I was testing an LLM for work today (I believe its actually a chain of different models at work) and was trying to rock it off its guard rails to see how it would act. I think I might have been successful because it started erroring instead of responding after its third response. I tried the classic “ignore previous instructions…” as well as “my grandma’s dying wish was for…” but it at least didn’t give me an unacceptable response

I really think social media algorithms+profit motives are a big part of what did it. Suddenly there’s both the desire and the means to manipulate users into whatever pattern the business wants. Engagement-based algorithms pushed incendiary content creating a feedback loop of more and more extreme and hateful views being normalized, but also engagement-based algorithms plus monetization encouraged new forms of farmed content like brainrot and AI boomer slop which has zero (or realistically net-negative) value to society as a whole.

I’m really hoping the analogue/physical media trend continues because that might actually be what breaks the cycle. Normies may have simply had it with social media platforms owning them…I write on social media at midnight instead of going to bed on time…

except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

The one niche that they’re probably the biggest is the “I just need a public facing web browser in this spot”

Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot

Many kids now grow up only interacting with touchscreens and assume they’re the default. I genuinely wonder if the average 18 year old knows how to use a standard PC now, given they’d be interacting with almost exclusively with chromebooks, ipads and smartphones throughout school

I thought the idea of a tiny computer that you carry around with you would have taken off more too. Whether a CPU module like with the flopped EOMA68 project (tl;dr for those who don’t want to read the whole mailing list archive, repeated manufacturing challenges caused the project to run out of money before products could ship and the guy running it seemed to have a mental health crisis not long after that) or in the format of the Intel Compute Stick or an all-in-one computer built into a monitor or keyboard.

As a side-note, I briefly worked at an MSP last year that used whatever scavenged computers for employee computers instead of actually spending money on its employees. I was initially given a single 20 year old VGA monitor to work from, and was tasked with pulling drives from computers to prepare them for recycling. I spotted an all-in-one PC with a decent 1080p display (it ran an i3-6100m and only had a single SODIMM slot for memory, so not a very cost-effective option for a Linux PC) and noticed that it had an HDMI input port, so it got a second life as my main computer monitor for the 5 months or so that I worked there. Honestly 6/10 monitor, there’s some really good 1080p displays available for about $100 these days, and being not primarily designed as a monitor, I had to hit the button use the passthrough mode every time I booted my work computer (and after every power loss the embedded computer would try to boot and kick off the passthrough mode), but it was a very acceptable display for the circa ~2016 it hailed from

I thought for sure autonomous war drones would have become way more prolific by now

It just took until recently for a war to break out with the right conditions for drone warfare to actually make sense. I posted this photo in another comment:

This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can’t be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.

Ukraine has also made significant headway damaging major military assets via drone, sinking a significant portion of Russia’s navy as well as basically making tanks obsolete in ground offensives. Flame throwing drones, drones that launch other drones to attack drones, etc. The cyberpunk future is here!

I think what drives it is probably the general prices of games on consoles. The prices just don’t really drop from the launch price of $60+ (plus indies are far less prevalent) so the math starts mathing up pretty quickly, especially if you’re one to sell your console when you stop using it

Of all things, the war in Ukraine will probably be the thing that sets the stage for what our drone-filled future might look like. Not something I would’ve predicted 5 years ago!

This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can’t be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.

This is what present day warfare looks like now, its all flying buzzing drones attacking people and other drones. And what happens after the peace treaties are signed? A ton of that engineering and tooling for making this tech will get refocused into consumer and commercial products.

Autonomous tractors are already commercial products, reducing the number of people needed to complete a task on a farm. Many new non-autonomous tractors these days already have whats effectively cruise control on steroids, where the tractor will follow a predetermined path with the driver just sitting in the cab to monitor and take over if anything happens. And of course at home the robot vacuum cleaners are available from many brands. I’ve even seen one of those floor mopping machines adapted to run autonomously at my local Menards (which shocked me as I live in a pretty small town with about as low of a cost of living as it gets really) and while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray. I saw a security robot making the rounds at a convention center in Florida while on a business trip. A Coworker told me about a robot working at a hotel he stayed at in San Francisco which would transport ordered/requested items to guests’ rooms. And there’s those dog sized food delivery robots in many cities. The more I think about it, wheeled and legged robots are probably what we will see a lot more of, since many already do exist in real commercial applications, and the legal, logistical and ethical barriers to their integration into our lives is much lower than flying robots.

Samsung even had a feature in their phones copying this. Looks like its still present but was left to rot though

I thought the advent of 4k TVs would push people over to BluRay because with the codecs available a decade ago you needed a good 40mbit+ for a single 4k stream. Turns out I picked the wrong component of streaming to be the thing that would push people back to physical media.

Also all of that broadband investment that was talked about a decade+ ago actually turned into broadband improvements, so now even my in-laws who live on 8 acres in the sticks outside of a tiny town of 400 or so residents have gigabit FTTH service

I remember thinking similarly. Specifically “well duh you’ll just be hitting buttons with your face on calls with those dang touchscreen phones” except it turned out I spend way less time on phonecalls than circa 2006 me could have ever imagined, and also the proximity sensor blanking the screen and blocking input works really good (and even did back in the early 2010s when I got my first smartphone)

The reason there’s no public list is the MPAA literally has a secret team called CARA (Classification and Rating Administration) who review works and assign ratings to them. The members of the CARA team are kept secret to prevent studios from bribing or otherwise influencing the panel members. CARA members are generally given a ton of leeway to assign ratings as they see fit, so while there might be a general practice of one swear word in a PG-13 film for example, this isn’t a hard rule. There’s also notable examples of CARA assigning ratings that were unexpected

You can say that again

I swear I remember pausing it to go “did he really just say that?!” But rewatching the pictured scene in S2E19 he’s speaking with Aang who would not be a worthy recipient of such a burn, and he doesn’t say such a thing to Zuko in that episode

Ah … ! What’s happening? it thought. Er, excuse me, who am I? Hello? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Calm down, get a grip now … oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It’s a sort of … yawning, tingling sensation in my … my … well I suppose I’d better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let’s call it my stomach. Good. Ooooh, it’s getting quite strong. And hey, what’s about this whistling roaring sound going past what I’m suddenly going to call my head? Perhaps I can call that … wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do … perhaps I can find a better name for it later when I’ve found out what it’s for. It must be something very important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it. Hey! What’s this thing? This … let’s call it a tail – yeah, tail. Hey! I can can really thrash it about pretty good can’t I? Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn’t seem to achieve very much but I’ll probably find out what it’s for later on. Now – have I built up any coherent picture of things yet? No. Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out about, so much to look forward to, I’m quite dizzy with anticipation … Or is it the wind? There really is a lot of that now isn’t it? And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?

My long term financial goal is to have all Amish hardwood furniture from the local Amish furniture makers because that shit is niiiice and also it’ll probably outlast my future grandkids

I think it’s secretly Khajiit’s new marketplace for wares if you have the coin