GATTACATS would be the most cursed musical possible and every day I give thanks that we live in a world where it doesn't exist.

It really is incredible how bad twitter got to make me root for the company that thinks DID is good protocol design and that was started by Jack Dorsey.

But heck it I'm (cautiously) rooting for Bluesky.

Molly White reports on Kamala Harris's recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.

VP Harris's press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.

Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected

[...]

Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.

More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.

Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.

"regulation" here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly don't live in a sensible world.

Presented, without comment, this book cover:

(found on the social medias, the books' website)

I mean as long as all the passengers can escape from the flames in time and the manufacturer didn't do something silly like use "bulletproof" glass for the windshields or make the regular door handles inoperable without power. Haha but surely no one would design a car that way!

*What's

For the sin of making a grammar error in a post criticizing grammar you must now do ten push-ups.

Just ignore the inconsistent theming, blurry cars, people phasing in and out of existence, nonsense traffic signals, unnatural leaf rustling, the car driving on the wrong(?) side of the road and about to plow into a tree, the weirdly oversized tree, the tree missing a trunk, the nonsense traffic paint, the shoddy textures, and the fact that the scene is entirely derivative and no one feels any joy from watching it.

Phew

If you ignore all that it could be the end of animators!!

Coming soon*: the thing we already said was coming soon, only worse in every way! No steering wheel! No charging port! One seat for you and one seat for your faceless robot "friend"!

Wait wait where are you going investors?! We have also designed a worse bus!

::: spoiler *

Certain statements in this presentation, including, but not limited to, statements relating to the development, strategy, ramp, production and capacity, demand and market growth, cost, pricing and profitability, investment, deliveries, deployment, availability and other features and improvements and timing of existing and future Tesla products and services; statements regarding operating margin, operating profits, spending and liquidity; and statements regarding expansion, improvements and/or ramp and related timing at our factories are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions with respect to the future, are based on management's current expectations, involve certain risks and uncertainties, and are not guarantees. Future results may differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statement. The following important factors, without limitation, could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements: the risk of delays in launching and or manufacturing our products, services, and features cost-effectively; our ability to build and/or grow our products and services, sales, delivery, installation, servicing and charging capabilities and effectively manage this growth; consumers' demand for products and services based on artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, electric vehicles, and ride-hailing services generally and our vehicles and services specifically, as well as our ability to successfully and timely develop, introduce, and scale such products and services; the ability of suppliers to deliver components according to schedules, prices, quality and volumes acceptable to us, and our ability to manage such components effectively; any issues with lithium-ion cells or other components manufactured at our factories; our ability to ramp our factories in accordance with our plans; our ability to procure supply of battery cells, including through our own manufacturing; risks relating to international expansion; any failures by Tesla products to perform as expected or if product recalls occur; the risk of product liability claims; competition in the automotive, transportation, and energy product and services markets; our ability to maintain public credibility and confidence in our long-term business prospects; our ability to manage risks relating to our various product financing programs; the status of government and economic incentives for electric vehicles and energy products; our ability to attract, hire and retain key employees and qualified personnel; our ability to maintain the security of our information and production and product systems; our compliance with various regulations and laws applicable to our operations and products, which may evolve from time to time; risks relating to our indebtedness and financing strategies; and adverse foreign exchange movements. More information on potential factors that could affect our financial results is included from time to time in our Securities and Exchange Commission filing and reports, including the risks identified under the section captions "Risk Factors" in our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on January 26, 2024 and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Tesla disclaims any obligation to update information contained in these forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. :::

The future as predicted by people who are completely addicted to computers.

Yes officer this smart device idea right here:

If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.

When I was adjusting to a high fiber diet for medical reasons I couldn't figure out why I was so incredibly hungry despite eating enough.

Then I realized "huh, I haven't had any fat at all for the past week" and went and made myself four slices of buttery toast and they were so tasty.

Someone shared this website with me at work and now I am sharing the horror with you all: https://www.syntheticusers.com/

Eric Schmidt trying to think of an AI conversation and coming up with "How do I build a house? Step 1: Hire a contractor ..." is like the Schmidt version of Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!

I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:

Yes, we recommend focusing on fixing the Grub bootloader configuration rather than a reinstall.

Thanks I hate it.

[Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

Content is a scarce resource y'know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm's two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be terrible actually quite nice.

We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history

WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.

"The common people pray for integration tests, healthy production, and five nines that never end," SWE Jorah told her. "It is no matter to them if the high lords play their Scrum of Scrums, so long as they are left in peace." He gave a shrug. "They never are.”

The license stuff is whatever, but Imagine seeing this sort of sloppiness in the revision history and thinking "Yeah these guys seem legit let's give them a million dollars!" We are in such a bubble.

SoftBank's Vision Fund will be investing $500 million in OpenAI

The herald of destruction: SoftBank! OpenAI is doomed!

Now that's just trying to do too much NFTs on stamps!

Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. [...], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

It's interesting that someone thought "smoothing life's complexities" is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life's complexities without smoothing out people's complexities, but it's not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that's if it actually worked, which it doesn't).

I've felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it's hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it's a shame we couldn't as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.

The tragedy of being Elon Musk: he has thousands and thousands of cryptocurrency bros and fascists that worship the ground he walks on, but what he really want is for Stephen King to reply to one of his tweets.