So the Meta AI app is bad, but this shit will appear everywhere and in places where it serves no purpose. I have an uncle-in-law living in South Africa who came over to Ireland and had a problem with Whatsapp on his phone. The problem was it had a frigging AI chatbot stuck in the middle of the UI. He's hard of seeing so his phone had font zoom on everything and this thing was eating 20% of the screen. As far as I could tell there was no way to turn it off or hide it from the UI either and I tried.

Why did he have it but my Whatsapp didn't? No idea, but presumably they forced it on some regions with lesser privacy regs with the intent of rolling it out everywhere in due course. So enjoy AI dogshit everywhere, even in apps where it makes no sense.

Erm no, because humans reason, i.e. feed scenarios into their thought processes and evaluate outcomes. And they are affected by a greater manner of inputs and a wide scope of context than just some sentence. An LLM is basically a crank handle - same input token == exact same output token. LLMs attempt to mitigate with randomization of output (e.g. picking a token randomly based on statistical likelihood) but it's a simulacrum, nothing more.

They really aren't doing more than I said. LLMs are trained on data in a way that given any set of input tokens, deterministically it will produce the exact same set of outputs. To mix things up, models will use a "temperature" parameter that will randomly select the next token from the list of most likely outputs so it appears more random than it is otherwise. If the temperature is too high, or the model is insufficiently trained, the response is garbage. If the temperature is too low the response is boring and the same each time.

More modern LLMs might also have callbacks to allow the implementer to inject context into the response, but I'm talking about the general mechanics of what is going on.

Almost every LLM works like this - given this series of input tokens, give me a list of the potential tokens, choose one with some random weighting, append to list of input tokens, rinse, repeat. With sufficient "parameters", or nodes trained on a sufficient body of input it makes the AI look like it is generating meaningful output whereas it's practically a mechanical process.

... as preferred delusion of crazy people everywhere.

Actually bollocks is it. The poor will be the ones most disproportionately hit by worse air quality.

GWM released the Ora Funky Cat car in Europe and it failed spectacularly. I would not be surprised if GWM has been doing a little price dumping of its own to get rid of them - selling them to leasing firms and the like at rock bottom prices to clear inventory. The car itself isn't awful, but its just not as good as the competition and it cost too much money for what it was.

Cyberpunk certainly had plenty of bugs and performance issues when it launched. But it was still a staggeringly large open world sandbox style game filled with decent content where you could spend hours doing significant side missions. When I was playing it I could feel the effort that went into the world building, story, and content unlike (for example) any Ubisoft sandbox game and I enjoyed it.

As for bugs, luckily CD Projekt provided highly significant updates that fixed them and also reworked things like police response, upgrade paths and other functionality. My only main criticism of the game and/or GOG.com, is when these updates arrived they were enormous - 20-30GB files. Whatever happened to the idea of binary patches?

So if there were a sequel I wouldn't have any qualms about buying it. But I would wait to see what the system & download requirements are first. And pretty please, learn to incrementally patch the game and don't make downloads unnecessarily large, e.g. by forcing people who don't need ultra quality textures to download them anyway.

Companies threatened with tariffs unless they relocate will make pretend they're building a plant in the US until Trump leaves office or dies and then they'll shelve those plans. Apple will be no different.

If AI companies had to ask permission they can seek it from the artists or their estates, or they can seek it from bodies representing artists, or they can wait for the content to enter the public domain. Same goes too for other content they plunder. That might involve paying money (shock horror) or providing attribution, links, references or other relevant information in the response. It should require affirmative consent, or a transparent revocable process which requires an AI company to make a best effort to obtain consent. But would it kill the AI industry? No it wouldn't. I'm sure these assholes could even write AI tools to help them deal with simplifying the effort for themselves.

Short of legislation companies will never, EVER, change their behaviour. The EU has such laws like GDPR and ePrivacy precisely to force companies to obtain user consent for data gathering and limit their ability to store and collect it except for the purposes intended. Consumers can also demand their data and the right to be forgotten. And there are heavy fines for companies that flout the rules.

There is no way that the likes social networks would do this shit otherwise that's for sure.

I can't say I've had many issues running Java on one platform vs another that wasn't caused directly by some assumption in the code itself, e.g. file paths. I suppose AWT was an issue back in the day but Swing is portable. So generally I take a JAR file built wherever and run it wherever and the expectation is it just works.

That isn't to say Java is faultless because tweaking heap and GC can be a pain in the ass and the language itself feels its age especially compared to more modern languages.

And the 2.x to 3.x debacle went on for a stupidly long period of time.

Apple will make noises about building a plant until Trump is distracted by something else and then shelve those plans. Because they know like everybody else that he is an abject, mercurial, moron.

People have screens to watch videos, take videos, browse. Remove the screen and you've just emasculated the device. And that's before considering the horrific privacy implications of allowing something fundamentally awful prying into your personal life, your emails and everything else.