Even if you’re absolutely spot on, there is a second place, I believe. So far, all of these AI tools are software. Specialized hardware helps, but is not nearly as important as the software.

Software is information, and secret information is only ever temporarily so. If that secret represents the distinction between existence and not, there is extreme pressure to learn that secret.

“Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”

Me neither. Both have a chance of getting it right, but not a great one.

That’s just a failure of imagination. This problem was solved before the Information Age and Ticketmaster/LiveNation unsolved it.

I just meant that there’s so many excellent games, old and new, everywhere you look, that it is easy to just walk past ones that seemed like they have anything even remotely distasteful about them.

That other ant colony on the other side of the sidewalk looks pretty good!

Yeah, but it’s complicated like an ant colony–incredibly complex and nuanced, but tiny, inconsequential, and easy to ignore.

I got one whiff of that dumpster fire and thought, “You know what? I’m going to check out some of the near-infinite other entertainment options available to me in the Information Age and give that whole thing a miss.” I’m sure a significant portion of other people interested in the game came to a similar conclusion, which can’t be ideal for their sales goals.

If it is “from the Makers of Thunderbird”, then I think it stands to reason that at least someone on the Thunderbird project spent time on this that they could have spent on that.

These FOSS projects barely have enough resources to complete their primary charter most of the time, so it really grates to see them squander their most limited assets.

I have read summaries of emails and meetings that had the action items all sorts of wrong, sometimes completely inverted.

It seems to me that if an email or meeting is at all important, the stakes are too high to trust the summary, and if it is not important, neither is its summary.

Add on to that the fact that locally running LLMs are even more scatterbrained, I don’t see how this fills even the limited need you’re describing in any useful way.

So, they spent their limited available manpower on an unrequested feature, and to add insult to injury, the feature is unlikely to have effective practical uses. It might be capable of more limited scope text prediction like code auto-complete, but the field is already flooded with those. I think the Thunderbird users have far more use from improvements to Thunderbird than they do for other unrelated products.

Generally speaking for routers, if you can get it at Best Buy, it is of poor quality, and if you can’t, it requires more expertise to use than most people have.

The quality of the router is not the biggest problem, though. Many routers now phone home and require you to provision them through the company portal, which strongly indicates they’ve got a back door to your traffic if they want it, and if you read their ToS, they give themselves permission to use it.

I’m not suggesting they’re hacking you or doing identity theft, but they are looking over your shoulder for things they can learn about you to make money, and in the future, they could potentially make money by collecting government bounties, since they’ll know who millions of people are and where they live.

Its really, really big and populous, and also ethnically, culturally, and socially diverse. I think those combined factors lead to California passing more volume and variety of laws than any of the other American states.

Many of the laws they pass are regulation on business and consumer protection in excess of those provided by the federal government, but the socially progressive side of politics has its villains, too. Their villainy comes in the form of forced trading of freedom for security–outlawing activities that are dangerous to you, or banning objects and knowledge that have the potential to harm you or others even if they have other practical uses.

Its the main reason why it is risky to fight for the victory of one’s own political “team” without further consideration. It is easy for people interested in the public good to be overzealous in enforcement of public safety.

It’s hard to get broad agreement on where to draw that line. For example, I tend to lean in the “natural law” direction, where I think you should be allowed to have and do almost anything you want, so long as it doesn’t materially harm anyone else, even indirectly. Most other people, even on the left, find that relatively extreme and believe in more personal regulation in the name of increased public safety. For example, most Democrats support moderate to strict restrictions on personal firearm, chemical, and encryption ownership, rather than banning the illegal uses of those things themselves. It is more dangerous for people to be able to be able to get dangerous stuff, so it makes sense people would have a lot of differing opinions on where to settle between “Mad Max” and “Minority Report”.

It is their problem until the second they submit it, then it is the project’s problem. You can lay the blame for the bad actions wherever you want, but the reality is that the work of verifying the legality and validity of these submissions if being abdicated, crippling projects under increased workloads going through ever more submissions that amount to junk.

What is the solution for that? The fact that is the fault of the lazy submitter doesn’t clean up the mess they left.

But now, even the person submitting the license-breaching content may be unaware that they are doing that, so the problem is surely worse now that contributors can easily unwittingly be on the wrong side of the law.

I don’t think the technological limitations are what are making those AR goggles get poor reception. They face a couple of non-technological hurdles that I think are going to be nearly impossible for them to overcome:

• People don’t like strangers pointing cameras in their face to the point where they may even be brought to violence about it, so using these in public settings will continue to be isolating and potentially even dangerous.
• The companies making things like this are too big to be capable of making a good product ecosystem. It has been an inescapable trend for over a decade+ now that these mega corps have stopped being able to make anything without too much monetization to be good anymore, so adoption is lukewarm, and they kill off everything new after a few years. They are surviving on things they made before that time that they have not managed to mess up all the way yet.