spandrew

It signals Anthropic is growing faster than OpenAI, and the market still feels the upside of AI is that it will eat all software and services.

This is the most Gilfoyle-coded comment of the day

This article nails it: Google is not the place for AI summaries.

It undermines the utility of search—and also Adwords? The benefit of Google to the world is to funnel people to the right websites. Not to summarize the website's content.

Oftentimes the AI is presenting a summary of 2 dudes on Reddit discussing something as if it is universal fact.

I'm not anti-AI by any means——but Google has lost the plot on why people go there.

There were a lot of YouTube science-fluencers talking about how dumb this idea was. Google themselves called it a Moonshot (har har).

Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.

This isn't an arguement I'm making.

There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio.

Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.

You pay for a game——if the game is not good, and patches are provided "for free" that doesn't mean much.

Here, NMS launched with abysmal content and atrocious systems. Now at least it doesn't have abysmal content. A bad game is a bad game (yes, my opinion).

I disagree with this logic.

They launched an empty, hollow game. And the features they've bolted on "for free" haven't addressed any of the core gameplay or emptiness issues people have with it. Most of their new systems are half baked—confusing and only adding to the game design mess the game came out with.

I'm convinced the reputation that they executed a "turnaround" is based on them staggering a few nonsense releases and being good on social media ad spends. The game is still bad and not worth the money.

The benefit to the NMS team for this is they'll have people half willing to try their next game because they "didn't give up". Not the worse idea, but I think we're over stating the heroicness of this.

Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies.

To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great.

Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?)

It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?

Amazon also did this for their "Look Inside" feature. To do this they had to spin up massive digital infrastructure——then realized that they could sell that infrastructure and make more money than from the books they were scanning.

This is was what ended up spinning up AWS as a business.

I dislike the idea of destroying rare books--but how rare? A digital copy has a lot more benefit.

Everytime a student says this—it's because they're procrastinating on their work. The hardest part about anything new is starting it. Once you build some momentum, interest and focus tends to build as well.There certainly are some homework assignments that are boring.

A child today can absolutely be successful at doing their homework if they have time to... sit down and write, or draw, or do crafts or things that require them to focus. It's not like Screens exist, therefore no attention span.

What's happening is people are only fixating on screens, and foregoing these slower forms of media. That's akin to saying all children will be obese now that fast food is around. Of course, obesity rates will sky rocket if all you eat is fast food. But if a kid grows up to have homecooked meals, and eat with their parent(s) then they won't. It's as simple as that.

This is too simplistic. There are disciplines, like Anatomy, where you're basically just memorizing bones, glands, and other parts of the human body. For organic chemistry, students need to memorize most of the krebs cycle diagram for their exams (because doing so and drawing it lets them reference it later).

Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.

Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.

Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).

AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.

Why would they give away a trillion dollars when their goal is to make a trillion more?

Yeah but that's not what the discourse around water and AI is. When people speak about water and AI/dc's, they're indicating that water is being "taken" from other uses. As if a AI usage will oneday cause you to turn on your facet and nothing but an auto-tuned cackle comes out. That the well has gone dry. That water is a scarce resource (which, sometimes it is, esp. if you're drawing from an aquifer in the southwest)

A data centre's construction sentiment clogging pipes is fixable; an acute issue. The discourse is that AI causes chronic strain.

But like... the same people will watch 2-3 hours of HD Netflix or post on TikTok right after lodging their complaints on Reddit. The MW/h of AI isn't that big compared to these services. And the carbon sync of digital goods, including data centres, pales in comparison to the supply chain of Blockbuster. Nobody gave af then.

The reason they're cherry picking AI is because we're all sick of seeing tech billionaires thrive when everyone else is pressed by inflation and stagnant job markets.

I wish people would knock this off. There is zero path to AGI at the moment — and all the Anthropic/pentagon Sam Altman/AI-skynet stuff is scaring people into being fearful (and outright ignorant) to the actual uses of this probabilistic NPL tool.

You can't use AI atm without a human with proper knowledge spot checking and directing it. We should market it that way.

This is not correct. People trust their "apps". They know Spotify's algo can feed them novel music. They know Kobo's reader connects to libraries in a way that isn't the DRM-lockin that Amazon shovels.

Most non-tech folks are incredibly skeptical about AI due to the piss-poor brand management of OpenAI and Anthropic—pushing an AGI Skynet post-employment narrative to make the tech feel bigger than it is.

I trust Google (and certainly Apple) to figure some of this stuff out—but nobody wants an LLM, that nobody knows how it operates, to run the show entirely. Heuristically, we may get away with a Human-on-the-loop approach—-not a Human-in-the-loop or Out-of-the-loop approach.

You're making a hubris-laden assumption coders know the gaps their baking into their software — that any human has a decent enough grip on the multitudes of spinning logic duct taped together to make the internet run. Most vulnerabilities aren't "ignored"; they're in a neverending backlog or unknown.

If you closed all of the AI-discovered security vulnerabilities tomorrow - by the next day there'd be a host of new ones. That's software, baby.

I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in).

Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch.

If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks.

Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.

Yea, the front service desk worker doesn't deserve that shit. Dick move.

Apple used to be like... the standard for how to do this.

IMO we're losing a lot of writing craftsmanship across many industries with Gen X'ers retiring

Let me push back and say that is not the point of university.

If you take the stance that education's function is to act like a feeder for business institutions; I guess? But that's only one byproduct of a strong education. Another is research; the other is critical thinking and civil productivity as a whole.

I'm as pro-capital as any private industry-focused tech worker is; but lets not pretend that's all the value we get out of the humanities.

Ever watch Netflix these days? Woof.

A social media ad company would be the least favourable. At least Google's central ad business is based off of search queries the user gives to them willingly for value.

Not me — Perplexity is so much better than Google. This troll bid made me laugh

I have to admit, everytime I hear the "Two guys hated x, so they built their own!" I see the XCKD cartoon https://xkcd.com/927/

It's not a fair comparison; competition can drive price down, but I pessimistically just see two guys who'll inevitably join the Comcast billionaires club. That's just where these "small guys" end up.

People pointing out NLP are missing the point — pulling and crafting rules to run effective NLP is time consuming and technical. With an LLM you can just ask it exactly what you want and it interprets. That's the value; and as this deal just proved it's worth the scaling costs.

A future where Miyazaki prefecture become littered with grandparent-fueled Ghibli characters and quickly become overrun with tourists...

Or kids at this specific stop are treated to a moment of joy while waiting for their train to come...

Time will tell...

Carbon fibres tend to crack under extreme torque.

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit.

And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.

Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?

Amazon has been doing this since the 2000's. Fun fact: This is how AWS came about; for them to scale its "LOOK INSIDE!" feature for all the books it was hoovering in an attempt to kill the last benefit the bookstore had over them.

Ie. This is not a big deal. The only difference now is ppl are rapidly frothing to be outraged by the mere sniff of new tech on the horizon. Overton window in effect.

I dunno about this; that greenlight vacuum they brought to market a few years back is dope af. My first little orb Dyson is still kicking almost 15 years after I bought it.

I think their brand isn't just about tech itself, but the utility exploring novel tech can drive.

From a GTM perspective, Apple is fine to be behind OpenAI and others. Other than Search and studying, most consumers just aren't finding compelling use cases for a lot of this tech. The news woman herself said it herself that

> I've had iPhone 16 and haven't used any of these features.

Not only did she not use it, she wasn't even sure how she would start to use it. Emoji customization is kinda fun, but hardly a killer offer.

Folks in business are finding a lot of use: Research summation, data structuring, rapid prototyping, copy editing, and all sorts of business-grade use cases are phenomenal. None of them are central to Apple's core business or user experience. Use cases might be found closer to the Macbook/Pro line-up... but most of these are already accessible via a web layer through Chrome/Safari. They're making good use of Apple's performant M-chips. Of course, we all know Siri really should be able to do a helluva lot more than it currently does.

Apple being behind tech-wise is a *huge* risk bc it puts them on the back foot, but short-term not enshittifying their tech with worthless AI use cases may be the right move.