The real problem is that Apple has entered a phase where there are too many BOZOS in leadership roles. And so far, no one seems to be focused on purging them

Steve, for all his faults, had a strong - No Bozos! - policy. Because they donâ(TM)t just do their own bad work, they make everyone elseâ(TM)s work suck as well.

I would add Liquid Glass, the announced-but-never-made charging pad, the many announced-but-never-shipped features of Apple AI in the previous version of MacOS, the addition of ads to Apple Maps, the claims that Apple Store employees can/are signing folks up for services accounts without having to ask the customers permission, etc to the long list of signs that Apple has a serious case of BOZO-ITIS.

The fact that some of its new hardware is also derivative is just more evidence of the same root problem

Obviously, I agree.

My other question, is how long will they be able to get away with this sort of thing, before customers decide the risk of disclosing your data to these external AI firms, is greater than the cost of building the capacity to run your own models in-house.

I don't use LLM, generally. But I was messing around and got some older models running on my laptop last night. Nothing special, no idea what I would use them for (couldn't generate a paragraph of text before clearing losing all coherence, because these were small old models running on 5 year old hardware). Supposedly Mac Studios and Mac minis are selling like hotcakes because hobbyists want to run local models. How long before the Venn Diagram for "can be run locally" and "capable enough model" overlaps for most use cases, making the risk of data exfiltration by these firms not worth the risk?

Lot of words to say this kind of thing may accelerate the bubble bursting.

How many of the other miraculous math solutions attributed to LLMs recently were similarly snooped from academics who bowed to pressure to stay silent on the matter?

I used duckduckgo for a while. I switched to Kagi last year. Not everyone is willing to pay, up front, for search. But if you do, the experience is even better, because there are no ads to watch out for at all. Everything is search results.

Except that non-ai search engines still work, whereas Google does not, unless you manually step in to tell it what to do. Still a reversion. And not an unavoidable one

The reason Google rose to dominance is that their algorithm accounted for trustworthiness. You didnâ(TM)t need to know the site that had your answer, Google knew it, and ranked it at the top of your results. This is basically asking you to manually do what Google historically did automatically, which is to vet websites that might contain answers to your queries. All so that they can inject LLMs into a process that does not need them. Yet one more reason Iâ(TM)m glad I ditched Google.

Itâ(TM)s like they think every person they have ever responded to is actually the same person, and so all those disparate conversations were one conversation with a single individual whoâ(TM)s refusing to listen.

there was a professor I knew who worked like that. He always seemed to jump into the middle of an ongoing conversation when he started talking with you. A conversation YOU might not have been part of previously, but it was the only conversation he ever had.

I always just chalked it up to him being autistic AF.

Exactly. The reason they do it this ways is it is that it keeps the power in private hands. They can decide to change funding, change priorities, use their position as leverage against municipalities wanting the funding, or simply as a corrupt bribery fund masquerading as charity.

Seriously, I am sick of these vanity charity projects. Just pay your fair share of taxes, and let us, collectively, decide on our priorities. Because this shit will not be evenly applied, and considering the popularity of a antivax beliefs, and the level of international travel, it his will simply not work without a global commitment. And as bad as the cold and flu can be, there are kids who are going into debt with their school over getting breakfast.

Yes, I saw that. And when combined with the quote towards the end, explains why his position is so fucking insulting.

This basically means that if your part of the movie making process can be performed by this tech, now or in the future, then your job doesn't really matter. Which is a wild take considering that he felt like he could not release the video without the parts AI provided, and which would have been handed to a person to do before AI exists, or if he'd had the budget for it.

Fact is the job DOES matter. He just does not want to have to address the difficult question of what is lost by using AI to do creative work that would previously have gone to a human profession, or what it means that he is willing to make that substitution without any apparent concern for the folks that decision harms. He is yet-another rich-fuck who does not care about the human consequences of technology, so long as they do not impact him personally. Fuck him, and fuck anyone who agrees with him.

Heâ(TM)s saying that Visual effects designers are not important. Because heâ(TM)s replacing somebodies work with AI output.

if I were someone who worked in that field, making the kind of content he used AI to create, and then dismissed my work as unimportant, Iâ(TM)d be salty as fuck.

their work is important enough that the film could not be considered complete without it, but not important enough to have a person do it. There is a clear double standard being promulgated here, that amounts to victim bling. Essentially that if AI can do your job, then by definition, your job is not important. Easy for the guy deciding where and when to us AI to decide in a way that does not put his own contributions to the process at risk of being replaced by AI. Fuck this guy and anyone who accepts this BS justification.

That makes no sense at all. If the company is spending $2-3k, for something they charge only $200, then it is an introductory price. To get you hooked. They have to charge you $3-4k at some point of they want to make money. Their suppliers want to get paid, and their investors want to stop losing money eventually. By ask means take advantage while the deal is good, but donâ(TM)t be so naive as to expect the deal to be good forever.

I wonder what they will do when the cost of AI increases?

We all know that AI companies are selling their services at a loss. Often on a cost-of-compute- basis, but even more so when you factor in model training costs incurred with investor cash. And that is even before we account for how the shortages of relevant hardware and server space for running all of this are driving up the costs of memory, chips, etc. Or the fact that the energy crisis is only getting started, and will impact literally every part of the value chain for addressing the current and future demand.

Most of the sunk costs to date, have been funded with investor cash, but those investors are going to start wanting to get paid back with a strong multiple of their investments to date. That means, as companies reorganize around the use of AI - at the current prices - they are creating a potential nightmare of cost forecasting and control when the AI vendors all decide it is time to start generating that pay-back by sticking the screws to their customers. This is CLASSIC ENSHITIFICATION.

This is a case of spreading FUD by presenting true facts in a sensationalist light.

we have been breeding agricultural plants for higher carbon concentrations, at the expense of everything else in the plant, since the dawn of human domestication of plants. This. Is. Not. New. And as such, should not be scary or cause for alarm.

to the extent that global CO2 levels are adding to the normal trend of breeding pants for higher yields, itâ(TM)s is likely to be the least significant way in which global CO2 levels pose a risk to you. Sea level rise, heat stroke, water shortages, resource wars, ecological systems collapsing ⦠all far, FAR more dangerous than a few extra calories per ton of grain. Most western diets are biofortified with minerals and vitamins already, so the plants natural contribution to your diet is already negligible in many situations.

January 6th attack on the capital involved a lot of proud boys. Several of whom were convicted for their actions that day.