cowsup

You can send as many questions as you want, and they don't necessarily need to be conflicting.

You can throw a user bio at it, like "NAME: John Smith, AGE: 71, LOCATION: California" and ask OpenAI:

* Is this user located in the United States?

* Is this user located on the East Coast?

* Is this user located on the West Coast?

* Is this user old enough to vote?

* Is this user old enough to retire?

4 out of 5 of those are all going to resolve Yes, with a far greater than 0.5 rate.

Toss a bunch of freeform text bios at it, and get folks categorized within any number of data-points you're looking for.

The idea is:

* .name is open for everybody

* a company called "Global Name Registry" scooped up a BUNCH of common last names, including fraser.name

* Global Name Registry then sold access to neil.fraser.name for far cheaper than the fraser.name domain would cost on its own; someone else could also buy john.fraser.name or jane.fraser.name, so the single fraser.name domain that they owned could have dozens of customers associated to it. They worked with ICANN to allow each domain to have its own registered owner.

* The article in the OP bought neil.fraser.name and has used it for years

* Verisign bought Global Name Registry; later they realized, hey, we're sorta not making a lot of money on this idea, and we're spending a lot of time/resources maintaining these domains "for cheap" and chasing renewals, and not scooping up more customers. Let's just stop it and stop paying for fraser.name and the potentially hundreds of other domains we own.

* Neil Fraser, not the only Fraser in the world, is upset because he might lose the domain he's had forever

So one CAN buy the mwai.name domain, as you have, and continue using vpn.mwai.name just fine. It's just you can't "officially" start selling out these subdomains as a separate registrar entry.

The very first graph you cited shows that we've had such a low number of natural disasters in the 21st century outside of Earthquakes, and now we're starting to tick back up with non-Earthquake deaths.

You would think, with all of the advancements in medicine, technology, and infrastructure, we'd be continuing to see improvements. Instead, it's ticking back up. Why do you think that is?

I remember poking around at the Wii U browser. Nintendo had examples of fetching the current state of buttons, analog sticks, and the touch screen to monitor for input.

While cool on paper, there wasn't a preventDefault() solution. So you could make a simple game where a sprite could move around and respond to "A," but if you press B, the browser would try to go Back a page. As the article mentions, the shoulder buttons activated a Gyro-based scroll mode (which wasn't great). "B" would go Back a page, Y would close/open the "curtain" on the TV, X would open the URL bar (thus showing the software keyboard and taking over all inputs), and Start/Select also did something, although I've since forgotten what.

So, although all button inputs were present, almost all of them also did something on the browser level, so nothing exciting ever came of it.

I think there's a difference between music that people will cherish for decades to come, and music that will sell in the short-term. This isn't even me being an "old man yelling at cloud," you can look at what was charting in the 80s-90s and recognize some songs, but others just got lost to time. They were fine, but they weren't special.

AI music will fill the gap. The "song of the summer," the latest TikTok trend, and music that plays for department store ads, will be produced and distributed by labels, without the need of a particular artist whose image they have to worry about. How many times have labels, who invested a lot of time and money into artists, had to deal with the artist having an episode or scandal? AI eliminates that risk.

I think trying to avoid AI music will be like trying to avoid auto-tune, or digital instruments, or people mixing tracks in ways that are impossible to replicate with real-world instruments in real-time. It'll be common at first, harder later, and impossible/silly in the future.

I don't think Twitter/X know for sure who the bots are, since Elon has been pretty vocal about trying to stop them for ages, yet I still get lots of spam DMs (as do others with far fewer followers/reach).

Even if 95% of the spam gets actively reported and dealt with, that still leaves a ton of nonsense on the platform, getting fed into the LLM. And spam has only gotten worse over the years, as the barrier to entry has lowered and lowered.

> Still no email blast from Vercel alerting users, which is concerning.

On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams.

But on the other hand... It's Sunday. Unless you're tuned-in to social media over the weekend, your main provider could be undergoing a meltdown while you are completely unaware. Many higher-up folks check company email over the weekend, but if they're traveling or relaxing, social media might be the furthest thing from their mind. It really bites that this is the only way to get critical information.

Such has been the case with many technological advancements. You can change the date on this to 1999 and complain that the Internet has accomplished this; suddenly everyone can get information on car repairs, recipes, and the like, without needing to do lots of research ahead of time or take a course, thus killing the need for a mechanic or a bakery.

Outside of software development, a lot of things that AI can do still require a human to understand and do it. I can't tell Claude to change my oil, or ChatGPT to bake me a cake. I can use them as tools to teach me what to do, same as the Internet, or TV programs, or books, or any other "invention."

Great piece. I thought the same of Cal's announcement; it basically boiled down to "we're willing to shift our entire business to a security-through-obscurity approach." It won't be long until systems are sophisticated enough that they can target an application over the course of a weekend, and try thousands of exploits across each possible endpoint you offer, to see what happens, regardless of whether or not your source code is public.

Anyone who's launched anything on the web -- anything at all -- and looked at the logs will see all sorts of endpoints being requested for /wp-admin/ or random WordPress plugins, even if their site has never, and will never, run WordPress. Imagine this at scale, with every possible attack method imaginable, blindly hitting everything on the web. That's where I think we're headed, and closed source won't fix that.

I was experiencing something similar over the weekend. Just happened to see this post. Lots of hours spent digging over the weekend!!!

I think it also helps them figure out which videos keep people on YouTube longer. If I scroll to a section of the page that has 6 videos, and I stare at them for 10 seconds, then scroll down, they'll know that one or two of those videos must have been somewhat interesting. But if I stare at 6 videos, then scroll away 2 seconds later, it knows that nothing in that batch was worthwhile.

The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.

Advertisements have helped finance the web for decades. AI could be no different.

What type of advertisers would want to advertise next to an AI chat window? How often would ads show? Would the users still enjoy using the platform if you showed enough ads to offset the cost of running the service?

Lot of questions that all boil down to "it depends." None of the big players want to dilute their product with ads (yet). But I definitely think some will be willing.

Good software can be art. And like all art, we have hit the stage in which code can also be cranked out en masse, thoughtlessly, for a quick buck. It was only inevitable.

The lack of domain re-verification seems important. The other things listed are the case for any social media platform, but they bear repeating.

I hope domain re-verification is fairly automatic once implemented. If I remove my Bluesky information from my DNS, it should be a safe assumption that the affiliated account will soon lose its username, maybe within a week or two. Same if I'm buying a domain; I wouldn't want lingering accounts for months or years after the fact. If it's a more manual process, that could be annoying, especially since you can also use subdomains -- someone could be "admin.example.com" and fly under the radar when selling example.com.

I find such thoughts exciting. In the future, children will be taught basic facts that, to us in the first half of the 21st century, are some of the most complicated questions of the universe.