WTF now… Post Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part III

I honestly thought I was done with this, I decided tonight to eliminate my billing from the original host and just have all my billing in one place. Never have any expectation of anything you don’t have high expectations for because when you think they are at their lowest they will go out of the way to prove you wrong and go lower.

I have one recommendation and Normally I don’t go looking for a fight. Avoid Hostgator, They overcharge, they use the same SAAS that other companies are using, like charging for emails. They have a Tech support end that is just a bunch of screen reading salesdrones trying to get you for another few dollars. The second you go off script with these guys they have no idea what to do. The thing is .. HostGator used to be an OK company and now they are looking to extract income from every angle they can from people who are either to lazy or don’t know enough about web development to open a website. Nothing against either because having a business do the hard part while you learn how to make a website is good, There is nothing better than a good handhold. I did the same when I learned HTML back in the day of ancient history.

But HostGator’s enshittification since their buyout has been a breakneck speed and they are failing faster than a door on a 737 MAX. All I wanted to do was finalize some movement on leftover stuff on HostGator , Instead I am dealing with dragging emails out of my file from 20 years ago, and other email from 17 years ago. Having tech support try to put the problem on me and than stick me with regulatory locks. This is not the way you keep a customer , this is how you make customer run! Talk about a failure of a good host, gone are the days of a bunch of guys running a webserver out of their homes to a mega conglomerate trying to say what else we can make a profit off of. The bunch of guys who made this from their uni must be cringing when they watch their empire crumble.

Give or take I had been with Hostgator for over 20 years, Wasted who the fuck knows how much money and they act like I am customer that walked in yesterday. They have had my information since the first man to open the hosting site in his University and they cant set up a profile right?

Ed Note: Subject to updates…

Attributions from:
https://www.newfold.com/ :owns Hostgator
Clearlake Capital Group :funded acquisition of Hostgator
Siris Capitol Group :funded aquisition of Hostgator
Coffeecommander.net : Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part I & part II

You might be eligible for a refund from your dealer… CVS

If there is one thing we learn as we age is most people step away from the illegal dealer and end up with the legal dealer of drugs… CVS. But the funnier thing is for the people whom have had a “Dealer” they are likely more secure than CVS.

Many CVS customers may be eligible for money as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit against the company.
The settlement stems from a lawsuit that alleged CVS violated laws by sharing user data from its website and application with advertising company Criteo.

The thing is as much as someone purports that it is alleged. My opinion is they are a bank vault with a screen door. The CVS registers tell you to put in your full name and birthdate. I made an objection to the CVS manager and they claimed “oh it has a privacy screen!” I said no it has a polarized filter pretending to be security, anyone that is lingering 10 feet behind you see you typing all of your information in as long as they stay in 20 to 30 degrees of the CVS kiosk.

CVS and Criteo denied any wrongdoing. In a statement, Amy Thibault, a CVS spokesperson, said: “We stand by our privacy practices and believe they comply with applicable laws. The settlement resolves claims based on legal theories that challenge common online industry practices.”

CVS and Criteo denied any wrongdoing. YET they changed their entire terms of service, Took more rights away from the consumer and now hold a INSANE right to hold your personal information in perpetuity

The statement also said CVS agreed to the settlement to “avoid expense and distraction of prolonged litigation.” While the settlement is still awaiting final court approval, affected customers can submit their claims through Nov. 16.

This statement is so contradictory its not even funny, Corporations love prolonged litigation. There is no way in hell they would want to “settle” if they can hang up in court for 10 years and keep that going its less than what is at hand. They threw out a number and said go away we are likely doomed if this goes to court.

I asked myself who the hell is Criteo, it would seem its a back end to CVS and it likely resides on those machines well that say “check your coupons here” , at a guess CVS was wholesale giving the purchases to them so every time you walked into CVS to get your drugs and purchased something Criteo got a copy. The problem here is recently CVS changed their terms of service to give Criteo a hole into your meds and other PII. If you buy plan B they know, if you buy condoms they know. If you buy those and a week later you buy monostat it will try to put that together that you are unclean or you had an issue during intercourse. If you buy pads every 24 days it becomes your unofficial period tracker. So that day you walk in on day 23 and go to the savings center the machine happily prints a Tampax coupon.

Yet, Criteo takes this information, sell its on a second market, and CVS claims they protect your information! Just from my last paragraph alone think about how much information they can take from you. Your period time, Plan B (you make mistakes), Condoms (sexually active), Monostat (Maybe doesn’t take care of themself if repeated purchase.) . Even for the males the same purchases will let the company figure out that a male purchasing the same items and come up with through metrics Male buys these items and the timings and will happily add “Male buying for female” and use all the same metrics.

For machines like this a little malicious compliance to the retail machine never hurts, Buy three things that never should go together in a purchase and put it on your card.. Say Cucumbers, Condoms, and Petroleum jelly.. Let the prediction machine do the rest. After awhile of crossing 3 item purchases together you will offset the machine so badly it will not how to accurately measure you. Vinegar, Tampons and Baking powder. the list goes on. Plan B, a turkey baster, and Cake mix and a fleet enema. Even if you are not needing these things such as the plan B or Tampons.. donate them to a shelter they always need the things..

The $10 dollars that CVS is offering is a bad joke, they want you to go away for the price of a medium tier Starbucks coffee..

Attributions from:
USA TODAY – CVS customers may be eligible for money from settlement

Nvidia CEO Doesn’t give a damn about anyone.

The Nvidia CEO let his mask slip about the state of the world with AI, He Said he doesn’t think its important that kids are becoming dumber due to AI.

Try to get a kid to do long division right now,” Huang said in an interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots? My goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter? I don’t think it does.”

I dare this man to say this to his own mother or father, I bet in 0.00002 seconds a sandal will hit this man like an ICBM. Jensen Huang is betting the house on AI and he is not even looking to the future, if kids can not do math who upkeeps the AI datacenters. Who fixes his car when it needs alignment and timing. Who makes sure that the FPU is accurate, because all of this is connected. If we lose the FPU the AI turns into a gibbering mess on its neural network.

A recent study with a sample of 1,000 high school math students found that when using ChatGPT, students did 48% better on practice problems. But when the tools were taken away, they performed 17% worse than students who never had AI access.

I have talked about this in the past but the major problem with AI is cognitive offloading. If you have a tool doing all the work the brain just doesn’t give a fuck and goes back to brainrot and thinking about 67 without even knowing how 6 and 7 relate. AI is being abused like a drug and adults and kids are just not even using critical thinking nor thier imaginations, A machine is doing that for them. Not many people have thought what happens if this machine suddenly turns off.

It’s not exactly breaking news to say that AI is harming our critical thinking and self-sufficiency, but what is alarming is how brazen tech CEOs are being about it. “We’re gonna discover new [skills],” Huang said, revealing that he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “Just maybe not those. There are a lot of skills that don’t matter.”

Sigh.. Mr. Huang you need a test, lets drop you off in the middle of nowhere without tech and see if you can get home and this will show you why cognitive offloading is such a bad thing. Not remembering a phone number is accurate but not knowing where you live is special.

AI is making us dumber, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t care. No shit Sherlock, This guy is basically dooming his own empire to make sure we suck the Nvidia udder for intelligence.

Does It Not Matter, Or Is AI Making Nvidia Too Much Money To Care? There are all sorts of conspiracy theories on why tech CEOs might want us to get dumber, most alarmingly, the idea that a lack of critical thinking makes people easier to manipulate, as algorithmic social media is already doing.

Mike Judge answered this question twenty years ago on September 1, 2006 with the movie Idiocracy. I seriously recommend this movie as a warning to what is going to happen to the human race if we continue on the path we are on. Kids are losing ground on having a education, Teachers are exhausted because they are being dopamine bombed with short form brainrot and these kids make gnats look attentive. Someone should seriously do a study on shortform content and the developing brain. Wait *checks*, Oh yes there is a study on this! Lets go to the results:

Results revealed that short-form video addiction not only directly impacted academic procrastination but also placed indirect effect on academic procrastination through attentional control. Furthermore, the mediating effect of attentional control was contingent upon individuals’ boredom proneness. Higher levels of boredom proneness weakened the impact of short-form video addiction on attentional control.

Well shit, It does exactly what we thought it would do. AI SLOP BRAINROT FOR ALL!

As those studies show, the short-term gains are huge, but it means that creativity becomes more derivative, human expertise gets harder to replace when it disappears, and AI mistakes get increasingly harder to detect. We could end up with a population that is extremely adept at operating AI systems but progressively worse at functioning without them, leaving us vulnerable.

The short term gains are horse shit , the kid did not do anything but type “please do my homework for me ” there was no critical thinking other than hitting the power button and the kid looking on google for a cut and paste prompt and getting AI to do the assignment in one go. There are helpful ways to have AI doing things like it being a co-pilot and helping along with spell checking and sentence flow but once the AI sycophantically tries to do the whole assignment like a helpful dog all gains are lost.
Mr. Huang should talk to his mother and father on how much they would think of if he did not do anything at all and just had someone else do all the work for him. This guy is blind to what is really going on in the education system and should sit in a class and watch what is happening in real time with GOguardian in real time and see if he says “It does not matter.”. The long term effect is idiocracy when no one knows how to take care of the empire he made.

Attributions from:
National Library of Medicine – The effect of short-form video addiction on undergraduates’ academic procrastination: a moderated mediation model
Wikipedia – Idiocracy (FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING WATCH THIS MOVIE! AND NOT YOUTUBE SHORTS OF THE BEST PARTS!)
thegamer.com – Don’t Worry About AI Making You Dumber, Nvidia CEO Says It Doesn’t Matter

Editor’s Note: For context on why this matters: I have HNPP. My hands slip, nerves misfire, and pain overrides fine motor control. Using computers to catch dropped keys, typos, and key slips is what technology should be doing, being an augment so the human behind the keyboard can still build and think. Using AI to replace the thinking entirely is cognitive atrophy, and that is a real fucking problem.

Uncontrolled AI could lead to Keanu Reeves…

The head of Microsoft AI has warned that without adequate safeguards, the development of AI could lead to the emergence of a new “silicon species” which competes with humans.

Mustafa Suleyman said rival firm Anthropic is treating AI like it is human, an approach he called “misguided” which could create technology that humanity cannot control.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, the chief executive said it was “right” for people to be concerned about AI, but there were “very practical things that we can do” to control it.

Microsoft says a lot of things and does a lot of things but this one is load of horse shit. It feels like all of the heads of Corps are getting together to make their own AI doomerisms to freak out the people who don’t understand AI. Mustafa Suleyman must be rich because the man has never heard of a light switch, AI for what it’s worth will never grow outside of its building because the first thing that happens is the off switch will be hit and the machine doesn’t die slowly it dies instantly.

The comments are the latest in a series of stark warnings from the AI industry about the technology’s possible dangers. Anthropic has been approached for comment.Speaking to the Today programme on Thursday, Suleyman warned against firms continuing to create AI systems capable of setting their own objectives, earning money and owning assets.That would mean “essentially seeding a new silicon species”, he said, which could “no doubt compete with us for resources, no matter how much it cares about humanity and loves us”.

Again these guys are either huffing their own farts or have missed the last 20 years of stock trading because algorithmic stock trading is a thing. The funny part is the AI will still be a slave to someone, whether it be the electric company, Nvidia, Micron, or a rubber factory. The AI is not going to be able to take up the resources to be able to keep itself alive, give or take even on enterprise level hardware it will fail in less than 3 years.

“AIs are not conscious,” he wrote. “They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations.

Given that AI’s may not feel but they are just as likely as humans to end up with viruses and will eventually get so bad off that the machine will hallucinate itself to death if you make it eat up its own slop. The paradox will not kill the AI , the Slop will.

The Microsoft boss said greater transparency was needed around how AI systems are trained and evaluated. This, he said, included independent scrutiny of AI behaviour and stronger tools to monitor and control the technology. “We must not sleepwalk our way into a decision we later come to bitterly regret,” he wrote.

The weird thing about this whole cabal of LLM bosses coming out wholesale and saying all of this is I think they want to be regulated, If you are regulated you are protected and coming out with this star trek level of bullshit of the LLM Terraflopiticon Intelacore Interpalex machine will come alive and cause Skynet to become active and judgement day of cookies and milk to take over the planet in raw cookie dough to poison all humans will come about.

Speaking to the BBC about an upcoming AI summit, Suleyman called for “alignment” to create technology that must be “subordinate” to humanity. Alignment is a field which aims to build human ethical ideas and principles into AI. In other words, it aims to keep it on track with what humans value.

Well I guess x is out of the deal because we’ve almost spawned Mecha-Hitler and that went about as well as anyone could think it could go. The fact is Suleyman is asking for something that could be bought for 2 dollars at the home depot called a “switch”. It is a high tech thing that could control the world.

Suleyman’s comments reflect Microsoft’s initial draft of its Humanist AI Code of Conduct, a “training manual” published on Monday for how the company is developing its AI, which sets out the idea of “humanist superintelligence”. This, the code states, is “very advanced AI that always works for people, stays within limits, and remains under human control”.

I hate to keep picking on Suleyman here but this is too easy.. 1942.. We’ve had the training manual since 1942.

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics
The Three Laws

Third Law: A robot must protect itself, provided this does not conflict with the First or Second Law

First Law: A robot cannot harm a human or allow one to come to harm through inaction.

Second Law: A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law.

Actually 4 laws… but who’s counting because Suleyman sure isn’t.

The Zeroth Law

Zeroth Law, which takes precedence over the others to protect humanity as a whole. (added in 1985)

There.. A man in 1942 did something that AI LLM devs are asking for and they are not even paying the fuck attention. The fact i had to write this post is amazing… I’m going back to making my coffee. Not to mention Andrew Martin would like to have a word with Suleyman..

Attributions From:
BBC – Uncontrolled AI could lead to ‘silicon species’ rivalling humans, warns Microsoft
Isaac Asimov – 3 Laws of robotics (see what I did there Anthropic, Google and whoever else)

Signs of the AI times.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot more commercials for ChatGPT and Other AI’s. usually when it is on a thing that has been out for awhile it normally is the first sign of a dying fad. Now AI had some advantages but people do not use AI other than a slop creator or a homework cheat machine. Watching disney+ the commercial for ChatGPT has come up during every break and its some old lady knitting with a woman having a conversational prompt with it. An elderly woman sitting with her yarn, talk with a her phone about sizing up her knitting needles. The interaction drags on, masquerading as genuine human companionship, until that sterile, uncanny synthetic cadence cuts in to announce, “It’s ChatGPT”. This could have very bad implications because suddenly people get the idea to replace human contact and slap some LLM in front of grandma and suddenly 4 months later you find her dead because the LLM suggested she microwave her needles for better loops.

The fact that they targeted the older generation with this is kind of gross, AI is not a replacement for human contact. The longer the advertisement goes, the worse it gets the elderly woman asks what are you and the voice changes to a more robotic voice and says it ChatGPT.

But seeing the advert come up so much is a sign of the times, with AI makers saying they want to slow down and the factor that they are advertising. In my opinion I think AI has peaked, Its peaked with all of the slop and the homework cheats and AI’s true use is fallen to the wayside. My reason for that is AI is at a level right now where it is functional yet makers are looking for more data, and unlike Jonny 5 they can only absorb a finite amount of data. The other part is with all the slop out there the AI is eating itself, and having hallucinations from its own crap.

Models are getting so corrupted due to the fact that companies like google have put synthID out there to keep themselves from being being a victim of autocannibalism. There is no synthID for text files and right now LLM’s have no clue what they are digesting because massive corporations are making the mistake of having AI bots to make their sites to look busier than they really are.

The worst part is we have seen this model play out in real life in the UK with Bovine spongiform encephalopathy. You say but wait, that’s a cow! Why yes it is and when you feed cows cows. When you use leftover cow bits to feed cows you create a feedback loop that gets worse with every time you do it and i feel like we are here with AI .

The recent announcement of AGI was more of a distraction optics move by makers to get away from the problems that are coming up. The warnings are out there.

AI makers grouping together and saying “we need to slow down”. What would happen if all auto manufactures got together and said we should not do X thing, there would be a lawsuit in 5 seconds. ,

Second AI makers looking for a carte blanche release from liability if the AI tell them to do something wrong. When hairdryers have warnings not to sleep with them or eyeglass screwdrivers have warnings not to stick them in .. well..

Third Capex spending that is tied to the US GOV when Rates are going up. CAPEX spending so far exceeds the profit ranges that Anthropic says “we are profitable” but “don’t look at the books”. Right now these companies are running with the “too big to fail” and we know where that goes. The governments investment into AI companies has no payoff because computer tech devalues twenty times faster than pulling a brand new car off a lot. The return on value of 1 year old hardware is at times not even 1/10th of the purchase price.

Fourth The fact that AI keeps doing things it should not. AI time after time now has been failing in big ways, The more that researchers keep pressing AI to do things AI ends up screwing up something it should not of touched.

Last is the advertisements, If the market was self driven it would not need a single advert because word of mouth gets 10 times the attract rate than a commercial has and for the most part 99% of the internet is word of mouth it follows outside of the way television had advertised to us in the past.

Given all of this, is a signs of the times. Do I believe AI should slow down. Yes in the public face, No in the research end. AI needs to fix its security and its own consumption of itself.

Anthropic says they are profitable as long as you don’t check the inbox for bills.

Anthropic stated that they are profitable but as long as you do not look at their stocks nor the bills for capex. The AI goldrush spend continues to built out for the billion dollar shovel for the 1$ AI nugget of gold. I mean hell, if I am to use this logic I am technically a trillionaire I just haven’t earned the money yet.

Anthropic has told its backers it will be profitable this quarter, as it moves to allay investor concerns about the aggressive cash burn of frontier AI companies ahead of its blockbuster initial public offering.

Right now anthropic* is pulling the one thing that people do when they are at a loss of what to do when they panic about money, If I do not see the bills they did not happen. AI development is slowing down, consumable content is drying up. AI is trying to get a 4g fancy rebrand to AGI. we are playing all the games that happen when a business knows the books are cooked.

Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq as the venue for an IPO that could value it at $2tn or more, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company declined to comment.

We’ve seen this play before, NFTs used this same playbook and while it works in the short term it crashes as soon as it gets legs. Anthropic price would not get a valuation out of the gate this high unless someone was jigging the system to make it seem like it was valued this high.

The listing comes at a fraught moment for the AI industry, as the blistering pace of development collides with public anxiety over the technology’s impact on everything from the environment and jobs to the future of humanity.On Saturday, the $965bn start-up’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, called on the AI industry to slow the pace of development.

The factor that the company is talking out both sides of the mouth on this should SCARE the SHIT out of every investor. No high level C suite Exec announces to “slow down” unless all the moves are played out and you are trying to ride the profits of the current system and hope for a breakthrough like an addict waiting for their next fix. The thing is right now AI is eating its own tail consuming slop and its margins for accuracy is degrading and the execs know this. The AI That is claimed as new is not really new it’s just pushed to the front, we are on the same AI that went on jeopardy in 2011, The difference now is computing power has caught up to the AI and CEO’s are terrified that people might figure this out. The modern tech purist will say “NO MODERN AI IS DIFFERENT!” Which in its most basic form it’s Watson with more association, or Charlie from It’s always sunny in Philadelphia with his conspiracy board.

Employees at the rival labs have been in close communication over recent weeks about instituting measures to safely manage the development of AI, according to people familiar with the talks, which are highly unusual given the fierce competition between the companies.

Brother.. Have I something to sell you. It’s called monopoly, the Factor the labs are getting “together” to talk about how they are going to manage safety it’s not safety, They are hitting a wall and know if one person gets an edge here the entire market can go down with it. This is cartel behavior they see the snake oil running out.

My final point here is, If AI were to slow down and redevelop the AI to a smarter AI that doesn’t get fooled into telling someone how to eat glass I’m good with that. The CEO’s are slowing down because they are building a 39483948329048 horsepower engine to run a Geo Metro. If the AI companies drove AI to be an augment versus the “replacement” they are looking for, it would actually make sense. Otherwise the markets are going to have dark times ahead.

Attributions from:
Financial Times – Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter

*Yes, the lowercase is intentional. anthropic hasn’t burned through enough compute or told enough truth on their balance sheet to earn capital letters on this site.

OpenAI claims AI is as capable as humans now, Great now it will screw up faster.

Here we go again, CEO or some three letter title in a company saying their AI is more Smarter/faster/capable than humans.

Greg Brockman, who leads product development at OpenAI, said he believes that the company’s latest AI model, Astra, due to be available inside ChatGPT in coming days,qualifies as “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. The company defines that as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.”

Oh brother we are doing this now. I thought we were over this with the 4g thing, when 4g came out they said THE SKY is the limit! Than when we got what really came out we did not even get an apology letter. But not we are slipping in extra letters with AI now. AGI is like saying ATM Machine, the reason I picked the Automated Teller Machine Machine is this is foreshadowing. AGI is going to be the subset AI, Why profit off of one AI when we can make thirty. It gives the vibe if you use the AI CPA and right after the moment you filing your taxes it goes “would you like to have the AI lawyer to check tax laws and assets to see if your negative tax return will affect any of your properties with liens” *insert 399.99.

Astra, which the company announced Thursday, has been trained to use computers in much the same way people do

So you mean it will work for 5 minutes, forget what you were talking about, and browse reddit and doomscroll tiktok? Oh wait LLMs baked that in already. That’s where they got volumes of data from.

OpenAI said, and can tackle lengthy tasks like financial modeling, tax preparation and video game development with minimal human oversight. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

We understand WAPO, your lips are brown. Give or take the way the WAPO has handled itself of the past two plus years it shows.

“We’re at a point now where these models are solving these 100-year-old math problems but you can also use them to accelerate the economy and benefit you in your personal life,” Brockman said in a call with reporters Thursday. “I do leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them” as AGI, he added. “I think we’re there.”

Sure these models are solving problems, but going back to the capabilities, we are talking 99.99% has ADD, if you miss-word one word in a draft your little LLM friend suddenly goes Normal output when you are trying to email your doctors about your sons spots and a fever and vomiting to from warning of sun spots and CME’s and the end of the universe.

Astra was evaluated by the U.S. government under the White House’s new framework for ensuring new AI is safe for public release, Brockman said. “There was nothing that they came back saying ‘you need to change this,’” he said.

The answer of no answer from the admin is on the level of “and?” The thing right now AGI is so far off the scope if we are to call it what it is, There is no way right nows neural network AI will ever be able to learn like a human , because right now agentic AI learns all information that is inputted, Even given weights to learning, you could have a structural guide to building a nuclear reactor and you are within three misspelling of getting Dear Playboy letters to the editor over having a one night stand at a nuclear reactor.

Real human cognitive awareness knows when to ignore a quip, a joke or the nuggets of information that are meaningless due to intuition. When we are at the store and see the shelf in the Nuts section with a store label of “ass nuts” we do not think of some weird ass shaped nuts, we know it’s trail mix not a Kardashian ass.

When we see a completely hands of AI , Where it can learn and knows what not to learn and what to learn we can revisit this. Right now AI is cookie monster, it sees data it eats, This AI doesn’t know when to stop eating and what we are seeing is AI eating itself in the end. There is a human in the loop, if we were to get to a true level of Self governance of an AI there would have to be laws to be put in place to protect humans from themselves and the AI.

My final word here is Greg Brockman, Has Polished a turd and tried to call it new by adding nuts.

Attributions from:
Washington Post – OpenAI’s president claims AI is as capable as humans now

Did amazon discontinue The Fire Max 11?

Occasionally I use a tablet in my EDC when I am diagnosing broken computer hardware. It is lighter than carrying a laptop around and can for the most part do what a computer can do. This week, I noticed that my Amazon Stylus decided to play a permanent game of hide and seek, I spent hours looking for it. So after I gave up I went to BestBuy to replace the stylus. When I went to bestbuy.com and saw the stylus I saw that it was discounted to $9.99 and thought to myself “shit, they are either doing a hardware refresh or retiring the tablet.

Well.. I think I am right . I originally purchased the Fire Max 11 in July of 2023 for $149.99 near its release day, at the price I purchased it for it felt like a good every day tablet when doing stuff. I had a bit of worry that I might not be able to side load Google Apps to it, Iit took a total of five minutes to do it. Over all it is a good tablet when you need something you can fire and forget, I have left the tablet alone for almost a month at times and it still has a charge in it when I need it. But amazon discontinuing this tablet is a terrible thing. they basically are leaving their best tech level tablet to disappear into the ether.

Give or take this tablet has some power to it. Its hardware is slightly above entry level and its usefulness can be augmented by adding the google play store. The Samsung a11+ might be entry level but they screw there tablets up by putting layers of bullshit on it. When you have so much bullshit on a tablet you can’t kill and often samsung has so much bullshit baked in with its custom interface by the time you add your apps you are stuck with a $200 paperweight while waiting for your app to open.

But, Irony is deep here, The Tablet doesn’t appear on Amazon’s search anymore. I was thinking about getting another one for the SO because with google play added and her being in a job that deals with needing portability she could have used the Fire max 11 in her day to day travels. I was going to recycle the case I took off of the fire max and give her a fully cased Fire Max 11 if I could have purchased one.

When I lost my stylus, I was ready to order a new one from amazon, But best buy had it for $9.99. Best buy however did me dirty in the first stylus they shipped. The stylus they shipped was open box and parts missing and the battery already installed upside down. I mean what the hell, that’s like selling someone a pre-drank coffee and saying its “brand new”. I started a chat on best buy, and they came through with sending me a new Stylus with all the parts and made good on the replacement, they also sent it to me for free which is confusing but I am not going to complain for that. When I was fixing to return the Stylus to best buy I had gone on the site and noticed something else. They were also on clearance, the Fire Max 11 Keyboard Case at $17.99, So I did the best thing possible . Ordered that too!

Given, that I had payed $149.99 for the tablet , $9.99 for the stylus and $17.99 for the keyboard case the end game is you have a durable chromebook jr. End all you have about 90% of the function of a Chromebook and I saved a bit of money because I cobbled this together through a bit of sideloading with a device I already had and BestBuy dumping accessories for cheap.

Attributions:

Best Buy – Fire Max 11 Keyboard Case, Fire Max 11 Stylus Pen (On clearance get them while you can..)
Amazon – Fire Max 11 (sad to see you go… )

AI in education – The Sloppening.. The Sequel.

I’ve written a lot about how AI in education is a bad idea. Well just like an AI coffeepot, The proof came fast! A school district put out their agenda for the year 2026-27 and boy, did they screw up! this shows exactly why cognitive offloading is bad because of how many levels of failure happened here.

How did this agenda pass so many levels without being noticed? At the very least this had to pass from a designer, to a school, to a book printer, to a Copy checker, back to the school, to the school board, to the school budget board, to the principal, to teachers and to final print. This map is like living an alternate timeline, there is no Florida, Other states are horribly misspelled. Did a map from the Fallout universe get printed here? This here is the proof of why AI does not work as a creator and why that there should always be a human in the loop. The school … Farnsley Middle School actually had parents pay for this hot slop garbage. $10 for this very very sad example of why not to drink and make books here while using AI. Whoever made this hit the bottle hard when they woke up and said “Shit! 3 weeks to school!”.

It gets even worse on the inside, I for one am sad we lost Pluto, But I welcome the new planet that would be adored at starbucks because it’s Marc with a C..

Our moon is not even spared embarrassment here. But, apparently Darth Vader had a look at it. This is all fucking nonsense here, the RUTATIONAL PERIOD. wow just what the fuck. All of the math is batshit crazy , 98,000,000 mi does not equal what they have there. Its 157,715,712 KM.

Even the math is wrong. Some poor kid is going to have a stroke in math class when the math doesn’t even line up. 304400km = 189145.391mi. After all of the crap about adding AI to schools would be the best thing since sliced bread.

Also I’m sorry to inform you that the basic elements have been changed in to the new Zodiac Killer cipher.

Good luck with your new elements and planets.. Frankly this is a huge embarrassment, this document traveled through multiple people and everyone was checked out and said to themselves “yeah that looks good”, I have warned about cognitive offloading and this is the perfect case to show what happens when zero fucks are given and Cut and paste is done. I knew that schools in the south were lacking but holy fuck, George Carlin would be having a stroke over this.

This school should be enraged with what was made here, the company that printed this slop should offer new agendas to all of the kids at this school, the administration should apologize for letting this slop salad even get into students hands… What did they do instead, They had teachers tear out all of the bad pages. I guess broken agenda broken school fits here.

Honestly, This is why AI sucks, because people just print out slop and totally offload cognitively and think AI is some majestic magic device. It’s not, it is just a more convoluted search engine when you really think about it with the ability to mad scientist things it knows together. The problem with AI is everyone thinks AI is smart, it is actually very stupid.. Until humans tell it how to deal with the massive amount of information the AI sees nothing but zeros and ones, Humans program the patterns and use patterns to spit out meaningful shit. Right now if you take an off the shelf LLM and ask it to make you a coffee, You will have the most average coffee you have ever had. That is AI’s best guess at the moment, I’ll keep making my own coffee. Otherwise if I ask AI to make me a coffee it might have me add plutonium because it saw it on a reddit post because I screwed the prompt up.

If Mr Conductor (George) were alive today , the man would have content till the end of time with AI slop.

Attributions:
wdrb.com – ‘Venecky’ instead of Kentucky: JCPS middle school parents suspect school agendas are AI-generated
Me – AI in education.
Me – News of the stupid: Robotic AI teachers….
Me – How do we Fix AI from being used by bad actors?

Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part II

I changed hosts a while back… I have sat on my opinion for a bit. I think now is a good time to say something about it. So far my new host has had some downtime but only a few minutes. I’m not worried about a few minutes here and there because this site is not an up to the minute thing.

As far as KnownHost, it was an unknown host to me, as it has only been a month the positives far exceed my expectations. The site is overall faster visually, Before the site would have a hang on a white screen before loading. Editing is not a quest in figuring out if the site is up to date enough to handle code updates. Support works with you rather than to upsell you shit every time you contact them.

Hostgator has only reached out with one message since I quit them. “Your auto renew is off, Please pay or lose your website” talk about being blind, they let their auto emailer spam me when the lights are on, the bill is not being paid, and the user moved out. they have my domain, it would take them 0.0002 seconds to realize I’ve left hostgator. It shows that their owners are just in it for the cash and not providing a service.

I’ve given hostgator my money, and 16 years of my time. basically, they did not even fight. when I said I’m leaving they did not even flinch, I have the entire interaction saved from the chat and they kept trying to upsell. My honest opinion about hostgator is “don’t shit where you eat!” and hostgator has not only shit where they ate, they shit all over the customers and they are starting to revolt.. charging for emails and acting like they are gold is bullshit.

Anyways. for the one month in on KnownHost, I would recommend it, The amount of spam they catch before it even hits the site is good, The speed is great, aside from a tiny downtime occasionally. If KnownHost’s biggest fault to me is losing a minute I can’t say anything bad.

So, this ends the Hostgator journey and now is the new odyssey with KnownHost. The spirit of this website lives in a new body to which will hopefully last more than 16 years. I’ve been editing and drinking coffee on this site since 2005 where i’ve shared my opinions on coffee to crazy tech.

In editing I noticed I did not capitalize company names, I’m leaving the wonky missed capitalizations with hostgator . they don’t take the effort to retain customers so why should I take the time to formalize them..

Attributions:
KnownHost – A reasonable webhost
hostgator – Not going to link that shit.