After .com popped, all the money ran to install fiber data infrastructure - a lot of installs put in more capacity than they projected using for 100 years (glass fibers are cheap, digging trenches for them is expensive). The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.

It’s not even about money or financials that add up on balance sheets. It’s about market share, political power. When you’re Too Big To Fail, balance sheets cease to matter.

I may “be used to” Autotune, but it’s not in 90%+ of the music I listen to.

My guests get WiFi access to the internet when they ask. What they don’t get is WiFi access to our home systems network. When they don’t ask, I assume they’re just fine paying for their own cellular data.

In the work I have done with Claude over the past months, I have not learned to trust it for big things - if anything the opposite. It’s a great tool, but - to anthropomorphize - it’s “hallucination rate” is down there with my less trustworthy colleagues. Ask it to find all instances of X in this code base of 100 files of 1000 lines each… yeah, it seems to get bored or off-track quite a bit, misses obvious instances, finds a lot but misses too much to say it’s really done a thorough review. If you can get it to develop a “deterministic process” for you (shell script or program) and test that program, then that you can trust more, but when the LLM is in the loop it just isn’t all there all the time, and worse: it’ll do some really cool and powerful things 19/20 times, then when you think you can trust it it will screw up an identical sounding task horribly.

I was just messing around with it and I had it doing a files organization and commit process for me, was working pretty good for a couple of weeks, then one day it just screwed up and irretrievably deleted a bunch of new work. Luckily it was just 5 minutes of its own work, but still… that’s not a great result.

Agree, I’ve been using claude extensively for about a month, before that for little stuff for about 3 months. It is great at little stuff. It can whip out a program to do X in 5 minutes flat, as long as X doesn’t amount to more than about 1000 lines of code. Need a parser to sift through some crazy combination of logic in thousands of log files: Claude is your man for that job. Want to scan audio files to identify silence gaps and report how many are found? Again, Claude can write the program and generate the report for you in 5 minutes flat (plus whatever time the program takes to decode the audio…)

Need something more complex, nuanced, multi-faceted? Yeah, it is still easier to do most of the upper level design stuff yourself, but if you can build a system out of a bunch of little modules, AI is getting pretty good at writing the little modules.

If you install Microsoft Windows 11 AI edition on your PC and let these AI features run, you get what you deserve.

regardless of whether or not customers want it. They don’t have a say in the matter except the more tech savvy of them who will find ways to edge around the restrictions

The tech savvy will run Linux. They all (tech savvy or not) have a say in the matter. Even my non-tech savvy wife has been using an Ubuntu laptop, purchased direct from Dell, pre-configured by the factory with Ubuntu 22.04 for the past 3 years. I recently talked her off of her Samsung fetish into the slightly less evil Pixel line of phones. It’s a purchase and use decision. Walking away from Windows isn’t all that hard for most people, if they would just do it. Most are so bloody apathetic, they get what they deserve.

(Some) corporations are going to go hard for the AI in Windows on corporate IT managed machines because “magic free productivity fairy dust…” no, they don’t know how it works, or if it will work, or if it will be a bigger waste of time than the Solitaire app, but it’s new and a lot of corporations embrace the new simply based on Fear Of Missing Out.

The lock performs a singular function adequately enough for the risk involved for most people. And it does it passively.

The AI is not the same no matter how often or how hard you try to shoehorn it into your silly analogy.

Technology marches on, the world does get more complicated. Before we had metal keys that had to be made by keysmiths, there were more simple latches that people could open but most animals couldn’t. Metal keys introduced all kinds of complexity and inter-dependencies and failure modes, but generally we have adopted them as the preferred solution over a peg through two holes.

stop drinking the flavorade for five minutes and just think about the fact that people don’t want this

A lot of people do want it, I’m not saying that people who don’t want it should be forced to use it, far from that. But people have to start standing up for themselves when it comes to what tech they do and don’t allow into their lives. Nobody is making people wear smartwatches, or have smart-speaker(microphones) in their homes, and you’re not actually forced to use any particular desktop operating system either. Maybe your job forces you to use one for work, that’s why you get the paycheck - for doing what they want.

Microsoft is saying that they know it’s problematic but they are forcing it on people anyway.

Only the people who let themselves be forced. Our local dominant grocery chain started inflating their prices radically about 7 years ago, we have plenty of other stores around town, but over half are this dominant chain. I shopped in that chain my whole life, since my grandmother pushed me around in the cart, I stocked shelves in one during college, and it was our 95%+ source of food up until about 7 years ago. I finally had enough with the price abuse when they were about 30% higher than the competition, we stopped going there. They’re over 100% higher than the competition now in most prices and people STILL shop there in droves. Nobody is forcing them to, they’re volunteering to pay double to keep using their familiar grocery store.

I hope the world of desktop operating systems is different, but it’s probably not. People who put up with intrusive agents on their PCs doing things they don’t understand: get what they deserve.

the door lock is not doing anything of its own volition

Neither does an AI agent. You give it power (electricity), you give it access to your computer / phone, any cloud storage accounts you may have, local NAS, network connectivity. You do all these things just like you install a lock on a door, or don’t. Once the lock is installed and you leave the premises, you are trusting the lock to do what it does.

If you hand an AI your CC#, you get what you deserve.

If you hand an AI access to your hard drive and you store your CC# on your hard drive, you get what you deserve.

If you leave your door unlocked and the school bus lets a bunch of 14 year olds off by your house while you’re away, you get what you deserve.

If you install Microsoft Windows 11 AI edition on your PC and let these AI features run, you get what you deserve.

I have many “smart home” appliances and features. They do not: control things that make fire, control the lights on our staircase, control the house door locks. I give them such access as I trust them with. I do “overtrust” one with alarm clock features, and the morning our power went out at 4AM we overslept, just like would have happened if we used an old 1960s style electric alarm clock. You can go back to wind-up with bells, if you like, or you can accept that the modern world isn’t always more reliable than the older ways.

The AI LLM is doing stuff both of its own volition

The AI stuff I have been working with has an explicit switch: Agent mode vs Plan mode. In Agent mode it can (and frequently does) do all sorts of surprising things, some good, some bad. In Plan mode all it does is throw responses up on the screen for me to read, no modification of files on my system. I effectively ran in “Plan mode” for a few months, copy-pasting stuff by hand back and forth - it was still more useful than web-search, imperfect, annoyingly incorrect at times, but I was in “total control” over what got written to (and read from) files on my system. I’ve had Agent mode access for about 6 weeks now. All in all, Agent mode is 10x more productive. And I have never, ever, even slightly considered the thought of handing it my CC#, though I’m sure many people will, and eventually we’ll get a story about how one of these wonky agents ordered three lifetime supplies of Tide Pods on Amazon when it was asked to get some detergent.

A door lock can’t buy up Amazon’s entire stock of tide pods on my credit card.

But it can let in a burglar who can find your credit card inside and do the same. And why are you giving AI access to your CC#? You’d better post it here in a reply so I can keep it safe for you.

A door lock can’t turn on someone’s iot oven while they’re out of town.

But it can let in neighborhood children who will turn on your gas stove without lighting it while you’re out of town.

A door lock can’t publish every email some journalist has ever received to xitter.

True, the journalist, or his soon-to-be-ex-spouse, can “accidentally” do that themselves - and I suppose the ex-spouse who still has a copy of the key can “fool” the lock with that undisclosed copy of the key while the journalist is out having sushi with his mistress.

A mechanical door lock doesn’t hallucinate extra fingers, and draw them into all the family photos saved on a person’s hard drive.

I’ve worked with AI for a while now, it’s not going to up and hallucinate to do that - unless you ask it to do something related.

“Hey siri create me an e-commerce site”

You should try it. If your e-commerce site is simple with a lot of similar examples out in the wild to point at, I believe the latest agents actually can do such a thing. You’ll just have to give them access to your financial account details so the site can process payments to you, you understand? While that’s a joke, it’s also true. You need to be able to check what the AI has done to be sure it’s doing what you want.

I started working with AI in earnest a few weeks ago, I find myself constantly making the distinction between “deterministic” processes and AI driven things. What I’m mostly focused on is using AI to develop reliable deterministic processes (shell scripts, and more complex things) - because while it’s really super cool that I can ask an AI agent to “do a thing” and it just does what I want without being told all the details, it’s really super un-cool that the tenth time I ask it to do a very similar, even identical, thing it gets it wrong - sometimes horribly wrong: archive these files, oops I accidentally irretrievably deleted them.

In some, limited, circumstances… jobs done using a computer should be done by the computer, with human oversight. Instead of having a manager who handles a “typing pool” of 30 wives and mothers and girlfriends with all their personal issues and needs beyond the time they spend typing information from forms into the computers, three managers who oversee that the data is being ingested into the system correctly could do the same work, with a similar error rate - probably different kinds of errors but a similar rate, for much less effort. That scales all up and down the range. Instead of 1000 line welders assembling car bodies, a team of 20 can install, maintain and oversee the operation of welding robots. And now, those 20 welding overseers can be reduced to 5 who just make sure that the computer visual inspection devices are doing their jobs properly.

Them being cheap means consumers no longer value them - which is what the wars are all about: value translated to sales and profits. Price is a function of what consumers will pay, which has little or nothing to do with what a thing costs to make.

If consumers went with HDDVD you would be saying the same thing about them.

Absolutely. BluRay was Captain of the Titanic, and is going down with the whole physical media ship. Vinyl LPs are the lifeboats.

I’ll agree that Apple is the big red nose on a much larger clownshow, but… between Microsoft and Mac, I’ll just say that I’ve got a request in with IT for a MacBookPro when funding becomes available. Some of that is because our IT has crippled Windows beyond its usual hobbled state, which is bad enough, and they haven’t hit the OS-X image as hard. But, even so, bone stock Windows 11 on a modern desktop i7 still has HORRIBLE performance issues that OS-X generally doesn’t suffer from. Intrusive virus scanning, intrusive file indexing, intrusive cloud backup… Apple does these things, but generally does them a bit better (though the clowns do mess up plenty along the way.)

I’ve used Ubuntu as my desktop for the past 15 years, it’s a different kind of clownshow - one that I prefer to the other two choices, but it has definite flaws of its own.

Blu-ray appears to have presided over the premium segment of the video-disc market just as it went down the tubes entirely. These days you can buy used DVDs 2 for $0.99, and Blu-Ray for $1.99 each - super 4x premium market they’ve cornered there.

And all the corporations are looking to put all the AI in all the places… because: magic free labor fairy dust, and all that.

turn down the randomness to get more consistent outputs for simple tasks.

This is a tricky one… if you can define good success/failure criteria, then the randomness coupled with an accurate measure of success, is how “AI” like Alpha Go learns to win games, really really well.

In using AI to build computer programs and systems, if you have good tests for what “success” looks like, you’d rather have a fair amount of randomness in the algorithms trying to make things work because when they don’t and they fail, they end up stuck, out of ideas.

Mechanical key based door lock cylinders are “Agentic AI” - they decide whether or not to allow the tumbler to turn based on the key (code) inserted. They’re out there, in their billions around the world, deciding whether or not to allow people access through doorways WITHOUT HUMAN SUPERVISION!!! They can be easily hacked, they are not to be trusted!!! Furthermore, most key-lock users have no idea how the thing really works, they just stick the key in and try to turn it.

There’s only one way to be sure: nuke it from orbit.

Had a friend who used to put his super-workstation laptop in his backpack. It would randomly turn itself back on and get HOT in there at times, like firestarter hot.