CommieBobDole

Looks like Dekton is primarily a countertop material and the reason the cooktop doesn't come with the normal top is it's designed to be hidden under a countertop for trendy minimalist kitchen design reasons. Which also goes against the "kitchen equipment nerd" framing since the hidden induction cooktops seem to be worse in several ways than the normal visible ones.

I wonder why it's still here after all these years? It seems both useless and harmful, one of those features whose lifecycle consists of someone rolling it out because of some idea they had and then removing it three hours later after having to fix multiple headlines because they didn't think it through.

What is it even supposed to do?

There has apparently been no confirmation of his death - Wikipedia still lists him as alive and editors there say there's insufficient evidence. If the linked article is true, maybe he faked his death.

This is nice, but how are you determining the location of a camera for map purposes? Some of them are correct, but there are others that have very specific map locations that are off by as much as a hemisphere - an Ohio one in Chicago, a Venice, Italy one in San Bernardino, Pennsylvania and Ohio in Phoenix, etc.

"No, we don't know why the two positions of the switch are labeled "magic" and "more magic".

I have a bin of cables marked "Obsolete". A cable only goes in there if there's absolutely no possibility of it being used for any reason ever again.

I use cables from it once every few years.

What do you mean? I assume the "we" and "our" refers to the author and his wife.

It does seem like a lot of the valuations and infrastructure investments for these companies only make sense if each one assumes they will be the first and only one to invent superintelligence and that it will largely replace all knowledge work.

The article touches on something that I've been thinking about with regards to Google's AI strategy; the automatically-generated AI search summaries are not great. They very frequently confidently misinterpret what the user is searching for and generate half a page of useless information that pushes actual results down the page, and they are occasionally hilariously incorrect, with hallucinated facts.

This is probably a difficult-to-solve problem; given that they generate billions of these a day, not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results. You can see this by selecting the "AI mode" from the search interface after getting the mediocre summary - the results are much better and generally perfectly usable. Though even that is probably a special minimal-compute version of the lowest tier of Gemini, it's still maybe an order of magnitude more capable than whatever generates the search summaries.

The bigger problem is that these search summaries are the default and by far the most common interaction that the general public has with "AI", and because this experience sucks, they just assume that all LLMs are similarly stupid and mostly useless. In non-technical spaces I frequently see the argument that "AI" is not useful for anything, all it generates is garbage hallucinations, and almost invariably they cite some actual terrible experience with the Google AI search summary. I would argue that the strategy of adding LLM summaries to every search is the worst of both worlds - it makes classic search worse while poisoning users against the idea of actual LLM-assisted search.

LLMs have solved writing in the same way image generators have solved stock photos - if you need an image that doesn't need to convey any information other than "I have added a somewhat-related image that doesn't look obviously AI-generated to this", you can now generate such an image pretty easily. That's a low bar, but almost the entire genre of stock photos exists in service to this goal.

Likewise, there's a whole lot of day-to-day writing that mostly exists to communicate "I have written some text about this subject because I am expected or required to" and at most needs to communicate some simple information. LLMs will probably replace a lot of that writing, at least temporarily. As people increasingly use LLMs to consume that information as well, it will probably eventually be replaced by some sort of inter-agent communications protocol.

Also, the dark pattern where it shows the interface and lets you enter a prompt/set settings, but then pops up the 'create account' dialog when you press submit is pretty annoying.