I'm regularly in contact with students here, mostly CompSci, since I represent my employer at job fairs. Over the past few years I noticed a sharp increase in students worrying about whether they'll find a job after graduating. And the anxiety probably come from concrete events. The big US tech companies with offices here are in a headcount reduction phase, after many years of expansion (and promises that they'll continue to expand). There are local options, of course, but the employment dynamics in the US tech sector are definitely having an effect here. I don't blame young people for more likely going to trade school now. The feeling in the air is that there are too many high-tech workers right now, not too few.

But what should they have chosen instead? Check the state of Nvidia drivers on Linux and Mac. AMD was absolutely the only sensible option.

Sure the result is unfortunate, but I respect AMD for taking the risk of trying to do the right thing, and for helping (once more) expose how idiotic the HDMI Forum is and why the HDMI standard absolutely needs to die and be replaced yesterday.

The million cables are an annoyance for sure, and things like eARC are a great convenience. But this stuff is usually set up once and not touched for many years. Also, there are good programmable remotes to get everything back under one control. I think it's not much of a dealbreaker.

I was planning on a new home cinema setup a year ago. I ended up dropping the project, but had already reached the point in my research where the general shittiness of HDMI made me give in to the realisation that I'd have to configure video and audio completely seperately. In the forums I researched in, it seemed to have been the consensus that it's the better choice anyway, and people would end up regretting the convenience solutions with HDMI and co.

We have no such thing as artificial intelligence. We have LLMs. We have next token predictors, we have statistical image generators and fuzzy search. While occasionally helpful, it has not even a remote relation to intelligence, and sci-fi AI is still as sci-fi as ever.

And who's gatekeeping here? Creatives produce content with GenAI and it's the public who lets them know that they hate it. I guess you could call the audience the ultimate gatekeepers, but that makes it sound unnecessarily conspiratorial. People read books, listen to music or watch movies because they're interested in what other people have to say. Without human creative work behind this, there's no point to it. It's vapid, bland, incoherent, boring and hackneyed. I stop reading any text that I suspect to be GenAI immediately because it's a complete waste of my time. That's not gatekeeping, just my conclusion to what has some inherent worth and what doesn't.

And if there was no basis for the Post's accusation, the NYT could sue them. That's what's happening here.

These AI companies believe they're above the law, and they need to be put in their place, badly and devastatingly. If the same standards were applied to them that are applied to regular people who commit copyright infringement or slander, Perplexity & Co. should be some trillion bazillion dollars in debt by now.

So it's 20 years now. I remember when all vaccinated people were supposed to have died off by late 2021. The deadline gets pushed like some shit doomsday prophecy. By 2095, everyone who got the vaccine will be sick of have died from it, I'm sure!

You'd think with all of the 10X productivity gains thanks to AI coding, companies would be able to supercharge their delivery of new features. Yet all I ever read about in news and release notes is the removal of existing featured. Usually explained by how they can't possibly commit the resources to keep supporting what they managed to support just fine for the past 10 years.

It could almost make you believe that all the AI coding tools are bullshit and nobody is actually becoming more efficient, instead losing time dicking around with the new toys before finally figuring out that the result is crap and can't be rolled out.

Almost!

"AI-generated" is conflating a lot of very different things in this discussion. I don't think anyone would mind that a game programmer used GenAI to draft some unit tests or optimise an algorithm. On the other hand, a lot of people will care if a game's story turns out to have been Frankensteined by an LLM instead of having been written by a person with an actual voice and something to say.

I don't think whether you notice the difference or not is a great standard. Even the attempt to hide the origin is deceitful. People may fall for a very believably written fake news story, but they will still care when they find out it was made up. The reaction won't be "doesn't matter as long as I can't tell the difference." People reading a book, watching a movie, listening to a song, or playing a game expect to hear or see someone's creative voice, not a blended goo of stuff stolen from other, actual creatives.

And even if I *could* tell the difference easily (I am maybe a bit too sure of my ability to detect the bland vapidness of GenAI-generated content anywhere) I'd still want to know beforehand. Because even just starting a game or movie takes time, effort, and usually money, which I wanted to spend on actual artists. I will never willingly give money to LLM slop generator button pushers; that's not a "work" that anyone deserves getting paid for.

Good brands still offer headphone jacks :) I hear Motorola does. So does, Sony, which I use, and they actually have a pretty good DAC to boot. They tried to remove the jack a few years ago, earned a shitstorm, reversed course, and now even advertise it as a premium feature and USP.

Likewise, no SD card means no sale to me.

I hate camera notches, and bezelless screens in general. Give me a place to actually hold the phone without accidentally triggering things! We'll survive with a screen that's 2 mm narrower, they're way too big as it is.

A Koolaider once explained to me that notches are unfortunately unavoidable because the technology to get rid of them simply isn't there yet. Funny, every phone I've had since the early 2000s has had this mythical, sci-fi technology of a screen without a hole in it!

But cutting holes into screens seem to be a trend now anyways, just see YouTube's new, inane rounded borders.

Thanks for reading my old man rant. I'm allowed now, I turn 40 this week!

Preach to the choir! My work laptop takes 2 minutes to go from black screen to BIOS screen, then another minute to get to the Windows login screen, then another 3 minutes to get from logon to desktop. Same thing when it's been on hibernate for more than 15 minutes. Heaven knows what it's doing during that time, but the fans could cool a nuclear core going by the noise they're making.

Not really. Agents have no concept of instructions. They're still just LLMs, with more output methods in order to not just generate a string of tokens but perform additional actions triggered by them. There is a deep, qualitative difference to macros where you determine what actions an automation should take (and you're responsible if you mess up). The unpredictability is inherent to LLMs. The very fact that makes them seem more helpful in some cases, because you don't have to spell out every step, is inherently what also makes them erratic and prone to act against your intent. This isn't a conflict that can be resolved.

They can do that now. You don't need many resources to make an excellent, even revolutionary movie. What would be expensive about it? CGI and compositing is dead cheap now, almost certainly much cheaper than the true cost of GenAI would be with the endless reprompting required to get an even barely coherent result.

Not that great movies need those effects. The most exciting and risky movies are probably more likely to come from two students with a 90s camcorder and living on cup noodles, rather than someone trying to imitate vapid Hollywood gloss.

And their stuff will actually be worth watching because they put their heart, soul, blood, tears, and personality in it. Unlike the guy who put a few sentences in the idea theft machine and called it a day.

It wasn't number 1, it was a bought headline (number 1 on download chart, which is barely a thing anymore and cheap to manipulate).

Also, it sounds like absolute crap and the lyrics suck ass. Nobody had ever listened to the song before the fake headline, but if they did, I'm pretty sure almost everyone would have skipped that unlistenable garbage after 5 seconds.

... more money being pumped into the bubble gives investors peace of mind that it isn't a bubble? I must be missing something. Guess that's why I'm not an investor.

Exactly this. Shovelware discs served a very real purpose when most people didn't have Internet access at home, and if they did, it was quite difficult to find stuff, and it'd be so slow that it'd take weeks to download a CD-ROM's worth of data. I was around at the time and these discs were *much* cheaper and more convenient than time at the Internet Café.

Add to that that the content was generally still stuff that real people spent real effort creating, the comparison to the flood of GenAI slop seems more than a little unfair.