Alec has been on a multi-year quest to get an incandescent color profile from LED Christmas lights. I haven’t watched this episode, but he usually does a pretty good job of recapping at the start of every episode.
It’s always super entertaining, in my opinion.
Walking into a meeting at Kohler and keeping a straight face after saying the words “toilet camera”–and then maintaining that straight face throughout the product’s discussion, greenlighting, development, manufacture, and sale–deserves an Oscar.
I’m a bigger fan of kisses and Higgs, myself.
That’ll be a massive breakthrough.
Looks like it’s MIT-licensed, so it’s probably time to make a non-Anthropic fork.
But how would one wash the dish? Surely not with a dishwasher pod?
The point: “stop wine-ing”?
By French law, bread can only contain flour, yeast, salt, and water. Sadly, he must be cake.
Whoa, the Eat The Rich people are serious.
Anything even slightly better than the idiocy we have seems amazing to me, apparently
As an American, I have no room at all to judge this decision. But
proposals need a majority of both voters and cantons to pass.
That sounds amazing. Let’s do that, please.
I mean, straight popular vote would probably be better. But this could really do what the Electoral College stans say that it was made to do, without doing what it actually does.
Most of the birds on New Zealand are flightless, because they evolved without natural ground-based predators (they only had threats from birds of prey). Cats’ impact on the avian population is actually pretty dramatic.
Meanwhile, a significant percentage of the islands remains undeveloped. The population of the entire country is only five million, on a landmass larger than the British Isles (population 65m+). Human settlement in NZ is actually pretty light-touch, which is why a ton of movies that need lush outdoor sets are shot there.
What would be a more respectful alternative?
As I understand it, most of that group prefer “Aboriginal Australian.”
It was for me about ten years ago, but because of that brief dalliance, when Microsoft really finally started running toward this particular cliff last year, I was already familiar enough with Linux to be comfortable diving in completely; I don’t have a single Windows install in my house anymore. So it’s not always for nothing.
Given Australia and New Zealand’s proximity to one another on the map, it makes sense to assume that the latter was originally settled by explorers from the former; and, indeed, Aboriginal Australian people can be credibly dated back more than 50,000 years, when they were able to walk to the continent from what is now New Guinea.
But no! There’s no real archaeological sign of Aboriginal Australians (or anyone else) settling on the island that would become New Zealand until the Maori arrived from Polynesia, around 800 years ago.
I didn’t leave out a zero; human habitation on New Zealand has a history of less than a thousand years. In fact, the Maori only beat Europeans to New Zealand (which they called “Aotearoa”) by about 300 years, and archaeological records indicate that they brought invasive species with them, too. They also caused the extinction of at least two bird species before European colonization even began.
Maori are great, great people. But I don’t think that they’ve “proven [themselves] capable of co-existing with the local ecosystem” any more than the European descendants have.
(As a side note, the word “aborigines” in that part of the world carries a potentially problematic connotation. Some Aboriginal Australians see it as a holdover from that country’s colonial era.)
Even if the Windows voice experience put Jarvis to shame, I wouldn’t be interested. I don’t want to use voice control on my computer. Just about the only time I actually need voice control are when I’m far away or my hands are busy; so it’s nice for turning lights on and off when I have my hands full, or controlling timers when I’m cooking, or turning music on without getting up from the couch. Sometimes I’ll use voice-to-text if I have a lot to say or need to think it through. But I almost never want voice control (even if it were completely perfect, which it is not!) for the same reason that I listen to podcasts on earbuds: I don’t want to bother other people! Certainly not while I’m working, and definitely not when it’s liable to take agentic actions for me.
Buttons, knobs, levers, sliders, keys—all of those are better than voice control 999 times out of 1000. I don’t even like touch screens that much, and I’d prefer them over voice control.
The Microsoft executives inhabit a different reality than I do.
Yep. No way Activision’s going to leave an addressable market as big as SteamOS is trying to be just sitting on the table. Especially if Valve puts some incentives behind it.
No, they’re saying that some hardware manufacturers report 80% as 100% (as you noted) while others do not. Just like some manufacturers report 5% as 5% while others report 10% as 5% with the realization that most people misjudge when they’ll be able to charge.
Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.
They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn’t have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.
I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.
It’s been a fun journey. And he’s on the Fediverse! https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
(not tagging him directly because I feel like he probably gets that enough)