AI Search is Going Well

Google AI and glue on pizza - Mastodon

Liam @ GamingOnLinux 🐧🎮 @gamingonlinux@mastodon.social Google AI is a hot sticky mess. Now they're telling people to add glue to pizza, as it took a shitpost from Reddit. Credit: https://www.threads.net/@petergyang/post/C7S6fzINqZj 9:57 AM • May 23, 2024 (UTC)

Late stage capitalism and OpenAI - Mastodon

Peter Cohen @flargh@mastodon.social There's a "late capitalism is awful" point to be made about Scarlett Johansson being the actual spokesperson for Feeding America, a legit non-profit focused on food insecurity in the United States. Contrasting with OpenAI - a business that pivoted from being a non-profit to the absolute worst example of sociopathic Silicon Valley tech bro overreach. I'm not clever enough and far too burned out these days to put the pieces together into a coherent narrative beyond, "Burn it all."

Microsoft Recall blocks DRM content - Mastodon

JP @daedalus@eigenmagic.net The fact that Microsoft's new Recall thing won't capture DRM content means the engineers do understand the risk of logging everything. They just chose to preference the interests of corporates and money over people, deliberately. 8:50 PM • May 21, 2024 (UTC)

Find Sarah Conner - Mastodon

HighlandLawyer @HighlandLawyer@mastodon.social @tob @pluralistic 3:46 PM • May 21, 2024 (UTC)

Inside Microsoft’s mission to take down the MacBook Air

Tom Warren writing for The Verge Over the past two years, Microsoft has worked in secret with all of its top laptop partners to ready a selection of Arm-powered Windows machines that will hit the market this summer. Known as Copilot Plus PCs, they’re meant to kick-start a generation of powerful, battery-efficient Windows laptops and lay the groundwork for an AI-powered future. These sound like they might be competitive with Apple’s M series chips. It’ll be interesting to see the reviews once they’re out.

Windows Recall could solve my biggest problem in tech

Mark Hachman writing for PC World Put simply: If you’ve seen it, so has Recall — it takes periodic screenshots of your desktop every few seconds, which it uses to hunt down details. […] But the images it saves can be interpreted via AI. So if you saved a document, that document image can be “read” via AI, and it will extract the text. There’s an app for MacOS called Rewind that does something similar to this. It’s a third party app though, whereas Recall is from the OS vendor meaning it may have certain advantages or capabilities a third party wouldn’t.

Who ruined Google? - Mastodon

nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social I asked Google "who ruined Google" and they replied honestly using their AI, which is now forced on all of us. It's too funny not to share! 11:36 AM • May 20, 2024 (UTC)

2001 Predictions - Mastodon

AaronDavid @AaronDavid@beige.party 8:48 PM • May 19, 2024 (UTC)

I’m so glad public libraries already exist… - Mastodon

Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid@mastodon.social I’m so glad public libraries already exist. Could you I magine trying to sell the idea of libraries to politicians in 2024? “You want to build a large public complex on prime real estate that gives away free books & education & community events—paid for by our tax dollars? Are you crazy??” 2:56 AM • May 19, 2024 (UTC)

For the first time I used Safari’s “Listen to page” feature to listen to an article while I cleaned up the kitchen. It was pretty great!

I expect to see a bunch of “the iPhone is powerful enough” takes in September when the new iPhone is launched.

The Man Who Killed Google Search

Great write up from Ed Zitron on how and why Google’s search has gotten worse. The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between the ads and search teams, discussing how the search team wasn’t able to finely optimize engagement on Google without “hacking engagement,” a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to “abandon work on efficient journeys.” In one email, Fox adds that there was a “pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want” and what search was doing.

AI Apocalypse: Only Apple Can Win

Remember before the Vision Pro was released there were rumours about using Siri to develop apps for VisionOS. Given how well generative AI can be at programming and all the chatter about Apple’s AI efforts this year, I wonder if we’ll see something around that at this year’s #WWDC.

Apple Intelligence

I’ve been wondering why everyone seems so interested in what Apple is going to do with regards to AI, or why there’s so much reporting about how Apple needs to “catch up” to others in the industry. Are Apple users unable to do AI things on their iPhones? No, because the majority of AI right now is a cloud service, accessed through apps or websites just as usable on an iPhone as on Google’s Android or Microsoft’s Windows. So why all pressure for Apple to “catch up”?

Marques Brownlee gets a look at the Disney Holotile

This is the first video I’ve seen that explains how these things actually work. Like Marques, I’m excited for the future of this tech.

X-Men ‘97 Lego Intro

The Long Comics History Behind X-Men's Sentinel Program

For all those enjoying the new X-Men ‘97 cartoon I liked this article from Gizmodo. Since almost the very beginning, the X-Men and their people have been hunted by the Sentinel Program—and now X-Men ‘97 is playing with that legacy too. The sentinels have always been my favourite X-Men villains. Probably because I grew up watching the original X-Men cartoon and they were featured pretty heavily in that.

This whole YouTube, AppleTV, screensaver thing really pisses me off. Why the fuck does Google think I want to see some random bullshit from YouTube rather than my photos on the screen as a screensaver!?

Does everything need to be an ad?

Joe Rosensteel writing for Six Colors Last week, YouTube rolled out a new version of its app for Apple TV. It overrides the screensaver by starting a slideshow just before the Apple TV’s screensaver is supposed to come on. If you’re watching a video, it’ll be an endless loop zooming into the video’s thumbnail and fading to black. If you were just paused somewhere in the app’s interface, it’ll be stills taken from a random assortment of YouTube videos on nature, or stills from drone footage.

Premier Doug Ford, Ontario medical group warn Ottawa’s capital-gains tax increase will hurt doctors

Laura Stone and Marieke Walsh writing for The Globe and Mail (Apple News+ Link) “I’ve been getting more messages from doctors than ever before this morning,” Mr. Ford said at an unrelated news conference in Oakville, Ont., west of Toronto. Don’t tell me Ford is all of a sudden concerned about doctors. He’s concerned for his coporate donors and developer buddies who are going to be impacted by this.

Elon Musk’s X botched an attempt to replace “twitter.com” links with “x.com”

Jon Brodkin writing for Ars Technica Security reporter Brian Krebs called the move “a gift to phishers” in an article yesterday. It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like “netflitwitter.com,” which would appear as “netflix.com” in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com. This is something you’d expect from a high school computer science assignment, not a company that’s supposed to be worth $44 billion.

Facebook Notifications

I have Facebook notifications set to deliver in the scheduled summary. It’s worked fine for a long time, but now all of a sudden I’m getting these notifications each day. These are not time sensitive Facebook. Needless to say I’ve disabled Facebook’s ability to send me “time sensitive” notifications.

Destiny 2 is getting a surprise new subclass and a lot more in The Final Shape

Ryan Gilliam writing at Polygon: The star of the trailer is the new Prismatic subclass, which allows players to combine all of the other game’s subclasses into one. Bungie calls this an “advanced” subclass, and it looks like it’ll offer an entirely new way to play. Prismatic Guardians even gain the ability to use a super-powered grenade that combines darkness and light together. Other subclasses will be getting grenades as well that combine elements: stasis and void for Warlocks; strand and arc for Titans; and solar and statis for Hunters.