A while ago I set up a Siri shortcut that opens ChatGPT in voice mode. Now I can just say “hey siri, ask the demon” and in a moment start talking to ChatGPT with no further commands and zero buttons pressed throughout. It answers in voice mode.

This is pretty useful for things like doing units conversions while my hands are sticky during cooking, or just doing simple information lookups while my hands are busy. I use ChatGPT responsibly, never trusting it for things that aren’t one-dimensional information retrievals and summarization. It works great for me for like 50-60% of the things I used to Google. Internet search is, once again, just for finding websites, like it should be.

What’s my point? We don’t need Siri Apple Intelligence to ship. There’s already something better. And it runs on my iPhone 14, which isn’t even compatible with Apple Flatulence.

Yes. He took too much inspiration from Stanford University’s “Stanley” winning the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. This was an early completion to build viable autonomous vehicles. Most of them looked like tanks covered in radar dishes but Stanford wound up taking home the gold with just an SUV with cameras on it.

It was an impressive achievement in computer vision, and the LiDAR-encrusted vehicles wound up looking like over-complex dinosaurs. There’s a great documentary about it narrated by John Lithgow (who, throughout it, pronounces the word robot as “ro-butt”). Elon watched it, made up his mind, and like a moron, hasn’t changed it in 20 years. I’m almost Musk’s age so I know how the years speed up as we go on. He probably thinks about the Stanford win as something that happened relatively recently. Especially with his mind on - ahem - other things, he’s not keeping up with recent developments out in the real world.

Rober just made Musk look like the absolute tool he is. And I’m a little worried that we may see people out there staging real world versions of this somehow with actual dangerous obstacles, not a cartoonish foam wall.

Honestly I think they suffer a little from early-mover disadvantage.

“Cheap Chinese” and all the associations that come with that is a little reductive in this case. Roborock vacuums are not actually cheap - they are extraordinarily well-made, featureful, and a good value compared to iRobot.

Decades ago, iRobot probably spent millions in R&D just to arrive at navigation algorithms that were worse than what you can get with open-source libraries today. They also spent the marketing dollars to convince people these robots were safe and effective. They weren’t always, so there were some ups and downs in that.

Nowadays the supporting technologies are all much more advanced (and cheaper) and the market for these robots has been created already and is very robust. Companies like Roborock just have to come in and build a good product and they’ll see much faster returns than iRobot did for all those years. They can go straight to lidar, which was probably prohibitive for iRobot for many years, leading iRobot to invest heavily in other technologies which are now a generation behind.

So in addition to their decades of tech legacy. iRobot is burdened with the expectations of longtime investors who want a big cashout, just as they are getting eaten alive by all this new competition. They pinned their hopes on a big exit and are now holding the bag. It’s not surprising that this all left them in trouble.

setting up companies just to be bought by mega corps

iRobot was originally founded all the way back in 1990 and have sold quite a lot of Roomba vacuums, advancing innovation in home automation along the way. I don’t think anyone can ever say that they set up this company for a quick flip corpo pump and dump.

I take this as a sign that it genuinely still works to block ads and hasn’t sold out and become malware like those others that used to be popular.

Thoughts? Frankly, none.

That was genuinely pulled out of my ass. Not a benchmark comparison. It’s just my perception that cards only get incrementally better each year, but “this year’s card” is always proportionally much more expensive for what you get. Few games actually demand the very latest and greatest, so I don’t know why people would ever pay the premium for the latest and greatest.

You’re saying that all backlit LCDs are projectors?

Sometimes a product winds up in late-stage enshittification before its sector is fully developed. Just as the thing it does is beginning to fully explode, it begins to aggressively harvest its brand value. They miss the big wave, and everyone asks what happened. That’s one disadvantage in moving early. You also hit enshittification early.

For years now the prices on this year’s latest cards are so high that I don’t know who buys them. I can afford to spend $1000 but I never would when I can probably get 85% of the performance for $250.

I see you’ve fallen into thinking that as long as we don’t talk about race, there’s no racism. And that actively trying to do something about racism draws attention to it, and is therefore racist.

The whole “I don’t see race” thing is empty. You can claim you don’t see race and so you don’t want to hear about it, while black people systematically get turned down for mortgages and have their houses appraised for less.

Maybe you don’t “see race” but society as a whole still does and you can see it in the numbers. Pointing that out and asking what we can do about it is not racism! That is not what racism ever was.

I would say that “not seeing race” is all well and good but you shouldn’t try to say that because you don’t think you see race, no one does, and therefore everyone should never mention it again. Do you see how that’s several leaps of logic thrown into one? And it makes you look like you’re desperate to bury any talk of the subject, which might be, you know… racist?

I agree the end state we would all like is one where no one sees race. But there’s no use pretending we are there when we aren’t.

Yep. Interestingly, conservatives disagree on this. They’ll say that black people have absolutely nothing to complain about post Civil Rights Act of 1964. They think that once the law changed, everything else is just a matter of personal merit and fortune. They only recognize institutional racism. They seem to think either that personal and cultural racism doesn’t exist, or (more likely) that that is a personal choice which no one has any business complaining about.

You’re asking why this culture is still around when segregation ended in 1964. Culture has a way of sticking, generally. But look at this timeline.

Slavery was a thing for hundreds of years, and segregation for decades. It’s very deeply rooted. I hate it, but I’m not baffled by it.

I realize that a lot of people casually brush it aside as a very evil, imperial sounding thing without understanding what a basic organizing model it has been for most of the world for 70 years, and how much their own little personal reality depends on it, whether they get that or not.

We’re arguing about whether music videos are videos and therefore there will be ads on videos… Here’s what the article says. Pretty straightforward.

With YouTube Lite, customers will be able to watch videos across verticals like gaming, fashion, beauty, cooking, news, and more, ad-free, but will be shown ads on music content and music videos.

My YT usage includes exactly zero anything related to music, so this seems relevant for me.

Such a bummer that I can’t use one here in the US.

I think they would say something like “our allies have been getting more from their alliances with us than we have been getting from those alliances, and we’re tired of being the donor in all these relationships.”

Of course, they are ignoring the fact that our alliances add up to American world domination, which has uniquely tremendous economic benefits for the US. They take that for granted though, feel entitled to it, don’t want to pay for it anymore because they don’t think it can ever change.

It’s just like their attitude on vaccines. They take herd immunity utterly for granted now and only see the minute risks of getting the shot themselves.

Sometimes the hype bubble bursts and then the products eventually grows to be even larger than the hype. But you never know how connected hype actually is to any realistic timeline. Hype can pop like a cherry tree flowering on the first sunny day of spring, thinking summer has arrived, but then get drenched by another few weeks of rain. And as stupid as that cherry tree is, summer will eventually arrive.

This is a good point. It’s never sat right with me that LLMs require such overwhelming resources and cannot be optimized. It’s possible that innovation has been too fast to worry about optimization yet, but all this BS about building new power plants and chip foundries for trillions of dollars and whatnot just seems mad.

Trump would blame the woke.