It's because economists haven't got the memo yet that informs them that smartphones have been recategorized as, "durable goods".
riskable
joined 2 years ago
It's good to know that incompetence is still the guiding principle of the Trump administration 👍
Let's look at the logic here: If we don't expect troops to defy illegal orders, that means some commanding officer could order his troops to kill the president 🤔
That's illegal but... The Trump administration thinks orders should be followed no matter what.
Doesn't matter: Nobody uses right shift for anything but pinball games!
This has happened to me three times:
- 2 AM: We had left our car door open and the officer was concerned that someone had broken into the vehicle and left it open in a hurry when they saw his police car coming down the street. Nope, we just got home real late from a long flight (an hour prior) and were tired AF when unloading.
- My neighbor's truck was stolen; twice (the replacement was stolen a week after he got it). The officer wanted to know how sketchy my neighbor was and if it was likely insurance fraud. Nope: That guy washed and polished his truck every week. He loved that thing.
- The officer was investigating Medicaid fraud and wanted to interview our autistic daughter to see if she had taken part in it (it involved a taxi service that she used regularly to go to appointments). When he found out she was (mostly high functioning) autistic he was basically done because she obviously wasn't mentally sophisticated enough to have intentionally participated in any such scheme. He went from "obviously* suspicious and skeptical to all smiles and applauded us for adopting and taking care of an autistic adult (my wife met her though the Big Brothers Big Sisters org).
From a legal standpoint, my home is the most boring place possible. If we're doing something illegal, it's news to us! LOL.
I have had my phone tapped by the FBI too! They must've been bored out of their minds, being forced to listen to my exceptionally boring conference calls at work for weeks on end 🤣
How do I know it was tapped?
- The phone company fucked up the tap. My totally stable phone line suddenly went to shit after a big news event at my previous employer. I could hear static regularly, cross-talk with police radio, and even an, "oops I hope he didn't hear that!" Moment (LOL).
- They sent me a nice letter a year or so later saying they did it as part of an investigation with the most terse language possible.
I'm in the camp of, "if it's good, why should I care?" However, I'm all for transparency! Passing off AI-generated music as human-generated is fraud. Be honest!
There's a LOT of grey areas though. If you're a vocalist and you're using an AI-generated background? How's that any different from pressing "play" on a sequencer or even an audio file (of some sequenced or drum track)?
If you're a lyricist, the actual music isn't as important as the lyrics. Does it matter if they used AI to generate the music or should every lyricist be forced to pay someone to make the music for them or master an instrument (or sequencer)?
What if you're trying to translate your music into a different language and use AI to translate it? Is that AI-generated music? You can give your whole damned song to AI and it'll convert to a different language in-place without having to re-record it. It even uses your singer's voice!
To me, it's incredible technology and it's enabling artists of all kinds to do cool things with their music. It seems rather paternalistic to suggest someone's creativity doesn't "count" if they didn't sweat or spend years practicing to create it.
We need some massive breakthroughs in AI efficiency soon or we're going to literally run out of RAM manufacturing capacity for all the things. The situation is so bad that in no time at all you're likely to be put on a six-month waiting list to buy a new PC/laptop or mobile phone.
Related: Every Fn key on a keyboard is a missed opportunity! That's not fun at all!
Well, I sort of agree but I'd be more specific: It's a chat LLM bubble where all the money is going to a few players that do that. LLMs for other purposes (e.g. programming) have already begun to diverge and I believe they'll continue to do so.
My hypothesis is that programming LLMs will reach a plateau soon where even the open source models perform within 90% of the most expensive, top-performing commercial models (e.g. Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3). When that happens, the market will switch from a handful of big players to a whole lot of service providers that merely host all the open source models like Ollama Cloud does today.
Yep! There's really only ONE operating system that doesn't do rsync over SSH. Can you guess which one? 😁
BTW: FolderSync does it on Android for free... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.lite (only OK-ish GUI but it works).
Magnolias with beetle pollination FTW! 😤
New maximum age to run for office just dropped: 66