There was a time when I didn’t know what those words meant either and I strongly encourage blissful ignorance over doing research only to come away more ignorant. Every time you don’t know what something on the Internet means, read a scientific paper or another few pages of Tolstoy or visit a museum. You’ll be a happier, healthier person.

Wait until they cut Medicaid. People are going to be gnawing on rechargeable AA batteries like it’s chewing tobacco. Maybe C or even D batteries if they need more OnlyFans subscriptions to make rent. It’s going to be like when N.O.R.E. found out Doja Cat was in racial chat rooms showing feet. People are going to find out their crazy but hot girlfriend ate whole car batteries for 8chan.

This is the America Ted Cruz wants. Vote for me and I will make sure Doja Cat gets the purest lithium.

You can get lithium from the pharmacy if you act crazy enough. Farm fresh lithium too, not some old phone battery lithium.

I’m glad my old, non-smart one still works fine. It slams into things and says, “Roomba needs help” or something when it eats a sock or wire I missed. But at least it will outlast the company’s servers.

Yale just put a scholar on paid leave because an article by an A.I. powered, pro-Israel site claimed she was a member of a sanctioned group that she apparently isn’t actually a member of. Assuming all that’s true — it was in The NY Times — the investigation should take 5 minutes, max. It was an A.I. hallucination on a fake news site. Case closed.

Plus, Yale has endowment worth over $40 billion and the scholar was part of a project that was 100% privately funded by donors. I’m somewhat sympathetic to schools with limited resources caving to pressure from politicians and major donors but Yale could absolutely take a stand. They could probably just threaten to get rid of legacy admissions and have most of Congress, SCOTUS, and political donors in a tizzy over having to send their idiot failsons to a state school.

I don’t use the A.I. features on iOS or Android — I have both for developer reasons — but I do like the new Siri animation better than the old one. So, not a total waste of time and money. More of a 99.999% waste of time and money.

Maybe it’s useful for people who work in marketing or whatever. Like you write some copy and you ask it to rewrite it in different tones and send them all to your client to see what vibe they want. But I already include the exact right amount of condescension expected in an email from a developer.

Others have pointed out plausible reasons specific to Google but they also laid off a fuckton of people and that never really works out long term unless the company has a good reason to lay people off (like if they lose a huge client or find one or a product line fails).

But the recent tech company layoffs seemed pretty arbitrary, especially the stealth layoffs (like the “return to office” demands that just made people with options go elsewhere). I wouldn’t be shocked if the Google Assistant team lost some talented people who either left, were foolishly laid off, or were shifted to Gemini (which, like all consumer generative A.I., is still in beta and hemorrhaging money).

I just say “consumer” there because it seems like highly focused A.I. projects could be legit businesses. Like the protein folding project at Google and things like that. But the chatbots and image generators might never be useful and profitable.

I actually emailed my local National Weather Service station awhile back asking if they’d post on Mastodon and even offered them a BlueSky invite and they wrote back saying only Twitter and Facebook were allowed and they’d be everywhere if it was approved by higher ups.

Someone made a BlueSky bot a few months ago for NWS notices and I’m pretty sure they covered every local one. I remember the person who made it asking people to request any missing stations. Not sure if there’s a Mastodon equivalent but you could use a bridge. It won’t help with transit delays or other local government announcements but the weather service stuff is available (via an AtProto <-> ActivityPub bridge if nothing else; it’s not like you interact with the posts so it’d be ideal for a bridge).

There’s always PiHole to block ads at the network level. It takes some setup and a raspberry pi but it can be one of the cheaper ones. And I’m pretty sure the sites aren’t going to do much more than check the User Agent to get the browser so User Agent Switcher will get around 99% of that.

You could, I suppose, block Firefox in other ways (like maybe checking for some random Chromium feature not yet supported in Firefox) but Firefox isn’t usually far behind Chrome so it would almost take an entire new developer to be effective. And there’s probably ways around that too. (I’m a web developer but have never worked on an ad-supported project and never will so I’m not sure but life finds a way.)

I’m happy for NZ but it might be a good idea to stay hidden for the time being.

Probably Coriolis effect? I’m not a professional meteorologist but I am an amateur meteorologist. I live in New Orleans and hurricanes follow somewhat predictable patterns. (Maybe not always where you can pinpoint exactly where they’re going but they tend to turn north in the northern hemisphere and south in the southern hemisphere.)

Alphabet/Google needs to fire their CEO. He’s an obvious idiot, not good with employees, not good with investors, and not good at lobbying. That’s like 99% of a CEO’s job. Just get rid of him and Google’s stock price will probably jump 20%.

To me, Russia fell into the “natural resources trap” where a country can sell oil, gold, diamonds, whatever and the citizens are fine with low taxes and jobs but it ultimately can doom you to misrule. A country that doesn’t have oil or whatever has to do things the hard way. Like educate everyone and be a knowledge economy. That’s harder than finding oil.

Sochi seems lovely and I’d like to visit St Petersburg once relations normalize but no one associates Russia with tourism like they do Italy or France or Thailand or Bali or wherever your nearest tourism hotspot is.

So, long term, I’d like to see Russia embrace its strengths outside of energy and arms. We’d all be happier. But I’m not in charge so we’ll see what Trump and Putin do instead.

Natural resources. Oil & LNG (which America exports but much of Europe, China, and India import). They have Uranium fit for nuclear plants (so does Mali, which is why it’s a point of contention between France and Russia). Kind of crappy but still explosive weapons sales. The U.S., France, and China will sell you previous generation weapons that are better than Russia’s best stuff.

I mean, to vastly oversimplify, it’s a gas station with nuclear weapons and rocket scientists from the Soviet era. It’s not a diversified economy for a country so large. They export grain and shit like that but it’s a whole continent wide and they aren’t efficient about it.

It’s not a conventional career path but what is in these times of change?

Thank you. I have a masters in headassery from the Advanced School of Clowning at Bologna. And I interned at the Milan Dick Sucking Factory, which is where I met your parents.

Make one if you want that. I doubt many adults are going to make a 4chan clone and deal with all that comes with it.

No offense. I’m just saying 4chan is toxic and bad and and there’s not a lot of experienced developers hoping to recreate it when we can just take a shit on the sidewalk and accomplish more in less time.

Fentanyl is a technology.

I’m only speaking for myself but I’m not sure I’d want my BlueSky and Mastodon feeds mixing. I tried it with Skybridge and a third party Mastodon app and the vibe shift felt weird. I’m all for people making bridges for those who want it but I don’t mind having two apps that I use to follow two different cultures.

On Mastodon, I followed a lot of developers and activists and it’s usually kind of serious discussions. On BlueSky, I followed shitposters and people who don’t take posting too seriously. Twitter refugees. People like that. And that works great for me. Sometimes, I want one and sometimes I want the other.

Back in the olden days when Twitter wasn’t fash, I made lists and that worked fine. Like, I had a list for activists, a list for weather alerts, local government announcements, etc. My main feed was for people making jokes. So, it can be one app. But I’ll be ok if it’s two apps. (It’d be nice to have a Tweetdeck thing — there’s blue.deck and Mastodon equivalents — that can view it all, especially during major events.)

BlackRock is an American investment firm.