Work smart, not hard.

They’ve already got it mapped out.

Atlantis

Consent-wise, would a side-to-side tail-waggle count as a Yes or a No?

Every time someone says something mean about Mamdani, you could post a link to his alter ego, Young Cardamom: https://youtu.be/DZ1OblYm5YY

Beginning if I like it.

Am working my way through a comedian’s interview podcast. Was a tough slog listening to all the episodes through the pandemic.

Was listening to an interview with David Cross, the comedian and actor. He was asked what was the best advice he had ever gotten. He said the best advice was from Jon Stewart, regarding parenting:

“Don’t take it personally.”

Said he thought about that every day.

do less of: hovering, rescuing, and pressuring.

Generally good advice in all situations.

I don’t think you’ll be able to keep AI out of those predictions. It’ll likely morph into something actually useful, and seep deeper into all kinds of technologies. Sort of like how so many cars now come with ‘Driver Assist.’

But I think a lot of it will migrate to run on devices, so your 3D printer or air-conditioner will be more adaptive and less prone to failing.

Also, given what Apple and Google recently showed at their dev conferences, we’re going to see a lot more use of AI inside games, like NPCs that say and behave in different ways. Or productivity apps that look at what you’re doing and berate you for being too stupid.

Apple just demoed exactly that, running fully on-device:

https://youtu.be/6Wgg7DIY29E

My car needed some repair work. Insurance set me up for a rental with Hertz who told me not to pay for bridge tolls with my own car’s transponder. When I take the car back, they tell me I’ll be invoiced later for the tolls. Had 4 toll crossings which ordinarily would come to less than $30 (even less if I had used the transponder).

A month later, the Hertz charges show up: $77 (including ‘processing fee’). Called and complained. They said they’d look into it. Never heard back.

Not using them again.

Half of California:

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

To be fair, Vaseline literally says ‘Petroleum Jelly’ on the label. They’re not hiding it as ‘headache relief.’

On-device AI is the way to go. No privacy leak. Doesn’t have server and networking costs.

This specific use case (looking things up in Start menu and settings) is a good one, since finding out which setting to tweak is a major PITA.

Apple just announced at WWDC embedding Foundation Models on phones. Except they will allow apps to access them and give them custom prompts. This doesn’t go quite as far.

“People don’t realise that paracetamol comes from oil currently,” said Prof Stephen Wallace, the lead author of the research from the University of Edinburgh.

TIL: https://newatlas.com/science/paracetamol-manufacturing-trees/

Doesn’t replace MCP, but it’s a crapton more secure and well thought out.

Smart move, handing it off to an independent entity. They probably saw how fast MCP took off and realized few people would adopt it if wasn’t.

Similar to other apps, CoverDrop only provides limited protection on smartphones that are fully compromised by malware, e.g., Pegasus, which can record the screen content and user actions.

Irish Coffee and Mission Burritos.

A lot of the Javascript attributes used for fingerprinting are used to decide WHAT to render and to cache settings so things work smoothly the next time you come back.

For example, the amount of RAM, your WebGL settings and version, presence of audio, mic, and camera, and screen dimensions are all relevant to a game, a browser-based video-conferencing app, or WebASM based tools like Figma.

And unless you want an app to do a full check each time it returns to foreground, it will likely cache those settings in a local store so it can quickly look it up.

If the app needs to send some of this data to the cloud so the server changes what it sends up, they now also have your IP address, rough reverse IP coordinates via ISP, and time. You can use VPN or Tor to obfuscate IP addresses, but you have to remember to turn that on each time you use the app, and in the case of VPN, to disconnect/reconnect to a random server to semi-randomize your IP (or use Tor, which does this for you).

But to answer the first question, changing or disabling those settings could break a bunch of features, especially Single-Page Applications, those using embedded analytics, or any amount of on-device graphics.

I know it’s fun to bash on Gates, but it’s also bullshit. Dave Cutler worked on at least two major operating systems. He’s way up there in the Hall of Fame.