https://www.tapplastics.com/

Middle-aged men: “phew!”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kastellorizo

The island’s official name, Megisti (Μεγίστη) means “biggest” or “greatest”.

You go inside gas stations because you HAVE to, not because you WANT to. Same with EVs.

Vet Techs.

Leasing a car.

I’d always bought a car and driven it into the ground. Leased an EV once. Hated the experience. Felt ripped off at the end.

Bought a used car after that. Back to normal.

I’ve worked with many people who like stability, and those who embrace change. It really depends on one’s personality.

Problem is that the world of work has changed. There are very few guarantees any more. In that case you have to decide if you want something that appears stable on the surface, but can be rug-pulled in a hurry. Or if you just accept that everything will change and adjust your expectations and life plans.

The former allows you to go deep and acquire expertise in one area. The latter gives you breadth, but may mean you won’t get deep into a single field.

This might seem a bit abstract, but it really means one needs to do a gut check when planning a career.

A third option is to just wing it and see what comes along.

Poptop camper 😍

Yes, but who makes the robots that make the robots?

The whole point of AWS Availability Zones (AZ) is that if one location goes out, you still have data elsewhere and it would automagically recover. The default for services in one Region is 3 AZs. Some regions like us-east-1 have 6 AZs.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/

From their own map, it looks like both Bahrain and UAE had 3 AZs.

https://builder.aws.com/content/3ADBRZtN2DSQEgLOa3ga88M4dnx/how-many-azs-you-need-to-deploy-to-in-prod-environment

Amazon also recommends storing data across at least 3 AZs to avoid data loss.

So either customers actively turned off multi-AZ support, someone screwed up the local installation, or EVERY single one of those AZs got hit.

Edit: article is paywalled, but there’s a small section that says multiple AWS locations were hit in Bahrain.

Turing Test is fundamentally based on fooling humans. Not sure it’s smart to pin humankind’s future on what a birthday magician can do.

Most TVs support both Infrared (IR) and Bluetooth. Just get an IR remote and take the battery out of the old one. I just got a basic IR-only one for an LG TV for $6. Works like a charm.

One of the fun things about this latest cycle of AI is how the goalposts move. Not the ‘AGI in six months’ one. That might as well be mounted on top of a golf cart with a brick laid on the accelerator. But the one that talks about the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and goals of a product.

One of the things they tell people pitching VCs is that you should be addressing a reasonably big TAM (potential customers) and have sensibly large, yet attainable stakes. With AI, though, the TAM was always questionable. Who would want or pay for a chatty ‘bot,’ especially one that ‘hallucinated’ answers? So they pivoted to change the TAM and the stakes. Your personal assistant. No? Therapist? No. Project Manager? Teacher? Still no?

What we have now is a constant churning of THOSE goals. Now, the TAM is pretty much the whole world, and the stakes are either massive unemployment, widescale industrial shutdown, or destruction of the human race. It’s all getting silly. Once you’ve extracted all the investment money you can by maxing out the stakes and scaring the pants off people, there’s not much higher to go.

Meanwhile, all your actual income is coming from pedestrian applications, like summarizing emails, screening job applicants, or coding assistants. There’s just not enough revenue to cover all the costs you’re incurring to get it to hallucinate a little less. So you have to pump up the stakes. Next up: setting off all the nukes! Shutting down the sun and the moon! Inviting alien colonists!

Speaking of going bigger: https://youtu.be/R8SeysuMpA0

A few points:

• “I have nothing to hide,” means you’ve accepted the premise that the burden of innocence is on you. That you are guilty until proven innocent. There are a couple millenia of jurisprudence, saying ‘innocent until proven guilty’ should be the default. The US 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments get close, but they don’t just come out and say it.

• “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” This has been attributed to a few people from Cardinal Richelieu to Voltaire. But the crux is, anyone can make someone appear guilty. Doesn’t matter if you’re innocent. The burden of proof has to be on the accuser, otherwise it’s down to chaos, and tyrrany of the powerful and the mob.

• Personal privacy by default is one of those fundamental rights that gives us control of a lot of things around us. From freely walking down the street, to our shopping habits, license-plate-readers, location-tracking, who we associate with, and our healthcare.

• Imagine if the rules were changed so any time anyone wanted to use our data, including transactions, web and mobile interactions, credit-card, banking, voting, healthcare, whatever… they had to get explicit, single-use permission. How much weight would be lifted from everyone’s shoulder. It means you, the individual are in charge.

• There’s academic data on the psychological effects of surveillance. It has actual effect on one’s behavior and mental health: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510

• At this point, there are too many privacy leaks. The only reasonable solution is to flip it all on its head. EVERYTHING is private, unless there is a legitimate reason to pierce that veil, and the burden is on those wanting the data.

It’ll have financial impacts on many business models. Yes, and? Do better.

AI software can’t technically kill you unless:

1. It convinces someone who can kill you, to you know, kill you.
2. It gets access to the physical world, which can definitely kill you.

Oh, wait.

1. U.S. military is using AI to help plan Iran air attacks: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/us-military-using-ai-help-plan-iran-air-attacks-sources-say-lawmakers-rcna262150
2. Anthropic Previewing the Model Hardware Standard: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview

See, nothing to worry about.