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.

It is the useful label that says, "We've crowbarred some more shit you won't want in here! You're welcome!"

Makes it so much easier to avoid stuff. Thanks, lads.

And stunned. Stunned, I tells ya.

Just confirms my absolute conviction that using any of the major GenAI products for anything is a very poor move. I'm becoming more militant in rejecting this utter crud. That little blue Meta AI ring is utterly unused in WhatsApp, and will remain so pretty much forever,

Right. So a completely impartial, disinterested source /sarcasm, not even an actual journalist, but a columnist, writing a predictably clunking opinion piece, for a newspaper whose reputation has not exactly been enhanced since the events leading up to last November, and then beyond.

I had a Twitter account for 17 years, joining in May 2007. I say had, because last autumn, after not posting, and using it read only for over a year, I finally deleted it. Why? Because it was a bin fire, a horrible swirling shit vortex, dominated by an algorithm that increasingly monetised the very worst aspects of the social graph.

I looked around when I stopped posting in the last half of 2023, and hung on for a Bluesky invite, so I was in there before the opened it up. And yes, at first it was quiet. But you find people. You find interests. And you talk about stuff. And, like Twitter, I was never really bothered about "how many followers do I have?" , or "how many likes likes/shares did the post get?", as long as the little and pop people I liked to chat to saw. I think part of the problem is that the waves of incomers expected the platform to work the same way, with an algorithm supposedly driving your engagement. That isn't how it is, and that suits me just find, thanks. I saw too many posts pretty much begging for the follows, and it seemed entirely to have the number, not to do anything useful at all with it. Lots of people saw that for what it was, and just ignored the pathetic pleading of people who'd been used to having an experience in a certain way, and could really understand how it may be different elsewhere.

It does makes me laugh that parts of the commentariat think that they have a divinely appointed right to demand whose voices we listen to, and more importantly, for what reasons. You don't get to shout your bought-off mouths off demanding we listen to what your paymasters wish, and "engage" with your content. I'm not American, so frankly, I don't want to spend my life listening to the noise about the US constitution collapsing because too many Americans voted for a lardy, vain sociopath who told them what he was going to do, and has then started doing it, in plain sight (my sympathies to those of you who didn't, incidentally). So I mute mentions of him, and his snivelling cronies. But then, I have also muted a lot of talk about UK politics for the same reason.

Social media is not a town square. It's a table in a pub/bar with your mates, telling each other stupid jokes, sharing gossip and stories, watching stuff together (in the UK that includes throwing fun shade at old episodes of Top of the Pops on a Friday evening), or just chatting about interesting stuff. I don't want to listen to the online equivalent of some shouty, pissed-up randomer yelling about "how you can't do anything these days because of woke", or haranguing anyone who's not white enough, or racist enough, or wilfully ignorant enough to pass some kind of online idiot-purity test of their choosing. I left Twitter because it was becoming exactly like that, so lots of us went and found another place to sit, to make sure we didn't have our time, and our mental landscape poisoned by toxic arseholes. If I want news, and political comment, I can find them. But on Bluesky I choose not to mostly, because life is simply too short to have to bear the cognitive load of having to filter out the screaming of demented chucklefucks who will never tire of telling you "everyone has the right to to an opinion." Yes, yes you do. But it doesn't oblige anyone else to take it at all seriously, or even listen. Go and have your opinion somewhere else, thanks, I'm just trying to hang out with some friends and talk.

And for some reason, a class of media worker bees who stopped being actual journalists some time ago, and whose livelihoods now depend on them drinking from that sewage-infused firehose can't quite grasp that there are some people who just don't want to play that game any more, and simply won't bother.

... all that matters is whether it gives useful output that would be difficult or impossible to reproduce with conventional single level (...) programming

The problem is, that in too much of the enduser space, the answer to that question is: no it does not. Indeed, quite a lot of its outputs are at best of limited or no use, and in too many cases actively harmful. This problem is only going to get worse if those models are permitted to ingest outputs produced by the first generation, hastening model collapse, like constantly adding sewage to the water supply. At iome point it becomes undrinkable and poisonous.

Sweet suffering fuck, is there anything this empathy free android will not try to wring coin out of?>.

Honestly, I wouldn't even give this cretin the steam off my piss now. It's the most hideous abasement of literally what it means to be human, mediating any kind of human experience, connection, communication, and emotion through software that, if we're being charitable we'd call 'unreliable', and if we're being honest, we'd call a disaster on a societal, and environmental scale waiting to happen, and coming soon.

NO NO NO NO NO.

... to how far the idea of me ever installing this can fuck off.

Someone might, at this very moment, be building interstellar probes that could be launched into the aether to wander the stars for countless millennia to come, and which will drift past far distant planets that are still not far enough away for Perplexity and their data-grabbing appliances to fuck off to.

"Make America Stupid Again"

Seems like a fairly transparent plan. You can't work out the shit these fundamentalist throwbacks are pulling if you can't understand it. The emphasis is firmly on the 'mentalist' there

A big dish of all the fuck off into the heart of a neutron star forever. And then some more fuck off to follow.

shocked, I tell you, that someone who is beyond balls deep in the mix of technology and marketing woo woo that his company (amongst others) has sprayed utterly ridiculous quantities of cash on, and who needs to generate revenue to satisfy shareholders' desire for RoI, is making all these promises of epoch changing experiences for end users.

What we get instead is parlour game legerdemain, weirdly unsettling reheated word salad (and that's when it's not clearly utter bullshit), Disneyfied colour saturated images, dominated by the bias and prejudices of a small, and not particularly representative group of human beings. If it weren't so enraging it would almost be funny. Especially the bit about search, because let's be honest here, pretty much all of the major products are useless for search, seeing as they just make shit up. It's basically a feature that you cannot trust the output.

Mass market machine-generated slop is an abomination. There are perfectly good, targeted, and useful applications of machine learning with tightly controlled training data, but who wants to drink from the well on offer now? It's more like a firehose laced with sewage; the only things you end up with are the stench, and the information equivalent of typhoid, polluting everything it touches.