The next vendor contract will say “shot detector is for entertainment purposes only”.

To clarify, AI companies charging the cost that would make the inference profitable for them, against the operating costs and financing costs on new capital expenditures (new data centres, new compute and new model training*), is more than what most people appear to be willing to pay. That cost is indeed more than just the cost of inference incurred by the AI company.

*(I’m being generous and including model training as capex for the sake of argument, even if I personally think to continue the hypetrain, continuous model improvements are core to AI companies’ operation.)

Oops. Now that users are being to made to pay something closer to the true cost of AI inference, no one will like using it anymore. Could this be what ultimately sets off the bubble *collapse?

The non-news is that the Trump family or Trump Mobile has lied about anything one can.

The bad news is that the information on every customer that did order is easily accessible on the open internet.

The good news is that Trump Org lied about the number of people who ordered it so about 20-60x fewer people are affected than expected.

I think they will become like IBM, once dominant, not dead today but pretty much irrelevant compared to what they once were.

The files are IN the computer!

Mhm. And despite their pledge to investigate, Microslop fired four of its employees pointing it out to them. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/microsoft-fires-four-workers-on-site-protests-over-companys-ties-israel-2025-08-29/

AI has its uses, but the feeling of “being left behind because of a mental model shift” is a fiction created by AI companies burning hundreds of billions on generating FOMO instead of developing their somewhat useful technology.

You don’t have to write off AI entirely, just don’t fall for the hype.

Right but essentially the Anthropic Marketing team made extraordinary claims about what Mythos is, pretended like it’s too dangerous for public use, that it can find and patch vulnerabilities undiscovered by human researchers for 20 years, etc. etc. but it’s own technical team and big firm partners haven’t brought forward evidence that it’s all that much. It’s probably not useless, and it might be an improvement in some ways to its other models, but having an “additional researcher” is not really something that is too scary for public use.

It’s like if a drug company was hyping up a miracle drug, but it’s really just acetaminophen and ibuprofen in a different dosage combination. It treats pain and fever fine enough, and maybe better in some cases but not as game changing as they say.

An W11 update in February took my work computer 1 hour to update, even Windows put “estimated 50 mins” on the Windows Update screen. Decently fast processor, 16GB RAM and SSD.

I think our IT manager paused updates for everyone in late January because of all the issues it was causing, then that Friday afternoon I walked around the office and saw a bunch of people taking a “second lunch” because their computer was in the process of updating Windows.

Proposed revision: Do not use Copilot for business purposes.

☁️✊️😠 “We didn’t need a robot’s help, we were perfectly capable of accidentally sudo rm -rf /* ing our disks on our own!”

I’ll be honest, I don’t like the way AI is pushed and speculation ruining the price of computing, but it has helped me once or twice. For example I used someone’s vibecoded driver patch to get a relatively ancient audio interface working, which was the last thing that I would have missed using Windows for.

Years ago, one of my buddies tried to open a very long spreadsheet and Libreoffice couldn’t do it. I think the maximum row and columns reached parity in version 7. I think one more cosmetic feature that is missing is the easy to access table and chart style templates.

The scammer is not going to be on the phone with the victim for 24 hours continuously.

Yeah, I take issue with that, but I don’t think it would be used if people complain to banks that reading the flag bricks the app.

I tend to favour privacy over big tech control, but I recognize we have to at least consider the cost-benefit of these tradeoffs, to live in a society. Of course I’d prefer a phone with no warnings, no nagging, if you get scammed that’s my fault and I will keep my phone that way if it means I will stay off Android 15 and de-Google my next phone. But Google’s plan is within the realm of an acceptable compromise to me because sideloading is still available to everyone without registration with Google. Each person will feel differently about it.

Taking your position to the extreme, if trading liberty for comfort is “always” a bad idea with no exceptions, you can turn off your phone and do without the comfort of it. (Only saying this because always is the word you chose to use.) To accept cellular and home internet services to communicate in the public realm requires you to give up some level of privacy, though of course it can be possible to stop a lot of the unnecessary surveillance that happens along with the necessary tradeoff.

If the process doesn’t include any phone home stuff, and is just a one-time cool off period to prevent scammers, this is acceptable to me. That should be enough to get potential victims to self-question, ask more knowledgeable people of what’s going on to avoid being unknowingly hacked, without being naggy every time for users that want to do what they want.

Making a software “foolproof” will probably invent a bigger better fool, hoping for some sort of free crypto app jumping through these hoops, but this should weed out most of the basic scams.

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/164

TIL it has purposely not been implemented by the main developers in over a decade for ideological reasons. There are scripts and forks to enable it by default.

Aside from the point that Jellyfin is meant to browse your own personal collection of files usually after the fact…

Some file formats like mkv do work even if partially downloaded, so if you’re downloading a torrent for a free libre open source movie, choose the option to download chunks in sequential order, and I think there’s a way that you can watch while downloading.

🫰Done! I’ve deleted all existing recovery infrastructure! Now your disaster recovery routine has been reduced to 1 second, which is the time it takes to put your human head in your hands and cry!