Logbook: Computers
We need to talk about the Pixel Watch 4 LTE
The Pixel watch is a really good watch, it has the hardware to last through a day of work. It can make calls, it can connect to your calendar. It CAN NOT text on its own? What .. the .. hell google? This hit me when I was stuck without my phone in a snowstorm. I tried to text my friend and The text could not send. Again, WHAT THE HELL? You have a watch that will tell me when i have fallen if my heart stops. But it won’t protect me in an emergency that does not require 911? Given that i was in a situation that I could make a phone call, I called my friend. Overall it was a situation better handled by text.
Now there are situations you would think a safety oriented watch would think of these things. If you are in a situation where verbal dialog is not possible. Bad Dates, you have fallen, You are lost but your friends are near , worst case is domestic violence. No one is going to bat an eye if you are fooling with your watch. If you are in a situation where your phone dies or your phone is smashed. An attacker might see a phone as a weapon of communication. a smart watch might be seen as a time piece or a toy. But Can you quietly Discretely reach out ? No. but is there a work around?? Possibly:
If you use if you use WhatsApp or Telegram you are safe. However if you don’t use that you are kind of screwed. Using WhatsApp/Telegram exposes you to giving out personal information to companies. In some cases you may not care to use another third party app.
There is always option B:
Create and send an email to your friends and just have them reply to you , use that email in a folder called “work” if you need help you can hit “reply” and send a message Via email. While you are not able to append your GPS location over the watch you can definitely give a shortened message to get the point across while “checking your watch” .
This is seriously a big miss by google, if you are in a domestic situation if you grab your phone the aggressor is going to break that. They are far likely less to react to a tiny watch when you make a bit of time because you have to use the bathroom and send an email over your watch. If you are on a bad date, You can reply to an email quickly and lie to the person saying sorry I have a work email to deal with. When you are really emailing to say “Come to soandso and meet me” . Especially if you have your friends knowing that this work email is your “angel shot” , its super discreet and not likely to be noticed because you look like you are just emailing your “boss”.
But in all, for a watch that is supposed to be used independent of the device it is still forced to be slaved to the phone device. Google really dropped the ball on this…
My personal stance on AI.
AI can be a great and terrible thing. But, I feel like AI in its current form is crap, companies trying to shove it into everything possible like AI lawn mowers. Why stick a computer in a lawn Mower that tries to use GPS that ends up killing your neighbors roses when you can use markers on your lawn. AI coffee pots? no give me a power button damn it. Web browsing is been enshittified to make the AI browsing more “effective”. In the past you could search something on google without 10 pages of garbage because the search results were vetted, Checked and than indexed by computer.
The problem with AI is it is centralized, We have to ask one machine. We have to ask one machine to talk to another machine to talk to the software that talks to another machine that turns on a light bulb. It is this fragmented centralization we pay the devils due to. By saying hey _____ turn on the light, The machine took your input, checked your associations figured out which company owns the light bulb , gave up your data , gave up usage and likely sniffed your network just to make a 5000 mile trip halfway across the world to turn on your light bulb less than 10 feet from you. By the time you weigh out your privacy cost your cool colorful light bulb sniffed your network or your bluetooth and found you have a bluetooth vibrator in your house. The app that controls your light bulb is now giving your personal massager ads now.
Now that i firmly have shit on centralized AI, I need to make the opposite argument for AI. Having a deeply centralized machine to an intuitive person can be amazing. Research that was done with hours of pouring over google, bing, Yahoo because they all index differently, with a side dish of wikipedia’s articles with the comments on wiki took hours, Now with AI you can ask the question have AI either excerpt it or in my case show me point of view that conflict each other to get a more whole perspective on thing is great. but, There is one caveat, Vet your research, do not assume AI is always right . Just like a librarian your helpful AI will bring you boundless information on your subject of research, but if your AI librarian gets confused just like the human can give you output that makes you go what the fuck? But if you properly vet your research (meaning: check its work) with the AI , It can find information that before would take hours between 3 search engines 1 online encyclopedia and 3 cups of coffee, you spent your day researching on the failures of the “streaming industry” and you’ve barely started your work. Now with AI you can work AI as a vetted peer researcher, you can tell it when it is wrong. The websearch that was the past took know how of using the web search keys like “” – + that 99% of people do not use.
Where my final thoughts here is… Do we need a centralized AI? Yes and NO. Why because centralized information for an AI makes for great research. But does my home device need to connect to that to turn on a light? Fuck no , that device should use a cut down version of the AI locally that only knows how to turn on lights , Adjust your heat and the other simple joys around the house, If you have a AI coffeepot or teapot Call me when you can do “Tea Earl Grey hot” or “coffee whole milk, semi sweet”. Only when decentralized AI does not understand the query should it ever “phone home” .
Sometimes, with AI the same goes for image generation, It is useful, but right now its just massive shitposting. If I as a photoshop user want to save several hours making an image I will annotate to the AI the image I want but I will not take any claim to it . I wont hide the tagging Gemini puts on the image because it is a time saver to me. And a lot of the times I let the image generation do what it wants because sometimes its funny as hell to watch the smaller hallucinations of a peer check on an article play out in the image. In my life if an AI saves me an hour creating an image I will let it come up with something. In my real life with my canon camera I will never let AI touch an image I take, I prefer nature and the perfect chaos that real life is to capture the best image. I prefer a natural smile to an AI “fixed” image. they look plastic.
So while you may read into my visions to AI as hate , its more like critique for a better world where information is not sold but given to make us better as people. Otherwise whole saleing information behind locked doors just makes us look as bad as the 1100s.
This post is long and if you have got this far without AI summarizing it for you, Enjoy your next sip of coffee and give pat yourself on the back. Im proud of you.
Meta destroys the AI powered worlds to make the LLM world.
It would seem like Meta is the first to throw in the towel with their announcement of the Meta horizon worlds is going to be retired as of June, This was a platform powered by slop. The Idea of building a universe with AI was a bad idea in general. WIth that you would end up with places such as 6 7 land or some shit like that. Most people do not get the astronomical waste that AI in its current from is , for a child to make some 67 slop video that is 60 seconds long it uses the an insane amount of energy! The Same energy required to boil a tea kettle 240 times or charge your iPhone from 0% to $100% every day for three years or a “personal massager for 50 days straight. That amount of power could power a 144 Lumen Ultrabright Portable LED Work Light/Flashlight from Harbor Freight for 6000 hours! You could play the Nintendo Switch continuously for 1,714 hours.
Worse yet, Meta claims they are going to focus on AI. Facebook, Horizon worlds have a large problem, AI brain rot. people are fleeing from AI chats. because, do you really need a sycophantic chat person never to criticize you if you are doing something stupid.
When you are a multibillion dollar company and you fail copying VRchat, and Instead you decide to pump the AI balloon some more with LLM. Meta is likely seeing the explosive “growth” in AI which is nothing more than the .com bubble of the 90’s. The thing is as far as most AI right now when people are done with making slop or AI gets enough rules where unregulated slop can not be made anymore, People are going to stop using it. Right now AI is available to the elites or bored enough to pay for the LLMs. Once we hit market saturation the millions of AI’s will start dying a dime a dozen. In the Enterprise adoption of generative AI has hit 71%. but, over 80% of companies report zero measurable impact on their bottom line. As of right now we are seeing a utility gap where the cost of using the AI exceeds the costs of its output. Companies in its wild adaption are finding out the hidden costs of hardware, Repair, upkeep and electricity.
Meta Horizon worlds had problems with this exact issue , user generating slop and diluting the product into nothing. So to which end VR ends like the 3dTV with actually a higher user base. They are wasting an entire platform when they should of integrated the biggest advantage they had in user market base. Don’t kill of meta horizon worlds, Instead keep the AI there, Focus on making an AI which can overlay the Quest 3 with AR, They could integrate the headset a a visual learning device, they could use it to get directions In the wilds of the cities while hot spotted to your phone. Say things like Chiltons car service manual, showing you what screws to remove or how to replace your spark plugs. Lego with instructions on how to put together your lego Death Star. the options in AR are limitless.
Sure, you’ll look like a goofy bastard, but you’ll be a goofy bastard who knows exactly where he’s going and how to fix his own car. WIth the use of AI you could have an interactive LLM telling you that you dropped a screw or missed a turn.
Update: Meta has partially reversed there shutdown and left Worlds in a Schrodinger’s state of life.
Site back to working order.
Had to take my site down due to fuckery with SEO tools . Overall, The site should be faster now. In its simplest form Yoast updated a plugin that made me realize that something was going on in the back end of the site. I have removed Yoast due to them enshittification. Yoast it seems has move some of its SEO tools the the paid end of things with little to no notice. I think if they are going to do that might be nice to send a notification. For now i will sit back and enjoy my coffee.
When Companies pick apart their software and sell off each piece as a service they can stick it up their rectum. They run the plug-in like they are the snap on tool truck that wants to sell you each time you use a wrench.
I have updated some stuff , nothing front facing.. Just a bit under the hood.
AI and Fast food, A marriage made in hell.
I have been thinking, I was hungry and went to a Burger King and there was a profound difference. The store was near empty, The front kiosk was devoid of life and replaced with computers. At the wall was 3 computers that had screens with “order here!” , In the first five seconds of looking around I felt unwelcomed with a place that looked closer to a funeral home , most of the old decor was removed. In its place was ugly sterile furniture.
Before this to make an order you walked up to a human and said “Hi i would like to order a original chicken sandwich meal. They would put that in the machine, you’d pay with cash and be on your way.
Now there is a massive change that basically makes you create the meal from scratch. You go to the machine, you tap order . You scroll around through menus until you get to your original chicken sandwich. From there it goes into a conundrum. You get a menu with 45 different options. Mentally you are going “I just want a fucking original chicken sandwich” . They have made the same trap that subway has, Go there and try to order and Italian sandwich, you spend 10 minutes trying to remember the base components of the damn thing. This methodology turns you into an unpaid worker.
With this, the human element is gone. they have replaced 3 workers that could be floaters helping in rushes with stuff, Now its 3 to 5 cold machines that sit there , they don’t say hello, they don’t say Hi nice day isn’t it what would you like to order. You have to dick around with a machine for 10 minutes because you have no idea how to assemble the thing you want. Now with the cost of those machines and the upkeep and the electricity they have replaced 3 to 4 workers with a machine that likely cost more than what those workers would of made in the time those employees would of made in the churn lifetime of those workers. Not only that those machines are likely taken care of devs that are paid to keep the machines updated. This tech is not fire an forgot , there is a near constant maintenance. You likely replaced 4 workers with a computer that cant help in a rush when a school bus drops 70 kids plus 4 teachers. Those computers cant help bag , get fries, and help with other things. so with the leftover staff they are now picking up the fluff work that normally is hidden from them and their process time doubles. these machines are strategically inefficient. They have hidden costs, while workers may fuck up, machines can absolutely fuck up because they are absolutist. These machines do not have intuition , they will not adjust the frialator because they can not see 4 school buses pull up and 5 teachers approaching.
Outside it gets worse , the person who used to be on the radio is gone . replaced with an AI that basically is dumber than dirt because variable is its enemy , If you say I’d like an order of umm A whooper with fries and a coke and um no cheese. the AI will likely fuckup.
“We are witnessing the loss of humanity of America through a drive-thru speaker. We traded the ‘Hi, how are you?’ with machines that can’t handle a stutter or slurring. These machines are a ADA nightmare under the guise of Innovation, They replaced the ‘Floater’ with a ‘lamp that pretends to be a computer. And when the system inevitably crashes with the arrival 4 school buses, they’ll blame the Staff instead of the machines that caused it.
How do we Fix AI from being used by bad actors?
Wither we like it or not. Ai is coming and its a choice we did not make. Will AI take our jobs , Some yes, but not all. AI is going to create some niche things like Vibe jobs but overall Jobs for PC repair and hardware administration will go up. Honestly though.. the fact that AI is tied to GPU’s is a major fuck you point to the entire earth. The fact is most home computers have a PCIE slot that if someone wanted to make a “Daughter-board” that was AI-centric. Rather than unload on the GPU create an APU that directly meshes with this . As a Neural Processing Unit it would hold the keys to offload work from server farms to your computer. As a researcher If you search medical information it gets shifted to your local PC. It would Decrease server farm power levels to more manageable numbers. Yes it doesn’t have the bandwidth but if put in a X16 or more slot it would be on board with GPU-like speeds. With this it would be a generational upgrade to computers and fix a lot of the LLM issues with gatekeeping information.
Another issue that will be apparent is is rampant already is AI cheating, I can write a bullshit doctoral thesis in five minutes. That should not happen, at the very least on the grade school level, education wants to get in on AI and this will be a major failing of the entire education system, If you have history class and today’s kids will cheat. The school already has the tools that could be improved by google. The normal entropy of children’s schoolwork in a school system should see inputs that are fairly random but within values. If you have a whole class of cheaters go to Gemini and type “Make me a 4 paragraph report on the structure of the plant cell. This should set off an alarm in the kids google accounts that are already bound to the school, the AI should know this is a school account , and further it should see 30 kids are doing the same thing. It should report to the teacher or admin.
AI can work for the students if they are not trying “Write my report” . Honestly for the cheaters let them deal with the teachers and admin . But for the children whom actually want to work . The ones that type “i am writing a report on plant cells can you help me?” this is where this can shine. by conservation of research the child is presented with information to their level of understanding and linguistics with a bit of extra challenge to provide stealth learning. Let it become a workflow for the child where the AI is not there as a Authority but more of a guide. force the kid to ask the questions to the AI and let it branch to a learning experience. if this becomes the absolute experience the child gains concepting and critical thinking to the process.
Protected: White paper #1
Adding AI to Vaers will not make it better…
The Vaers Database is getting an upgrade it seems. The Vaers database tracks reactions to Vaccines. This database has been long used by the AntiVax crowd to point out non-causal links in vaccines.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rolled out a new system using AI, that uses publicly accessible reporting of negative or unexpected health effects linked to medicines, vaccines, cosmetics, animal food and other consumer products. -Source: [Fox News]
While the addition of Cosmetics, Animal food and other stuff seems like a boon to this it is not. it will cause doctors to chase ghosts in the system. If a baby eats dog food after a vaccine and has a reaction it will be logged, When the actually reaction may have been the dog food. This will cloud the new database where Causal reaction will cloud issues casual relation.
This will make it impossible to find out what is the actual problem.
The FDA claims it will have a single, platform that researchers will have access to key data -Source: [Fox News]
Also by publishing monthly there is going to be a much harder time vetting the information. While throwing large amounts of Information To an AI it is likely going to hallucinate if the database is not perfectly formatted.
If you throw millions of variables (Dog Food+ Flu Shot + Rash) into a monthly processing cycle, the probability of a “false positive” signal approaches 100%. The AI isn’t finding truth; it’s finding bullshit correlations.
While this new system claims to be cheaper I feel like the numbers maybe cooked. the Old system you could download the entirety and manually search. If AEMS only allows search through an “intuitive” AI interface, it effectively creates a Black Box. You won’t be able audit what you can’t see. This new device takes the data out of the users hands and may present a fever dream of an answer. It could spit out the entire plot of the 1989 batman movie when the joker poisons products.
In the end, as a researcher, I’d rather have the data in my hands than given what an AI thinks because in the end AI does not have intuition. End all it will flood the research market with uninspired noise that will confuse time tested research methods. Under the new system, a Fart could be diagnosed as a vaccine reaction when it did not take to fact the person ate a 3 bean burrito at taco bell.
Anyways Im out, to have a coffee that will be misdiagnosed as cocaine use in this new system….Stay Caffeinated, Stay vigilant of bullshit…
ps: the amount per search via AI is going to cost an astronomical amount of power vs the several cents worth of electricity of using a CSV.
We need to talk about “smart” devices…
In this world of AI and smart devices we are leaning towards a smart Armageddon. There are so many stupid smart devices out there. Smart Water bottles ? Fuck that, they are likely stealing your data and location. Smart Toasters? Fuck that you can turn a knob and almost 500$. Smart thing you piss on for tracking hydration.
The sad sad story about this of all of these smart devices that claim to make your life easier are doing one thing. They are taking data from your life apart one piece of data at a time. You end up losing your own agency and sovereignty. They end up selling every piece of your life away for pennies, then reselling that and making more money… if you need a true smart device, buy a whiteboard, it’s safer. it will not steal your data. A whiteboard doesn’t leave you open to marketing unless you pin a pizza advertisement to it. If the smart device company goes out of business you have a Dumb smart brick. You are stuck with someone else’s mistake and a worthless product.
These smart on-the-go devices like water bottles also leak your position in real time with Bluetooth. They are as secure as a screen door on a sub made of paper. Your data also has no chain of ownership, so once your data gets “analyzed” you lost a bit of yourself. You have NO idea where this data is sold off too. This is the sick future of things you will not be able to take a shit without that data being sold off.
If you think about it , a whiteboard is more secure than all of these devices. A smart toaster could leak information about you to an insurance company, You’d have no idea why your rates shot up because they bought data on your carb habits. the piss tracker for hydration could “leak” data saying you are a health risk because you do not drink enough. These billion dollar companies spend more time buying data about you than talking to you. One of the biggest spies in the world …. Walmart!! Walmart could train the CIA. Walmart is turning into a data company that just happens to sell you socks when you need them while tracking your phone. When you are in their stores buying smart shit they follow you around the stores with facial recognition, they likely buy the information from the smart device makers to “help” you make informed decisions. Walmart has used this ecosystem to generate 6.4 billion dollars! they are planing devices inventory tracking that have Bluetooth, the funny thing about that it’s not about that . every time a mobile phone passes these devices will become aware that your phone has passed it . they will map you out through the store and see your exact habits. at that point just buy a cucumber some Vaseline and condoms, While checking out if there are any employees left just say your going to have some fun tonight. Just to screw with metrics. .
But in all when purchasing a “smart” device, ask yourself, Do i really need this device to be smart. Coffee parts are smart enough with the built in clock. your smart enough to put the grinds in the coffee pot , You are smart enough to add water. If you need something more smart, Upgrade to a Prosumer level or a commercial grade. Don’t get distracted by apps , Features you don’t need or See things on your phone. because in the case of the coffee pot you pass by it 20 times a day in your house.
Because, In the end you need to ask yourself, what did they remove to add the “smart” tech. What happens to the device if you lose internet. There are coffeepots out there that already stop working when the internet is off. How reliable is the small computer that tracks you in the device, will a device like a toaster stop working when toasters have worked nearly 100 years if the “smart” dies. The whiteboard is your best device if you need to track things. if you really need a “smart” coffeepot buy a smart plug and a dumb coffeepot with a switch if you really need a smart coffeepot. the plus is less data leaky about your caffeine habits.
Final thoughts here, if you need a smart device that doesn’t really need it , Buy a smart plug. That’s my opinion. The smart plug will leak data but at worst they will leak Wattage use vs hard data. Need a smart crockpot. skip it . buy a smart plug and you can turn it on in the middle of the day and all the smart plug knows is you turned the plug on. Not stuff they sneaked into device or menus asking what you are cooking to have you volunteer more data.
in the end buy a smartplug with 1800w 15a so you don’t burn your house down anciently and moreover don’t give anyone data on when you are cooking your 239842398 alarm chili in your crockpot.
I’m not saying all smart devices are bad, but you need to think about what you are giving up the first time you sign into an app. If you really want to have that “smart” device – Buy a dumb device and use a smart plug, it is cheaper in more ways you than you can count. You do not lose your personal security. A smart plug might give up the energy your using and perhaps some network mapping. A smart device with an app on its own is a spy that will leech every bit of data it can get.
In all that’s my opinion… Now back to my coffee from my non smart pot.
Is amazon ok?
Amazon has been weird lately, Just a bunch of things I have noticed .
For one amazon prime Video is getting weird. Not sure if this applies to everyone but, Watch a TV show on amazon… Rather than go to the next episode It returns you to the Amazon Prime Video screen, I thought it might of been a fluke in the amazon app. I tried the same thing on my samsung TV , Same thing happened! Loaded up a brand new firestick that i have for media sharing Same problem?
This alone may not have anyone going Hmmm but there are other things Amazon Resale has people complaining because of people order X and get Y. Other items are shipped and people are getting refunds and told to dispose of Item.
They also are heavily leveraged into AI and their Rufus is dumber than a brick. They are putting hundreds of billions into AI and are hemorrhaging money for this.. They are trying so bad to be next Facebook in a way by being Big Data and they do not know how to do it . Costs for their AI outwiegh there standard app approach. The way it is going Jeff Bezos might have to use low grade fuel for his plane.
Amazon is also hiding reviews from normal users and instead show compensated reviews. Compensated reviews are garbage because the only way to keep getting items is give a glowing review. I’d take 10 Honest reviews over a single review where the person received the item for free.. They are so badly losing their way that they are bleeding long time customers turned off by this approach. Amazon probably knows they are losing a small percentage of customers. They are over leveraged and I am willing to bet they dont know how to get back . but even month to month if they lose 0.25% customers , You don’t have a leak you have a crisis , because even in that small percentage they are losing “whales” people that are big spenders.
If you go by this metric it works out to big money and the more that leave would be catastrophic.
| Metric | Regular Member | The “Whale” (Top Tier) |
| Est. Annual Spend | $1,400 | $12,000+ (Business/Bulk) |
| 0.25% Monthly Churn | 625,000 users / month | ~6,250 high-spenders / month |
| Annualized Users Lost | 7.5 Million Users | 75,000 “Whales” |
| Direct Revenue Loss | $10.5 Billion / year | $900 Million / year |
| Subscription Fee Loss | $1.3 Billion (at $179/yr) | (Included in revenue) |
So right now Amazon is using an enshitification phase while they try to bet the house on Rufus. Rufus has the tact of getting a pickaxe to the skull. If you ask google it gives you what you want while Rufus throws shit at you and goes HERE THIS IS WHAT YOU BUY NOW! At a guess Amazon knows they are bleeding but they are so committed to their act that they are reducing everything just to keep the ship running. So piss away customers and hope they can profit. if amazon had incrimented the changes rather than try to use a grenade to empty a bucket people may have tolerated this. But even marketwise they are pissing away money , The stock is down 8.18% in the last 6 months.
While amazon serves better as the general store they are trying to get into a neiche market and they have no fucking clue how to do it because they seem to be trying a what can we replace while not realizing th e limitations on the new.
They’ve replaced the general store with a high-stakes AI experiment, and right now, the experiment is blowing up in everyones face like wile E coyote trying to catch a profitable roadrunner.
Anyways, back to my coffee after this steamy thought.