These AI labs shouldn’t be private profit-seeking corporations. They should be more like publicly-funded nonprofit research institutions like Fermilab or something. It doesn’t seem possible to even talk about the labs without feeling like you’re increasing their value. That’s a problem. It’s also a problem that the research and announcements from the labs sound like publicity stunts. It’s hard to tell what’s genuine and what’s buzz for the press. There’s this arms race between the labs that’s negatively affecting seemingly everything. This should all just be put to an end. Step on the brakes. I don’t claim to know how to do that when the Constitution makes private property sacred, but, you know, just throwing the idea out there… The Constitution can always be changed.

Mrs Darwin

7 April 1852
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him—
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.

Carol Ann Duffy

I’m just gonna drop these links here.

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2026/06/leiden-declaration-warns-ai-is-challenging-the-core-values-of-mathematics

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.02859

Sure, let’s just ruin the most challenging and fun pursuit humans have ever engaged in by turning it into a competition of who can find the right prompt and throw the most money at the AI companies.

Capitalization is also wrong. The school district needs to quit its job as a school district.

It’s such a tragedy that the Earth had to be a sphere. I mean, I know it was inevitable. But come on, universe. A sphere? Really? You had to have known about Gauss’s Theorema Egregium, yet you chose sphere. Now we’re all fighting over who gets to be squished or enlarged and in what directions.

With Prodigy Internet, you get on, you get the information you need, and you go do something with it.

Did they get that burrito from the Upside Down?

My local Microcenter has posters of notable computer pioneers up high in the back where you can see them from anywhere in the store. Each poster has the person’s name as well as a description of something they’re most known for. Bill Gates is there as well as Ken Thompson, Robert Kahn, Robert Metcalfe, Grace Hopper, Richard Stallman, etc. I always thought that was a nice touch. Even though it’s like the nerdiest of all stores, I suspect 90% of customers are probably Windows normies and just need a computer for work or to play games and wouldn’t recognize any of them with the exception of Gates. Even I don’t recognize some of the names, like Kahn (co-invented TCP/IP) and Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet).

Every community on the internet full of computer nerds suffers this problem. It’s not exclusive to here.

In that case, hunt down Immortan Joe and pay him to do it. He and his goons have the experience for this sort of thing.

Something you might like: https://bootstrappable.org/

Most users don’t care about any of the spying. I’d expect a competitor of similar size to do the same. If there’s any improvement competition could bring, it would be for the creators, giving them a larger slice of the ad revenue that otherwise goes to the owners of the platform. I guess that would mean better quality videos for users. Though, I don’t think allowing anyone to make boatloads of money by getting millions of people to sit around for hours and hours watching videos has been a positive for humanity. Incentivizing creators with more money will just make this worse.

Right. Except you can’t influence the Chinese government. Whereas you can, if you are American, influence the American government (through elections, say). And the American government can, in turn, possibly influence the tech companies. And they do. See: the antitrust enforcement in the Biden administration.

As an American, I can’t say I’d be terribly enthused about using a YouTube competitor based in a foreign country. And China is quite foreign to us as far as countries go. And I use YouTube constantly.

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.

That’s not his site. This is his official campaign site.. He’s a republican running in New York’s district 21.^[1] The flyer pictured in the post and the website on the flyer are a parody by someone else.

Is the last thing you hear before going under anesthesia

Folder is better. On disk, a folder is a list of pairs of a name and number, mapping the items in the folder to their location on the disk i.e. it’s a directory. The days before computerization are before my time, but, as I understand it, library index cards worked this way. You might have a card for each author which listed the books by that author with the location of the index card on that book, and you might have directory cards on subjects or keywords too, and the card on a book might point to the location of the book on the shelf and the card for the author, etc., or something like that. It would be most confusing to call these directory cards “folders”. The computer does the same thing internally, but the user interface has hidden away any notion of directory. They’re logically folders. It’s only a directory if you’re writing a file system implementation.

KDE’s Plasma Desktop has a web search plugin that I use all the time. Typing the Win (Super) key followed by wp:Sistine Chapel and then the Enter key brings me straight to the Wikipedia entry on the Sistine Chapel. imdb:Jurassic Park brings me to the IMDb page for Jurassic Park. yt: will search YouTube, and so on. There are around 200 keywords pre-programmed into it, including for searching programming language documentation. Unlike the Windows feature displayed here, it doesn’t use the network unless you specify a prefix and it accesses only the service you specify by the keyword. Whoever added this feature had to do so very little work compared to the payoff. It just takes the part after the colon and inserts it into a search URL for the corresponding service and opens that URL in the browser. It’s very convenient. None of this web search stuff comes up when you’re just searching for apps and there are no surprises.