of view… he just calmly and methodically explains what he’s done and what the issues are.

I don’t think I followed a specific guide. I’m using the HifiBerry Amp2 amplifier with the Pis. The house I moved into had Bose in-wall speakers in a couple of rooms and I added some in-ceiling speakers and a couple of outdoor speakers. Most of the speaker wires are routed down to the basement, so I can have all the Pis connected right to the switch via Ethernet.

Running speaker cable is by far the hardest thing about this. You could also connect the Pis via Wi-fi; I haven’t tried that but it is supposed to work pretty well.

On the software end, it’s pretty simple. PiCorePlayer is just an image you burn to an SD card and boot up on the Pis. I run LMS in a docker container. As long as the PiCorePlayer instances and LMS are all on the same subnet, they will auto-discover each other. If they’re not, it’s just a matter of configuring the LMS server URL on the PiCorePlayers.

LMS configuration is also pretty simple… you point it at your music folder and it will scan and index your MP3s and other audio files. It has plugins for Spotify, Tidal, Youtube, and some other apps. You can control it via browser, or there are Android and iOS mobile apps.

Once you buy the Pis, amps, power supplies, and cases, you are looking at probably $140 or so per zone… so it’s not entirely cheap, but I think it’s cheaper than Sonos or other pre-built systems. It sounds great and the different Pis sync very well. I don’t hear any sync issues walking from zone to zone.

I have 6 4b’s running PiCorePlayer for home audio. I control them with LMS and can sync them or play different things in different rooms.

I’ve been running Linux on all the machines I own for years, but I still have to run Windows for work. Not everyone can just switch and I doubt there are many reading this who are unaware they could switch to Linux (or Mac, BSD, etc.).

Oh I also have one MacBook running MacOS because Apple decided to only allow iOS development and parental controls, of all things, on Apple devices running Apple software.

Yes MS and Apple suck but it’s not as simple as “just switch.”

You’re right, but you could say the same about the National Park GIS lookup.