Aside from budget and time overruns it looks like they overshot the target of “futuristic” and landed in the middle of dystopian…

Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

Depending on your level of caffeine tolerance/dependency actual coffee might be even better.

Alternatively: Decaf.

IF you already have an email domain you control.

Calling “acquiring and setting up an email domain and configuring the mail server for wildcards” “basically no extra effort” is a bit disingenuous compared to “solve a captcha for a Gmail account”

Oh, they’re putting a lot of thought into it I’m sure.

That thought being “Money, Money, Money, Profit, Profit” of course.

Coconut at least…

I’m with you on LLMs being over hyped although that’s already dying down a bit. But regarding your claim that LLMs cannot “understand context”, I’ve recently read an article that shows that LLMs can have an internal world model:

https://thegradient.pub/othello/

Depending on your definition of “understanding” that seems to be an indicator of being more than a pure “stochastic parrot”

Ah, you “work” in “marketing”?

They occupy a strange niche full of contradictions.

Entering the code on the device itself should increase security as opposed to entering it on a compromised computer.

But plugging it into a compromised computer means the data is compromised anyway.

Their security is way harder to audit than a software solution like PGP. The actual “encryption” varies from actual decent setups to “entering the code connects the data pins with no actual encryption on the storage chip”

Not having to instal/use software to use them means they are suitable for non-technical users which in turn means more support calls for “I forgot the pin, it wiped itself, can you restore my data”

They are kind of useful to check the “data is transported on encrypted media” box for compliance reasons without having to manage something bigger.

Is that a reference to Angleton?

Decent writeup by Charles Stross:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon-in-the-news.html

The mode of operation of WorldCon/the Hugos seems interesting as in “May you live in interesting times”

Edit: fixed auto-co-wrecked spelling of Charles Stross

I didn’t know you could hear a picture so clearly.

Teenagers and a dog sound like Scooby Doo. No idea how specific the rest is.

It doesn’t. It carries you by having a module for absolutely everything even shooting yourself in the foot.

B stands for Billion (Parameters) IIRC

To a certain degree, yes. If someone at Google decides to wage all-out war against ad blockers they have a good chance. But if that costs more money than it generates, odds are that someone will stop it. Google / Alphabet is publicly traded after all and that means profit above all else.

Embedding ads into the stream would be hard to counter, but it’s far away. That would invalidate caches along the way and need extra performance to reencode the stream with the ads inserted.

That’s extra costs that are hopefully orders of magnitude above the lost ad revenue from ad blockers

Ballistomancer

Well I doubt this can match the supersports acceleration ;) but I get what you mean.

It’s actually interesting from a design standpoint. How do you handle a lead vehicle that has much better acceleration. Do you artificially slow down the lead vehicle so it can’t abandon the “towed” trailer? What does the follower do when it loses the leader. This basically needs nearly fully autonomous driving.

Eh, even If it does, it shouldn’t be a problem. Relying on a wireless link that could fail due to interference or jamming for actual control would be Musk-level insane.

The hitchbot would need to be capable of visually following the lead vehicle, possibly using something like a big QR code for identification and tracking.

The wireless link could be for telemetry like range and non-critical controls like “stay here” and “start following”.

If the link fails, you get a big warning to stop ASAP but the bot keeps following.