If you willingly gave money to a two-bit con-artist who is widely known for robbing or defrauding nearly everyone he has ever done business with, then you got what you had coming.

“AI” coding tools can offer some value. The problem is that they often generate tech debt with pay day loan level interest rates. What’s made the interest rate so high is that now, not only do you have the actual code base tech debt. You also have a bunch of code that no one understands and the barrier to entry for software engineering has become so high that fewer younger people are actually learning how to be good programmers. Lots of organizations don’t give a shit about their rapidly growing mountain of tech debt today but they’re sure going to at the end of the week when the payment comes due.

What their “leadership” fails to understand is that any idiot can shell out code. I’ve seen lots of terrible programmers generate millions of lines of really shitty code that somehow, by the power of the dark Lord himself, manages to compile. That’s not what a software engineer actually does though. Software engineers design operational systems with software. Writing code is a secondary function of that. There are currently no AI agents that can successfully design a software system with any degree of complexity because LLM’s don’t actually understand anything.

They would have to stop wasting so much money on LLM’s first.

Some interested buyers have gotten more creative, offering to sell their home in exchange for Anthropic shares at a valuation above $800 billion.

No way this could possibly go badly.

Damn. I wish I could waste over a million dollars and have my employer see it as a good thing.

Walmart acquired Vizio with the express purpose of using TV’s to serve ads. In fact, that is exactly what they said they were going to do.

No surprises here.

People, especially younger people, need to get on board with the idea of supporting quality journalism financially. The decline in traffic is concerning in and of itself but print journalism as an industry has been circling the drain for years because advertisers and subscribers have increasingly abandoned the medium. Good quality reporting is an art. One that LLM’s are wholly incapable of.

I recently cancelled my Office 365 subscription because I’m no longer willing to financially support Microsuck’s bullshit. It was hard too. There isn’t another groupware solution that works as well as Exchange. It was important enough for me to make the move despite that. I’m not completely cured of my Windows dependency yet but I’m working on it.

Ohio missing the “good old days” when their rivers were flamable.

Aaaannnnnddd the server crashed.

I’m just gonna leave this here

Personally I like using server side rendering when I can. The UI should be as light weight as possible and you can do a lot with just HTML and CSS. That said, it’s pretty hard to build a responsive web app without at least a little bit of JavaScript.

Hey everybody! I’d like you to meet my girlfriend. Isn’t she beautiful? The black powder coat really accents her indicator lights.

On December 15, 1953, led by Paul Hahn, the head of American Tobacco, the six major tobacco companies (American Tobacco Co., R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, Benson & Hedges, U.S. Tobacco Co., and Brown & Williamson) met with public relations company Hill & Knowlton in New York City to create an advertisement that would assuage the public’s fears and create a false sense of security in order to regain the public’s confidence in the tobacco industry.[12] Hill and Knowlton’s president, John W. Hill, realized that simply denying the health risks would not be enough to convince the public. Instead, a more effective method would be to create a major scientific controversy in which the scientifically established link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer would appear not to be conclusively known.[13]

The tobacco companies fought against the emerging science by producing their own science, which suggested that existing science was incomplete and that the industry was not motivated by self-interest.[11] With the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, headed by accomplished scientist C.C. Little, the tobacco companies manufactured doubt and turned scientific findings into a topic of debate. The recruitment of credentialed scientists like Little who were skeptics was a crucial aspect of the tobacco companies’ social engineering plan to establish credibility against anti-smoking reports. By amplifying the voices of a few skeptical scientists, the industry created an illusion that the larger scientific community had not reached a conclusive agreement on the link between smoking and cancer.[11]

Internal documents released through whistleblowers and litigation, such as the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, reveal that while advertisements like A Frank Statement made tobacco companies appear to be responsible and concerned for the health of their consumers, in reality, they were deceiving the public into believing that smoking did not have health risks. The whole project was aimed at protecting the tobacco companies’ images of glamour and all-American individualism at the cost of the public’s health.[14]

A Frank Statement

Putting aside all the late stage capitalism going on here, I still can’t get over the fact that Alphabet (Google) spent billions of dollars developing self driving car technology only to arrive at, “Oh shit. Someone left the car door open. What do we do now?”

Don’t even need to spend that much. Trump accepts fake peace prizes.

Altman, a regular user of X since 2008, has been forthright about his frustration with the bots on it. In September, he posted to X that “somehow AI twitter/AI reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn’t a year or two ago.” A few days earlier, he made a similar point, citing dead internet theory, which posits that since 2016, the internet has been overrun with non-human activity. “I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM [AI]-run twitter accounts now,” he wrote.

CEO of glorified bot farm complains about effects of bot farming.

I need Office/PowerBi/Teams to work without issue. The web versions do not cut it for my use cases.

Same problem. I actually use Mint on my laptop but the desktop still has Windows 10 because some apps are still just not useable or fully useable on Linux. As much as I wish Libre Office was a full replacement for MS Office, it’s not. At least not for power users.

I hate places that drop ship from Amazon.