Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Its been a pretty normal type week, nothing exciting to talk about. I did get a haircut! 😁
Work on Stream continues at a blistering pace!🤣 The feature I hoped to complete a few weeks back is nearing completion but I’ve hit a real snag on device only. I think I know what it is. Goodness knows I hope I’m right because I’ll be stuck if my change doesn’t work. Such is the way it goes!
Enjoy the links.
Brent Hinds, the former lead guitarist of the acclaimed heavy metal group Mastodon, was killed in Atlantaovernight.
RIP 🪦
CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse
A new payment system based on the Fediverse sounds great but will it catch on and be safe and secure? I’ll be interesting to see who adopts it.
Cracker Barrel changed its logo this week, a move that was quickly and widely disparaged by MAGA figures who decried the switch as a “woke” gesture.
This has gone so far off the rails. Look, I’m not a fan of the redesign but I’d imagine it wasn’t done for some nefarious reason and the original company has long since outgrown its roots.
I’ll continue going there for breakfast. I like their pancakes. 🥞
Michael Hiltzik • Los Angeles Times
As it happened, GPT-5 was a bust. It turned out to be less user-friendly and in many ways less capable than its predecessors in OpenAI’s arsenal. It made the same sort of risible errors in answering users’ prompts, was no better in math (or even worse), and not at all the advance that OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, had been talking up.
Lots of hubbub over GPT-5. I guess folks really fall in love with certain models? But, like with any other software, big, buggy, changes tend to make folks unhappy.
If you have six engineers, and everyone’s paired up, you’ve now limited your WIP to three items of work instead of six. That work is being continuously reviewed through the pairing process, and is ready to be merged quickly, without introducing the delays we sometimes associate with code review.
I got to work with Paul at WillowTree. He’s a super smart fella and extremely nice. He was one of those superstars at the company. Technically gifted and extremely kind. CarMax is lucky to have him. WillowTree was unlucky to lose him.
Ah, but there’s a rub. Microsoft explicitly warns users that its AI function should not be used for things like “doing math” or “anything actually important”
Sorry, this made me laugh. Let’s take Excel, a tool relied on by a hojillion people and make it less useful. 🤣
Please, for the love of Pete, stop shoving AI into everything.
Notion recently did this and it started trying to record my meetings. No thank you. I turned off all of its AI capability.
Look. I think it’ll be fine for use in my dev environment but I’d rather be selective about it. Put it in a setting somewhere and let me turn it on. It should be off by default. 🙏🏼
Microsoft and Asus are putting a date on their new Xbox Ally handhelds: October 16th. Both the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X will be available on the same day in a variety of markets worldwide, but Microsoft and Asus aren’t opening preorders yet or revealing pricing.
I don’t really understand these devices. Are they meant to fully replace an XBox? Are they like the Switch and dock to play on the big screen but easy to carry around? It seems like it but it also seems like it can’t play all games?
Someone, please, straighten me out.
Oh, and the rumored price of $699 and $1,049 sounds really expensive.
Notice that I said short-term, not long-term. This isn’t about AI causing unemployment by replacing humans. We’re talking instead about the risk of a recession if the current surge in AI-driven investment turns out to be unsustainable.
Mr. Krugman seems a bit bearish on AI. There’s a lot of talk about an AI bubble and I can see that. At some point one or more of these AI only companies is going to fail and disappear or be acquired by someone else. Seems inevitable.
The power situation seems pretty dire to the continued existence of AI companies and they absolutely need to provide their own power and be held to environmental standards. Space Karen’s xAI is such a bad citizen and Tennessee is pathetic state for allowing it to go on.
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I like this. We’ve seen stories of companies firing employees in favor only to ask the employees to come back because AI isn’t really ready for prime time.
One thing LLMs are good for is development. I’ve seen some good work produced by them. You still need an expert to check the work but it can be a handy little helper.
