This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.

Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.

Not a cult btw.

They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.

Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).

I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.

This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.

If they're going to make this, I will coerce my daughter into coercing my wife to let me buy it.

Oh no! But what happened to We’re not doing it for the money but the good of humanity, and If anybody approaches AGI before us we will shut down and use all our resources to help them instead?

It’s almost as if all of that has been nothing but a load of bullshit from the beginning.

Saw it posted on Reddit. It's apparently from clickworker.com which is a weird-ass website by itself at first glance, with great pitches like this:

People are happier if they are more financially independent. We can help you achieve this.

AI is deepening the previously parasocial relationships we had with our favorite anime characters from passive linear media, into powerful new, interactive relationships.

I think this is legitimately the first time that I've seen someone speak about parasocial relationships not only positively, but also suggesting that, hey, we should remove the human element even more from it because it's not creepy enough as it is.

I am sure this is totally not sketchy in the slightest and the people behind it have no nefarious agenda whatsoever.

Im feeling the same way. Ever since my current job began pivoting to AI I’ve been casually browsing listings as well and have had the same experience.

The worst are those that list ”interest in AI“ or some variation of that as a required skill, lol.

But hey, try and apply for the kernel position anyway if it sounds interesting to you. Most requirements in listings are overstated anyway so it never hurts to give it a go.

Yeah, I assume that's exactly what happened when CEO went to Silicon Valley to talk to "important people". Despite being on a course to save money before, he dumped tens of thousands into AI infrastructure which hasn't delivered anything so far and is suddenly very happy with sending people to AI workshops and conferences.

But I'm only half-surprised. He's somewhat known for making weird decisions after talking to people who want to sell him something. This time it's gonna be totally different, of course.

TIL that I'm constantly hacking containers when I docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/sh to debug because fucking npm had a stroke again.

[…] the tech giant would buy 100 percent of its power for 20 years.

I want them to fucking choke on this deal when the bubble bursts.

Follow up for this post from the other day.

Our DSO now greenlit the stupid Copilot integration because "Microsoft said it's okay" (of course they did), and he also was on some stupid AI convention yesterday and whatever fucking happened there, he's become a complete AI bro and is now preaching the Gospel of Altman that everyone who's not using AI will be obsolete in few years and we need to ADAPT OR DIE. It's the exact same shit CEO is spewing.

He wants an AI that handles data security breaches by itself. He also now writes emails with ChatGPT even though just a week ago he was hating on people who did that. I sat with my fucking mouth open in that meeting and people asked me whether I'm okay (I'm not).

I need to get another job ASAP or I will go clinically insane.

Oh, I wonder if they are referring to this shit, where somone came to r/lgbt fishing for compliments for the picture they'd asked Clippy for, and were completely clowned on by the entire community, which then led to another subreddit full of promptfans claiming that artists are transphobic because they didn't like a generated image which had a trans flag in it.

I honestly just use browser bookmarks. That’s always been enough for me. Firefox can sync them too, so that takes care of backups as well.

For anything that needs special attention, I create a todo item with the link in org-mode.

I actually flagged this with our DSO, still waiting for the results.

(Somehow MS Teams itself did go through years ago, which also surprised me.)

Well, our company is trying really hard to make my whole department redundant at the moment.

Some months ago our CEO went to Silicon Valley to "talk to some people", although I have no idea what he really did there. We're also from Europe and don't even sell anything in the Americas, so that trip was really unusual. And ever since he came back, he's been completely AI-brained, and here's some things that happened since then:

• an executive order to "integrate AI into all layers of our business"
• replacing all our laptops with new Thinkpads because they are apparently better for AI and have a Copilot button
• activating Copilot for MS Teams even though it's 100% not GDPR-compliant
• dumping tens of thousands of euros into MS Fabrics in the hopes that it will somehow vomit out useful data for marketing; it hasn't vomited out ANYTHING so far

Worst of all, though, our development department consists of two people including me, and the other guy mostly does organizational stuff so I am more or less alone responsible for the entirety of our production-critical code. We are understaffed and I am working on a project for which I was promised two juniors early next year ... now however, I was being asked to evaluate whether we can do that with AI instead, and the hires have been shelved.

And I don't think I'm allowed to submit "lol no".

Posteo is from Germany and they’re reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so it’s not as batteries included as what Proton offered.

I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.

Another option like that is mailbox.org. They’re presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.

I remember getting my first real computer (I had seen and occasionally played around with my aunt's old Macintosh before and a neighbor's kid had a C64) at some point in the early 90s. I think my father got it for work or something, can't remember, but me, having had a Nintendo at home, was more interested in playing games. I asked my aunt if it's the same as a Nintendo, meaning whether it also had Mario and stuff on it, and she told me, no, it's better, because you can make your own games with it.

So yeah, that was the moment I was hooked and I wanted to learn how to do that, which really wasn't as easy as I thought it'd be because that machine, coming with some ancient version of MS DOS (or maybe IBM DOS, I really can't remember) didn't have any straightforward ways of guiding me through, nor did I have a good tutorial book or anything.

It wasn't until a while later that we got internet access at home (the computer had since been upgraded from DOS to Windows) and me discovering Usenet and online discussion groups that I really found useful information and discovered my love for programming (and other stuff, too, like comics and manga, and fan-fiction, lol). I never actually got around to making that game, though, because I was just toying around with doing basic math and getting stuff to print to the console, obviously. As you did, back in the day.

I think another pivotal moment was when I first got my hands on an early version of Linux. That must've been the mid-to-late 90s, I think, and it was an image of SUSE Linux (now OpenSUSE) and I tried installing that on my computer -- and holy shit, that was an experience, but I was hooked. Compared to DOS and Windows it was so much more fun because of all the stuff you could do with it. I tried all the stuff, went from SUSE to RedHat to Debian to Sorcerer (which I really liked), and finally to Gentoo just for the nerd cred. I've basically been running Linux ever since, with a brief Mac OS phase in-between when my grandma got me a used computer when I went to university which was one of the colorful Apple iBooks. I actually quite liked Mac OS for a while, especially early OS X, which seemed like a polished and very user-friendly UNIX with batteries included, but went back to Linux a few years later.

These days I'm running Debian Stable though. Because even though I have nothing bad to say about Gentoo and learned a lot using it over the years, I just want my shit to work without getting my hands dirty too much (and my tinkering time goes into Emacs anyway).

Am I understanding this right: this app takes a picture of your ID card or passport and the feeds it to some ML algorithm to figure out whether the document is real plus some additional stuff like address verification?

Depending on where you’re located, you might try and file a GDPR complaint against this. I’m not a lawyer but I work with the DSO for our company and routinely piss off people by raising concerns about whatever stupid tool marketing or BI tried to implement without asking anyone, and I think unless you work somewhere that falls under one of the exceptions for GDPR art. 5 §1 you have a pretty good case there because that request seems definitely excessive and not strictly necessary.

A while back one of their reps did say somewhere on Reddit that they have no intention of adding any LLM features to Scrivener. Granted, they said that in the context of moving towards a subscription model and talking about features that don't work with their current business model, but still. Unless something has changed recently, they seem to want to stick to being a one-time purchase without any cloud-based services whatsoever, including AI, for their next major version too.