Even if the Windows voice experience put Jarvis to shame, I wouldn’t be interested. I don’t want to use voice control on my computer. Just about the only time I actually need voice control are when I’m far away or my hands are busy; so it’s nice for turning lights on and off when I have my hands full, or controlling timers when I’m cooking, or turning music on without getting up from the couch. Sometimes I’ll use voice-to-text if I have a lot to say or need to think it through. But I almost never want voice control (even if it were completely perfect, which it is not!) for the same reason that I listen to podcasts on earbuds: I don’t want to bother other people! Certainly not while I’m working, and definitely not when it’s liable to take agentic actions for me.

Buttons, knobs, levers, sliders, keys—all of those are better than voice control 999 times out of 1000. I don’t even like touch screens that much, and I’d prefer them over voice control.

The Microsoft executives inhabit a different reality than I do.

Oh man, the Ouya. That’s a blast from the past. Play mobile games on your TV using a controller made out of cardboard and balsa wood and sized for a Roswell alien. Good times.

No, they’re saying that some hardware manufacturers report 80% as 100% (as you noted) while others do not. Just like some manufacturers report 5% as 5% while others report 10% as 5% with the realization that most people misjudge when they’ll be able to charge.

Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.

They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn’t have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.

I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it’s actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.

Interesting. Some of them are just dip switches, too. I hadn’t heard about needing a cable, that’s an interesting wrinkle.

I don’t have any specific recommendations for you, but I will say that

• pretty much every modern Chromebook will be able to have Linux installed over ChromeOS. You might have to open it up and remove a write-protect screw.

• Linux is a surprisingly good platform for games these days, actually. Steam has done a lot of work to get it there.

• If you’re wanting lightweight specs, you’re probably going to find the best bang for your buck in an old Chromebook; however, I don’t know if you’ll see as many of those coming on the market, and you’ll want to watch out for old school devices. Those things get worked over pretty hard.

I think it’s the fact that he has a recognizable username that gives me pause on that, though. For a lot of people, his position is naturally going to afford him some level of deference and authority.

If the people making decisions spent time as normal editors anonymously, I agree definitely that that would be a good way to get to know the community more.

Looks to me like that link is broken. Must be something going on.

Honestly I kinda feel like “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide” sounds more damning than just “Israel perpetrated a genocide.”

Still, Jimbo, you should probably stay out of this. Wikipedia’s whole thing is that no one person is in charge.

C. G. P. Grey’s “Rules for Rulers” is illuminating on that front, but I don’t think you mean soft power. I think you mean gangsters. And I think that most US presidents avoid such a thing by virtue of being the C in C of the biggest military on the planet. Though maybe they get a little bit of it from the Pentagon, I dunno.

I’ve been in a lot of blue collar environments in a previous career, and this is definitely something that happens. It’s not normative, but you’ll usually find a few construction companies or factories or warehouses in an area that employ a much more equally-gendered workforce.

I get why you say that, but I disagree.

Fred Rogers was Ted Lasso, from what I’ve heard. Relentlessly encouraging, always on-mission, no dark side.

Ooh, you are in for a treat my friend. Parks and Recreation is a modern classic.

The first season is a bit rough. But once Adam Scott joins the cast, it becomes legendary.

“Because he can?”

You see, growing up in white conservative christian america, my brain has this old deep conditioning to see people who are different looking or who have different priorities in life than me and think of how stupid/worthless that makes them.

It’s so interesting to see how other people’s experiences of white conservative Christian America can be so different from mine. I have this deep conditioning to see people who are different looking or have different priorities and be curious about their choices and experiences, specifically because of my upbringing in a little country church.

In fact, I remember being cautioned to pull back on the reins a bit when I was in my “angry conservative” stage in college—back during W’s first term, when I was super far right for the time but still had beliefs that would make me a “radical lib’rul” today. Some of the people I went to church with were like, “yeah, I can see that your heart is in the right place, but you’re kinda over the top about this and this.” Most of what brought me out of that phase was meeting people who were different from me, but another part was Christian people I trusted saying, “that’s too much.”

That’s part of why I had so much cognitive dissonance when Christians started supporting Trump; it felt out of step with everything we had ever been taught as children, and even as young adults.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I (and my parents, more recently) just aren’t going to be welcomed back into that community again, because it has gone so deeply maga. But it wasn’t like that when I was a kid.

their stupidity isn’t gonna frustrate me into being like them again.

That’s a really great way to say it. I feel that way myself, though I couldn’t put it into words.

I don’t remember, but I hold my kids’ hands whenever they want me to and whenever I am concerned that they’ll run off into a dangerous situation. (And, to your second-to-last paragraph, I’m a dad haha)

My five-year-old and three-year-old sons actively seek it out. My eight-year-old daughter is ok with it, but doesn’t usually seek it out. My eleven-year-old son doesn’t need it and doesn’t ask for it; if we’re in a crowded place and I need to keep him close, I’ll usually just put a hand on his shoulder.

My wife and I have phones where we keep our shared calendars, yes. But we have four kids who also have their own lives and schedules, and they often want to know what’s going on, what our plans are, etc. They would value being able to see the day’s upcoming events, too; when the play dates are, when the dentist appointments are, when the days off of school are, what we’re eating for dinner, all of that. Currently, their only access to that information is through our phones.

Having a screen in the kitchen that only shows calendars and a couple of other pieces of data would be useful. We wouldn’t want to be able to watch videos or browse websites on it, though.