That’s Roku’s Basilisk

Imagine how much money she could make if she dyed her hair blonde and claimed to now understand that climate change is a hoax. She’d get her own show on Fox.

I don’t have a problem with the idea of a digital ID. I’ve been saying for years that it’s ridiculous that any time you want to do something even vaguely official you have to take a gas bill with you to prove your address.

What I worry about is the implementation. It seems like it’s going to be a government app that stores everything. What company is going to develop that? Where’s the data going to be stored and how? What vulnerabilities does it have, and how has this been tested? Is biometric data going to be stored anywhere? etc.

If they were to let me store my ID in my phone’s built-in wallet, then I’m happy. I know the security and I’m content that my data is safe and recoverable.

But it doesn’t seem like that’s something that will be possible. So I’m going to object strongly.

There must be some kaizo levels which require you to do this

Outer Wilds. Easily the most profoundly moving experience I’ve ever had from playing a video game. And it does such a good job of starting off - and even remaining, to a degree - a fun, light-hearted story.

If there’s anybody reading this who’s interested in the game, let me say a couple of things.

1. Go in as spoiler-free as possible. The entire progression system is based on acquiring knowledge, and a lot of the power of the game comes from discovering everything for yourself, in your own way.

2. Don’t treat it like a game. Instead put yourselves in the shoes of your character. See something that you think looks cool? Go and look at it. Don’t think “well, I should probably finish this area first…” Explore. Learn. Decide for yourself what your priority is.

Loads of games call themselves open world, but are actually quite on rails. One trigger at the beginning of the game aside, Outer Wilds really is open world. One reason why watching other people play it is so much fun is that everybody really does have a completely different experience while playing it. One person will do something as the first thing they do, then someone else will do the same thing when they’re 80% of the way through. And the game is so well-designed that both ways is equally rewarding.

Sorry, I tend to evangelise for this game a lot because it is, as I said above, a genuinely profound and moving experience.

I‘ve spent far more free time than I should have watching let‘s play videos of this. But I‘ve not downloaded it myself because after putting around 200 hours into Vampire Survivors and buying the first two lots of DLC I‘ve burnt myself out on the genre. This has got a couple of twists, not including the fact that it‘s 3D, but in the end it doesn‘t really appeal as something to play myself.

I was brought in as a contractor for a week at a private school once here in the UK. The food was okay but on the nicer/posher end of „nothing special“. But what did strike me was that between two periods one of the girls felt peckish so just wandered in to the kitchen and made herself cheese on toast. Nobody treated that like it was anything unusual.

Thank you

They‘re probably okay with the price because the number of private users will dwarf the commercial users.

As for businesses shutting it down - any business which is using it has already bought the hype. They‘re not using it because it‘s actually effective. They‘re much more likely to crack down on workers than they are to ban AI all together.

I do agree that it won‘t work out in the end, not because this particular strategy is stupid, but because the products don‘t work and no strategy could work.

Kinda looks like if she & Emma Watson had a baby. And then that baby became a haunted waxwork.

And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.

So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.

The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.

And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.

You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.

You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.

Yeah, Irfanview is what I use too. Easy to set up, quick & light, and it‘s actually my go-to for converting a picture into a different format.

It‘s perhaps worth noting that the first people the Nazis came for was LGBTQ people. If you‘ve seen photos of Nazi book-burnings, there‘s a high percentage chance that what you‘ve seen is the first book-burning, because the vast majority of photos are from one event. The books being burnt at that event was research from an organisation called Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute of Sexual Science), which was founded by a gay activist and focused mainly on LGBTQ research and care - including gender-affirming surgery. The Nazis very deliberately tried to wipe out this research and acknowledgement that trans people existed.

If you don‘t care about the current attacks on trans people in and of itself, it should trouble you as a canary in a coal mine. The famous poem‘s first line should be „first they came for the trans people“, rather than „first they came for the Socialists“. Don‘t do the „and I did nothing because I wasn‘t trans“ thing.

It all matters, even if your concern is purely for yourself.

The issue there is that even at that pricepoint, Microsoft is still operating CoPilot at a loss. If they drop it more, they’ll be making even more of a loss. Which is the standard business model for new products these days, but the losses on AI products dwarf things like Netflix and Uber during their “operate at a loss to drive everybody else out of business” phase.

Of course, that would all be fine if CoPilot was some killer product that people quickly found themselves unable to work without. Instead, the feedback shows that workers find that it’s not useful or reliable enough to be worth using, and Microsoft’s own latest advert for CoPilot in Excel contains data which shows that at best operation it doesn’t work 46% of the time, and that figure can be as high as 80%.

I’m not sure these problems are really surmountable - you’ve got an incredibly expensive-to-run product which doesn’t do much that’s useful and is bad at the things that it actually could be useful for. It’s not just Microsoft, it’s the entire tech industry that’s facing this problem.