Gemini might be good at something, but I’ll never know because it is bad at all the things I have ever used the assistant for. If it’s good at anything at all, it’s something I don’t need or want.

Looking forward to 2027 when Google Gemini is replaced by Google Assistant (not to be confused with today’s Google Assistant, totally different product).

Google as an organization is simply dysfunctional. Everything they make is either some cowboy bullshit with no direction, or else it’s death by committee à la Microsoft.

Google has always had a problem with incentives internally, where the only way to get promoted or get any recognition was to make something new. So their most talented devs would make some cool new thing, and then it would immediately stagnate and eventually die of neglect as they either got their promotion or moved on to another flashy new thing. If you’ve ever wondered why Google kills so many products (even well-loved ones), this is why. There’s no glory in maintaining someone else’s work.

But now I think Google has entered a new phase, and they are simply the new Microsoft – too successful for their own good, and bloated as a result, with too many levels of management trying to justify their existence. I keep thinking of this article by a Microsoft engineer around the time Vista came out, about how something like 40 people were involved in redesigning the power options in the start menu, how it took over a year, and how it was an absolute shitshow. It’s an eye-opening read: https://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

This is really cool! I like the idea of pen and paper as a supported UI. I’ve never found handwriting on a touchscreen to be an effective or enjoyable experience, across the myriad devices I’ve tried it on (including an iPad with an Apple Pencil). And app-based form entry is often a drag. By the time I’ve even opened the app and clicked the “new entry” button, I often could’ve been done already with a simple pen and paper.

Disgusting and unsurprising.

Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.

Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.

Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.

Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?

Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!

The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to monke gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/whinge

Racism in America is real. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just living a charmed life and incapable of accepting that their personal experience is not universal.

I don’t have the time or energy to prove this exhaustively, but here’s a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black

In 2019, as reported by NBC, the Stanford Open Policing Project found that “police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items.”

Please refer to the citations on that page for more details. Lots of studies in various states showing the same thing. The fact that the mere existence of racial profiling in America is still debated, when it has been consistently proven again and again for decades, is itself a clear indicator of a different kind of racism.

Here’s a little story that stuck in my memory, about how a white woman finally came to realize that racial harassment by police was a real thing. It’s kind of hilarious, in a dark, face-palmy kind of way. https://franklywrite.com/2020/06/01/a-white-woman-racism-and-a-poodle/

It’s explicitly forbidden for anyone to discriminate against you based on your race or ethnicity

Ironically, it’s very common to be asked for this information specifically because of anti-discrimination laws, so they can demonstrate statistically fair practices. I always see a box for this on medical forms, new-hire paperwork, etc. I believe the law requires it to be optional and only used for regulatory reports. So that’s probably what OP heard about.

Sorry, it looks like the real estate option in Portugal is no longer available. :( Now it would take a €500K investment in a local business or €250K in a nonprofit. If you’re that stinkin’ rich, you probably have better options already.

According to https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/real-estate-citizenship/ , Cyprus offers a citizenship path with real estate purchase of €300K. Greece and some other countries do, as well.

Are you able to spend a lot of money on it? Last I checked, there were a few places in the EU that had a citizenship track if you purchased substantial property. So if you’re in position to buy a nice house, that’s an option. I think Portugal is the most approachable cost-wise. But it’s been a while since I looked at this so I’m sure things have changed.

Several countries will allow extended student visas, even if you only speak English. I think Sweden allows this.

Then of course there’s the easy way: marry a Canadian.

Yep. AGI is still science fiction. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just trying to fool investors. Ignore anyone who is less than three degrees of separation away from a marketing department.

The low-hanging fruit is quickly getting picked, so we’re bound to see a slowdown in advancement. And that’s a good thing. We don’t really need better language models at this point; we need better applications that use them.

The limiting factor is not so much hardware as it is our knowledge and competence in software architecture. As a historical example, 10 short years ago, computers were nowhere near top-level at Go. Then DeepMind developed AlphaGo, which was a huge leap forward and could beat a top pro. It ran on a supercomputer cluster. Thanks to the research breakthroughs around AlphaGo, within a few years had similar AI that could run on any smartphone and could beat any human player. It’s not because consumer hardware got that much faster; it’s because we learned how to make better software. Modern Go engines are a fraction of the size of AlphaGo, and generate similar or better quality results with a tiny fraction of the operations. And it seems like we’re pretty close to the limit now. A supercomputer can’t play all that much better than my laptop.

Similarly, a few years ago something like ChatGPT 3 needed a supercomputer. Now you can run a model with similar performance on a high-end phone, or a low-end laptop. Again, it’s not because hardware has improved; the difference is the software. My current laptop (2021 model) is older than ChatGPT 3 (publicly launched in 2022) and it can easily run superior models.

But the returns inevitably diminish. There’s a limit somewhere. It’s hard to say exactly where, but entropy’s gonna getcha sooner or later. You simply cannot fit more than 16GB of information in a 16GB model; you can only inch closer to that theoretical limit, and specialize into smaller scopes. At some point the world will realize that trying to encode everything into a model is a dumb idea. We already have better tools for that.

I try not to judge people…unless I see them right-clicking to copy and paste. Ew.

30 years ago, maybe. Post-Napster, not relevant. Most online piracy is non-commercial now, and it’s still illegal across most of the world.

Who do we arrest if a crime is organized via phone call on T-Mobile’s network

I guarantee you, T-Mobile does not hesitate to hand over any and all data they have to the government. And they don’t encrypt shit, as evidenced by their many many data breaches.

or via mail?

The postal service is from a different era, and has legal protections I wish online equivalents had. Logically they should. Realistically they probably never will.