“What if AI Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?” – a pretty good summary for those who don't want to read Gary Marcus’s rather… elaborate… treatizes.
> I think it’s safe, at least for now, to turn your attention away from the tech titans’ increasingly hyperbolic claims
🧘♂️
https://ca…
Rep. Johnny Olszewski D-MD tried but failed to get recognized on the House floor today
to get Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva D-AZ sworn in.
Speaker Johnson has refused to seat Grijalva for more than 3 weeks.
"This is wrong and you know it Mr. Speaker."
https://bsky.app/pro…
Um, yeah. Fuck you, Amazon. I've got ancient #Ring 1.0 equipment so I've gotten my value outta them. Taking recos for alternative connected camera systems.
☑️ Ring cameras are about to get increasingly chummy with law enforcement - Ars Technica
So, no due process.
Air Force: Trans Troops Don't Get Discharge Hearings - Joe.My.God.
https://www.joemygod.com/2025/08/air-force-trans-troops-dont-get-discharge-hearings/
🚨 Gaza Verified: Emergency appeal for @…
Aseel, her lovely cat Liza, and her family are in the danger zone in North Gaza and need your help to get to the South.
To find transportation, rent land, and get a tent is going to cost them roughly $4,500 when you figure in the 40% commission they’ll have to pay when withdrawing the money in Gaza. Th…
> Мы предоставляем все данные о вашем профиле, доступные на момент запроса архива. Это значит, что в архив могут попасть и удалённые вами материалы, если срок, отведённый законодательством на их хранение, ещё не истёк. Например, на хранение удалённых переписок отводится полгода.
(источник: https://vk.com/faq18145
Typically I’ll spend every summer saying “I hate the heat” and I still do, but I’m trying my best to get used to it because it’s only going to get hotter on this planet every year. Okay, off for a bike ride!
Jad Tarifi, who founded Google's first generative AI team,
told Business Insider that he would not encourage people to get a Ph.D. to cash in on the AI hype.
"AI itself is going to be gone by the time you finish a Ph.D.
Even things like applying AI to robotics will be solved by then.
So either get into something niche like AI for biology, which is still in its very early stages,
or just don't get into anything [AI] at all," Tarifi said.
…
And another couple of etch cycles on the PIC12F683 done.
On the home stretch, I've almost got the last of the dielectric off. But I don't want to be too aggressive because ideally I'd get a beauty shot of intact poly across the whole die first, *then* undercut the poly and get a substrate image.
So I'm still doing my usual 2 minutes etch, then image routine. It'll take as long as it takes.
Survived a week long ‘holiday’ with the blended family. The chaos completely drained me. Got back late Saturday night and was wiped out yesterday so didn’t get around to unpacking. Now I’m wiped out on Monday morning with the house turned upside down with holiday stuff, sat at my desk trying to work. Except I can’t work because the house is a shit tip. I need to get everything back in order to enable my brain to function. So I’ll creep away from my desk and get it sorted.
Mostly nature videos, or just whatever I get up to in real life.
@…
https://peertube.wtf/c/p.marg/videos
My wife's philosophy: "The trick is to never be cool. Because then when you get old, that's just sad. But if you're a dork, once you get old- you're still just a dork."
Is An Orange Halloween Pumpkin Green? - Sow in April, reap in September, get soup and pie and roast seeds too! Oh, and a Halloween lantern. #green #pumpkin #Halloween -
Went ahead and cleaned off the workbench as it has the tendency to accumulate random electronics on it. Still need to get the computer hooked back up, but it's nice to get back to soldering a few things here soon.
#electronics #workbench
Public hospital procedure for gastroscopy and colonoscopy. Husband is on a disability pension but that is not relevant in this case.
Obviously he has to take the prep beforehand - which he needs to get from a chemist as TCH no longer supplies it as part of the procedure??? - and it costs about $39 for the 3 sachets he has to take beforehand.
Okay, now we can afford this but it seems to me that it could be quite a stumbling block for those who can't.
Don't get me w…
Let me use AI to summarize a book for me so I can skip all this pesky reading and get to all the fun things in life such as doomscrolling
#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
JENNA: About twenty-four hours. If you're expecting a last-minute reprieve you'd better forget it. Once they get you this far there's no going back. You'd better get used to the idea. Nobody out there gives a damn about you.
[Scene: VARON's apartment. He walks towards the bed where MAJA is sleeping and stops. She awak…
9:00 - just check my socials before I get to work
9:45 - I should really get to work soon
11:17 - ok that's enough scrolling get to-... well, I have to leave at 11:30, no point in starting something _now_ <reopens Mastodon>
I thought I was too old to get excited about protocols, but this atproto discussion from Dan Abramov delivers:
https://overreacted.io/where-its-at/
(a follow up to his open social post)
ProTip: Floofy gamer cats help you get a better score!
Honestly the worst thing about AI and the main reason we should get rid of it is the endless discourse of it is “useful” or not.
I’d like to have Internet arguments about flat vs skeuomorphic design or which JavaScript framework is best or how Jony Ive says “Aluminium” again.
If you've been paying attention, this is a *very* strong signal that OpenAI is hitting the limits of improved capability with more compute/data and they're (predictably) all out of other ideas. The quiet "exponential model capabilities" lie here is what Altmann promised but is now starting not to be able to deliver, even in cherry-picked demo terms.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/sam-altman-says-agi-is-a-pointless-term-experts-agree.html
The "agentic" turn was never going to pan out, because it exposes the unreliability of LLMs too directly, and it turns out that no amount of yelling at your text vending machine to "Be smarter! Think harder!" will actually get you anything more than vended text.
I'm *praying* that we get into this crash sooner rather than later, since the faster it comes, the less painful it will be.
My recent reading in actual research papers corroborates this, for example, asking LLMs to play games exposes their utter lack of anything that can be termed "reasoning":
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08501v1
Battery acquired. \o/
It can (at the load I was giving it there) run my laptop, camera, phone and wifi router for about 10 hours.
Should be plenty of time to get into the field more.
Might look into a bigger one in the future (especially when I get started with dew heaters n such) but for how, this will do to get started.
🎧 The latest episode of my podcast is out.This time, I explore some of the ways you can get more value and impact from any development programme you go on.
👉🏼 Ep194 of 'My Pocket Psych' is available wherever you get your podcasts, or simply stream it from the website: https://www.worklifepsych.com/podcast/194
As CEOs and executives mandate AI adoption to make their businesses more efficient and competitive, many have yet to fully integrate it into their own workdays (Jordyn Holman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/busines
Interesting take on how contradictory things seem to be, unless some people are people and some people aren't.
https://www.the-reframe.com/acceptable-losses/
via @…
lastfm_aminer: Last.fm social graph
This network contains the social graph of last.fm, a site that provides a streaming radio service, where users can search music and get personalized recommendation. A directed edge (i,j) means that user i follows user j.
This network has 136409 nodes and 1685524 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted
Teenager has just suggested some of the programs, which I was under the impression were via the browser, may need to be on desktop.
This might mean Wine I guess?
And probably some kind of microsoft office install? I was hoping to get away with libreoffice..
Anybody have any experience with wine?
I will in any case have to contact the IT support at the school I think. I hope I am not the only parent doing so with the #EndOf10 .
Meanwhile, over on the laptop, the Linux Mint is installed (in danish even) and seems to be restarting without the USB
holding breath here...
🤞
13/n
Sharing This Video Could Get You 14 Years in Prison #ukpol #protest
I get to vote, this is proof I’m a real Hamburger now 🍔
*puffs out cheeks, exhales sharply*
OK, well the good news is, we get to try again today.
By the way, we’ve never managed to get any hashes or urls from the so-called non-profit organisations that claim to share CSAM material hashes or links for detection. We’ve come to assume we’ll never receive any, so supporting actual detection was out of reach for us.
So we decided to build it ourselves. We now provide a public onion lookup service where you can look up Tor onion addresses to check whether they’re linked to CSAM for filtering and detection.
Lookup example (non CS…
Those recurring, intrusive popups in Photoshop and Illustrator are driving me nuts tbh! You’re working and want to get stuff done quickly with a pro tool – but suddenly, your mind needs to process a “useful” tip about how to use the brush tool? WTF. 😂
I haven't found a way to turn them off other than turning off the contextual task bar completely…
Zelensky has been well prepared and briefed not to react on lies or get angry, just "thank you" and "praise", smart.
Morning all. Now time to get on with my day.
#UnicycleLife #unicycle #Iceland
Because this is Mastodon, I know lots of people will take the previous post as an invitation to put their opinion in my replies. It was not in fact such an invitation, but…it’s cool. C’est la vie Mastodonique!
What’s really important, per Dash’s OP, is for those of us in tech to get the actual debate among experts into view of the broader public — i.e. not just here — and not let charlatan billionaires dominate the conversation.
Wanted to use DuckDuckGo to get to the wiki-page on "curb" and was presented with an "infobox" about "curb stomping" 🫠
Technically the road is closed but the bridge isn't out... at least not by bike. Construction crews were not around today so I was able to get across the bridge. It'll take some time to get it paved for cars though.
Proof that even the mighty Fleetwood Mac could get it terribly, terribly wrong at times. #TOTP
Mom expected to get a water heater via delivery company, as a warranty replacement.
The delivery man calls, "I have a small parcel for you."
Mom's quite surprised: "A small one?"
The delivery man: "Yeah, 50 kg."
She was less surprised when she saw the huge truck used to deliver it. "Missus, one time I carrier a single letter in this truck."
Folks, just a heads up: I’m busily coding a Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal site so that we can raise one amount that will get all our remaining families in the danger zone in the North to safety in the South.
I’m adapting the donation form I’d made for us at Small Technology Foundation (https://small-tech.org/fund-us
Just fwiw, 98% of the world's children do fine without access to Disney.
Maybe idk get some books instead and read it to them or something.
I spent more hours than I care to admit trying to get this cyan EDR color (not sure if it will come through) from macOS 26 finder in SwiftUI.
I don’t think it is possible to do that with SwiftUI without using Metal?
Would love any pointers to how to get this. My photocopying won’t be complete without it.
Also, that black, I have struggled to get that black/opacity right.
David Gerard on the "AI doomers"/"rationalists" and their beliefs.
In the end they are a bunch of eugenicist, racist losers afraid of death.
(Original title: AI doomsday and AI heaven: live forever in AI God)
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/17/ai-
Fluffy kitty vs 7 very happy void puppies
Nice, Trump gives Putin the red carpet treatment, european leaders don't even get a handshake when arriving.
"European leaders were greeted by the Chief of Protocol and former Fox News personality Monica Crowley rather than the president."
#trump #EU
Sometimes you need to illegally climb buildings to get the nice pictures.
To state the obvious: this is bland stuff, clearly protected by the 1A and so very far within the bounds of what a non-authoritarian FCC would allow that it’s just comical. Kimmel is about as controversial as a goldfish here. They aren’t serious about it being a problem; the whole •point• is that it’s obviously •not• a problem.
They are using something extremely benign to test the waters of government repression of speech, to see just how much they can get away with — and ABC caved like 3rd-grade toothpick bridge.
My son has been listening to Meshugah and is interested in an 8 string guitar for his 18th birthday but can't find anywhere near Sheffield/in the UK that stocks them. You can get affordable ones online but doesn't seem like the kind of thing to buy without trying.. E.g. not sure about multiscale. Any ideas/tips welcome!
PIC12F683 poly/substrate with some residual contacts (some floated away, some sitting at random positions, some still firmly attached) but almost all oxide etched.
Doing the whole die at this state, then will probably do a clean to get all the loose contacts and debris off, another imaging pass.
Then I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to try for a clean substrate image given the poor contrast I'm seeing, vs just calling this the final form. We'll see what happe…
The dream of safe C/C code is here.
I have been following this development, and I am in awe at how much has been achieved, now available as a package:
https://fil-c.org/install_optfil
You can get drunk on the details here:
US military has adopted an aggressive push to embrace AI; the top US Army commander in South Korea says "Chat and I" have become "really close lately" (Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/even-top-generals-are…
A guy I know said he was way more productive when using AI.
My question:
"Are you able to get your work done in fewer hours and spend that time not working, maybe spending it with your family, or doing hobbies or other pleasurable activities? Or do you just do more work?"
Their Answer:
"I work the same hours but now productivity is up so it is not a benefit to myself or society. However, I think the opposite. The quality of work I produce in that time is…
Get your free download of “Ritual Escape” here >
(Your email, etc. is not revealed to me. I’m just glad you get to hear this cool suite of instrumental music.)
#DownloadCodes #FreeMusic
I found two different apps for iOS that will export GPX files one at a time, which is nice when you don't want to export *all* of your Apple Health data to get just a few files.
But also, it's fucked up that we cannot just access the data/files in the file system.
Yeah, yeah, I know... Apple, iOS, etc. So much I don't love but it's the lesser of many evils ecosystem for me right now.
For the first time in U.S. history, there are more Americans over 62 than under 18.
With the national workforce getting older every year, many economists argue that having people keep working longer than they used to would help maintain a robust labor market.
But it can be hard for many older adults to stay employed past the age of 62, the year they typically become eligible for early Social Security retirement benefits, even when their health is good.
In part, that’s becaus…
Milwaukee Friends, I will be at Enderis Park on Saturday Sept 20th (tomorrow!) 9am-Noon with my artwork for sale for super-cheap.
And if you say "I'm Anti-Fascist and believe in Free Speech!" you'll get a 50% discount!"
https://www.enderispark.org/events-1/harve