They’re really optimizing for the income of the people who make the apps. No surprise there.

And thus begins the three-legged race between imaged-based age verification and kids. (Prediction: the kids will win, but it will take the other side a looooong time to admit it.)

LLMs need to have the same warnings attached as the old psychic hotlines: “Must be 18. For entertainment only.”

That being said, I’m not sure that this is any more ridiculous than an ad asking for ten years’ experience with a piece of software that’s only existed for three. HR departments have never had much contact with reality.

With the LLM pushers driving hardware prices through the roof, will any of us be able to afford these?

Speaking based on my own PC in that era: it had 512MB RAM and the video card was capable of running FFVII PC version with hardware drivers, so there was some very modest and primitive 3D capability buried in there somewhere. I believe the CPU was a ~500 MHz P3, so I’ll grant you that one, and the one about RAM speed. Well, I did only claim they were “somewhat similar”.

Wi-Fi 7 Marketing is Lying About it’s Biggest Feature

Truth in advertising is pretty much nonexistent these days. Assume they’re lying until proven otherwise.

Except that it isn’t really the first iteration of any of those things. Java did most of 'em more than a quarter century ago: browser-embedable, multiple languages could target the JVM, and, yes, sandboxed—the only issue was startup (not runtime) performance. That wasm doesn’t share those startup performance woes makes it useful, but not revolutionary.

As for tiny environments, a typical desktop system from around 1999 is somewhat similar to a Pi Zero W in terms of ability.

At that point, you’ve put multiple man-hours into analyzing the response required to placate it, and it isn’t a “cheap” device anymore. Easier to return it.

Double your traffic congestion, or your money back!

. . . or not, since I’ve never heard of Tesla voluntarily refunding anything.

If they’re auditing that many of them, there will be a queue, too.

Only in the US. But they do tend to be measured and sold by volume (rather than weight) in contexts like farmer’s markets and pick-your-own operations.

Problem is, we’ve never found a better system. They all suck, in various ways, many of them far worse than representative democracy. And that’s even if no one’s messing with the details of the setup to keep a certain group in power.

If we actually had superintelligent AI, I might be concerned. But what we have instead is stochastic parrots with no innate volition. In and of themselves, they aren’t dangerous at all—it’s the humans backing them that we have to be wary of.

Because AIs don’t understand physics. Or anatomy, given that Tux has three flippers here. (Nor do the upper swooshes make visual sense.)

Someone too lazy to update their listings to reflect a rising sticker price (or not wishing to do so for other reasons) isn’t too good to be true. If they’re an established business selling new-in-box items at more than the wholesale price they would have paid (around 50% of the lowest sticker price the good’s ever been sold at isn’t a bad estimate), then you may have found a genuinely good deal.

It’s when someone starts selling at below their cost (unless it’s obviously to clear out old inventory or the like) that things get suspicious.

You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.

Seriously, ending up with nothing is always a risk you run when buying something advertised as non-functional in the hope of fixing it or recovering any undamaged parts. The fact that the components on this card weren’t original is almost irrelevant, because the result would have been the same if they were authentic but damaged beyond recovery.

I suspect they’re making an unwarranted assumption that the experimental patient ended up with high cholesterol due to excessive consumption of animal products (rather than, say, a genetic defect that would cause them to overproduce it regardless of diet) and applying some typical vegan arguments regarding livestock farming. No need to listen to them.

There are still a few brands of dumb consumer TVs on the market, although they’re becoming harder to find. Ars Technica did a roundup in December.

Even their older, simpler fridges are crappy. We bought one because our previous fridge conked out in mid-pandemic when the selection of new appliances was low. It lasted about three years before developing an issue that would have cost us more to fix than just replacing the damned thing. So we replaced it with some cheaper probably-Chinese brand I’d never heard of before and will never buy another Samsung appliance again if we can help it. AI will just add expensive, useless functions on top of their already poor design and dubious manufacturing.

In other words, if these become the only fridges in existence, I may just try to find out where I can purchase an old-fashioned icebox.

According to records obtained by the group, “it’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer.”

This does not give me a great impression of the literacy level of American police officers. Another good reason to stay out of that country.