TIL about Sparklink: https://digitstodollars.com/2025/03/27/sparklink-the-biggest-wireless-standard-you-have-never-heard-about

Tl;dr: Claims to be Bluetooth.next, invented by Huawei, trending in China.

It seems after 10 years of previously serious and respected people saying the cloud is the future and that I’m a dinosaur for telling them it’ll be back on prem before the end of the next decade, I was right.

It WAS more expensive.

It WAS less performant.

It WAS less secure.

It WAS a gateway to increasingly more exploitative pricing models.

A lesson in getting carried away with the hype and not looking at the actual trends. This was always going to happen. Threats increasing, and compute, storage, and bandwidth costs reducing faster than your upgrade cycle.

The street that my mum lives in is a one-way street, but wasn't marked as such on #Google Maps. This caused many drivers to drive the wrong way. I have tried to edit it on Google Maps (there is such functionality), but to no avail. No matter how often I submitted a change (with photos of street signs!), Google said "Sorry, we could not verify it".

Solution: Edit the street on #OpenStreetMap! A few months after I did this, Google seems to have stolen the data, as it regularly does, and now the street is correct in both datasets!

Really enjoyed David Gerard's amusing take on how programming with AI becomes like a gambling addiction for many.

"Large language models work the same way as a carnival psychic. Chatbots look smart by the Barnum Effect — which is where you read what’s actually a generic statement about people and you take it as being personally about you. The only intelligence there is yours."

"With ChatGPT, Sam Altman hit upon a way to use the Hook Model with a text generator. The unreliability and hallucinations themselves are the hook — the intermittent reward, to keep the user running prompts and hoping they’ll get a win this time."

"This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult. Send ’em a copy of this post."

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

Oh, would you look at that? It almost lifts the spirit, but not quite.

You know, looking at fresh water like this reminds me that AI will use over 6 billion cubic meters of water between now and 2027 just to cool down the data centers.

While the average human being only drinks 60 cubic meters of water in his life.

Yes, it's a scarce resource, but a small price to pay for a technology that would show us what Ratatouille would look like if it was directed by Stanley Kubrick.