Mojeek remains Europe’s only search engine with a fully independent index, but there is progress on that. Qwant & Ecosia are now using their own European index (EUSP) for some results, and OpenWebSearch.EU’s pilot index is ready for commercial adoption. Let’s see if anyone builds on it.
The US NBER report on ChatGPT has some surprises. Coding is just 4.2% of use, companionship only 2.3%, and non-work chats soar to 73%. It’s more daily info tool than a coder or a therapist.
12 years since Spike Jonze’s Her was released but it’s still fascinating to see Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Jonze’s movie give each directors perspective on their mutual divorce. She (Johansson’s character) felt abandoned, he (Phoenix’s character) struggled with intimacy. Both had guilt.
I’m a big Demon Slayer fan, but the movies are always badly paced with too much filler. I’ll wait for their TV editors to streamline the Infinity Castle footage for a better watch.
AI is more like the smartphone era, where you didn’t buy your hardware and OS from two people in a garage, than the early PC days. Today, two devs in a garage aren’t selling LLMs to hobbyists. Megacorps own all the model innovation.
Immutable Linux distros are perfect for handing older PCs to family. Skip the regular distros, unless you want to be tech support forever.
Anthropic admitted to degraded Claude output for nearly a month due to inference bugs. Tough pill to swallow for $200/month users who were getting lobotomized responses for weeks.
Hypertension alerts on the new Apple Watch are a great step as hypertension is often underdiagnosed. If you get an alert, see a doctor. To double-check, use a validated blood pressure cuff from a pharmacy. If readings stay high, go see your Doc.
In the US, YouTube rolled out an age estimation tool that estimates the viewer’s age from their viewing history. If it judges you to be a teen, you get put in the teen bucket, and some content is restricted. To remove the teen flag, YouTube wants a credit card, a government ID, or a selfie.
Microsoft joins the World Nuclear Association, Google and Amazon invest in Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology. The first deployments of SMRs could be used to power AI anime waifu chatbots.
Satellite TV was revolutionary in Europe, but in Ireland & the UK, its days are numbered. The Astra satellites at 28.2°E, are nearing the end of their service lives, and KA-Sat 9A (Saorsat in Ireland) ends its service life around 2026. You may have to talk to your Granny about IPTV soon.
The European Processor Initiative has developed its first ARM based European designed microprocessor (Rhea) and RISC-V vector/stencil/tensor accelerator chip (EPAC). No path to consumer commercialisation that I can see. That’s going to make TMSC charge an arm and a leg for fabbing low volume parts.
It’s remarkable that PowerPC is dead in the consumer market. At one point, it was in the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii all at the same time. ~300M units in homes. Now we’ve got x86-64 or ARM. Maybe you’ll get a RISC-V CPU on the controller of your next SSD. Maybe you won’t.
IPV6 is now the infrastructure protocol of the Internet, and most end users never noticed. HTTP3 is built into all Chrome-derived web browsers. It’s been in web servers since 2019. Handsets will make it the default. And most users will never notice. Except for their page loads getting faster.
20 a month for access to AI has created history’s largest beta test group. I think mass exposure is a good thing, as the more people use it, the better they’ll get at detecting when AI starts making things up. There’s a point where you can almost feel it collapse under its context window.
Having looked at several different public DNS resolvers I can say that those who have DNS Over TLS running correctly are the large operations (money to hire nerds with OCD) and the one person outfits (has nerd OCD). There’s a lot of poorly configured junk out there from those providers in between.
The male urge to stay up all night putting 10Gbps Ethernet into the house and building a DNS resolver & cache “because if I dumped that hardware it would just be e-waste anyway.”
Then I watched this week’s episode of Foundation, where none of my networking changes mattered.
Larry Ellison’s dream of revolutionizing agriculture on his private island of Lanai has led to one of Hawaii’s most expensive produce offerings: lettuce, which is priced at $24 per pound.
The Oracle database was a hell of a trick. But Larry has a disease where he thinks he can repeat it on anything.
I’m impressed by the HD remaster of The X-Files on streaming. I was never a “monster of the week” series fan so I skipped it when it first aired, but this show now looks pristine. It’s a great looking procedural TV time capsule show.