I'm asking you politely: Please don't litter on the internet? AI generated art and music smells.

It's perfectly normal to encounter the idea of datacenters in space and wonder, "Why?" As an aerospace engineer who has been in this industry for ~15 years, let me try to give some historical context: No one has yet found The Idea™ that makes space-based civilizations a profitable investment. 1/

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. FOSS nerds: the Torment Nexus cannot be ethical until it is Open Source

The sheer lack of respect for users in this story makes me glad I bailed on FB years ago. Yeah, I still have an account, just to mess with Zuck’s “active user” stats, but I haven’t logged on in ages.

Illegal migrant in small boat stopped from entering sovereign territory without a permit.

I don't think this excellent Francis Spufford piece on Fantasy from yesterday's Guardian is online yet.

A previously on the ball guy calling refusal to use chatbots "purity culture" is like seeing the worm break through the skin.

Hang on: the largely unstaffed high-throughput lines are being shut down to divert more people into the staff-intensive low-throughput lines? Also: I will look forward to a pro-rated refund/extension on my Global Entry when this “pause” ends. #travel

Half of business owners on this Toronto street estimated that more than 25% of their customers arrived by car. In fact, it was 4%. And the % of customers who who walked or cycled? 72%. Retailers routinely overestimate the # of “car customers.” Via @carltonreid.com www.forbes.com/sites/carlto...

It’s really important that #Vancouver’s Downtown Business Association, who were originally against bike-lanes, are now among their most vigourous supporters, because of ACTUAL EVIDENCE that they’re better for downtown business than any street parking they replaced. Safe bike-lanes mean business.

This is a succinct encapsulation of why I think the market-share dynamics in the #AI market are under-appreciated. There is no platform lock-in, and without that, the monetisation strategy for pure-play vendors looks like fantasy accounting.

This is what kills me about the AI zealots: okay, you got to 95% accuracy. Those are impressive numbers for a college exam. Those are "things go boom" numbers in chemical manufacturing.

Google continues to drive me insane. However, this time it’s not the web apps, but the iPad apps. Google Docs now silently suppresses the “paste as plain text” shortcut, so instead I have to paste styled text, then select it and apply “normal text” styling.

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

🍔 Me, I quite like the idea of lab-grown meat — no killing of animals required. But maybe I’m in the minority? mydigitaldive.com/lab-grown-me... Honest question: how do vegans feel about this? Is it tainted by the original biopsy?

AI FAN: now, you can finally imagine anything you want! ME: I could already do that AI FAN: no this different ME: I'm imagining running you over with a steamroller AI FAN: don't do that ME: now I'm imagining consoling your girlfriend after AI FAN: I don't have a girlfriend ME: I know

Is software dead? Short version: I don't think so. AI looks very much like sustaining innovation, not disruptive innovation. What might disrupt the market is pricing, if vendors don't adapt to the new usage models which AI enables. Regardless, your vibe-coded demo is not a product. Sorry?

Interesting moves in digital sovereignty, as the EU bans use of #AI features due to #privacy concerns. Maybe the EU as a whole is a big enough “customer zero” to kickstart development of a serious alternative to the current US-dominated status quo?

“AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.” lolol not even two pages in.

We are but star dust, And to dust we shall return, Make it worth the ride. #Photography #Haiku

Early on, the CEO is “the best person at the company” at some things. Often sales (passion + knowledge) or product vision. But by 100 people, if the CEO is “better than everyone” at 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, the CEO has hired poorly, and the company is suffering. Tough transition.

Print it out and hang it in the Louvre

Long after it lost the ability to turn up on your doorstep with a warship and stiffly worded letter suggesting you stop that shit *right now*, Britain retained a hell of a lot of soft power. Remarkable to see this government pissing a key part of that down the drain.

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

I mean, I busted out the short bike trousers for the first time this year, but it’s 13° and sunny here; in Cortina it’s 1° max today! I guess the same rule applies in cross-country skiing as in biking: if you’re cold, push harder…

I have watched the sort of cognitive collapse that @simonwillison.net described in real time, as a coder excited to demo all the work they’ve done with vibe-coding goes entirely to pieces when they realise they can’t answer even quite basic questions about the logical structure of what they have.

Facial-recognition tech is the epitome of a product I would enjoy using (I’m terrible at remembering people, sorry) and hate having used on me. It takes a moment of thought to realise this means it must be opposed. See also how people use “AI”. It feels like a superpower if only you have it.

Can confirm: I killed the whole “six seven” thing dead around here by turning my Cringe Dad superpowers on it.

☕ Is #GenAI the death of #enterprise #SaaS? Or are we just seeing its latest evolution? Join me for a coffee and we'll talk through the question.

I very much recommend this book, and even more so at this price! Buy it so we can all get the sequel that @kerstinhall.bsky.social has been trailing…

At this point it would be more honest of Google just to ship Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides as app bundles that include the Electron stack. Functionally that's where we are at anyway, if they require Chrome and a boat-load of RAM to run.

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

NUDE ELON MUSK: The invisible clothes I'm wearing are a product of xAthleisure, which will roll out self-dressing outfits within two years at the latest THE CREDULOUS PRESS: Fully Clothed Tesla Innovator Does It Again

Genuinely, what is the point of #tvOS profiles? I sort of get why they’re not passed through to Netflix, but they don’t even affect the screen saver. Makes it a bit obvious that it’s relying on #iOS internals, which have no concept of multiple user profiles.

📺 TVs doing content-recognition on everything they display is a big no-no to me. My fix: TV is completely offline (never on WiFi, went online with a cable for initial setup and unplugged immediately afterwards), streaming content comes through #AppleTV.

What sort of a week has it been? Well, it's Thursday morning, and I'm taking a break from reviewing web copy by finally putting away all the stuff from the weekend's skiing trip.

-"A new update is available, do you want to install it now?" -"Just tell me it's not f****ng AI." -… -… -"Ok, I'll install it later tonight, when you are asleep."

I’m not a software engineer, but I find it slightly concerning how coding assistants are pay-to-play. What happens to non-commercial software development if it becomes normalised to spend tens of dollars per day on tokens? Or will coders club together to buy hardware to run offline models?

It is so embarrassing that it has taken nearly a decade for a British minister to say this, a statement of the absolute bloody obvious

It's not at all clear that new data centers (whether for "#AI" or anything else) lead to significant new jobs. We are not quite at the mythical data center staffed by a man and a dog — the man to feed the dog, the dog to bite the man if he touches anything — but we are not far off that.

Why does every single website seemingly need to implement its table views as a huge pile of DIVs, instead of just using a TABLE element as God and Tim Berners-Lee intended? I just want to export this tabular data into a spreadsheet without having to futz around, but nooooo.

Consolidation in the #EV charger market is probably rational: it doesn't make sense to have thousands of independent operators. Larger companies can presumably negotiate lower electricity prices, and then either pass those on to consumers or keep them as margin.

I am not at all convinced by these renders of the interior of the new Ferrari Luce, with the floating screens dotted around the cabin. Sure, the Jony Ive connection means everyone will rave about it, but personally I preferred the look of Bentley's Rotating Display, which made the tech disappear.

always so funny to me when people are like “how am I supposed to explain Gay to my kids?” my kid asks me way harder shit all the time. “why did they build the road this way? why are some people bad?” I don’t know. please ask me about Gay

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Your Ring camera can scam passing dogs and compare them to databases of missing dogs and that’s heartwarming and there are absolutely no sinister implications that’s why the guy in the button-down and Dockers is soothing

Why do I get annoyed at American cultural imperialism? - Oh, there’s an event going on in a sport literally no other nation has any interest in; let me plaster your music app in it. - What, you wanted to watch that film in that app you pay for? Sorry, it’s only available to people who pay in USD.

🏂 Capsule review: The new Jones FASE bindings are great, especially for riding with skiers, but if your boots are old, they may peel the sole right off! 😅 #snowboard

We need a moratorium on the following depictions of AI: gleaming white robots, floating blue holographic brains, glowing amber lines connecting a dark globe, Lawnmower Man style 1990s computer graphics, semitransparent screens floating in the air showing vector art faces, robot & human handshakes

What people need to understand is that safe bike infrastructure means not only freedom for kids, but *freedom for their parents*. I just met a captain at San Quentin whose kid rides 3.5 miles to middle school every day. A parent doing drop-off and pick-up would spend 60 more minutes in the car.