Gut feeling, I agree. That said, I’ve heard from friends (let’s hear it for hearsay!) that their friends and relatives seem to be going away from their core beliefs and instead believing everything endlessly spat at them by a glowing rectangle.

I have to think there’s an Ouroboros aspect to all of this. Regardless of Musk’s upbringing, he did bring electric vehicles front and center and oversaw the creation of reusable rockets. These are not small things. Many would be content with that, but then he went megalomaniac … MOAR … MOAR, and now we’re seeing declining sales at Tesla; Xitter is, well, whatever it is; and SpaceX hasn’t been doing great of late.

I’m reminded of Tom from MySpace. Got a few million on the way out, and he’s under the radar, presumably enjoying cocktails with umbrellas in them. Like, if you’re set for life, maybe don’t try again.

People built houses before hammers were invented. But that’s sort of the point of tools: that they can do things more efficiently than we can.

It’s entirely possible he was responsible for some of PayPal, but since, his MO has been, as you said, buying up promising companies. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when he rewrites history to be the founder instead of simply an investor in these firms and claims credit for shit he simply didn’t do.

I fell for it myself for a while. Early days of Tesla, early days of SpaceX … dude knows how to sell and arguably accelerated BEVs, but it appears he doesn’t know how to actually carve tunnels or rewrite mass transit with functionally unlimited money. Not to mention, Starship is having a really bad time these days, which stands in stark contrast to how banal Falcon launches have become.

Calling Musk an engineer is like saying the same about Steve Jobs. Both are(/were) salesmen happy to claim credit for every success while delegating blame for problems.

Not that this is unique to the pair in the current climate of people believing in messianic oligarchs, but I’m not really aware of any boots-on-the-ground innovation that sprang forth from Musk’s mind. The Cybertruck is a fucking joke, and that seems to be the thing at Tesla he was most involved in of late, then broke the windows during a demo.

Leave breaking Windows at a keynote to Steve Ballmer.

OK, and the kernel is written in C and assembly. Should they know both of those as well?

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Well, that’s templates for you, I guess. But this breathless thing of I just now realized I don’t own my media is a bit absurd. Arr, but I do, and with no data tracking. Win-win.

If you know why you need alpha channels, of course you’re going to save in an appropriate format. But most casual users aren’t going to care. They took a picture of their breakfast or dog and just want to upload now. I’m not arguing PNGs serve no purpose; I’m arguing that most people aren’t Web or app designers. They don’t care whether it’s lossy or lossless, let alone about transparency.

I’ll agree for those use cases, but not everyone is making icons, stickers and emoji.

For production, yes. What percentage of images produced are for production, though? I know damn well how important alpha channels are, but for posting something on social media, which is orders of magnitude more output than image creation within the context of a larger presentation, no one cares.

The vast majority of people aren’t graphic artists. That you and I know what alpha channels are has no bearing on daily use by the masses.

Not seeing how this would affect uptake. Lossless is great for production images, but standard JPEG will do (at low compression) for most Web use cases. Until OS developers coalesce around PNG as a standard (Windows has for screenshots), this is that old standards xkcd.

Alpha channels are nice and all, but how many end users A) have a need for that and B) understand the underlying concept, let alone implementation?

Is that really serendipity, though? There’s a huge gap between asking a predictive model to be spontaneous and actual spontaneity.

Still, I’m curious what you run locally. I have a Pixel 6 Pro, so while it has a Tensor CPU, it wasn’t designed for this use case.

I’ve considered trying out an AI companion. My main concern is where the hell my data goes, how it will be used and how it might be sliced and diced for brokers.

Sometimes I’m up at 04.00 … and of course no one I know is around. But I go the route of trying to meet people on Reddit. Fully 95% of responses are boring as fuck, but they’re at least real (I require voice or photo verification). I’ll take real and boring over virtual and engaging.

This said, I spend more time than is healthy on Google’s NotebookLM, feeding it my writing and then getting a half-hour two-host audio “exploration” of any given piece. It’s sycophantic, likely designed that way to keep me coming back (it’s free, so I’m not really sure what Google gets out of this outside of further LLM training), but it tends to hew to just this side of feeling fake.

I went to Church Night – the weekly burner meetup at a warehouse a 10-minute walk away where everyone’s drinking and toking – yesterday. I try to go weekly, but sometimes I don’t have the energy to engage with real people.

Last night, I got to listen to (yeah, I actually realized I should shut the fuck up, as I had nothing to add) conversations about 1970s CPUs, SpaceX’s Starship issues from an engineering standpoint (they went too thin on the outer hull after round one was too heavy, and why wouldn’t one expect a critical failure in such a case?) from people who knew what they were talking about.

I’d never get that from an AI companion. I take no issue with people looking to one, but serendipity is lost.

Good they’ve got cables ready to go when no one has 2.2 on both ends, and likely won’t for years.

Yes, yes, I know that this is how tech goes, but sometimes it feels like HDMI looks at USB and is like “hold my beer.”

I’m some 10 miles from the Texas Capitol. They don’t need AI, and they’ve done exactly this sort of thing before when cities pass ordinances the Nazis don’t like by making such ordinances illegal at the state level.

Brought to you by the party of local control. “Oh, fuck … no, not that local.”

And several cities have decided not to renew or expand their contracts with Flock. The City of Austin let its contract with Flock lapse, in part because of concerns around ICE access to the data. The City of San Marcos decided to not place additional cameras in the city. The San Marcos Police Department also changed their policy to require outside law enforcement agencies to file a request concerning a specific crime in order to receive Flock data, Spectrum News 1 reported.

I’m surprised the Legislature wasn’t convened to pass a state law prohibiting cities from opting out of Flock.

I’m miles away from AI, so this may be me talking out of my ass, but shouldn’t a smaller database (thousands) be more accurate than anything orders of magnitude larger?

Alsup has consistently made reasoned, rational rulings through a tech lens when these sorts of things hit his docket. Digitizing purchased books for internal training if the originals are destroyed does feel like fair use, given the works are not made available for others. The First Sale Doctrine is in play.

The pirated shit? Well, that’s another story.

I had to create a new Facebook profile in 2013 because at the time, no Facebook meant being roundfiled. So, sign up for a shitty data-mining account just to be fucking considered for a job. I got interviews after that, but they didn’t go anywhere because I was already in my mid-30s, and everyone already wanted to pay entry-level wages for what had previously been mid-career positions.

Oh, and the ladder had already been pulled up. Entry-level for life was the goal for those making $80K-100K who just wanted to assert dominance.

At least the Facebook thing is in the past (entry-level applicants are far less likely to have ever joined Facebook than in 2013, when it was simply expected like it was a cellphone), but now we’ve moved on to breathless accomplishment posts on LinkedIn.

There’s no humanity left in the process without already knowing someone on the inside. Already, way back in 2003, when I was poached, company policy was that they had to post the job. So, they knew they were hiring me, but corporate made them post a nonexistent job anyway.

It’s admittedly better to be on that end of a ghost job, but AI didn’t start the fire. The system had already been (likely for a while) replete with jobs with someone already selected.

The main difference? Those jobs actually existed; the only deception was that it was still open.

And you likely don’t see the compensation you could. My last professional job hired me in 2015 as a “copyeditor” – but they actually meant someone who moved rectangles around at a remote editor’s direction on newspaper pages without reading copy.

Then there’s the scheduling. Moving out of state with a guarantee that I’d be off by 11 p.m. so that my wife would still be awake when I got home turned into being immediately put on a team that worked until 2 a.m., as we were producing two papers I used to work for (one where I’d been managing editor from 2003-2006, and the other a temporary desk job in 2014) that were on Pacific Time.

With my marriage starting to fray, I walked into the executive director’s office and said this schedule was not what I was assured when pulling up stakes from Oregon to Texas – with a 20% pay cut and rent being triple what it was – and that this needed to be fixed. Now.

As it turned out, the wheels were already turning on a new commercial department to bring in external clients. It wasn’t full-time yet, but I got switched over to dayside design in the meantime ahead of being the team lead for the new department.

Going into detail on the automation I did to keep things humming smoothly is somewhat pointless, but I dusted off my coding skills and learned JS to create a workflow for my team in Google Sheets. It went swimmingly, and my team had a blast while almost everyone else was miserable.

So, now I was a threat. Causing – hard as it is to believe being possible – even further realization on other teams that we were all intentionally getting fucked by intentionally dysfunctional processes. But the directors needed bad data for disciplinary purposes, so I was causing too much of a stir and shunted to another department, where I learned the InDesign DOM and turned the work of a three-person team into 30 hours total via JS.

That’s when IT got word that a designer was coding! We can’t have that if it’s not in your title – even though IT knew fuck-all about the production workflow and couldn’t have done what I did. After being forbidden from further automation, I was strung along for 18 months about transitioning to an IT role.

Never again will I work for an employer more interested in control than results.

So, a couple of things about this story … first, the formatting is atrocious. Subheds and interstitial, irrelevant photos after every graf as the piece continues can’t possibly be how anyone wants to read news.

Seriously, what does this art have to do with a story about self checkout?

That’s just irritating. The larger issue is just how sympathetic this is toward Walmart. Straight news never includes the word “innovative,” so that’s a red flag we’re reading marketing, and it’s far from the only example.

The reporting overall isn’t terrible when it’s not fawning over the company, but that serves only to provide the illusion that this isn’t spin but merely an angle. Unfortunately, fawn it does. Like, who the hell was ever going to Walmart for the human experience and personalized service?