Yay I finally get to make a “both sides are awful” argument and be right

Especially if you’re Google. Matching “anonymous” travel activity to their Google Maps, login, Chrome, and Gmail history should be pretty trivial with a high success rate.

Everyone loses here. It’s no longer possible to trust any organisation with your data, because no matter what they say or do, they have no control over what will happen to it if they ever become insolvent.

Facebook’s AI auto summarizer that it passes to Google et al, is currently rewriting The National’s reporting of Rod Liddle’s death to say “he dies of alcoholism, suicide or cancer, a short illness followed by a heart attack”.

As usual, it was without their explicit consent.

The starkest signal of the MAGAfication of Silicon Valley isn’t this fairly par-for-the-course spyware tech, but their public response.

A short couple of years ago they would have downplayed the whole thing and peppered a few apologies in, but these days the standard response is attack, attack, attack. Call the journalist a liar, call the journal failing, no need for evidence on either, just as long as you keep attacking.

Call me sexist but that guy has really girly handwriting

There’s only about eight billion humans in existence. 3.56B daily active users is as close to saturated as you can get.

if legit users fail Google’s captcha, then site owners will stop using Google for captcha

yeah, I can’t believe a team of professional astronauts don’t know which way up to hold a camera. I hope someone got fired for this.

/s

It’s extremely unhealthy for a free society, to have too much power imbalance between the ruling classes and the people.

Capitalism eats itself

Video sharing is not a technically difficult problem in 2026. It really is just about making the money work.

Jensen Huang can go fuck himself

It’s a fucking chatbot. We should be worried when it can’t be persuaded to say mad things.

I’m willing to bet that at least half of these “look at the mad things Grok said” pieces were planted by Elmo’s own media team.

Why not start with disabling it by default and see how many people switch it on?

“This technology is so useful we’re going to force it on you every way we can think of”

And they still haven’t figured out how to stop Netflix from crashing 15 minutes into every other show I watch. First year I had it no problems. Then one day about two years ago, bam, unwatchable.

Meanwhile in the UK pedestrian deaths are down despite the number of miles walked increasing.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2024/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2024

But what if bias was not the reason? What if your face gave genuinely useful clues about your probable performance?

I hate this so much, because spouting statistics is the number one go-to of idiot racists and other bigots trying to justify their prejudices. The whole fucking point is that judging someone’s value someone based on physical attributes outside their control, is fucking evil, and increasing the accuracy of your algorithm only makes it all the more insidious.

The Economist has never been shy to post some questionable kneejerk shit in the past, but this is approaching a low even for them. Not only do they give the concept credibility, but they’re even going out of their way to dishonestly paint it as some sort of progressive boon for the poor.

You don’t even need to reject the applicability of Gödel, because there’s no proof that our universe doesn’t include a bunch of undecidable things tucked away in the margins. Jupiter could be filled with complete nonsense for all we know.