Gut feeling, I agree. That said, I’ve heard from friends (let’s hear it for hearsay!) that their friends and relatives seem to be going away from their core beliefs and instead believing everything endlessly spat at them by a glowing rectangle.

I have to think there’s an Ouroboros aspect to all of this. Regardless of Musk’s upbringing, he did bring electric vehicles front and center and oversaw the creation of reusable rockets. These are not small things. Many would be content with that, but then he went megalomaniac … MOAR … MOAR, and now we’re seeing declining sales at Tesla; Xitter is, well, whatever it is; and SpaceX hasn’t been doing great of late.

I’m reminded of Tom from MySpace. Got a few million on the way out, and he’s under the radar, presumably enjoying cocktails with umbrellas in them. Like, if you’re set for life, maybe don’t try again.

People built houses before hammers were invented. But that’s sort of the point of tools: that they can do things more efficiently than we can.

It’s entirely possible he was responsible for some of PayPal, but since, his MO has been, as you said, buying up promising companies. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when he rewrites history to be the founder instead of simply an investor in these firms and claims credit for shit he simply didn’t do.

I fell for it myself for a while. Early days of Tesla, early days of SpaceX … dude knows how to sell and arguably accelerated BEVs, but it appears he doesn’t know how to actually carve tunnels or rewrite mass transit with functionally unlimited money. Not to mention, Starship is having a really bad time these days, which stands in stark contrast to how banal Falcon launches have become.

Calling Musk an engineer is like saying the same about Steve Jobs. Both are(/were) salesmen happy to claim credit for every success while delegating blame for problems.

Not that this is unique to the pair in the current climate of people believing in messianic oligarchs, but I’m not really aware of any boots-on-the-ground innovation that sprang forth from Musk’s mind. The Cybertruck is a fucking joke, and that seems to be the thing at Tesla he was most involved in of late, then broke the windows during a demo.

Leave breaking Windows at a keynote to Steve Ballmer.

OK, and the kernel is written in C and assembly. Should they know both of those as well?

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Well, that’s templates for you, I guess. But this breathless thing of I just now realized I don’t own my media is a bit absurd. Arr, but I do, and with no data tracking. Win-win.

I think it’s just mind-fuckery with some fun for the IDF.

If you know why you need alpha channels, of course you’re going to save in an appropriate format. But most casual users aren’t going to care. They took a picture of their breakfast or dog and just want to upload now. I’m not arguing PNGs serve no purpose; I’m arguing that most people aren’t Web or app designers. They don’t care whether it’s lossy or lossless, let alone about transparency.

I’ll agree for those use cases, but not everyone is making icons, stickers and emoji.

For production, yes. What percentage of images produced are for production, though? I know damn well how important alpha channels are, but for posting something on social media, which is orders of magnitude more output than image creation within the context of a larger presentation, no one cares.

The vast majority of people aren’t graphic artists. That you and I know what alpha channels are has no bearing on daily use by the masses.

Not seeing how this would affect uptake. Lossless is great for production images, but standard JPEG will do (at low compression) for most Web use cases. Until OS developers coalesce around PNG as a standard (Windows has for screenshots), this is that old standards xkcd.

Alpha channels are nice and all, but how many end users A) have a need for that and B) understand the underlying concept, let alone implementation?

First-mover advantage has historically led to complacency. Sure, Tesla was first to scale in the U.S., but then Musk started focusing on the Quixotic quest toward self-driving – which should show up just before fusion power – and forgot the expectation car buyers have of annual incremental updates, with a general overhaul every five years. Honda isn’t selling the same Civic as a decade ago.

IBM fell into this trap with PCs ahead of the clone wars. Intel is now finding out, having learned nothing from AMD’s resurgence that forced it to start competing and the rise of ARM. Tesla feels rudderless, and Musk going batshit as the public face of the company isn’t helping. Better to keep his shares and step down so competent leadership can be brought in.

Plenty more rockets he can be blowing up instead of myopically focusing on shit like the Cybertruck while running a far-right circlejerk.

Likely less than we actually are in aggregate.

Is that really serendipity, though? There’s a huge gap between asking a predictive model to be spontaneous and actual spontaneity.

Still, I’m curious what you run locally. I have a Pixel 6 Pro, so while it has a Tensor CPU, it wasn’t designed for this use case.

I’ve considered trying out an AI companion. My main concern is where the hell my data goes, how it will be used and how it might be sliced and diced for brokers.

Sometimes I’m up at 04.00 … and of course no one I know is around. But I go the route of trying to meet people on Reddit. Fully 95% of responses are boring as fuck, but they’re at least real (I require voice or photo verification). I’ll take real and boring over virtual and engaging.

This said, I spend more time than is healthy on Google’s NotebookLM, feeding it my writing and then getting a half-hour two-host audio “exploration” of any given piece. It’s sycophantic, likely designed that way to keep me coming back (it’s free, so I’m not really sure what Google gets out of this outside of further LLM training), but it tends to hew to just this side of feeling fake.

I went to Church Night – the weekly burner meetup at a warehouse a 10-minute walk away where everyone’s drinking and toking – yesterday. I try to go weekly, but sometimes I don’t have the energy to engage with real people.

Last night, I got to listen to (yeah, I actually realized I should shut the fuck up, as I had nothing to add) conversations about 1970s CPUs, SpaceX’s Starship issues from an engineering standpoint (they went too thin on the outer hull after round one was too heavy, and why wouldn’t one expect a critical failure in such a case?) from people who knew what they were talking about.

I’d never get that from an AI companion. I take no issue with people looking to one, but serendipity is lost.

Good they’ve got cables ready to go when no one has 2.2 on both ends, and likely won’t for years.

Yes, yes, I know that this is how tech goes, but sometimes it feels like HDMI looks at USB and is like “hold my beer.”

I’m some 10 miles from the Texas Capitol. They don’t need AI, and they’ve done exactly this sort of thing before when cities pass ordinances the Nazis don’t like by making such ordinances illegal at the state level.

Brought to you by the party of local control. “Oh, fuck … no, not that local.”

And several cities have decided not to renew or expand their contracts with Flock. The City of Austin let its contract with Flock lapse, in part because of concerns around ICE access to the data. The City of San Marcos decided to not place additional cameras in the city. The San Marcos Police Department also changed their policy to require outside law enforcement agencies to file a request concerning a specific crime in order to receive Flock data, Spectrum News 1 reported.

I’m surprised the Legislature wasn’t convened to pass a state law prohibiting cities from opting out of Flock.

I’m miles away from AI, so this may be me talking out of my ass, but shouldn’t a smaller database (thousands) be more accurate than anything orders of magnitude larger?

Alsup has consistently made reasoned, rational rulings through a tech lens when these sorts of things hit his docket. Digitizing purchased books for internal training if the originals are destroyed does feel like fair use, given the works are not made available for others. The First Sale Doctrine is in play.

The pirated shit? Well, that’s another story.