Proprietary service drops support for proprietary protocol..

Did US Intelligence Agencies hack the national timekeeping agency to set their clocks back 10 minutes in order to make it seem like everything was running late?

They were not the only source of fossil fuel generated power being imported from Utah.

When I used to live in Glendale, California, I noted from reports from the Glendale DWP that most of the power used by the city--and by the state--was imported from places like Utah. Power would be generated in Utah, then shipped by power transmission lines to Glendale.

Will California also stop importing electricity from coal-fired plants outside of the state? Or is this simply virtue signaling by the state as they continue to export their pollution?

It's subjective.

My wife and I went to see a couple of movies last year because they were big deals to us (Terrifier 3 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). We enjoyed the recliners, the limited edition popcorn bucket merch, the time out together, the reclining seats and the big screen.

What we didn't enjoy was the other people in the theatre talking through the movies, using their cell phones, coughing, breathing loudly, chewing food loudly, opening wrappers etc.

I'm with the parent, personally. If other people still enjoy the theatre experience then there's nothing wrong with that and theatres certainly don't "deserve to die." But there are those of us who don't consider watching a movie to be a social activity, and get extremely resentful and triggered when the presence of other people in the space pulls our heads out of the film we're trying to feel immersed in.

More people die in the aggregate when censorship is status quo. You start by censoring things you feel are absolutely justified because, allegedly, those ideas "cost lives." But then someone comes along with different ideas as to what is justified. Maybe they are threatened by ideas that challenge their power status. Soon enough science, research, innovation, investigative journalism .. .things that objectively improve people's lives and save many more lives than a virus has ever taken are silenced out of fear of repercussions for saying the wrong thing.

Freedom of speech is not a "laudable ideal". It is a fundamental human right that exists because reason is our primary tool of survival as human beings. But like with everything, there is good and bad to be found. There are bad actors out there who will lie and cheat and steal. The solution is not to prevent people from being able to share information, no matter how justified you feel in doing so. The solution is to counter bad ideas and lies with better ideas and truths. Individuals will make their own individual choices and face the consequences accordingly. Reality always wins.

My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.

Thankfully it must have been that particular OEM that chose to do this. I had installed "vanilla" Windows 11 on a custom PC build and that didn't happen - and we just bought a new laptop for our new business, different brand, and that was the first setting I checked (not an issue).

Still... companies pushing this type of crap on users is just batshit. Offer as an option, sure. But fundamentally re-configuring core functionality that people who have been using the OS for decades take for granted is just madness.

AIs will become useless if they keep learning from other AIs

So we know when AI trains on data trained by AI, the LLMs become more and more unstable. (Source)

Meaning the problem is not just "Social Media will suck more." It also means that a large treasure trove of data used by AI companies to train their bots will become increasingly toxic. And this will hurt the value proposition of companies like Reddit (which depend on selling their data for training AI), as well as companies like OpenAI, who needs more and more data to train on.

Investing in what, exactly?

I mean, when you invest in a company, you're investing in the people, the processes, the products of that company, on the idea that the hard work of those folks will lead to gains in your portfolio. But if there area no jobs because they've all been replaced with AI, what is left? Some sort of weird gambling casino where we're betting on the next genius idea that AI then implements for us?

What sort of dystopian bullshit future is this?

Of course it's from a company which manages people's investments and makes money off their trades, so I can see how when all you are is a hammer manufacturer everything is a nail that needs to be pounded.

No it's not "obvious." My wife and I own 3 properties. One is commercial, the other two are residential. That might paint us as extremely wealthy but neither property is huge. We're fairly middle class. We use both residential properties interchangeably because they're not huge houses and we like our space. We could sell both and move into a single dwelling but we like things the way they are. Especially now that our daughters are adults in their twenties, who still live at home for the time being, but have their friends & significant others stay over quite a bit. I'm too much of an autistic introvert to live with that many other people in the same house 24/7 even if the house were a mansion.

The only reason I pay for the highest tier Netflix account is because of the number of devices allowed. Basically for my wife and daughters. I almost never watch it myself. Every time I open it up I feel like I spend more time scrolling to try and find something to watch than actually watching content. So if Netflix comes after us for "account sharing" I'm cancelling our subscription immediately without thinking twice about it. We're a single family, we just occupy multiple locations most of the time.

And our case is a bit more complicated than people who are talking about paying for a family account that includes kids who are away at school or camp or what-have-you. Or families who travel a lot. My wife and I are magicians (our commercial property is a small theatre and magic shop). This gets me thinking about families that travel for work. Army families or entertainers. Imagine being a Cirque Du Soleil performer - many of whom have kids ... they live on the road most days of the year.

The point is that there is no one-sized-fits-all "family" and it's more common for a nuclear family to occupy multiple locations than many would think.

Decades ago, the move to 'open offices' was driven by bad research. That is, the research on productivity was done with college students; they found that college students in a collaborative environment do better than college students trying to study in isolation. Which--well, that makes sense, given that college students are still learning, and it helps to have some collaboration while in a learning environment.

But that research was used to justify the whole 'open office' movement--forgetting that people like software developers are not college students, and need a way to drown out the 'forced collaboration' in order to find a modicum of peace so they could focus.

Of course, open offices aligned with managers who wanted to be able to see all the veal in the cattle pens workers working for them, and it aligned with the penny pinchers who didn't want to build enclosed offices.

And it was only decades later that we "learned" the painfully obvious: that open office floor plans are a failure.

And now we're doing the same damned thing with "hybrid work" and forcing people back to the office.

Both civic leaders who want to bring workers back into the downtown corridor so they have the captive audiences for commerce in a downtown corridor, commercial real estate owners who want full buildings so they can guarantee returns on their investments, and managers who want to see full veal pens their workers so they can 'manage' them, have all aligned with this idea that "returning to the office" is better, somehow.

And now comes the research--undoubtedly being done on college students, who in fact do benefit from collaboration. And not on workers who benefit from quiet space so they can concentrate on their work.

Worse, because of the absolute mess done by the pandemic shutdown requirements--and how people moved across the country (because they could), the push to get people back into the office is often accompanied by confusion and worse: a lack of desks for workers to work at. But we're ploughing ahead anyways, regardless of the loss of productivity or the loss of good workers--and I'm sure research will be "discovered" which support all of this.

And a decade or two from now, after the wreckage is done, someone will point out that maybe all of this wasn't a good idea: that the increased carbon footprint of daily commuters to fulfill some sort of financial and political obligation to large commercial real estate owners, as well as satisfying the need to fill veal pens, may not have been the wonderful idea prior "research" suggested.

A lot of us are old enough to have worked through the dot-com bubble and crash. The AI boom over the last year or two feels a lot like the late 90s leading up.

That said, if the market hadn't gone so all-in on the Internet and world wide web, investing stupid amounts of money into so many idiotic crackpot ideas that were doomed to fail, we arguably wouldn't have the Internet that we enjoy today.

In other words, you have to throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what will stick. 90% of just about everything we humans create is unremarkable. It's the 10% that we end up with that matters.

And we will get the 10% out of AI. Which is another way of framing what you are saying.

I've been a pretty big skeptic when it comes to the hype vs actual productivity gains, but that doesn't mean I haven't found a few areas where it has been useful in my workflow. LLMs are a cool magic trick. They can create some breathtaking illusions and are exceptionally useful at a few narrow applications such as searching and pattern matching.

While I don't want to see the ugly side of the crash (layoffs and unemployment), I am looking forward to when the hype train is over so everyone shuts up about their overstated fantasy and we can get on with doing actual work. The blockchain hype was annoying too, but since it wasn't obvious how blockchain could be applied to all types of work we didn't hear every single CEO at every single company talk about how AI is going to fundamentally change the way we work.

The problem as I see it is that if we take it read that all of this is 100% absolutely true and we have three years to prevent an existential world-wide crisis from destroying the environment and rendering the Earth as inhospitable, then all eyes should be on China--which thus far has been exempted from various intergovernmental requirements to reduce CO2 emissions. And part of the problem is that while China itself claims it has capped carbon emissions--a lot of the environmental and governmental statistics coming out of China is as honest as a three-dollar bill. Meaning unless they are willing to actually audit China's numbers--which account for 31% of emissions, give or take a hell of a lot of uncertainty--we can convert the US and Europe to eating bugs (to save on cow farts) and it won't matter one whit.

But despite China's "Double-Carbon" policy announced in 2020, I'm personally not convinced China is doing anything outside of trying to position itself as a "responsible world leader"--that is, it seems China is more interested in displacing the United States and eradicating the "western centric" world than it is actually doing anything that is transparent, verifiable and actionable.

China can't help it, and for the same reasons why GDP numbers from China are untrustworthy: the CCP must maintain appearances to maintain legitimacy--which puts a lot of incentive on lower party officials to lie, cheat and steal.

And the real question is can the world, when facing an existential crisis, afford to put up with China's lack of transparency and unwillingness to allow outside observers actually audit all aspect of China's society for environmental compliance?

Before you think "that's stupid", remember that a lot of the environmental excesses of the Soviet Union were not uncovered until after the Soviet Union collapsed. And despite better intelligence gathering and satellite coverage--it's still possible to hide a hell of a lot behind government secrecy.

Like we did in Area 51.