> At some point, you need to watch out for cynical/nasty series. In fact, all of the books we purchase are ranked against peers they have read in the past, or those we know to actively avoid buying due to cynicism, sarcasm, or open disdain towards adults (Wimpy Kid).
yeah how do you "know" this? our kid is obsessed with wimpy kid and a few other similar series and "cynicism" nails it perfectly, is there a list? of what's known to be "cynical" and what's not?
in my Atari days, I went through half a dozen of those stupid joysticks, which broke easily as they were poorly designed and put way too much repetitive strain on the plastic insides that broke regularly.
contrast to my SNES controllers that still work today and feel more or less like they did literally 34 years ago. that blows my mind.
on the console side, the 2600 itself had some components go out which had to be replaced back in the day (remember when you'd take your console to the video game shop and they'd repair it?). The 800 itself didnt have any failures but the 810 disk drive was always a nightmare.
my comparisons are all to the SNES so admittedly these are all unfair comparisons, I never had an NES.
I was a total Atari kid and I still have my 2600 and my 800 on me. If Atari was the one distributing an NES like system IMO they would have just fucked it up. While I loved my atari devices, they were also extremely unreliable mechanically / electronically. The build quality of Nintendo devices (I own about 10 Nintendo devices going back to the SNES that's plugged into my TV with a modern HDMI adapter today) is worlds beyond what Atari was able to pull off in my experience. Granted the Nintendo devices have the advantage of more sophisticated technology but Atari I think really had a cheaper build mentality.
there is significant resistance to air conditioning in Europe at many levels (all of which are invalid or solvable):
* "not technically feasible" - people talk about old buildings with oddly shaped windows
* "can't afford it" - as you see here. people talk about the units themselves and the electricity bills
* "our infrastructure can't handle it" - this has to do with things like grids overheating, failing
* "our infrastructure can't handle <the regulations>" - things like nuclear reactors in France not allowed to raise the temperature of rivers by another N degrees during a heat wave
* "it's bad for global warming" - a little late for that, probably should save lives first
literally hospitals in europe don't have AC throughout the entire building yet. global warming is really coming at them fast
I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.
You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.
> execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs.
reading this article I think that is not what happened in this specific case:
> Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions.
> “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”
That is, Ford had been slowly relying more and more on automated tools (if the "rehiring" is over three years, then this all precedes our current "AI" ecosystem) and realized that now that they want to add modern AI tools, they need experienced engineers to train the newer systems, and are hiring people from the open market, where some of these folks were former Ford employees, but nothing like "were laid off due to AI".
That is this doesnt sound at all like "Ford fired 350 engineers to be replaced with AI and is now backtracking", which is certainly what the headline here implied.
As I said - on mainland. That study was done on a peninsula community surrounded by water, except on the north side, which was mostly a nature preserve where a 6 foot high fence on that side prevented new deer from entering.
So yes "kill all the deer" (like nearly ALL deer) works if you're in a small community that is 95% sealed off.
Realistically, "we have no solution to tick borne disease except for hiring tens of thousands of full time hunters continuously shooting animals in residential areas to keep the deer population on the brink of extinction" is not a sufficient solution for me.
And I live in a town where we have lots of those guys. It's fine. But scaling them up to the point that we don't need to spray for ticks anymore, you'd have them falling out of trees in playgrounds.
the sovereign AI thing is fascinating to me for many reasons:
* it's time to build out stacks! servers, deployments, things! Especially in Europe. Hence sovereign AI is already a big sales buzzword for lots of hardware and hardware adjacent companies - NVIDIA (obviously), Cisco, Oracle and my own employer, Red Hat (hooray!)
* It makes the whole "AI is a bubble" thing completely irrelevant. OpenAI and Anthropic are no longer relevant, AI models themselves no longer need to "make money", and hopefully lots of really good / free ones start becoming commonplace. Ed Zitron goes out of business.
* How fascinating that Trump/ Hegseth maybe didnt completely create this but boy did they throw a thousand gallons of gas on the fire, bullying Anthropic around and scaring the crap out of every government, institution and business that's not 100% US only who is using Claude. nice job idiots!
* Can models be maybe trained with little more focus on only what they need to know? They need to know code, math, business, science. They don't need to know how to rip off movies or art. These LLMs would hopefully not be spamming Amazon with shitty books and Instagram with fake influencers (but I'm likely being too hopeful)
and the rabbits and chipmunks and mice and squirrels, as well as that you have to kill basically all deer to the point of about 8 deer per square mile, since one deer can carry 2000-3000 new ticks. which is basically impossible on mainland because new deer just wander over.
We definitely noticed behavioral differences in 3.14 regarding gc which could show up in particular test suites we have that are purposely ensuring all objects of a certain type were collected after a gc.collect() run. Between this and other issues (changes to the runtime API for typing, the first decently runnable version of free-threading, kind of a longer time for some C-based dependencies to catch up), the transition for my projects (SQLAlchemy) to 3.14 was generally more bumpy than that of say 3.12 or 3.13. will be interesting to see if 3.14.5 allows us to relax some changes we had to make to the test suite.
> Palantir, whose software is widely used by US defence and intelligence agencies, has faced growing scrutiny in parts of Europe as governments reassess their dependence on American technology companies.
I think it's great. Europe and other regions will be building out their own tech stacks, decreasing global dependence on big US players like AWS and Palantir, creating lots more jobs for programmers and much broader ecosystems for doing things.
http://techspot.zzzeek.org