Posts by Mimsey Borogove 83 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2024
"Companies are, unfortunately and frustratingly for us, responding to consumer demand. "
In a lot of cases, they aren't doing that - they are dictating what the comsumer shall have!
That - I don't think any consumer, anywhere, decided they wanted an IoT toothbrush before it was flashed before their eyes. "Oooh, shiny!"
I think specifically the Smart Home IoT.
Almost before smart homes really were able to get going, the idea was enshittified by overlaying the internet on it. I'd been in love with the idea of smart homes since reading Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" in about 1969 or so, but after seeing it inexorably tied in with the internet, my heart fell.
It's actually possible to have a smart home which runs on your own server and never has to touch the internet, but because of IoT, there is never any discussion of that fact. Whenever I'm settled into my forever home, I'm fiddling with the idea of doing that, and assuming it works, I might see if I can write about it and let other people know how to do it.
BTW, bêtes noire doesn't need an e on the end.
where AI becomes incredibly scary is when it's ability to predict gets better and better
Where it becomes incredibly scary is when you think of the damage to the environment it's causing, requiring vast amounts of water to cool square acres of data centers (it's not only "AI" causing this - crypto is part of it, too). Especially now that Trump has decided to double down and impose as much harm on the environment as he possibly can, avoiding "AI" is something everyone can do to reduce that harm.
Seems like a great application to try out and well worth a 40k price tag (doubling 20k to account for the initial test suite building) for many organisations if successful.
Ok, say it's worth the cost in money - does this "total" cost include the enormous amount of water required to cool the computers that do this? Even if it does, because of "AI" and crypto taking such unimaginable amounts of water to cool their vast data centers, there will be water shortages. We may get to the point where no amount of money will be enough to buy enough water to keep doing this. Then there will be abandoned data centers sitting in deserts created by the use of this much water, where maybe, once, there might have been farms, forests, or even cities which no longer exist.
I expect that if Europe goes through with this (hope so!), y'all will end up with a much better computer system than we'll still be stuck with. Everyone here knows the inertia that hits companies when faced with the choice of staying with what they're familiar with vs. changing to something better. But if we started over from scratch, as Europe may be doing, we'd be able to fix a lot of security, accessibility, and interoperability problems that are pretty close to hopeless now.
I've been telling every European I have contact with to break all ties with the US. If they are living here, move, quick before ICE makes the decision for them. If they are doing business here, get free before Trump nationalizes everything (as he looks to be trying out: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-administration-now-holds-stakes-023008085.html). Don't start any new business here, don't take any vacations here - complete detachment. I want everyone who voted for Trump to see what authoritarianism and isolationism do to an economy. We'll miss you so much, but I want to keep you safe.
Then, hopefully within three years, we'll be happy to welcome you back.
Thank you for your concern for the US, and for the link. I read the article, and am somewhat surprised that a Baptist publication would publish an article that not only doesn't support the pro-ICE prayer and the disrespect of women coming from this Calvinist minister, but actually support the people and government of Minnesota. (It doesn't surprise me that he's Calvinist, by the way - I think that a lot of Evangelical support for ICE and other Trump policies rests on a foundation of Calvinism.)
You may have heard of this, of American Christians being called to a new era of martyrdom, acknowledging that what happened to the two victims of ICE in Minnesota could happen to anyone who tries to protect immigrants from ICE violence, and telling us that it is our duty as Christians to do so. https://www.nhepiscopal.org/blog/2026/1/11/bishop-robs-reflection-from-the-renee-good-vigil-in-concord-nh-january-9-2026
People who read your post may think of Christians as being preachy, or, worse, like that minister who prayed for support for ICE. I'm here to let them know that many Christians aren't like that, and want to support or even lead the protection of the immigrants who make our country what it is.
making their names and phone numbers public? I see no problem with that.
Everyone's name, address, and phone number used to be available to everyone, in a big book given free to everyone who owned a phone. It used to be a public service. How did it get to be such a ghastly crime?
The only people I really feel I need to hide my address from are the ones with no badges, and masks covering their faces.
The mass importation of illegal migrants into the US to be bussed to marginal constituencies, put on welfare and given the vote.
<sigh> Undocumented immigrants don't get welfare (although most who are working pay taxes), and they certainly can't vote. Why do you still keep using this idiotic line?
I found this, which may help: https://legalclarity.org/what-benefits-are-illegal-immigrants-eligible-for/
It does say that they can get emergency medical care if they are in danger of death, and there are benefits available for children under five. Not remotely like the broad brush with which you paint.
I won't bother with a citation for undocumented people not being able to vote, because that's one of the more stupid ideas I've been seeing around for, maybe, roughly ten years or so.
This happens to libraries and librarians constantly. Libraries are never directly revenue-generating, and so are seen as cost centers. Since revenue is the only measure of value, anything the library might have been doing by way of competitor research, finding prior art that could cause problems with new products, keeping executives up to date with current trends, etc., is completely devalued. I've always wondered how the companies that do that fare afterward, but since I or my colleagues are no longer there, I haven't heard. I could research it for myself, of course, but why should I, when no one's paying me to do it?
So, they chose to name their company after a tool of evil [*], they created a tool of evil, and now they're trying to convince the world that they're not evil?
I noticed that, the first time I saw anything about them. First I was mad that an evil company had named themself with a LotR name, but then I thought, wait, do they know what the Palantiri were?
Second Life is still a thing - in fact, my church is there. It may even be growing in popularity, generalizing from an n of 1: our Bible study class, which had 3 members for several years, now has 7-10 people showing up reliably. Everyone is welcome to come back and play!
I've never spent a penny of real $money on it, although I've been there for something like 11 years. Maybe more.
it isn't enough of an improvement based on the cost, energy, and environmental impact.... consumers will play around when it's free, but once they have to pay it'll be dropped like a hot potato.
I played around with it when it first burst out in, what, '22? But reading about all the costs has persuaded me that there's nothing I might want to do with "AI" that would be worth that. People need to be hit sooner rather than later with the need to pay their share for their "playing around."
If your system doesn't allow for $X then you can't use $X, but it may be that you can update your system to allow for use of $X.
Compromise is a lost art, despite the fact that both big things, like the US Constitution, and small things, like family life, depend on it to survive.
you would not use ChatGPT training on the internet for drug research or medical screening
That's something that should be more widely known. For "AI" to be useful for anything, it has to be trained on carefully curated information, so that it doesn't have the chance to add any of the idiocy of the Internet to its results. I expect that this might cost more than just turning it loose on the Internet, and it will certainly be more difficult, or at least more nit-picky.
Even with this kind of training, "AI" won't be able to do most of what it's being slotted into, no matter how hard the slotters want to persuade us that it can.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Thank you so much! I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in all my browsers for some years now, so I was very disappointed when an "AI" search started popping up without my being able to decline it and save all the energy and water required for it.
Customer service chatbots at the least save the bother of reading product descriptions, instruction manuals and terms and conditions. Is that convenience really worth it?
Is it a labor saver if it gives you an erroneous product description, or gives instructions for something that would be impossible given the item(s) involved, or completely mangles the T&Cs?
It's just what everyone has been saying - since you do have to check every single thing you get it to do, why spend the massive amounts of energy and water involved to do it in the first place? Just read the stuff yourself!
App that *puts* clothes on women could be useful.
Now something like that, I might even use! Only if the energy and water use of "AI" comes down, because there's nothing I'm ever likely to do that would be worth that kind of waste. But assuming that, an app that would show me how I would look in a particular outfit might be useful.
Oops, we already have those, and they don't take "AI".
It's a search engine
It's not a search engine. If what it tells you is accurate, and if the citations listed at the end are accurate, it might have found something decent. But you have to check that anyway, because if it doesn't know the answer to something, it makes it up. It might get wrong information from the right place, or right information from a non-existent place, or it might just make up the "information" and the citation both. Since you have to check it anyway, you might as well just do the search yourself.
Besides, when is a search important enough to throw away the amount of power used by a LLM (yes, they're large language models, not any kind of "intelligence")? Hundreds of dollars'-worth of power and water wasted for what? To settle a bar bet? To tell you when the latest blockbuster will be on at your local theater? You don't need "AI" for that, you just need a little of the old-fashioned kind yourself.
TL;DR: It's not a search engine.
If nobody knows you are making something, you don't get any sales. Marketing is how you get people to know you exist.
As a young and idealistic librarian in the 90s, I turned up my nose at the idea of marketing. I thought, it's a library! People know libraries exist, and that they provide useful services to everyone from CEOs to poor children. But around 1998 or so, when we hired a new head librarian with good ideas about marketing, I realized that I couldn't assume that. Even if people knew, vaguely, that the library existed, it might not occur to them that even if they didn't need a best-seller to read at the beach, it could still be helpful to them. Our new boss started a marketing program that told people what we did that would help them in their jobs (being a government library), and usage went up. I adopted her ideas, helped with the program, and finally knew that, no matter how good the product may be, people still need to be told about it.
This applies to everything out there, products, services, shops, software, and all.
That word "hyperscale". It needs to be seen as a warning. That's what it means.
The US used to have laws to prevent monopolies, but we've pretty much dispensed with them. Just because we're allowing a few corporations to take over everything, though, doesn't mean the rest of the world should. Our corporations are far too large, and far too nosey, to be allowed to take over other countries. Please do everything you can to sever your systems from ours. You'll be glad you did.
I see dystopian pictures of tumbleweeds rolling by huge rusting/decaying building in the middle of nowhere. I also see a lot of governments (small and large) being left with huge holes in their budgets and nobody can find the original investors or their attorneys.
I am almost 100% sure that that's what will happen. And there will be lots of holes in lots of budgets. I talked to my "finance guy" the other week and told him I don't want my money going to anything involving crypto or AI. He said that avoiding AI is difficult, since almost all companies are doing something with it. With only 5% of users actually paying for it (per Ed at www.wheresyoured.at), where are the AI companies expecting all this growth to come from? Will they be able to get everyone so addicted to it that they'll be willing to pay the stupendous amounts it actually costs to run?
All the municipalities that are turning against data centers in their back yards will be so glad they did, to avoid your dystopian future.
When people wanted a ride, they called a "taxi". In most US jurisdictions, taxi drivers were registered with local law enforcement, with a background check.
That! I still take cabs - drivers are bonded, so if s/he takes me off and kills me, someone will know about it and the culprit will be found. Besides, my husband drove a cab in the mid-80s, so I'm still loyal to them.
...and what happened to the blue pet carrier? Someone clearly did something with deliberation.
That's what I was wondering. The cat couldn't get out by itself (not for lack of trying, as several of my cats have discovered), so who removed the cat and took the carrier? Somewhere, there's someone who knows that, and owes the cat's person a carrier.
This reminded me of something I did in 1979. I had no computer training whatsoever, and was working as a Kelly Girl (temp) in various offices. They sent me to an office that ran on computers, and as long as they just had me inputting text, everything was fine.
One day, a person I knew only vaguely handed me a floppy disk and asked me to reformat it. I'd never heard of anything like that, and asked how to do it. She was in a hurry, so she just told me the command to type, then click OK. I followed the instructions, and the computer labored for a long time. I was still sitting there waiting for it to finish when she came back, surprised at how long it was taking. I said, I did what you said, I don't know anything about it. She looked more closely, then kind of shrieked - I was reformatting the C: drive! This meant nothing to me at the time, but several people got very exercised about it. I heard later that they had asked my temp agency to pay for it, but since it was one of my last assignments before I got a real job, I never found out what had happened. At least they didn't try to take it out of my hide!
I didn't realize what I'd done for many years, when someone finally got around to training me. Oops.
My current solution is to park next to a more expensive car. A thief probably cannot steal both at the same time and will likely pick the one with the higher resale value.
My husband and I have discovered a nearly foolproof way of preventing theft: standard transmission. We know this works, because we frequently experience long delays after valet-parking our car while they look for someone who can drive it out.
Most who do cite battery life as the reason, and they're also mostly wrong
That's why I leave mine off (besides never needing them) - do Bluetooth and NFC not use power when turned on? I'm not likely to stop doing it, because of not needing them, but if I ever did need them, it would be nice to know I could just leave them turned on without draining my battery. Thanks!
The phone on the account was a home wired line so it could not receive a text.
I am right this minute having a laborious conversation through chat with a representative of our phone company, just asking questions about charges. They wanted to send a text to the land line WHICH IS THE ACCOUNT I'M CALLING ABOUT, and they're sending me to another department to ask about it. I'm currently trying to discuss my question with another agent.
I know people that do participate and do a bit better, but they also wind up putting in far more work for that gain.
What? You know it's possible to make more money with your company, but you don't do everything possible to bring in every last cent? I didn't think there were any people like that left. Good on you!
By mid-afternoon, I was mentally shattered, so I took a nap. Woke up a few hours later and solved it in 15 mins!
This is why I always insist on a lunch HOUR - 60 solid minutes not thinking about work. People who work the whole 8 1/2 or 9 hours they spend in the office (or in front of the computer in their bedroom) may not get the results people who take breaks and/or lunch do. Professional work requires a lot of thought and imagination, which gets harder and harder to access the more desperate you are to get at it. It's vitally important to clear your mind every so often to keep the cruft from building up. Will AI understand this? Probably not.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
