StephenMelon

The killer app is military usage, so they just need enough consumer and b2b demand to keep what they charge governments within what they can justify to taxpayers

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek to tell me about a contemporary Scottish indie band that hasn’t had a lot of press coverage. ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all gave good answers based on the small amount of press coverage they have had.

DeepSeek however hallucinated a completely fictional band from 30 years ago, right down to album names, a hard luck story about how they’d been shafted by the industry (and by whom), made up names of the members and even their supposed subsequent collaborations with contemporary pop artists.

I asked if it was telling the truth or making it up and it doubled down quite aggressively on claiming it was telling the truth. The whole thing was very detailed and convincing yet complete and utter bollocks.

I understand the difference in the cost/parameters etc. but it was miles behind the other 3, in fact it wasn’t just behind it was hurtling in the opposite direction, while being incredibly plausible.

The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.

It just wouldn’t be possible to have a fair election when a sizeable percentage of the population is living under foreign occupation.

Google currently has an advertising campaign for Gemini (in conjunction with Netflix!) which is all about how you can use AI to tell you what the key episodes are so that you don’t need to watch the whole thing. If that isn’t an admission that most of it is filler I don’t know what is…

Seems like autonomous personal air travel would be a far, far simpler problem to solve than road-based driving? Far less edge cases, once you are in the air the only obstacles you really need to worry about are other vehicles, birds, leaves and the odd stray plastic bag. With VTOL the whole thing could be an order of magnitude easier than driving. By the same principle, sea travel would also have less edge cases, at least in calm conditions. Is it the case that people aren’t seeing markets for those applications of autonomy or is there some other reason why there isn’t the same hype in those areas?

Isn’t that what Cambridge Analytica were aiming for?

Facebook jumped the shark when they started trying to encourage private individuals to “create engagement” and pay to boost their posts. If internal marketing jargon is leaking into your UX, you clearly have serious problems with how your staff are being incentivised.

Facebook could have become an engine that allowed society to maximise human capital and but they sacrificed all that potential at the altar of growth hacking and bleeding advertisers dry.

Nuclear weapons are the reason why the competing global powers have found new ways to compete and project power abroad. Global wars have mostly moved from being violence-based to being fought via propaganda and economics. It probably mirrors the way smaller communities moved from physical to intellectual competition.

Why are we still teaching assemby and C over development languages more popular, enjoyable, and accessible? It is not a good career path, it is not popular with kids or with the masses, and it is a lot more expensive than any other genre of software development.

I am getting the Wikipedia list (“I found this on the web”). Tried asking it to search Wolfram Alpha (which spellcheck corrected to WolframAlpha btw!) and it said it couldn’t find that info on WolframAlpha

Apple autocorrect has gotten worse over the past few years. The worst part is that it often changes words that were correctly typed to something wrong without the user noticing.

There are also obvious mistakes with location that just shouldn’t happen. If I am in Glasgow and ask Siri “how far to Loch Lomond?” it should be obvious that I mean Loch Lomond in Scotland and not Loch Lomond VA.

It’s interesting to note Woz’s current enthusiasm for the watch because he was very down on it when it launched.

Like those janky Bin Laden videos from a few years back?