There was a time when I didn’t know what those words meant either and I strongly encourage blissful ignorance over doing research only to come away more ignorant. Every time you don’t know what something on the Internet means, read a scientific paper or another few pages of Tolstoy or visit a museum. You’ll be a happier, healthier person.

Wait until they cut Medicaid. People are going to be gnawing on rechargeable AA batteries like it’s chewing tobacco. Maybe C or even D batteries if they need more OnlyFans subscriptions to make rent. It’s going to be like when N.O.R.E. found out Doja Cat was in racial chat rooms showing feet. People are going to find out their crazy but hot girlfriend ate whole car batteries for 8chan.

This is the America Ted Cruz wants. Vote for me and I will make sure Doja Cat gets the purest lithium.

You can get lithium from the pharmacy if you act crazy enough. Farm fresh lithium too, not some old phone battery lithium.

I’m glad my old, non-smart one still works fine. It slams into things and says, “Roomba needs help” or something when it eats a sock or wire I missed. But at least it will outlast the company’s servers.

Yale just put a scholar on paid leave because an article by an A.I. powered, pro-Israel site claimed she was a member of a sanctioned group that she apparently isn’t actually a member of. Assuming all that’s true — it was in The NY Times — the investigation should take 5 minutes, max. It was an A.I. hallucination on a fake news site. Case closed.

Plus, Yale has endowment worth over $40 billion and the scholar was part of a project that was 100% privately funded by donors. I’m somewhat sympathetic to schools with limited resources caving to pressure from politicians and major donors but Yale could absolutely take a stand. They could probably just threaten to get rid of legacy admissions and have most of Congress, SCOTUS, and political donors in a tizzy over having to send their idiot failsons to a state school.

I don’t use the A.I. features on iOS or Android — I have both for developer reasons — but I do like the new Siri animation better than the old one. So, not a total waste of time and money. More of a 99.999% waste of time and money.

Maybe it’s useful for people who work in marketing or whatever. Like you write some copy and you ask it to rewrite it in different tones and send them all to your client to see what vibe they want. But I already include the exact right amount of condescension expected in an email from a developer.

Others have pointed out plausible reasons specific to Google but they also laid off a fuckton of people and that never really works out long term unless the company has a good reason to lay people off (like if they lose a huge client or find one or a product line fails).

But the recent tech company layoffs seemed pretty arbitrary, especially the stealth layoffs (like the “return to office” demands that just made people with options go elsewhere). I wouldn’t be shocked if the Google Assistant team lost some talented people who either left, were foolishly laid off, or were shifted to Gemini (which, like all consumer generative A.I., is still in beta and hemorrhaging money).

I just say “consumer” there because it seems like highly focused A.I. projects could be legit businesses. Like the protein folding project at Google and things like that. But the chatbots and image generators might never be useful and profitable.

I actually emailed my local National Weather Service station awhile back asking if they’d post on Mastodon and even offered them a BlueSky invite and they wrote back saying only Twitter and Facebook were allowed and they’d be everywhere if it was approved by higher ups.

Someone made a BlueSky bot a few months ago for NWS notices and I’m pretty sure they covered every local one. I remember the person who made it asking people to request any missing stations. Not sure if there’s a Mastodon equivalent but you could use a bridge. It won’t help with transit delays or other local government announcements but the weather service stuff is available (via an AtProto <-> ActivityPub bridge if nothing else; it’s not like you interact with the posts so it’d be ideal for a bridge).

There’s always PiHole to block ads at the network level. It takes some setup and a raspberry pi but it can be one of the cheaper ones. And I’m pretty sure the sites aren’t going to do much more than check the User Agent to get the browser so User Agent Switcher will get around 99% of that.

You could, I suppose, block Firefox in other ways (like maybe checking for some random Chromium feature not yet supported in Firefox) but Firefox isn’t usually far behind Chrome so it would almost take an entire new developer to be effective. And there’s probably ways around that too. (I’m a web developer but have never worked on an ad-supported project and never will so I’m not sure but life finds a way.)