Your friends could be sharing your public phone number! The one that’s listed and accessible to the world via the Internet’s version of the White Pages!

In the US, phone numbers aren’t private unless you pay extra (no one does except celebrities who are wasting their money… Because even if they pay it gets sold to 3rd parties anyway!).

You mean a browser with AI features built in? Sounds useful!

Not a damned thing in that article had anything at all to do with “chatbots”.

This situation is SO DIMM!

If extraterrestrial, sapient alien life has been discovered here on Earth by the US government it was probably uncovered via signals intelligence gathering. Not via any sort of physical interaction or visual observation.

Everyone thinks that to find aliens you need to search the skies, looking for visual evidence or radio patterns. No one bothers to think that a mass surveillance network across the globe would pick it up first—from local sources. Meaning: They’re already here and could have been for hundreds of thousands of years (or longer).

There’s probably an autonomous alien monitoring station broadcasting information about Earth on the regular. Probably more than one.

Exactly the type of thing that would be investigated by signals intelligence analysts who spend their days trying to figure out, “WTF was that?” Looking at data gathered from all over the world (for spying reasons).

That’s why Obama would laugh at the question of, “where are the aliens?” Because he wouldn’t know! He’d just know that they’re here… Somewhere. Probably just super advanced machines, connected to a quantum-level universe-wide network.

The real question to ask is, “are they enjoying our memes?”

Simple: Exfat does not support symbolic links. So every file that’s just a symbolic link on your btrfs filesystem is getting copied in full (the link is being resolved) to your Exfat drive.

Solution: Don’t use Exfat. For backups from btrfs, I recommend using btrfs with compression enabled.

Also don’t forget to rebalance your btrfs partitions regularly to reclaim lost space! Also, delete old snapshots!

I take exception to this one:

We must make robust software that can work for years without needing to update

Everything needs maintenance. Everything.

The world turns and the solar system moves through the universe. Nothing can be left alone for long before you have to do something to make sure it will continue working.

Everything left alone rots and gets taken back by nature. Both living things (weeds, animals, other people) and non-living (UV radiation, natural radioactive decay, oxidation) will impact anything and everything humans create.

Even the oldest artifacts that live inside museums need regular maintenance!

Software runs on human-made hardware that has change cycles that result in backwards incompatibilities, end-of-life issues, general expiration (think: motherboard batteries), and technical debt.

There is no situation under which any software can be installed once and then left alone forever. Even NASA sends out software updates to remote, far away probes!

There’s a lot to parse through in regards to the trend discussed in the article…

1. Startups and existing businesses are making thin wrappers around AI APIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and selling it as a service. Their customers can often just skip their service and go straight to the source (ChatGPT), which means their “service” isn’t really providing any value. Businesses like this are just acting as a funnel to bring money into companies like OpenAI.
2. Businesses that do this are basically throwing money away, since they could just buy or rent GPU hardware and run open source models that are just as good (if not better) than ChatGPT and similar. They will pretty much always prefer to rent such hardware though because of how investors view CapEx VS OpEx (EBITDA and all that nonsense).
3. There really is a ton of innovation to be had in this kind of “put an AI in front of it” business! Nearly all B2B is one business making something cheaper, easier, or faster for another business. AI—if done right and used appropriately—really can provide value in one or all of those three things.

There’s a central, great big problem with all of this, though: The cost of electricity and secondarily, the hardware necessary to run AI stuff. There’s so much demand it’s unreal! Yet there’s not enough generating capacity in the world to power all the AI workloads companies like this want to handle.

Having said that, here’s what’s likely to happen:

• AI startups that can perform tasks using the smallest, cheapest (lowest compute overhead) models will thrive. At least until humanity somehow installs enough generating capacity.
• AI startups and existing businesses that over-charge for their services will be completely destroyed by smaller companies that can do the same thing more efficiency (see the first bullet).
• There’s going to be news articles throughout 2026-2027 like this: “Company A sues Company B for stealing trade secrets” when in reality it’s just that Company B reverse engineered their prompt and started offering the same service, cheaper. We’ll also see news like, “Service X’s prompt leaked” and “Service X jailbreak”.
• The AI-driven companies that will survive will be those that offer something beyond just services that pass stuff through a prompt. Otherwise they’ll get overtaken by companies that can do the same thing, cheaper.

The demand for AI-driven stuff (from businesses, not consumers) is insane. There’s no “AI bubble”. OpenAI is probably going to fail because of traditional reasons (too much spending, not enough income) but people need to remember that ChatGPT is not “AI.”

Articles like this are really just propaganda (wishful thinking) trying to soften the blow of Baumol’s Cost Disease:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Industries that benefit heavily from automation reduce costs over time. Industries that rely heavily on services (that require people to perform them) increase costs over time.

If you can somehow convert a big chunk of your economy into services from automated production, you can smooth out the difference in that economic curve. In theory, that means the rich (capitalists) can continue to get richer while everyone else’s salaries flatten out.

It’s total bullshit. The only logical end result of such a situation is the rich getting eaten sooner rather than later.

Smart rich people are (right now) lobbying to get their taxes increased to pay for a better social safety net. Stupid rich people are lobbying for bullshit like converting everything into a subscription economy.

Folks here jest, but this business model is coming to PCs next. Bookmark my words!

(Literally, you can right-click the perma-link to this message and have quick access to it later so you can reply, “Damn, you were right!” And post the link to big PC vendors suddenly offering a similar services because DRAM and GPUs have become so expensive, normal people can’t afford to buy PCs anymore)

It’s also pig-headed!

It’s quite Byzantine for something that’s supposed to be a diagram.

Forbidden chopsticks

Remember folks: Education teaches us that working 9AM to 9PM six days a week is total bullshit.

Of all the things to object to… This?

It’s so silly! No matter what the panel concludes, the current Trump regime will just ignore it anyway. Just like they ignore the IPCC or polling or basic economics.

It’d be like the administration objecting to a panel being formed about vaccines, pollution, corruption, or authoritarianism. Clearly, they don’t care so why bother? It just draws attention to their incompetence.

Just another loud demonstration of their incompetence, actually. Otherwise they wouldn’t have objected.

She got the instructions wrong: Obviously, the Trump administration wanted her to torch the building after the immigrants were inside.

Truly, a keystone of a wise and connected culture.

You’ll want to get an electronics starter kit. There’s zillions of them.

Having said that, the easiest hardware to work with is the rp2040 (RPi Pico) and rp2350 (RPi Pico 2). It’s got USB mass storage support built in which is about as easy as it gets and it does everything and you can use just about any pin for any thing. It really is awesome.

If you can’t find a kit that includes the RPi Pico (or Pico 2) just get a regular kit (e.g. Arduino) and a Pico separately.

Note: I just found this neat thing… https://a.co/d/05qypEzY it looks like it’d be super easy to learn with but you miss out on learning how to use a breadboard but that’s no big deal (you can just do that later).

My favorite these days for embedded stuff is Rust. It’s soooooo nice.

My AHEK-95 keyboard has an IR receiver and I programmed it with a cheap $0.50 remote. I only set it up to send the play/pause, next/prev, and volume control but in theory I could make it work with a huge universal remote to do whatever I want.

There’s a demonstration of it working to send some numbers here: https://youtu.be/iv6Rh8UNWlI