everyone is falling all over themselves about all this new whale language research and how maybe whales have words. but, my people, we've known prairie dogs have a language -- verbs and nouns, even adjectives -- for fifteen years and no one has ever cared.
I think crypto broke people’s brains. There was a clearly useless technology being hyped by pundits, VCs and tech companies which turned out as worthless as we all thought.
So there’s now a gut reaction to treating any hyped technology as a scam. The trend is similar to how after the dotcom crash, pundits proclaimed every year that we were in a bubble for almost two decades while big tech started generating hundreds of billions in revenue.
AI is the same. It’s hyped but there’s also substance.
@carnage4life As someone who is very negative about what is currently being called "AI", I don't think crypto is the right comparison here - neither for the technology itself, nor for negative opinions like mine.
AI is the current tech marketing cycle's XML.
XML had (and continues to have) value. But that value is vastly, supremely inferior to what its VC hype cycle had enthusiastically promised.
Good morning, and welcome to Enshittification Tuesday. We've got quite a selection for your perusal today, and shockingly it isn't all related to AI.
We've got:
Microsoft adds AI spyware at the OS level
iTerm2 adds AI spyware at the Terminal level
FireTV interface has been sneakily tweaked to automatically subscribe users to new services when downloading certain apps (yes, there's a confirmation screen, but blink and you'll miss it & might get double-subscribed)
@rpsu yeah. Though the concept might have some small amount of experimental merit (terminal commands are strings, LLMs mash strings together), it still gets a hefty NO THANKS from me. https://mastodon.social/@Viss/112476622482265388
@thomas@grmpyprogrammer The nature of the technology makes it so; the fact that it is opt-in is solely why I'm not planning to ditch iTerm over it. Yet. (And I ditched windows over a decade ago.)
However, as someone I follow pointed out, "you do not let the camel's nose into the tent if you do not want the camel's ass in the tent."
You're right, the sky is not falling in this case. But a thousand cuts are being made, and I was long ago bled dry of trust & excitement for silicon valley
> I certainly don't classify it as "spyware”.
I believe we all should. Part of those thousand cuts I refer to are all of the backchannel information trading practices that led to the current data harvesting economies.
@thomas Maybe we'll be lucky and the biggest threat of it will turn out to be the potential for the AI rug-pull - everyone goes all in, and then they become beholden to the new gatekeepers, their entire business model on the financial hook.
I took a new (to me) lens to San Francisco, the Canon FD 50mm/1.4, which I haven't had a chance to test before going (which I in hindsight realized was not very wise). I shot 4 rolls of film on the trip. Eagerly awaiting the scans to come back from the lab...
Is there any recourse -- besides bolt cutters -- to these scooter companies coming by in their truck and locking their commercial product to every slot in every bike rack so that nobody with a bike can use the rack at all?
Is there anyone at the city who will do something about these assholes?
I’d love to see a behind-the-scenes or making-of for #LastWeekTonight. How do they put it together in such a tight, well-made package. There don’t appear to be many cuts, and John Oliver’s hand motions and everything is so well-choreographed. Is he really that good, or do they practice this over and over?