Last time, it didn’t go so well for the robot:

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/17/15986042/dc-security-robot-k5-falls-into-water

Maybe he slurred his words and meant Virginia.

https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2020

2020 California Electoral College vote. 55 for Biden/Harris. 0 for Trump/Pence.

California is also part of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which awards every electoral college vote to the winner of the popular vote.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

Not a big fan of gossip, but my buddy sent me these. You may connect the dots. Let’s just hope the pre-nup is bulletproof.

• https://x.com/joshtpm/status/1834433341644210271
• https://www.semafor.com/article/09/11/2024/republicans-fear-laura-loomer-is-influencing-donald-trump

Also:

and

🤔

Everybody should listen to Uncle Bernie. Really listen. He knows what he’s talking about.

Good read. Sad ending that all that work ended up nowhere.

Screw the debate. The real news!

/s

NEW feature: As you drive down the road, Ford cars will automatically take over and drive you to the nearest sponsor location. Hungry? It will take over and swerve into the nearest KFC drive-thru. Next stop, CVS pharmacy, then Office Depot.

Disclaimer: Disabling AutoAd feature requires monthly subscription.

When this whole ‘training’ trend started a few years ago, there were companies offering image and video labelling services.

It turned out they were mostly sweatshops in low-income countries, where people sat in front of monitors and just dragged boumding boxes around sections of images and picked from an icon menu. Here’s a car, here’s a person, here’s an apple. That sort of thing. You didn’t even need to know how to read or write.

Of course, the quality was questionable, so they needed a second layer of supervisors verifying the choices. But even with that, the cost was way lower than having an engineer or QA person do it. IIRC, there was a bit of hue and cry when stories came out of big tech companies supporting sweatshop conditions.

Sounds like it’s still ongoing.

NEW, automated children’s bicycle. Guaranteed to teach the little tyke how to ride! *

• ^Comes with training wheels, and adult monitor standing by at all times.^

Once they get Threads support, their target audience will be the non-Twitter universe. This would make it easier for businesses, governments, journalists, and non-technical folks like influencers and celebrities to switch out. That’s how you get mass adoption.

I just tried it last week. Good start. Lots of promise.

I’ve always kept a strict separation between work and personal projects, including a personal laptop, accounts, and yes, paying for AI services. For a while, a few years ago, while commuting on the company shuttle, I even had my own MiFi cell access point and a laptop battery booster so I could work on my own projects on the bus and not be accused of using company resources.

Most employment contracts spell out that anything you create using company resources is the property of the company. Legally, they own everything that passes though their computers, software, and networks.

Also, many corporations run system monitoring services on their laptops and MDM mobile data management on mobile phones (for example JAMF on Apple devices). These monitor things like file access, copying, communications, and web access. This data is sent to central servers for processing and looking for anomalies based on pre-set rules. This might sound tin-foily, but it’s mandated by legal in a lot of companies, including small and medium sized ones.

If you want to use non-company data to do AI work, or develop a service or idea on your own, or even keep your text messages and email private, you’ll want to use your own equipment, accounts, and services.

Edit: also, if you get laid-off or fired, you’ll want to have a decent personal rig so you can continue working on your own projects while looking for work. Even if working on a novel on the side, suggest keeping everything off company systems.

IRL, arms manufacturers claim they’re not culpable when their products are used to blow up civilians. They point at the people making decisions to drop the bombs as the ones responsible, not them.

This legislature tries to get ahead of that argument, by putting reponsibility for downstream harm on the manufacturers instead of their corporate or government customers. Even if the manufacturer moves their munitions plants elsewhere, they’re still responsible for the impact if it harms California residents. So the alternative isn’t to move your company out of state. It’s to stop offering your products in one of the largest economies in the world.

The intent is to make manufacturers stop and put up more guardrails in place instead of blasting ahead, damn the consequences, then going, oops 🤷🏻‍♂️

There will be intense lobbying with the Governor to get him to veto it. If it does get signed, it’ll be interesting to see if it has the intended effect.

The otherwise sensible people I know who are still on Twitter all say it’s because of a specific interest or group, and the community of people around it who are all on there as well. They all hate what it’s become but put up with it because nobody is sure where else to go.

There’s also a sense of FOMO when it comes to realtime news updates. Until government, news media, and personalities go somewhere and take all their followers with them, it will be hard to break away.

Places center and forward something that has always been troubling about SCOTUS decisions.

The one part missing is how the threat of ‘activist judges ruling from the bench’ is always trotted out against liberal judges during confirmation hearings, but when conservative SCOTUS just makes up its own rules and privileges and completely ignores precedent, nobody should question them.

As long as they stay away from public ‘channels.’

There lie dragons.