"Oooh, I love The Machine! It has all the answers"

"Oh yeah, we've been powering it with puppies and small children this week!"

"Have you seen this video of these bears jumping on a trampoline? So neat!"

"We also cut down 10,000 acres of rainforest... I think we threw some indigenous tribes into the grinder with the trees"

"I'm so efficient now at work! Do you know, we would have had to hire a Graphic Designer for this before?"

"Oh yeah, we threw the Graphic Designers in the machine, too... the rest are now homeless and fleeing from our hunting groups..."

"LOOK AT THIS animation! I'm so brilliant!"

"Yeah, we threw all the Japanese manga animators in there a long time ago..."

"THIS IS SO FUTURISTIC! THE FUTURE IS HERE!"

"Anyway... the reason we're here, is we need to feed you into the machine today, sorry!"

This evening I had to wire a mains power plug. I've done this lots of times and when I think about it the first time I did it I was far too young to be allowed near such tasks. Still, I don't do it often and I'm careful, both of which mean I'm still alive.

I wanted to check I had phase & neutral around the right way so I grabbed my phone and did a quick search for a diagram with the right labels. I'm in Aotearoa/New Zealand so we use the plug style the Australians use.

The first diagram I found was a UK style plug, though it was labeled Australian. Hmm. The second one showed the correct style but it showed the plug and the socket, which would have been okay except the labels on the pins contradicted each other.

I don't often search with my phone, and I realized I had not turned off the AI, which may have been the problem. Meanwhile Mrs had found a decent diagram on her tablet so I used that. Everything worked, no one died.

But this kind of thing really could kill someone.

#slopai

Extracted all my audiobooks from Audible and de-DRMed them in about 10 minutes this afternoon. Now I have all the digital book material I ever bought from Amazon in formats I can control.

If this interests you, Calibre and Libation are your go-to projects.

https://getlibation.com
https://calibre-ebook.com

#amazon #audible #Kindle #enshittification

I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.

I just talked to someone who thought AI hallucinations would be obvious because it would be obvious if you talked to a *person* who was hallucinating.

In other words, they equated "hallucination" with "sounds wacko" and accepted AI output as true because it sounded level headed.

1/2

Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:

Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.

Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.

I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.