Nice to see they’re still chugging the AI Koolaid after completely blundering their test rollout of AI search results.

Apparently offshoring basically all of your manufacturing while not giving a shit about the loss of engineering capability and institutional knowledge has significant downsides. Who knew? Who could possibly have seen this coming?? I’m serious. I would ask the people in engineering but they all got fired like twenty years ago.

Data Rule Numero Uno:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Have fun training your LLM on a big steaming pile of hot garbage. That’s 80% of Stack Overflows content.

Now you can have a computer tell you that you’re an idiot and your question is stupid rather than actual person.

Touch screens in cars are a massive safety issue. I’m not saying they don’t have some benefits but the fact that many newer cars have basically no physical buttons to perform basic functions is a problem. I can feel for the dial to adjust the volume or change the radio station. But a touch screen encourages the driver to take their focus off the road. That’s a serious problem.

Half your fleet experiencing engine failure around 110,000 miles really puts a wrinkle in the jihad so I guess that rules out Chevrolet.

This is not new. Microsoft has been pushing users further into their SaaS ecosystem for years. Creating a local account on Windows 10 is more difficult than signing up for a Microsoft account. That’s by design. It just goes along with the transition of their core business away from desktop software and into hosted solutions and data processing. Annoying? A little. Surprising? Hardly.

Reddit is niche when it comes to social media. It caters to a particular group of people and has its own style of both content and engagement, just like Facebook or Tiktok have their own styles. I would argue reddit is, in some ways, more like an old school forum with a fresh coat of paint. It requires more effort from the user to engage with than some other social media platforms. The content can be a lot “heavier” and it’s not centered around people and/or personalities. To be clear thats something I liked about Reddit but I don’t think it really resonates as much with the average user.

Site visits are just one metric and, while it’s an interesting metric, it doesn’t say much without a lot more context. OK, so a lot of people end up visiting Reddit. Why? Is it intentional? Is it because every third Google result is a reddit post? If so, is it driving further engagement? If not, then that benchmark is worth little. If it is driving further engagement, then something else is wrong.

$5 Billion for a chronically unprofitable, niche social media platform in an already crowded field. Yeah, Ok. You’d get a better return on your investment if you just burned the money for heat.

I live in a rural part of the US (Which is honestly most of it) and electricity runs about $0.12/kWh. Ya’lls prices are mind blowing. Especially since we heat with electric heat pumps. At those rates my electric bill would be about $625/mo instead of $250/mo.

First rule of technology: if the increase in complexity and decrease in reliability outweigh the added tangible value, don’t implement it. This is why it’s usually best to avoid “smart” appliances or, you know, brain implants.

Anytime they talk about using “AI” at my job it’s in some way that is completely unnecessary and seems to actually make the product shittier. And no, it’s not Bing.

I used to work in utilities. Electric, not telecom so different set of regulators. What they would do is yank you into and office and tell you something to the effect of: “[Name of Regulatory Body] is considering [issue]. You should really consider going on the public comment section of their website and voicing your [support/opposition depending on corporate stance] for it. It’s not mandatory but you should really consider doing that. It’s very important to our company.”

It wasn’t “mandatory” but they would repeatedly hound you until you either did it or told them to fuck off, at which point you would be branded a “troublemaker” and they would find ways to punish you.

Now if I could just a “dumb” TV that doesn’t have a bunch of built in apps, which apparently is now a huge ask. I just want my TV to display whatever HDMI port is currently selected. Not nag me about connecting it to WiFi every time I turn it on.