spandrew

Why would they give away a trillion dollars when their goal is to make a trillion more?

Yeah but that's not what the discourse around water and AI is. When people speak about water and AI/dc's, they're indicating that water is being "taken" from other uses. As if a AI usage will oneday cause you to turn on your facet and nothing but an auto-tuned cackle comes out. That the well has gone dry. That water is a scarce resource (which, sometimes it is, esp. if you're drawing from an aquifer in the southwest)

A data centre's construction sentiment clogging pipes is fixable; an acute issue. The discourse is that AI causes chronic strain.

But like... the same people will watch 2-3 hours of HD Netflix or post on TikTok right after lodging their complaints on Reddit. The MW/h of AI isn't that big compared to these services. And the carbon sync of digital goods, including data centres, pales in comparison to the supply chain of Blockbuster. Nobody gave af then.

The reason they're cherry picking AI is because we're all sick of seeing tech billionaires thrive when everyone else is pressed by inflation and stagnant job markets.

I wish people would knock this off. There is zero path to AGI at the moment — and all the Anthropic/pentagon Sam Altman/AI-skynet stuff is scaring people into being fearful (and outright ignorant) to the actual uses of this probabilistic NPL tool.

You can't use AI atm without a human with proper knowledge spot checking and directing it. We should market it that way.

This is not correct. People trust their "apps". They know Spotify's algo can feed them novel music. They know Kobo's reader connects to libraries in a way that isn't the DRM-lockin that Amazon shovels.

Most non-tech folks are incredibly skeptical about AI due to the piss-poor brand management of OpenAI and Anthropic—pushing an AGI Skynet post-employment narrative to make the tech feel bigger than it is.

I trust Google (and certainly Apple) to figure some of this stuff out—but nobody wants an LLM, that nobody knows how it operates, to run the show entirely. Heuristically, we may get away with a Human-on-the-loop approach—-not a Human-in-the-loop or Out-of-the-loop approach.

You're making a hubris-laden assumption coders know the gaps their baking into their software — that any human has a decent enough grip on the multitudes of spinning logic duct taped together to make the internet run. Most vulnerabilities aren't "ignored"; they're in a neverending backlog or unknown.

If you closed all of the AI-discovered security vulnerabilities tomorrow - by the next day there'd be a host of new ones. That's software, baby.

I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in).

Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch.

If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks.

Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.

Yea, the front service desk worker doesn't deserve that shit. Dick move.

Apple used to be like... the standard for how to do this.

IMO we're losing a lot of writing craftsmanship across many industries with Gen X'ers retiring

Let me push back and say that is not the point of university.

If you take the stance that education's function is to act like a feeder for business institutions; I guess? But that's only one byproduct of a strong education. Another is research; the other is critical thinking and civil productivity as a whole.

I'm as pro-capital as any private industry-focused tech worker is; but lets not pretend that's all the value we get out of the humanities.

Ever watch Netflix these days? Woof.

A social media ad company would be the least favourable. At least Google's central ad business is based off of search queries the user gives to them willingly for value.

Not me — Perplexity is so much better than Google. This troll bid made me laugh

I have to admit, everytime I hear the "Two guys hated x, so they built their own!" I see the XCKD cartoon https://xkcd.com/927/

It's not a fair comparison; competition can drive price down, but I pessimistically just see two guys who'll inevitably join the Comcast billionaires club. That's just where these "small guys" end up.

People pointing out NLP are missing the point — pulling and crafting rules to run effective NLP is time consuming and technical. With an LLM you can just ask it exactly what you want and it interprets. That's the value; and as this deal just proved it's worth the scaling costs.

A future where Miyazaki prefecture become littered with grandparent-fueled Ghibli characters and quickly become overrun with tourists...

Or kids at this specific stop are treated to a moment of joy while waiting for their train to come...

Time will tell...

Carbon fibres tend to crack under extreme torque.

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit.

And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.

Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?

Amazon has been doing this since the 2000's. Fun fact: This is how AWS came about; for them to scale its "LOOK INSIDE!" feature for all the books it was hoovering in an attempt to kill the last benefit the bookstore had over them.

Ie. This is not a big deal. The only difference now is ppl are rapidly frothing to be outraged by the mere sniff of new tech on the horizon. Overton window in effect.

I dunno about this; that greenlight vacuum they brought to market a few years back is dope af. My first little orb Dyson is still kicking almost 15 years after I bought it.

I think their brand isn't just about tech itself, but the utility exploring novel tech can drive.

From a GTM perspective, Apple is fine to be behind OpenAI and others. Other than Search and studying, most consumers just aren't finding compelling use cases for a lot of this tech. The news woman herself said it herself that

I've had iPhone 16 and haven't used any of these features.

Not only did she not use it, she wasn't even sure how she would start to use it. Emoji customization is kinda fun, but hardly a killer offer.

Folks in business are finding a lot of use: Research summation, data structuring, rapid prototyping, copy editing, and all sorts of business-grade use cases are phenomenal. None of them are central to Apple's core business or user experience. Use cases might be found closer to the Macbook/Pro line-up... but most of these are already accessible via a web layer through Chrome/Safari. They're making good use of Apple's performant M-chips. Of course, we all know Siri really should be able to do a helluva lot more than it currently does.

Apple being behind tech-wise is a *huge* risk bc it puts them on the back foot, but short-term not enshittifying their tech with worthless AI use cases may be the right move.

I, for one, welcome our new Apple overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

AI "Agents" that can do tasks outside of the confines of just a chat window are probably the next stage of utility.

The company I work for integrated AI into some of our native content authoring front-end components and people loved it. Our system took a lot of annotating to be able to accurately translate the natural language to the patterns of our system but users so far have found it WAYYY more useful than chat bc it's deeply integrated into the tasks they do anyway.

Figma had a similar success at last year's CONFIG when they revealed AI was renaming default layers names (Layer 1, 2, etc)... something they didn't want to do anyway. I dare say nobody gave a flying f about their "template" AI generation whereas layer renaming got audible cheers. Workflow integration is how you show people AI isn't just replacing their job like some bad sci-fi script.

Workflow integration is going to be big. I think chat will have its place tho; just kind of as an aside in many cases.

Consider how these dynamics manifest in Silicon Valley, where Facebook's infamous "move fast and break things" mantra shaped a generation of tech culture. This emphasis on speed and disruption at any cost has created work environments that mirror the artificial pressures of captivity, where displaying dominance often takes precedence over fostering sustainable innovation. –

Yeaa..... this is a huge stretch. I'm not a hustle culture proponent by any means (Patagonia's 'let them go surfing' seems great to me!), but "Move fast and break things" is a pragmatic mantra that speaks to the nature of enterprises in highly competitive markets.

Laypeople will balk at the idea of "breaking things". But that's hubris. It takes humility to admit that the breaking things part of discovery and invention isn't isn't optional. Fast or slow, you will break things pursuing an idea unknown space. The mantra speaks to the need to adjust risk tolerances in futuristic-leaning businesses.

There are other ways, of course. Bio-med breaks things in controlled trials, for example. But it's also slow as molasses. Rife with in-fighting.

But to equate alpha-male captivity with futuristic pragmatism is a huge reach.

I have a friend who went into full-on overemployment mode during the pandemic and never stopped once RTO became a thing. Somehow he juggled 2, and sometimes 3, jobs at one time. Of course he was staving off a performance-improvement-plan (pip) at one of his jobs at all times.

He didn't care about work. It was all about money. That worked for him short-term, but longer term Jack became a very VERY dull boy.

This is good advice.

People who do good work, and get good at craft, do it as much for their sense of pride as they do for some kind of reward. Rewards are nice, but the joy you get from them are fleeting. Enjoying the work itself is evergreen.

Work is work. Even at a job you like, you'll have days where you'd just rather be out having a day off. Don't get indoctrinated into hustle culture.

But don't get cynical and start being a pleb about jargon or whatever. It's like a person stuck in traffic complaining about traffic as if they aren't... traffic?

Yeah it's just decent strategy on their part (I hate to say). Even if they don't profit directly off of the TikTok deal they look like absolute bosses for being able to "give" Americans what they wanted all along.

They'll just ban you from the service.

You can follow accounts, but you don't need to follow accounts. The UX is dead simple: scroll and watch content of interest to you. Tiktok handles the rest

YouTube essentially does what every big stupid US-based social media algorithm does: If you like cat videos, it serves you more and more cat videos.

Because YT is longform content and the UI isn't a scrolling feed it's OK. I appreciate the different-ness than TikTok (which is why YouTube shorts is kind of annoying actually)

TikTok's algorithm gives you more of what you like, too. But it also feeds you just... random stuff. Content adjacent to your hobbies. Or content that seems to be somewhat popular with people who frequent the niches you frequent. Feeding you a lot of uninteresting videos is low risk; user's still appreciate the variety even when the algo isn't on point.

"My algo has gone off the deep end" is a common trope amongst TikTok users. Bc every now and then TikTok would pull in a lot of new/unrelated stuff for you to check out. And you just scroll by the stuff that isn't of interest. This is how its algo gets good; it's a UX heuristic as much as an algo one.

It's an important distinction because it exposes users to new content, which is fun. YT doesn't do that as much, so YT's content recs can be dull as paint some times.

100% it's what happened. And the craziest part is that it worked because Biden went along with it. It's easy enough to argue Trump played hardball to negotiate for any divestiture that may occur; because that was his goal all along. The narrative/pundits can spin this easily in his favour.

Either because they gave in to the ploy, or because they were unable to close a TikTok deal, the Democrats look incompetent here. And Trump gains favour in the younger demo (that he's already pretty strong in) AND with SMB because he gave TikTok more time.

They'll be on RedNote within 2 weeks.

Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.

Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.

On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.

The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.