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.
I’ve written a lot about how AIineducation 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.
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..
I was reading today, Sony has a new patent for a buttonless controller. Everyone is already making the joke about it, But I think people are missing the factors on this one.
This thing at face value is going to make some gamers go oh look futuristic , Me I am looking at this thing and saying to myself – they are using this for an AD space. There is so much wrong with this controller. With no buttons it is an outright disaster for the disabled. Being capacitive is nothing new, the HTC touch had it and if that outs my age, I don’t care.
It uses a built in display to display the layout, while sony is not saying it out loud, Your EA game is now going to have Nike Advertising while you are trying to pick your next play in madden. Call of Duty will have a button for loot boxes just in range of an accidental purchase range. While this display looks to be a simple matrix display, it would not preclude the fact that they will give the player text advertisements just on the very edge of their visual range and would likely fall into the regulatory issues of subliminal advertising.
Here’s a test: put your hands on your controller right now, now look at your hand and tell me what your hand is doing. Its sitting at the ready position sitting lightly on those buttons, With sony’s patent controller you will now have to float your fingers because any twitch at all you are changing the resistance around that button and you are hitting a button without even trying to.
For people with nerve damage, you now have zero feedback to what you are doing. They should of taken a page from Nintendo’s playbook and had a split controller which takes the weight off your hands and improved on it, Hell if you wanted they could of stuck a screen on the thing that plays Noo-Noo from teletubbies and it still would of been an improvement over this buttonless design.
People with prosthetic fingers and hands.. good luck , suddenly either the servos in your prosthetic or changes in your magnetic field will suddenly have buttons inputs you never made. People with tremors will suddenly be all over the place and while the controller claims to be “accurate” you are now going through a translation layer which adds ms to button hits , so all old games with precise QTE will fail.
Further thinking, if they move forward with this controller, sony will move into dangerous territory , the first dev that decides to put an accessibility layout behind a microtransaction will run very fast into the wall of the ADA considering that prior hardware did not have this layer.
They also may be taking a page out of BMW’s playbook, “UNLOCK THE PRO LAYOUT NOW 0.99 Cents!” meaning with zero hardware changes they are increasing your cost per button touch. In the last 10 years Xbox has taken their controllers and have gone from 40$ to almost 65$ , Nintendo jacked up the cost of the joycons, and while the price has gone up functionality has not increased, sony sees a niche here and goes hey we are going to make this “futuristic” controller and its “Fully Changeable” but under the hood you are going to have some CFO who has never played a game in their life go “how can we monetize this?”
There is another layer that is interesting. What happens when a scammy 3rd party indie dev that is not above board finds a way to use the controllers and steals and streams all of the button presses back to a server. Now they have every button press you hit for the last 6 hours in your gaming experience and matches it out to a screen. They just stole your logins, every little thing you said, they found out your “gay” and are “afraid to out yourself to someone” its a security nightmare. your intercepted button presses on the controller to the onscreen keyboard just got mapped and days later you are trying to figure out a $399 charge to your credit card in some place you never visited.
But this controller feels like an april fools joke that is 4 months late. After sony’s disastrous announcement of they will not be moving forward with solid media you would think someone in marketing would be like “hey bob, this controller is just going to make the players mutiny”. In an irony, sony wants the innovation that nintendo hit with the Wii… and for what it is worth nintendo did it better, They did “how can we make this simple” Sony fails at this because “how can we make this AWESOME” with a bunch of interns jamming whatever the hell their cracked out monster energy high made them think in the moment.
This isn’t hardware innovation this is hardware subjugation. US Patent 12,533,573 B2 is written like 10 guys with ideas got bored with chatGPT and told it to make a patent. The capacitive button idea has a history, Creative labs you have anything to say about this?
My final word for this is , you are making a 3 camera , Glass device to last through the gaming experience. What parent is going to buy a controller that will last one game, not work right for a person who just came out of the swimming pool, an ADA nightmare , One controller throw and this thing is now glass bits on your floor and an injury hazard.
You know I started reading this and I thought to myself oh forbes fuck off.
Imagine you’re the head of an enterprise organization that just dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on AI consultants. Racing to introduce artificial intelligence into your workflows, you also bought the latest pricey tools and invested in time-consuming workshops to get your people ready.
Really fun is not going to make workflows any faster you will have people fucking off in the prompts if you make it too fun. Also, if we take the title we can come up with an equal comparison. “Forbes:The Secret To drugs Adoption? Make It addictive.” There I changed to the quiet part out loud. The Factor here is as AI adaption take up and more cognitive offloading happens we are going to see individuality disappear and the LLM Borg consciousness take over. The problem with AI innovation is it removes human innovation as more people offload to an AI the idea someone had in the shower is shot down over the Borg AI saying do this not that it wont work.
Neither set out to become technologists. Instead, in 2022, when ChatGPT hit the mainstream, they felt compelled to understand it. As a professional magician and mentalist who performs for corporate events, Mike was used to acting out his thoughts and ideas. So was Sami, especially from all her creative and voice acting work. This led them to ask the question that corporate leaders reeling from staff resistance, should ponder, “What if learning this new tool could be … fun?”
This stood out to me .. A magician? The fuck? This is like hiring a baker to market a nuclear power plant. The fact we are seeing resistance is people who see their jobs being automated out of existence with no checks and balances. Are you going to have fun with a device that if you teach it well enough it automates 70% of your job and they fire you thinking they can handle the other 30%. Or for the sake of things the dreaded 1% problems that nothing is written for? If AI takes over a nuclear power plant and its by the sea and takes in water to cool the reactor and the hundred year event of jellyfish comes and suddenly the reactor has no water. AI is not going to have an answer for that even if it has geographic data.
Their first slogan captured people’s emerging feelings about this tech: “Smart people. Dumb AI.” Building on their improvisational chops, they invited attendees to partake in what may have been the first AI-powered variety show. From the start, it unfolded with the kind of energy you might find at The Moth where people swap tales on stage or StorySLAM, open-mic nights at bars and small venues that encourage audience participation and speaker vulnerability.
AI is not dumb nor is it smart. How you use AI is completely up to the user. So a dumb user can screw up things faster with AI than without. I think a better introduction of AI to a user is better done with matching their abilities with the AI , so if a user knows code and they put it into the AI and the AI spits out some refinements that is fine. but the user needs to learn what the refinements did, otherwise its lost cognitive offload. In the simplest of forms if you want to introduce a user to AI park them in front of a computer have them type whatever bullshit they can think of into the AI. Than let them feel for what the AI can and can not do.
When you set up a “show” you are not showing off what an AI can do. You are showing off what AI has been forced to do. So yes you can turn a picture of your boss into a video of him farting on whatever product you have in the works. But to sit your user down and have the AI optional for use and let them feel out AI for when they can not fathom an answer to something is better than forcing it .
It’s no secret this type of experimentation is rare in corporate cultures where the lion’s share of personnel wants the AI craze to just blow over. All those executives who have spent so much time and resources to foster adoption would do well to promote an explorer mindset over an avoider one.
The secret here is too many top level CEOS and COOs think AI is some magic machine that can replace human innovation and human intuition which is completely wrong. if Boards and Ceos treated AI as an augment innovation would go up and failures would go down. Don’t force AI but have AI optional… That way when someone needs a bit of help they can do that without leaving their station but at the same time the same user can leave their station get a coffee and make a life changing innovation rather than let AI try to reason how to innovate.
Anyways… Back to my coffee from a non AI coffeepot because if i ask AI to make my coffee it will be the collective average of the universe.
It would seem my want of a good Non-AI coffeepot has been reinforced yet again. The IoT coffeepot has been caught spying.
A cluster of seemingly unrelated incidents ranging from exposed enterprise AI tools to a breached coffee machine has revealed the daunting reality that modern cyber risk is no longer confined to servers, endpoints or even employees. It now increasingly spans ecosystems, vendors and even the delivery mechanisms for the very tools designed to drive organizational productivity.
The problem with AI is it is veiled in a ton of secrecy that is no good for anyone. Because once the bad agents start figuring it out. We are in deep trouble. The convenience of the AI coffee pot might be nice but it comes with a ton of drawbacks most people don’t account for .
A digital forensics investigator, identified only as TR, was called in when a client suspected a rival had infiltrated their systems after a data breach. Instead of finding malicious software, TR discovered that an internet-enabled espresso machine, equipped with a default password, an outdated operating system, and no firewall, was the source of the leak. Threat actors exploited this device, which was connected to the client’s secure network, to exfiltrate sensitive data. The machine was sending packets internationally every time someone brewed a cup, bypassing all the client’s advanced security measures.
This does present the facts of IoT machines need just as much vetting as computers on a network, if your IT guy doesn’t find every IoT devices on the network he is creating a leak, and the corporate moto of just buy the cheapest thing is normally a recipe for disaster.
Firstly, Keep all of your IoT shit on its own network, If you have a store named BOBcorp, Put all IoT devices on BioT29384 network that is isolated from the main network. Second, You want a network monitor IoT devices are chatty in nature but if your network traffic jumps sniff it out and make sure its sanitized. IoT companies should give a master list of where their devices connect to. That way if your AI coffeepot is connecting to Nigeria you know something is wrong. Either that give google, Apple, Amazon, and other Hub Devices a choice to go through a master server on the devices Hub of choice, That way if all of the corps go through the hub device the IT staff have an easy way to poke at what the IoT stuff is doing.
By having a master hub list of devices if a device starts misbehaving or an attack vector is found. They can deauth the device. It stops companies from just vomiting out “smart” everything devices, That way if they lose there auth they will act fast to restore the trust in the devices.
Another thought here is with security layers is, that most IoT have BLE enabled by default, After pairing there should be a dipswitch to turn off the BLE until its needed for repairing to the network. BLE is notorious for sniffing what is around it .
FirstNet Trusted™ Could really do something to come out on top here. Because of corporate laziness of “just buy the cheapest thing” leads to the problem in the first place. since they are part of AT&T and there network knowhow.
Even passed that Cellphones on the corp networks need to be on their own network, Workers who place IoT or cellphones on the larger corp networks need to be taken off and the employee trained for network safety, it would create a top down security that would even extend to the workers home after. Rather than finding out too late that there beloved AI coffeepot has been stealing secrets for Months.
In the end, You are better off with a Coffeepot with a switch , and if you need it smart. Add a smart plug to it and than you can control it from afar without having so much bloatware you never know what it is connecting to.
In a blog post, Microsoft says Defender is enough for most Windows 11 users. No extra antivirus needed if you keep defaults enabled and update regularly.
Microsoft might be right, but instead they are so wrong here, The average computer problem exist between the computer and the chair. Even the most security minded individual can find themselves trapped in a moment where they have to wipe their entire PC out due to one misclick .
Give or take even if you have a secure version of windows they are assuming you never install 3rd party software, Never update your drivers and never have the computer on the internet with the computer locked in a scif. Otherwise, the second you are on the internet, Microsoft is leaking a shit ton of telemetry on your computer to the world.
if you never take a risk ever with the computer, You should be “fine” however you go to site to download common safe software and you get to play roulette, four different download buttons two chain off to different sites and one gives you the computer STD.
From the second you enter in your information for your windows 11 , Windows(microsoft) is already messing around in your cupboards taking inventory so if you have a stash of photos of your family Microsoft has already taken that and moved it to onedrive without asking much… well they did but they did a batch accept on all microsoft logins and by the time you violated some privacy policy or moved a picture of someone who did not want to be on the net it is already there with a shared use from microsoft. Given the fact that MS leaks this much out of the box anyone trying to hide from domestic abusers or worse there is a major chance to leak and leave yourself out in the open.
The other thing is , if there is a 0-day exploit on a wednesday, You have to wait till next tuesday until MS patches windows defender to update the definitions. With mainstream AV programs , it could be as little as hours until the AV updates to stop the 0-day.
Also bad websites are telling people to put commands in the “search” which in reality just fucks you over by installing spyware where you might just kiss your bank account goodbye. NEVER run anything a website asks you to do in a search bar.
But to make Microsoft’s Assertion accurate. You turn on the PC , Never Log it in. Air gap the updates to it . Never connect it to the internet. destroy bluetooth and Wifi Cards. Otherwise the second that PC thinks its on a network it shouting into the ether on IM HEEEEEEEEEEEERE.
Not to mention, Microsoft undoes any safety margins you have created every time it updates. Deleting onedrive from the system is like trying to get rid of lice with butter, it just doesn’t work. It switches you back to Edge and tries to import anything from other browsers back to edge. Microsofts security is part of the whole, if you must run it , Get Malwarebytes , on a secondary level do not be afraid to run another anti-virus to be double sure. if your PC is acting strange, don’t just assume that everything is ok. Google occasionally fails at spot checking their own sponsored links. That vector can lead to the fastest accidental system infection.
The worst part of the whole thing is Microsoft claims to have made everything easier, it has made it where as long as you invite the vampire in by either command line or installed software or even microsoft themselves they are free to do what they want and microsoft defender won’t look up from looking at the magazine it’s looking at.
A single misclicked installed chrome or edge extension can lift your entire saved password folder without even as much as a thank you.
In the end Microsoft is saying you can have the safest PC in the world, Just don’t use it, move it to an island without internet nor power and your fine.
Matt Novak Starts his article with ” The AI Doomers Who Are Playing With Fire: For years, the dangerous rhetoric has been out of control. And things are turning violent.”
Well now that is an opener. Novak says on how chatGPT burst on to the scene and lays up how AI companies went to congress to told them, That the technology that posed imminent risks to society. AI had the power to destroy the entire world. These AI companies went to congress and they wanted to be regulated now rather than later, because receiving regulation now is easier than getting regulated later. metaphorically its easier to destroy a door than put one up.
No supposedly AI Execs are telling everyone to calm down over AI.
Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global policy chief, sat down for an interview with the San Francisco Standard this week in the wake of at least one attack on CEO Sam Altman’s home.
What is the grammatical formation of this sentence? “in the wake of at least one attack” what kind of word soup is that?
Moreno-Gama was carrying an anti-AI “document,” according to police, suggesting his motivations were related to concerns over artificial intelligence and existential threats. The Wall Street Journal reports that he had called for “Luigi’ing some tech CEOs,” a reference to Luigi Mangione, who’s been charged with murder for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO.
While Moreno-Gamas attack with a firebomb was deplorable , it makes me wonder why he did it , and what was this “document” the way “document” is framed in this sentence as well is kind of weird. Also for notation here, the firebomb struck a metal gate. Not Altmans house.
There was a second incident involving a firearms discharge at Altmans house. This is an incredibly long lead in to get to the meat of the article.
The so-called AI doomers simply aren’t being sold properly on the benefits of this new tech, Lehane argues. “Our job at OpenAI and in the AI space — and we need to do a much better job — is to explain to people why … this is going to be really good for them, for their families and for society writ large,” Lehane told the Standard.
The So called doomers are seeing AI’s drawbacks in real time. One AI company has been sued for a child’s life ended at the assistance of AI. Neighborhoods having brownouts and brown water due to AI . Wendy’s Drive Up Kiosks that barely function. children offloading critical thinking to a machine that will never be able to think for themselves in a power outage.
My personal fear here is that the execs are trying a trying to build a formula to make anyone who criticizes AI into “Extremist” . That if you say AI hurts X .. they will institute “You threatened my child(AI) .” which since the two attacks happened they will use this to frame that anyone who criticizes AI is a “possible” extremist. This is not the case, If i threaten a person they call the police. if you are threatened by an AI who do you call and its not ghostbusters…
The problem is right now with AI you can’t call the police on AI if it tells you to do something that would injure you. IF an AI is hijacked and tells you to do something that is dangerous, the companies will hide behind liability releases. If an AI tells you how to fix something and you die. There is no one to sue. Constitutionally if bob dies because the AI did not tell him to turn off the power while fixing an outlet. the AI CEO’s will point to the T&C and say “its not our fault” . You have machines that are programmed with the worlds knowledge and not a fucking clue how to use it . The AI only uses predictive languages. Such as the cat In the ___ (At answer “Hat”) . Paradoxically, the world at large changes on whim. Think of the 1930s version of “im gay” to the 2026 “im gay” .
The thing is , AI has its uses. The ones AI is trying to use it for is not correct. They want AI as institutional replacement of the human soul and agency. they want you to pay 10 to 29$ a month for the critical thinking that used to be taught in schools. Are there going to be attacks, yes, but can you use the framing to lump them into one single descriptor… Absolfuckinglutly NOT. By this logic that would mean that an AI maker could jail or sue there own employees if they have a moral objection to putting something into the machine that would cause damage.
Mr Novaks article is a huge miss here. it frames that anyone who criticizes AI is wrong. we are not wrong we are also trying to doomsay AI, We all know the potential of AI, But in current hands AI is SLOP, When it is being used by world leaders to make planes fly around and poop on people.. is this the world you want to live in?
By choosing to lump every AI critic into the same room, you are missing the point. We see the things it can help with. We also see the massive misuse of it, and this is what we are trying to point out.
But making every person that criticizes AI the enemy is not even remotely good for the corporation or the human. because this will be weaponizes. If every AI maker told there machines “list every time that the USER has said “You suck” . Than reframed that to USER is threatening me and They should be arrested. This binary approach is what killed millions in the 1930s to 1940s . So tell me again why something that is a machine, that cant think, only predict, and is subject to massive change in human agency and culture. The biggest problem is todays AI is actually last weeks AI .
The very liberties here are that AI makers are trying to marginalize free speech to AI Speech . AI is being promoted as magic right now . That it can do anything! the reality is AI can only do what its been told.. No more no less. AI is like a sith and it lives in absolutes, any variance and its lost. The AI makers and others are also framing that (dislike AI) + (human agency) = violence. It is a complete violation of human elemental drive. The guy who dislikes your ai , is going to be the guy who fixes it. The yesman to your AI is going to agentically turn it into an Extremist.
In the end , AI needs to respect the human element, the diplomatic nature of humans and not the garbage society creates, because in 3 to 5 years we are going to have AI’s that instead of do work, spam 6 7 , and fortnite dance instead of do work because of the predictive nature of AI. Instead of brand AI doomers , Invite them to the table, listen to them they are going to be the ones pulling AI back from the brink.
There is a need for a diplomacy now , rather than later, AI has the ability to “Change the world” but, it also needs to be a force for good. not under a subscription model. If cavemen sold fire as a subscription , Humanity would of died out before it started. The universal coefficient for greed is killing humanity. If used badly, AI can destroy human agency, and the next great disaster for humans would be the next power outage.
At the end of this AI is always going to be the SUM of HUMANITY . and if we all degrade into SLOP producers , AI becomes the SLOP MAKER. So pitching AI right now as the next replacement is a sin that many see as cost saving but they do not think past the AI prompt. Your Wendys order in tokens for the AI if you speak in broken language likely just took up 25% of the cost for the order. The AI removed the human intuition, The wendys worker that saw a tour bus pull up and he throws on extra fries as the 88 people form the bus comes to the door. The Wendys person that now has to play AI interpreter because the AI thought it heard its wants an order of burger that Tries.
If we move forward in the rollout of AI, ethical diplomacy becomes Machine subserviency , Human foresight becomes an obstacle. Human critical thinking gets disassociated to the machine and possibly lost forever.
I think that this article poorly frames the ideas of why people are critical of AI, by framing the few extremist as the majority. It is a diplomatic dishonesty that they are focusing on. There is a real chance here for AI companies to align with people with foresight, not come out with AI underwear or AI Soda just because you can slap AI on it and think you are going to make billions. Right now companies are pushing products out the door with the word AI slapped on it, and the thing that was changed. Nothing. they just added an element that phones home and a subscription model.
Humanity is being pushed back to the age of you could not take a shit without spending a quarter. The AI Companies have seen there own models in the last year , They know the models are degrading in quality because its a feedback loop.
The thing is without the human agency in the loop, the AI will degrade and the companies know this. so its is unequivocally the 1849 gold rush that they are selling the shovels for and they know the end point already.
Some mornings I take a peek at the news and I just read up on things while I wait for my coffee, and one article caught my attention.
Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot to AI, adds $127 million in value
Shoes to …AI ? Did I read that right. Yes I did . The first thing that came to mind was SouthPark. than The 1990s.
A Business pivots so hard that even a contortionist goes damn!
Give or take right now, AI is “hot” but, it’s as hot as running a building full of graphics cards with a failing cooling system. The thing is ALLBIRDS reads as a master class of failure. They make shoes, The shoes become popular. Allbirds leverages itself that they are the Steve Jobs of shoes and don’t read the room. Two years out they are sputtering and failing and have not become the next reebok or nike. They come up with a “brilliant” plan , They sell off all of their assets and jump on the AI train. ALLBIRD than renames themselves to NEWBIRD AI. Sure sure they likely wanted to create an image like they were a phoenix reborn from the ashes of their old company. But they missed out .. ALLbird to AIBIRD (which would of been perfect. like the mimicry of a parrot?). They could of adjusted there merch with a sharpie at that point.
But here’s the thing. A shoe maker has a soft fail, they could of sold off all of the assets that was shippable. Clearance out the shoes, Leverage out the lower markets and find out if the non tech-bro market liked the shoes and pivot there. Less risk than buying the AI lottery ticket. The fact they exited the shoe market at 39 million means they were not cratored.
They have Zero experience in the AI market. They have nothing other than cash to invest, Than they spoke the word they are going to invest an AI and than the venture vultures came. There market cap climbed to 148m . The funny thing is this is all speculative. like the .com bubble. Everyone is jumping in. NEWBIRD AI doesn’t even have land yet, they need to get in line for AI infrastructure, they need to find land that will not overwhelm local infrastructure. So right now they are selling their vision on a feverdream that by the time it comes to realization may be gone.
If ALLBIRD was a tech startup and they had some revolutionary code to help AI this would be a viable path but in the end, this is a shoe company that is buying a shovel from NVidia and trying to be the next big thing when the shovel is a kids play shovel and other companies are using construction machines in the AI market with very small to negative returns.
One last thing, “Stockholders are also asked to approve a charter amendment to remove the company’s environmental conservation public benefit and to authorize a plan of dissolution the Board could implement within 12 months.” Talk about the Theoretical take away from this. live in good nature and ecology than, setting your customer base on fire pissing on the fire and walking away from your mission statement.
For Allbird, They could of paired down the back stock . Sent shoes to influencers , built a brand on tiktok with a close enough reproduction , Kept there ecologically sounding mission statement, built an entire sector off of sephora girls and won big off of “vibes”.
The worst part of all of this, is this is an AI adjacent, that needed to talk about no technology and honestly the fucktons of money thrown at nothing. New Bird AI might be the Futures New Turd AI.
update: You know its bad when Voidzilla enters the conversation….
Walmart has recently made move to require a walmart account on your Vizio and ONN branded Tv’s and its not over Watch metrics, its over how much data they can take from you. Its how much they can market your name and sell it off to other Entities. They claim it is a unification, Its not, it is walmart wants your living room, These TV’s likely have microphones in them and worse proximity sensor to know who’s in the room.
Beyond innovation, the results from Walmart and VIZIO are already clear for customers. 65% of surveyed Walmart customers report that CTV ads helped them discover new products3, underscoring the power of placing premium content in front of high-intent shoppers.
How the fuck did they flavor this question. They probably used a no win question where they gave 5 answers and gave people a no way out. something like “How much do Walmart ads on your VIZIO TV help you learn about new items? 1.Significantly 2. Somewhat 3. A little bit 4. Not much 5. Not at all.. They just flavored the poll to 4 yeses and a no. The poll is bullshit and likely people don’t know what they answered to. Because they will bias the outcome. But Walmart should not have the control over the TV they want. We bought Vizio Tv’s for the game room, for grandma when her tv dies. We dont want to buy a TV for grandma when it makes her able to click the interface and made the home shopping channel in one go because she was watching the big bang theory and walmart spawns and ad for notebooks on sale.
Roku does the injected ad Garbage. Even when you try to turn it off you find ads overlaid on other ads. Roku recently patented technology for “HDMI Customized Ad Insertion.” This allows the TV to monitor the HDMI port. Meaning when you have a monitor for a test while you are checking out someones test results while you are looking up someone’s health roku just made a hipaa violation. Privacy is now a subscription service, the price of getting the subscription is shopping at savers and finding old tv’s that don’t record you while you take a shit. The problem is Walmart is the granddaddy of data from customers , they are the place the FBI turns to when they cant answer a question. they made the reason facebook knows you jerk off because they are reading your watches and phones sensors while you sent memes an hour ago to your work buddy.
The sad part is walmart just leaped over facebooks tracking. Because walmart just stepped up the game. They will probe your phone via the Vizio, Than when you hit the store they will have a tracking Tag that probes your phone again and if you go for the product that was on TV they have your home address, they have your means of payment. they have everything. This needs to stop. With this if you stop to long in an isle walmart will hallucinate that you are buying Plan B while you are pregnant because you dodged out of an isle to talk about something important. In states where birth control is frowned on you could be arrested.
My answer to this as much as I hate it, Buy a Firestick or a google device. Amazon uses Sidewalk, But you can turn that shit off. They are geofenced, they go no further than your TV. They have more regulatory rules to stop them from doing what walmart wants to do. If it is discovered that either them are taking information beyond the boundaries than you know to stop it . If that Vizio or ONN tv refuses to setup without an account, return the TV as a defective product. Make a report to the FCC that the TV is refusing to let you see OTA TV. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, specifically the OTARD (Over-the-Air Reception Devices) rule, manufacturers cannot place “unreasonable restrictions” that impair the use of antennas for video programming. There are people out there without internet still and imagine nursing homes being TV locked because no internet.
But honestly at this point I am almost ready to say if you buy a cheap TV , use a cheap Chinese brand, They will track you but the end game what is a Chinese man going to do if you talk about farts with a friend for 45 minutes.
Walmart is creating a surveillance state that the US government is dying for, now if walmart follows through they dont have to do it. Worse yet if Walmart cheats and says “you need the Vizio APP to set up the TV” congrats you have given walmart your location down to the foot.
It’s bad enough in the generation of smart Devices that you need a SCIF to talk about stuff that is under NDA or court injunction because of a divorce or other means. We as the consumers need to place boundaries. we go to the store to get products, we don’t need to spied on at home because we ran out of coffee.
Also, You know all of this is going to further enshitified by AI , The fact you know these TV’s are going to be taking private data, the second you replay the BLURAY/DVD of your child’s birth congratulations, your or your significant others Vagina is on the internet.
Anyways, if you buy a TV read the TOS , privacy policy and be safe. otherwise the assholes win. I need a coffee now…
