Notable few weeks for translation: DeepL launches this automated voice subtitling, Kagi launched it own translate.kagi.com, while Google seems very busy understanding why they made 5c less per word last Thursday…
Link
Recent study on the link between technology and youths feeling lonely finds out people are much worse than machines:
Teens are telling us things like, ‘That robot actually listens to me — people are mean and judge you, but gen A.I. tools don’t,’” she said. “I’m wondering what that’s going to look like.That I would call a niche for AIs
The AI landscape today (November 2024) is heavily driven by large corporations that subsidize/fund the compute and R&D costs of small companies that have worked for years to train their LLMs. Therefore, it is hard to miss that these large corporations and funds are looking to recoup their investments by selling the final product (like MS’ Copilot) to large and medium enterprises that are already making good money. Why? Because they can make even more money by cutting costs: streamlining their processes, shortening their internal procedures, and getting rid of employees who were hired merely to check a box, among many other reasons.
My social media rule No. 1 for our present rancor-filled times is that I will mute any account (a person or a media outlet) that I think is creating more heat than light
I found Perplexity to be one of the most transparent AIs when it comes to sourcing information. It displays articles, authors, and proper notes in highly visible locations.
In comparison to almost all other AI chatbots, Perplexity (including Perplexity Pro) comes across as a well-prepared student, complete with quotes and a bibliography.
I don't quite understand why the New York Times has taken issue with them while many other, more popular chatbots are doing a poorer job overall.
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My thanks to my friend, Jack Lhasa, from Exoteric.live, who describes himself as:
A mutant wolf-human hybrid caused by nuclear fallout, solar flares, Aztec prophecies, Persian poetry, Irish moonshine-blood, and American pharmacology.
I found Perplexity to be one of the most transparent AIs in terms of sources: it shows articles, authors, notes, with proper notes which are placed in highly visible places.
Compared to almost all other AI chatbots, Perplexity (not only Perplexity Pro) is a well prepared student, with quotes and bibliography.
I don’t really understand why NYT started barking at them, while plenty of more popular others are doing a much poorer job…
Basecamp is right, Apple is wrong, at least from tactical perspective.
Here is why:
Apple cannot track the devs the way it dreams it canI’m looking at my 20-something subscriptions I used to have in AppStore, 5 of them expired this year, another 4 will expire til the end of the year. Nevertheless, I’m not going to stop the services. All those 9 devs (making budgeting apps, games, weather services, office apps, password managers, VPNs) whose AppStore subscriptions I’m dropping, they made me direct offers bypassing AppStore.
We all saw OS X Lion; it’s touch and gesture based, it resembles iOS big time.
Maybe this resemblance makes me see the mouse cursor as something that does not belong there anymore. Swiping, tapping, page-scrolling and so on are the enemies of the cursor. When migrating to a gesture based UI you lose the focus of a cursor and concentrate on areas, tabs and apps. The spot goes out, the zone comes in.
The Albanian virus
There’s an old joke about the Albanian virus. This virus was just an email message reading: “I’m an Albanian virus, so I can’t do any harm to your computer. Please be so kind and delete some of the important system files on my behalf. Thank you for understanding!“.
The idea is that, within hacking relation, there shouldn’t really be such a big intellectual or financial difference between the hacker and the “hackee”.
“Bloomberg Businessweek +” for iPad is a real treat to the eye! Extremely friendly, simple, readable and, gush, you actually don’t have to be a rocket scientist to pay for it!
I hope Murdoch will fire the guys doing The Daily’s UI and NYT will learn some product placement. It’s just a hope.
Although it may look quite the opposite, Apple’s main task was not to make a popular, thus a visible device, but to make it fully transparent and even invisible, from user perspective.
They managed to build a device that you can easily forget about, especially when you are using it heavily. The paradox is the hardware is working so fine compared to user’s expectations, thus you can dive deeper into what you were doing, i.
Europe says Google is wrong placing its own preferred results at the top of the results page. Guys, are you stupid?! Google is building all the results! placing a result anyware in their own structure is a fucking decoy!
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Google has done this move to protect itself from fragmentation, says Bloomberg / Google. Well, that’s a bit exaggerated: 1. Fragmentation means letting everybody hack and mod the Android OS until it looks and behaves cool enough to be sold (read “until it resambles iOS”). 2. Being able to hack and mod an OS means that OS is open. Conclusion: “fragmentation” means “open”. Now, Google says they are closing the OS to avoid fragmentation; this is “they are closing the OS in order to avoid letting it open”.
30%.
Compared to Apple’s outrageous 30% from the same service, Google approaches the issue in a much more humane and thoughtful way.
You should also remember it’s only around 50k of the total apps in Market that are paid apps (compared to AppStore’s 200k!), therefore Google puts a lot less pressure on the devs and service providers…
Amazon, Netflix (if it actually starts working on Android), all the online news services, like NYT, BBC, The Daily and everybody else providing in-app purchase for Android will find this small fee benign and suited for their common objectives.
Coyote Tracks: Google Open
chipotle:
I’m increasingly irritated by the way Google uses the word open. When I think of open I think of Linux and FreeBSD, but that’s just one sense of open—the open source, or if you prefer, “free software” sense.
There are also open standards, like TCP/IP, ASCII and USB: published, openly available…
I may not be the only one to notice it; Scott Cleland says it from a different perspective: “Let me be clear, as I have long said, my problem with Google is not that it discriminates against content in its ranking process, my problem is that it has consistently and blatantly misrepresented to the public that their search results were objective and unbiased when they knew they were not objective or unbiased — all to build up trust of an unsuspecting public.
J-P Teti: The iPad is 99% more open than any other computer
roboteti:
As you may or may not know, this is my 8th grade year. My school goes to 8th grade, so this is my gaduation year. It would be worth mentioning that I don’t have any nerdy friends at school. I’m the only nerd in the whole 8th grade. I have an iPad. I’m the only person in my class who has one (at…
90WPM: Garage Band
90wpm:
I’m an iPhone junkie. And, until recently, I had little to no use for the iPad. Thankfully, I’m not required to check mail on my mobile devices. I’m at my laptop for most of the day, and on the subway I usually stick to Reeder, Instapaper , and NYTimes on my iPhone 4, since after using the…
They suck mainly because of the following dialog:
Competitor company CEO: “How come Apple makes so much money?”
Competitor company Marketing Director: “They’re building innovative products and these products are very well marketed”
CEO: “What’s the most innovative device they’ve built?”
MD: “iPad”
CEO: “Let’s make iPads then!”
This is where everything is already lost. There are 2 huge mistakes here:
The CEO should have known his / her company needed to follow how was Apple doing, not what was Apple doing.
Christian Zibreg, 9to5 Mac
It goes without saying that for many of the iPad-toting toddlers Apple’s iOS devices and Macs will be a natural fit as they enter childhood and teen years. It’s the Apple brainwash and it works like a charm. Apple gets them while they’re young and rivals must be pulling their hair because they’re missing out on the entire generation of kids raised on Apple’s mobile gear and computers.