What began in 2022 as broad optimism about the power of generative AI to make peoples’ lives easier has instead shifted toward a sense of deep cynicism that the technology being heralded as a game changer is, in fact, only changing the game for the richest technologists in Silicon Valley who are benefiting from what appears to be an almost endless supply of money to build their various AI projects — many of which don’t appear to solve any actual problems.

I don’t have advice to give you beyond looking at [email protected] and [email protected]

I feel like Rat Race was an underappreciated movie

Handyman thinks lack of use in the basement lead to a clog that built up over the years. Years before Airbnb they were renting out the apartment through the local tourism department because there aren’t a lot of hotels here but it’s a scenic area. But they stopped as they got older so now it only sees use for a couple weeks twice a year when we come. But when we come with 3 people it puts more pressure on the waste line and starts backing up, and finally became a problem tonight.

He thinks there’s a drain in the floor of our bedroom and somebody just put down laminate flooring overtop of it. There should be a drain somewhere but he doesn’t see one, and given the water intrusion there as the other drains were backing up that’s his best guess. Won’t know for sure until he pulls up the floor this week, though.

We rushed up to my in-laws about a week-and-a-half ago because my mother-in-law seemed to be dying (it seems like she turned the corner this week and I think she will recover). Tonight, though, I ran to the bathroom in the basement apartment we use at their house with an upset stomach. At the bottom of the toilet was paper, a telltale sign of a toilet that was clogged but has since drained without flushing. Feeling like there was no time, I went ahead and used it, figuring I’d use the plunger after.

While I was there I could hear my wife in the kitchen on the other side of the wall. When she ran the sink the water in the toilet started gurgling, which is not something I’ve experienced before. Before adding any paper I figured I should try a “courtesy flush” to see what happened. It was clogged. Fortunately I didn’t end up needing much paper, but I was still surprised to find the toilet had already drained by the time I had finished.

I decided I should try to keep running the water into the toilet, figuring that maybe it was draining too fast but if I could keep the water pressure up it might clear itself and I wouldn’t need the plunger. I tried it for a couple minutes but then heard a sound and noticed that water was filling through the drain into the bathtub. At that point I figured this was probably not a plunger problem and instead time to call a plumber.

I told my wife but she still thought it was worth trying the plunger first, so I went to go through our room to head upstairs and get it. As I entered the room, I had the sensation that the laminate floor was floating, before it sank down into a puddle. I was wearing socks. I told my wife, so she went upstairs to tell her dad. When she came back down she came back through our room, also wearing socks. It was while waiting for the emergency plumber that I saw this post.

I’ve seen several from this campaign and they’re so dumb I feel like someone was maliciously compliant in making these so that Delta’s opposition to the union would actually encourage more people to vote to join. Like, management came to someone in marketing, but that person actually wanted to support the union effort.

Is he still on TV? Twenty years ago I worked a part-time job doing data entry at a small local brokerage. One of the assistant brokers used to complain because they had a client who would call in almost daily wanting to buy a stock he had a hot tip on, which was invariably whatever Cramer had featured on his show the night before.

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Taping to the camera as shown on the left would be challenging to make work at least. The cameras don’t put out light so whatever image you use would have to be on paper thin and light enough for backlighting to work. The distortion that close would also be extreme, so you’d want to keep the main part of your image in the center and small. And yeah, it’d probably be blurry, but the resolution on most of those cameras was already pretty bad up until a few years ago so you might not notice.

The manufacturers were opposed to them being required. I think they claimed it would cost an extra $200-250 per car. But they sure won’t pass up on the ads if they think they can get away with it!

I’m very curious about who screwed up first

Here’s the Google blog post announcing it: https://blog.google/products/android/quick-share-airdrop/

It’s one of the very small number of books to defeat me. The narrative part was okay but every other chapter was full of wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales and their lives and I just couldn’t take it.

I’m sure there are many jobs AI is not capable of doing but some CEOs probably do a bad enough job that an AI chat bot could probably do better.

I know we like to dump on CEOs all the time but a good CEO does not seem like one that could be replaced by AI, certainly not by what is currently being hyped. There are just a lot of highly visible companies with CEOs who aren’t actually very good. I suspect the dysfunction of publicly traded companies and the goals of Wall Street investors (or other nations’ equivalents) frequently not aligning with a good long-term health of a company has a strong influence on this.

And of course these guys will be happy to have AI replace them; they’ve already made boatloads of money and think they’ll be able to keep that going even if they lose their job.

I don’t work there and I also say it will be a huge mess

I can’t remember if it’s announced or rumored, but I think there’s an entry-level MacBook coming with an A17?

The one area I would sorta disagree is on updates, although only inasmuch as they’re needed for security fixes on things connected to the internet. But if it’s not connected? No, no updates needed unless I encounter a bug or they add a new feature I really want.

To tag along with this, I remember this becoming an issue 10 or 15 years ago and a lot of the big lyrics websites were forced to reach licensing agreements with the songwriting groups like ASCAP and BMI (they collect and distribute royalties on behalf of the writers). I think a couple sites tried going to court to claim fair use but lost pretty quickly. That’s pretty established law going back to the earliest days of music publishing. Just because they were publishing online instead of printing up songbooks doesn’t mean the laws change.

The article on The Verge has a quote from someone at Valve saying they expect that will be among the first ones the community creates for it.

As much work as the Verge article says they put into cooling, I’m not too worried about heat issues