If it's any consolation, we already have far higher death counts through systemic violence, which is so normalized most people balk at the idea of even referring to it as such.
It should be impossible to die from "poverty" (certainly not in a "rich" country like those in Europe or North America) and yet that is one of the most significant contributors to a staggering number of ongoing deaths. Things get only worse if you consider stress from existential anxieties or conditions that would have been treatable if they had been diagnosed earlier (but that would have cost extra).
Well, I guess that's not much of a consolation after all.
Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.
Typical example:
"Where can I buy ?"
> You're looking for . It is sold by .
"No, that's different. I'm looking for ."
> Ah, my mistake. You're looking for . It is sold by .
"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."
> I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out .
"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."
> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at .
"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."
> Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy .
The few times I've resigned myself to asking Gemini or ChatGPT something I couldn't find an answer to, my experience has been the same. 100% of the time. An LLM has never, not once, given me a correct answer or not lied to me. It's always been the same experience you describe. It goes in circles "Try X... Try Y... Try X?" Until I tell it to stop telling me X or Y, and then it goes, "LOL you can't do that at all, I was just wasting your time."
Most recently, I was considering moving away from iterm2 on MacOS, and I wanted to know if any other terminal emulator supported gestures for switching between tabs. So I asked Gemini, and it says, "Yes Ghostty supports gestures for switching between tabs."
"Ok I just installed Ghostty and I can't find anything about gestures."
"You need to add foo=bar to your conf file."
"I added foo=bar to my conf file and now it's saying the conf file is invalid."
"Sorry bro, remove foo=bar and add baz=boo to the conf file."
"It says baz=boo is invalid too."
"baz=boo isn't a real option. Remove that and add foo=bar to your conf file."
"You already told me to do that and I already told you that doesn't work."
"You shouldn't put foo=bar or baz=boo in the Ghostty conf file. Both are invalid. Ghostty doesn't support gestures. Have you considered iterm2?"
Gemini is utterly useless, but every other modern model would be capable of answering this correctly. If you ran a local coding agent, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could one-shot implement gesture support in Ghostty. It’d definitely configure BTT for you.
Here’s GPT 6’s answer to the prompt “What macOS terminal apps support gestures? Include a reference to the docs on how to enable/configure them.”:
iTerm2 supports configurable three-finger taps and swipes for switching tabs/panes, creating splits, pasting, etc. Set them up under Settings > Pointer > Bindings. Check for conflicting macOS trackpad assignments. [1]
The others are more limited: Ghostty supports macOS lookup/Quick Look gestures [2], while WezTerm lets you bind scroll events—for example, Ctrl+scroll to change font size. [3] Neither is equivalent to iTerm2’s gesture bindings.
For custom gestures without switching terminals, BetterTouchTool can map app-specific trackpad gestures to the terminal’s existing keyboard shortcuts. [4]
This whole tree just made me realize that people have wildly different prompting styles, and Gemini is probably too specialized for usage patterns of long-time Google Search users. The prompt my finger generated(before this comment was posted) was "are there any terminal emulator that supports gesture actions, on macOS, other than iterm2", and Gemini gave me Tabby, WezTerm, Kitty, and BetterTouchTool gestures.
This is a different experience to GP from query to result. I thought they've all fixed that issue of difference in tones affecting results. I guess it was never easily fixed.
Pretty sure it's the harness here, not Gemini per se. Plug Gemini into pi or any harness that has any competence pointing to web search and the hallucinations drop 75% immediately.
LLMs can actually be a good fit in this application if a better search engine feeds them a list of candidate websites that might sell the thing, and the LLM drives a web browser to see if any of the websites have it.
AI isn't (for the foreseeable future) a superintelligence, certainly not one with its own motives.
Right now AI exists to do two things:
- sidestepping legal and regulatory inconveniences like copyright (which drives a massive chunk of investment the same way crypto did by sidestepping financial regulations, AirBnB did by sidestepping housing regulations, Uber did by sidestepping passenger transport regulations and it and the various delivery and other "gig work" apps did by sidestepping labor laws)
- drastically reducing the cost of (and drastically lowering the bar in terms of skillset and effort for) churning out large amounts of low to medium quality assets/code, saturating various systems designed to pay for intellectual property (e.g. ad or subscription based music/video streaming apps with revenue sharing programs, but also literally any form of digital contract work at almost any scale of business)
Neither of these are helping people (in general) and in fact they're extremely destructive (or "disruptive" if you want to make it sound positive) to the existing systems society relies on because they became feasible and (thanks to massive private subsidies, aka "investments", by VC firms and extremely creative accounting) very affordable extremely quickly.
What's worse - while it seems extremely likely that most of the AI generated "works" aren't actually considered copyrightable works by law and it's entirely possible that the use of copyright-protected works in training data does in fact not violate copyright, this does not in fact create a "world without copyright" because IP laws continue to exist and continue to apply, they just no longer meaningfully protect creative labor (i.e. anyone whose profession relies on producing works, whether that's an artist or a programmer) because anything they produce can be cheaply mass reproduced while they still have to stay clear of claims of anyone with enough funds to enforce rights against them.
Under the current economic system there are exactly four ways to earn money to buy back a share of society's resources to sustain your own life (let alone that of your dependents, e.g. kids or aging/impaired parents/spouses/family members):
1. Simple labor: you generally get paid based on your output or a very low flat day rate conditional to maintaining a measurable level of performance. This is typically "low-skilled" menial production labor. Much of this has been replaced by automation in factories and offices alike and most of what couldn't be automated has been moved into countries with fewer labor protections and a higher supply of desperate people willing to accept what are often bad working conditions because cost of labor is usually one of the biggest contributor to overall production cost. In "the West", this kind of work is now scarce and even when it's relatively safe it's often exhausting and unrewarding. A traditional example would be a seamstress or factory line worker, a more modern example would be someone working in visual effects overseas or content moderation / AI training. How much money you can make is ultimately limited by the physical limitations of how much output you can produce per waking/working hour. For the entrepreneurial-minded this would also include people selling their home-made goods on sites like etsy.
2. Time-based: this can be anything from a masseuse to a lawyer or technician. Unlike simple labor the only relevant metric here is time spent. Although employment contracts may specify a fixed wage or at least a fixed component, the understanding is still that this fixed amount is conditional to a minimum average amount of billable time provided. Most employment contracts specify an expected number of working hours for various reasons but we're specifically talking about jobs where the output from the worker to the customer is "billable time". Arguably most service work (e.g. barristas, store clerks, waitresses, performers/mascots in amusement parks) also falls into this category because while customers often don't directly pay for access time the understanding is that you are paid to perform a certain role for the duration of the opening hours (i.e. act like a friendly, welcoming host or assistant). How much money you can make is directly tied to how much time you can spend working or justify billing.
3. Assets: you produce or buy works/products and lend/license them for use. This is in part where a lot of the original "gig work" lived (e.g. facilitating "couch surfing" or renting out your spare lawnmower) but also includes many simple rental businesses and arguably also landlords. The limiting factor here is the starting capital required to produce or buy things in the first place. Physical assets often also come with storage and maintenance overhead whereas software licensing often comes with expectations of continuing maintenance updates or improvements. Note that software inherently lives in this category rather than the first because unless you're selling away exclusive rights (such as usually required by the terms of employment contracts for wage labor) you only ever sell licenses, not the software itself.
4. Capital: although I said landlords arguably belong in the previous category, real estate traders/investors definitely belong in this one. The idea here is that you don't need to produce anything, you don't need to spend certain amounts of time, you don't need to produce or buy anything substantial and facilitate its use, you make your money entirely in the abstract. Whether it's margin trading, investing in derivatives or holding company stock until you sell it when the line has gone up far enough. The easiest way to make signficant amounts of money reliably is to start with many orders of magnitude more than what you want to make so that percentile gains are still significant - or that you can make enough risky high-risk high-reward bets for the occasional successful moonshot to offset the losses. Nowadays in many countries retirement funds are tied to the stock market, so in a way most people participate in this in some way but actually earning an "income" this way requires access to significant amounts of capital.
Advances in technology and especially low cost of transport and thus access to cheap labor overseas have significantly drained the ability for most people to earn their living via category 1. While there was a short-lived boom in "DIY retail" that one (alongside much of traditional retail) has largely been drowned out by white label dropshipping thanks to the disinterest from platforms like Amazon which are now flooded by nearly identical copies of the same knock-off doodads you can also find on Temu and Alibaba (respectively at decreasing fractions of the price).
Despite some astroturf campaigns trying to sell you on believing otherwise so they can run away with your money after the next cryptocurrency rugpull, category 4 isn't really a meaningful option for the vast majority of people although it can sometimes be a good way to slowly grow excess wealth (i.e. money you don't currently need and ideally can afford to lose) - but that still narrows it down to a small segment of the overall population.
Category 2 used to be a jumping off point to category 3: you work overtime, save up the extra income to buy or rent a studio or office or equipment or factory, or to be able to afford to take some time off to develop and launch your own asset (or SaaS) - it's how many startups with technical founders started out and it's literally the "American Dream". But hourly wages have mostly stagnated (or even decreased) relative to the rising cost of living (even more so if you include expenses expected to "participate in society", which naturally also often increase with the income bracket of your peer group - or the parents of your kid's peer group if you have kids).
And now AI is coming along and just like cheap white label dropshipping of knock-off goods turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of the technological innovations believed to make it easier to launch your own physical products (via 3D printing, cheap overseas sourcing of parts, online advertising, etc), AI has turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of platforms and schemes marketed as making it easier to launch your own digital services - in addition to completely eliminating the market for paid "just good enough" quality digital assets, such as the kind of work found on sites like Fiverr or Upwork, i.e. the kind of work that often provided early experience to professionals not yet qualified or confident enough to take on higher paid work.
PS: All of this is inevitable and perfectly fine. But the same economic system that sustains and demands this development also can not function if all of these jobs and opportunities go away because the attitude towards labor has evolved in such a way that unemployment is at the same time widespread and often impossible to avoid (although it's worth pointing out that a pool of unemployed "reserve labor" is already required for a healthy economy under this system) while also being seen as a personal moral failing that needs to be urgently remediated by the affected individual alone and where any failure to accomplish this compounds on the original sin of being laid off or denied. If society provided free unconditional access to all necessities like housing, food, healthcare and education to everyone, mass elimination of the need for labor might be extremely beneficial. Alas that's not the attitude to humanity currently on the rise so the rise of AI will likely either make a lot of people's lives a lot worse, or it will end with an economic bubble bursting and making most people's lives much worse.
PPS: Another aspect worth mentioning is that the low cost and easy access of mass producing "custom" content using AI has drastically increased the amount of attempted fraud and scams - the technological precedent here would be email compared to paper mail and spam/phishing has been a problem for a long time and never really went away because it's an extremely successful strategy for taking advantage of the technology.
That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.
The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?
The German Defense sector did something with Nextcloud, Collabora Online, Open-Xchange, Element/Matrix and Univention Nubus I believe. With things like Euro-Office and Nextcloud really stepping things up. Even Proton getting an office suite, I don't think the M365 platform is the big hurdle it once was. Especially because Microsoft lost the private market. 25 years ago you'd get employees who knew how to use Microsoft Office, today they all grew up with Macs, Chromebooks and similar.
What is the alternative though? If you piss off Trump you risk getting all your digital infrastructure shut down over night. It doesn't even have to be you who pisses him off. Obviously using Anthropic AI service has it's own issues within the EU trade zone, but it's been what... 3 months? Since they were ordered to shut off EU access to their most powerful models because they ran afoul of the US government.
Contrary to the Great Man version of how we mostly talk about history, scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs and such have historically often occurred multiple times in multiple places often in close proximity time-wise but otherwise completely unrelated to each other. This of course makes sense if you consider that history seems to be primarily driven by material conditions (e.g. steam engines were known to Ancient Greece but their usefulness for industry simply hadn't occurred to them because they lacked the prerequisites to make them useful and neither economic efficiency nor access to cheap labor were significant enough concerns - plus there was no patent system of course).
I'll leave it up to you to decide whether one should expect the demographic of this website to be especially invested in the Great Man narrative but trying to convince them that two people can independently have similar-sounding ideas involving similar-but-different technology is probably an uphill battle. Just be glad you're not composing music for a living because there's literally an entire industry built around the idea that it's impossible for two people to come up with similar melodies without knowingly or unknowingly copying eachother and that it's very important that one of them (or rather the company they had to sign a deal with in order to make any money off their music at all) 100% owns that exact melody and should be paid by anyone who wants to use it.
Next time you have an idea you should just file a patent tbh - the insistence on prior art invalidating the work seems to be quite similar but at least if you're granted a patent you can shake down "copycats" for money.
> Contrary to the Great Man version of how we mostly talk about history, scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs and such have historically often occurred multiple times in multiple places often in close proximity time-wise but otherwise completely unrelated to each other.
My favourite example of this is calculus, followed closely by heavier-than-air flight.
I think there is ample evidence that the Wright brothers were (unlike many other inventors) uniquely suited to solving the problem of heavier-than-air flight, as they solved several open problems that nobody was making progress on (the main ones being control authority, propeller designs, the scientific basis for wing designs, and the ability to test designs and practice without dying) -- they even discovered and solved previously-unknown problems (such as adverse yaw, something their contemporaries should've independently discovered if they were on the right track).
A full rundown would be too long but [1] is a pretty good video going through the history of flight and how most of the other candidates for "first flyers" people bring up don't count and how it's difficult to argue that any of their contemporaries were even close to the Wrights.
Google (Alphabet) is a corporation. Corporations follow the profit motive. Furthermore it's a publicly traded corporation. These follow the interests of their shareholders.
What does killing dodgy ads do for Google's bottom line? It's removing paying customers and driving down competition for (and therefore value of) ad space. What's the cost of dodgy ads to Google? The sites that use Google Ads will continue using Google Ads if they do nothing about the dodgy ads. The sites that don't use Google Ads won't be swayed to use Google Ads if they do remove the dodgy ads. Google is not held liable for serving dodgy ads so there's no direct risk associated with serving them.
Why should Google remove the dodgy ads? "Don't be evil"? That motto exceeded its shelf life before it was first publicly posted.
Hanlon's razor is nice and all but there's a difference between malice and amoral apathy. Corporations would sell shredded orphans as fuel if it made economical sense to do so.
Vehicle physics/dynamics in my case and yes, same. I got a lot of mileage out of letting it use Opus/Sonnet sub agents for much of the exploratory and implementation work, which cuts down on token use. I got into way fewer "oh, that's nonsense? what about this then?" loops with Fable and it was the first model that actually tried to reason about the full system rather than fixating on details and chasing bits and pieces out of context. Haven't tried Sol yet but so far haven't had a reason to switch.
No need to switch as they give out free trials and Sol Is available on the 20$ plan. It's very fast for its power. I ask it for insight, read the responses myself, and offer its points back to Claude. More efficient than letting them talk to each other.
The US has local oil extraction so in theory its oil supply should be easily self-sustaining. Of course oil doesn't work like that (the local refinement industry is not built for the domestic oil) but this failure is ultimately a consequence of economic policy - not that the US is unique in this.
As I understand it, the oil reserves simply weren't built for frequent use. They were built as a backup plan for a global supply chain collapse. Arguably that happened twice in recent history - first with COVID, then with the US deciding to do it itself by getting into a war with the one state where its experts had predicted a war would cause this to happen and that could not readily be defeated because it's literally carved into a vast mountain range and had decades to come up with a plan for defending itself.
Honestly, the war on Iran isn't even in the range of ordinary American politics - even if you come from the most pessimistic "CIA regime change world tour" angle. There's no coherent reason for it to have been executed the way it was that doesn't require assumptions that most people justifiably would dismiss as conspiracy theories (e.g. intentional destroying the global economy for short-term profit through betting & investments).
It's noteworthy that the caverns holding the reserves are on the verge of collapsing. But it's kind of a moot point because there's no way to restore global supply lines in time to refill them when fully drained this time. Tankers are the only viable way to transport large amounts of oil over long distances and it would take months for any shipments out of the region to arrive and there have been practically no shipments for months already.
Unless the US is going to enact rationing, reserves will be gone soon and so will be local supply. Plus if there's any place willing and able to buy oil at a ridiculous markup, that's where the market (and the remaining supply) will go unless the US wants to pivot into outright piracy.
Wasn't this known for a while? The problem is that simply agitating the liquid already causes immense wear because these are natural caves selected for their potential as long-term storage, not active sources.
Not to mention that draining them reduces the quality of the remaining oil (much like how you never want to feed an engine from the bottom of a diesel tank).
It's also my understanding that the problem is not just the reserves being drained, let alone drained so much, but also how rapidly they were drained because that again makes things worse.
It should be impossible to die from "poverty" (certainly not in a "rich" country like those in Europe or North America) and yet that is one of the most significant contributors to a staggering number of ongoing deaths. Things get only worse if you consider stress from existential anxieties or conditions that would have been treatable if they had been diagnosed earlier (but that would have cost extra).
Well, I guess that's not much of a consolation after all.