4. If only their coffee didn't taste like sieved, week-old diarrhoea

"Enshitification complete, sir!"

This is a decent point, though one supposes the rush to build datacentres would slow further, so it won't all be gravy for the hardware companies either.

There comes a time where there has to be some actual utility for the software running on the hardware that is there however, because a significant amount of what it is being used for now quite often has zero, or negative utility itself. But it may mean some people are going to get access to compute power cheaper than they may have done previously once the realignment starts.

Yes.

I do have a smartphone, but this number of future non-customers very certainly includes me. A process designed to favour the providers, not the customer's ease or convenience, is not a good process.

The principal reason for this is that lots of us here in Europe neither want, nor need them.

Mass transport in Europe is better funded and more integrated in general. It's not a second class option, especially the major cities, where often you don't need a car at all, or to be stuck in traffic in another car, whether it has a driver or not.

The geography, and especially the topology of European cites, with road networks that are significantly different to most North American and modern Chinese cities aren't amenable to autonomous cars that aren't always good at navigating those topologies. Think of how bad some of Elon's dustbins are at it.

... and finally, those of us who aren't using public transport might just sometimes want to just drive, because there are lots more enjoyable driving experiences in Europe.

There just appears to be this constant inability in the minds of corporate America that other places don't have the social conditions, seemingly lack of concern for driver or pedestrian safety, or the physical characteristics of the USA to necessitate what they are selling. These are not European defects, merely differences, and we're quite happy with them, thanks.

The East Wing of the White House (better yet if Kim Don Un has finished his absolutely not at all tiny penis compensating ballroom by then), or Mar a Lago. Either would be great, thanks.

"Then toss a coin to see how accurate it will be."

This is why I will not touch this stuff. At all.

One user in the OpenAI subreddit said that being able to play with copyrighted material was "the only reason this app was so fun."

Fine. You want your fun? PAY THE PEOPLE WHOSE STUFF YOU'RE APPROPRIATING. Then have your fun after you've paid

To go WHERE exactly five times faster?

Over a cliff in full Thelma and Louise style?

Marriott has a fairly chequered record as a columnist, to be honest, and has written some utter drivel in the past. However, this is isn't one of those times. But that's mostly because he's mostly borrowing from Postman (who, oddly enough I just read after meaning to for a number of years). Lots of Postman's thinking is directly mapped onto experiences in US society and culture at the time he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, though some of the worst aspects have crept through to the rest of us over time.

Postman wrote at a time before the web existed (Amusing Ourselves to Death was first published in 1985), but at the beginning of what people were starting to cll even then, The Information Age. Ir was also the time when TV was becoming the dominate form of culture in the West, supplanting film and radio, as well as books. Our cultural discourse depends hugely upon the media used to conduct it. In a culture where even visual culture is being reduced to memorable clippings, and 'vibes' rather than thinking, you do have to worry. Introducing slop inot all of this makes it worse yet, as not only is literacy being downgraded, but actual cognition too. I think we are in very grave danger of seeing as wing back to circumstances like other hugely unequal historical periods of history, and we all know how those ended, don't we?

Unveiling the ID announcement, Starmer says "you will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID".

"It's as simple as that." Really? Is it though? REALLY?

I can think of some who won't check ID, won't ask questions, and will "encourage" people to keep their mouths shut.

Let's be charitable and say reception is ... mixed

They are very much not alone. See this https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.5281%2Fzenodo...

I actually used Glass in the wild for a while back in 2014, including at a conference (Wikimania in London). It was instructive in many ways, and does not now make me hunger for all the product Meta is desperately trying to shift in this context. Before 2020 I was mildly interested in Snap's product but there are a whole bunch of things that bother me about that whole product space now

Won't that be a useful extra distraction for drivers to have to contend with?

I'd imagine this won't filter out to many European nations (including the UK) particularly quickly, because local laws tend to prize the ability of drivers to actually pay attention to the road when they're driving, which is why there are laws about phone use behind the wheel. This is not unrelated to why we don't particularly trust fully autonomous driving modes on cars - European roads, particular off motorway/autoroute/autostrada/autobahn/etc are often simply more difficult to navigate, for various complicated reasons

Because the big tech companies have ploughed enormous amounts of money into terrible GenAI, are throwing it at downstream tech companies (including their own subsidiaries) to try and grow market share, because they need to get that promised RoI somehow. So have some terrible slop.

Er, no thanks. I'll pass.