I tried pointing a text classifier at a subreddit’s comments 15+ years ago. It would be surprising if we weren’t seeing widespread use of automated moderation by now.

Interestingly, a sentence starting with “you are” ended up being one of the most damning features a comment could have with regard to civility.

Even the headphone jack is an option you need to buy, it’s silly.

This is only true of the 16; the 12 and 13 have it built in. That makes me think there was a technical reason.

That kind of thing is true of purely standalone products. Your local Starbucks franchise is making more money than your cool indie coffee shop because on average, people like Starbucks better.

People use smartphones to run third-party apps. They want to have the kinds of smartphones that run the apps they use. The same effect made Windows dominant even though most people didn’t really like it.

the customer see’s the PS5 for 600, and the steam machine for 1000+, and assume steam is the one doing something unethical

Do they? I don’t automatically assume there’s anything unethical about the more expensive option in any other product category. The PS5 itself costs more than an XBox Series S, probably not because Microsoft is morally superior to Sony.

I think you said that people who do things like build a cluster of PS3s because they’re a lot of compute for the money are shitty, and that they’re abusing the fact that Sony priced them low in the hope that people who bought them would also buy games. I disagree with that position.

If you meant something else, perhaps we don’t disagree.

Buying things at their retail price and using them in a way the manufacturer didn’t intend is not shitty, nor abuse.

Most of the business models that enable subsidized pricing for consumer products, on the other hand rely on artificially restricting how people can use those products, which is shitty and abusive.

Improved reliability is, ironically a major cause of this problem.

Buyers of brand new cars in the USA keep them for fewer than ten years on average. If most cars can go ten years without needing major repairs, the car manufacturer’s actual customer is not strongly motivated to consider repairability in buying decisions. The second or third owner likely cares a lot, but their preferences don’t matter very much to manufacturers.

You’re absolutely right!

Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Good metrics are hard, but token leaderboards are obviously terrible metrics that will lead to bad business outcomes unless propped up by investor hype. Of course investor hype is a real factor, and it’s often driven by guesses about what other investors will do rather than real business outcomes.

It seems obvious to me that there’s a huge gap between a search result, which is a link and an excerpt where the operator of the linked site is clearly responsible for the content, and an AI overview, which mixes information from multiple sources with generated nonsense.

Google should absolutely be liable if it generates overviews containing defamatory lies.

They weren’t going to let people have it that cheap for very long. The plan was to offer it on subscription plans for a couple weeks, then move to usage-based billing, which is much more expensive for a usage pattern that comes anywhere near the subscription limits.

Keeping a single instance of Fable busy for a full day would probably cost a thousand dollars at standard API rates, and some agentic coding workflows run many agents in parallel. Companies have just recently started to figure out that rewarding employees for how many tokens they use may be a waste of money, but Anthropic is hoping to cash in before they all do.

If it’s true that young software developers are mostly not productive, then employing them hasn’t made sense for decades because staying at the same company for most of one’s career stopped being the default some time around 1980.

The battery law is “so broad and so restrictive that it prevents the sale of this wonderful, jointly developed, U.S.-European product from being sold in the European Union…”

No. Meta chose to design e-waste.

I’m curious as to how people were actually using Google Glass in 2013. The only place I saw one then was at a programming meetup. I’m quite sure people weren’t regularly running the camera continuously because that drains the battery in a hurry and overheats it even faster.

Source: I bought a new old stock Glass XE-C this year. They’re $50 on Ebay. I’m working on a navigation app for it because I want heads-up cycling directions.

How to motivate right to repair advocacy in other regions in one easy step…

If someone was going to reward me for burning a lot of tokens, I’d feed LLM output into the LLM input until they ran out of rewards.

I am surprised. I’ve run both KDE and Gnome on a Surface Go 2 (8100Y), which is either slower or barely faster depending on which CPU you have, and I’ve had no UI lag.

My solution in the same situation is to use Gnome. I strongly prefer KDE on a desktop/laptop, but Gnome is an outstanding tablet UI and KDE isn’t… except that Gnome’s onscreen keyboard is crap.

That means if Google’s verification system gets widely adopted, browsing the web could become a headache.

Using a phone to scan a QR code in order to access a website on my desktop is a headache even if it has no dependencies in particular.

It seems very unlikely to me that the model itself has a list of banned words, and much more likely that a purported list is hallucinated.

If they did want to have a simple list like that, it would probably go in the harness rather than the model, and the model wouldn’t have been trained on it, nor would a reasonably designed harness provide it to the model. Legitimate use cases, such as asking the model for a list of abusive words for use as a first pass in a filtering system could get tripped up.

As a test, I asked Perplexity to generate such a list. It did a bad job, including such words as abuse, hate, and threat which are far more likely to be innocuous than abusive. It did also include some highly offensive slurs that one would expect on any banned words list.

A judge can’t make laws. Higher courts can set precedents about how existing laws are interpreted,but that isn’t happening here. The judgment will be specific to Meta.