Knew one family that had a big rear projection in their “media room”. Going to watch movies at their house was a legit event.

Bringing back Gnutella.

Hi dad!

The Mayor should just go ahead and resign. Take the city attorney with him while he’s at it.

What a bunch of asshats.

I wouldn’t pay for an AI subscription but I have no problem using my own PC for work on the condition that they give me a VM to remote into. Mainly because I like using my three big monitors and the shitty laptops my previous employers provided are either underpowered or locked down to the point where multi-monitor support is really poor.

I do pay for tools that I use outside of work and if it’s something that helps me with my day job, I have no problem using it for that. That said, using AI to generate code is usually a waste of time. Unless it’s something really, really basic.

You’re not missing anything.

Even if it were actually doable, this a dumbass idea. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that night/darkness are necessary for life and that we already have enough environmental problems related to artificial light pollution.

I seem to recall about 13 years ago when “the cloud” was going to put everyone in IT Ops out of a job. At least according to people who have no idea what the IT department actually does.

“The cloud” certainly had an impact but the one thing it definitely did NOT do was send every system and network admin to the unemployment office. If anything it increased the demand for those kinds of jobs.

I remain unconcerned about my future career prospects.

Just the other day, the Mixtral chatbot insisted that PostgreSQL v16 doesn’t exist.

A few weeks ago, Chat GPT gave me a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table that used several DAX functions in ways that they could not be used.

The funny thing was, it knew and could explain why those functions couldn’t be used when I corrected it. But it wasn’t able to correlate and use that information to generate a proper function. In fact, I had to correct it for the same mistakes multiple times and it never did get it quite right.

Generative AI is very good at confidently spitting out inaccurate information in ways that make it sound like it knows what it’s talking about to the average person.

Basically, AI is currently functioning at the same level as the average tech CEO.

“OMG. Are you a hacker?”

“…I’m just using Powershell.”

Resiliency and security have a lot of layers. The crowd strike bungle was very bad but more than anything it shined a bright spot light on the fact that certain organizations IT orgs are just a house of cards waiting to get blown away.

I’m looking at Delta in particular. Airlines are a critical transportation service and to have issues with one software vendor bring your entire company screeching to a halt is nothing short of embarrassing.

If I were on the board, my first question would be, “where’s our DRP and why was this situation not accounted for?”

We got our oldest a smart phone a few years ago. Based on that experience, our younger two can buy their own smartphones when they’re adults because we’ve decided we’re not going to repeat that mistake.

One that I miss is r/Accounting. Mostly non-tech community but with a relatable degree of cynicism about the corporate world and high quality memes.

It primarily reveals that Trump can simply be bought. He is nothing but a political whore. Weird, isn’t he? Will he sell state secrets and tax benefits to the highest bidder if he gets back into the White House? Most likely definitely.

FTFY.

This is one advantage Gnutella had/has over torrents. Kind of like a federated content library. Too bad low quality content and malware were such a huge problem.

It actually wouldn’t be hard at all to transition to lower impact technologies in a lot of places if people were okay with not electrifying/connecting everything possible.

I would assume the push to connect everything under the sun is driven more by cheap electronics and corporate marketing teams rather than actual consumer demand. Making products “smart” is cheaper and more profitable than making them better quality. Go figure.

I think there is potential for using AI as a knowledge base. If it saves me hours of having to scour the internet for answers on how to do certain things, I could see a lot of value in that.

The problem is that generative AI can’t determine fact from fiction, even though it has enough information to do so. For instance, I’ll ask Chat GPT how to do something and it will very confidently spit out a wrong answer 9/10 times. If I tell it that that approach didn’t work, it will respond with “Sorry about that. You can’t do [x] with [y] because [z] reasons.” The reasons are often correct but ChatGPT isn’t “intelligent” enough to ascertain that an approach will fail based on data that it already has before suggesting it.

It will then proceed to suggest a variation of the same failed approach several more times. Every once in a while it will eventually pivot towards a workable suggestion.

So basically, this generation of AI is just Cliff Clavin from Cheers. Able to to sting together coherent sentences of mostly bullshit.

AT&T has a copper wire connected to my house but they refuse to offer me any service at all because they “dOnT oFfEr DsL aNyMoRe.” Shitty DSL is shitty DSL but it’s better than nothing. At least I have access to Cable but I know plenty of people who don’t. That shit should be illegal.

Ash trays in all the passenger doors. AKA mini trash cans.

I remember making a crystal diode radio with my dad as a kid. You can still buy kits for those.