That time was long ago. The writing was on the wall as soon as they put a giant perpetual ad on the home screen.

Here’s the worst part, there are no parental controls on the home screen, so if I’m trying to get my kid to Disney+, while it loads we’re staring at some ad for a horror flick. Great job Roku…

Honestly, the parental controls on the Roku are non-existent and it’s definitely on purpose, really pisses me off.

Yeah, I’d say they’d be looking at a class action suit if it weren’t for the fact that it’s just so easy to apply a pirate crack.

They’re still doing better than a lot of fields. I mean when you factor in compensation it’s still one of the best fields to be in. Compare to a teacher, where you’ll need a master’s degree in most states and then you can expect a salary around 40k. Whereas with software, when you do find a job it’s not unusual to start over 100k. But if you were willing to work for half that, I bet you’d find something quick.

Well if they have degrees in software engineering, certainly.

I think you’re missing the point. Apple has famously resisted implemented back doors for the authorities.

He’s warning against leaving that metaphorical key under the mat.

Oh man… That is wild. How is that a thing?

At the jiffy lube, or perhaps more likely, the dealership service center.

Ok, so the alternative is buying Intel/Nvidia. Surely they’ve never done anything problematic, so this is a good plan.

In retrospect I probably should have mentioned the horizons games as well, but I just finished with cyberpunk, so that’s been on my mind.

I just don’t understand the motivation here. Why are they helping us?

Wait… I just got it. The Chinese government actually wants us to fall behind in the “AI arms race”… Oh my God, the Chinese are actually bullish on AI… They’re just as dumb as we are.

They’re trying to hurt the US by discouraging us from pursuing AI tech. LOL. wow. Just wow.

Yeah uh… “No China, don’t do that. This hurts so much, please stop.”

Yeah, that would probably be a put use of resources.

Ok you want something as rich and interesting as skyrim, so I’m assuming open world games are your jam.

There are three games you should play.

1. Red Dead Redemption 2 - it’s a Western, the world is very believable, and it makes you feel like you’re really part of it. You can follow the main story line, or you could spend your days hunting and fishing. You could travel from town to town playing every poker game you can find. You can conduct train robberies, breed horses, really, there’s just a whole lot to do.

2. Cyberpunk 2077 - this is RDR2 but in a scifi dystopian future where the corpos own everything, sex is for sale on every billboard and every ad break, and the only justice is what you can achieve on your own. You’ve got a ticking time bomb in your brain and no time to fuck around. In this world where you can’t trust anyone, somehow what really matters are the friends you make along the way. (seriously)

3. The Witcher 3 - from the same studio that made cyberpunk, the Witcher 3 is truly a masterpiece of storytelling. The one caveat I have for this game is that it starts hard, almost “souls-like”. But get past that first rough hour and there is an extremely rich world with a seemingly unending collection of stories to become a part of. This may be the most skyrim-like of the games listed here, but you’re in for a treat, because this is a much better game than Skyrim.

All three of these games are gonna make you feel real feelings, they’re all actually better at telling stories than Skyrim is. The Witcher 3 in particular loves to live in the grey zone, it’ll make you make ethical choices that matter, and you probably won’t like any of the possible outcomes. But this is a good thing!

So that’s what that means. I always wondered.

Please! Think of the GPU!

And oh… The RAM… that poor fucking RAM never had a chance… Did it have a family?

The article is making a big deal about the huge price disparity, which I get. But on the other hand, this is basically true about all missiles. As a rule, missiles are cheaper than the vehicles you destroy with them.

I’m sure you could find a few exceptions, but in general missiles are much cheaper than aircraft, and a “kamikaze drone” is just a guided missile.

That’s really interesting. I’ve never really thought about it in this light, but a search engine’s job is generally just to point you at a bunch of information that could be what your looking for. But they don’t generate any content, so as a result they aren’t really liable or in any way responsible for what you find, they aren’t telling you anything.

But a generative AI, well those are very much their words, they don’t have any link to hide behind, they are absolutely responsible for anything their AI tells you. This explicitly exposes them to legal risk in a way that they never were before.

I hope that in the rest of the world our courts can all make similar rulings. When people search for information you should not be allowed to generate something and provide them that answer as if it were a fact, without taking responsibility for it.

When does quality not matter?

Like, I guess you could ask it subjective things? Recipe ideas, art projects for kids, things where you can’t actually provide a wrong answer…

And by making their user’s initial impression one that might be wrong, they effectively poison people’s thought processes as they sift through the rest of the actual results. Is that a better experience for the users?

And just to be absolutely clear, my understanding is that giving your users the best experience possible is what’s going to result in retaining the most market share. Search is free, users will happily use a different search engine if a particular one doesn’t work or annoys them.

So here’s my conclusion: this method of using AI in search is not only frustrating for users, but also bad for Google. For the sake of their users, they should stop. For their own sake, they should stop.

Actually, yeah. That offloads the responsibility to the parents. I think that solution actually works…

Yeah, it’s like the French are trying to prove something.