When have voters ever had anything meaningful to say? I mean the system is built to minimize their input!

Agreed!

Prompt engineer.

It’s time to turn that ridiculous term into a slur.

But … “moron” is already right over there.

It very much depends on which specific front you use. In February of 2025 I had DeepSeek insist that any speculation about Donald Trump being president was “future speculation” for example. Because its training data cut off at … I think October 2024?

The ones that factor search into the prompt are better at keeping up to date, but even then I had Perplexity argue with me that there were no devastating fires in Jasper so it was just fine to go travelling in it.

I disagree with him. It is not like a heartless monster. It is a heartless monster.

I think we can safely assume that any woman with public photos who says anything that someone, somewhere gets offended by will be deepfaked with porn.

The VW bug got big because it was a decent car at an affordable price.

Neither of these hold true for Tesla.

He got the information he needed, destroyed the departments that were investigating him. He’s good.

I’m so glad I’m not in the USA right now. From every angle human lives are under attack by rich assholes.

I swear the entire west has turned into abject cowards over Gaza. All the posturing at every country in the world over (often only suspected) genocide. Israel does a genocide on live TV and the west not only doesn’t do the moral chest-thumping it actively aids and abets it.

So much for being the stewards of virtue…

I’m not sure you can triple the rapes of 15th-century Britain.

Wait, you mean MEN, in TECH, have problems with CONSENT and women saying “NO”?

This is my surprised face: 😐

🤮

The fact that you don’t know the answer to that question yourself is pretty much clinching evidence that it’s AI code.

“Boom, baby, BOOM! I’m the Evil Midnight …”

Never mind.

For those hitting Wired’s paywall: https://archive.is/fMTwf

Looking at the URL, yes, there’s a very simple pattern to Kaptain Ketamine’s broken promises: if he opens his mouth he’s lying.

The year is 1999. The tech scene, where I did most of my marketing work at the time, is collapsing in Ottawa. I’m getting tired of the disrespect I doubly get for a) not being a techie, and b) not being male. I decide to go for the money instead.

A company in Houston is hiring and I get headhunted. The salary hinted at is almost double what I’m making now, plus some very generous bonus and stock schemes. I get flown down to Houston, kept in a really nice hotel room for two days as I go through several interviews with different departments and managers. When I’m finished and on the flight back home, I have my pick of four jobs. Feels good, right? To be wanted that much?

Yeah, except that the final interview had already settled which I’d take: none.

Before that final interview I’d already had a few red flags:

1. Houston is a lovely city and far more cosmopolitan than I’d imagined I’d ever find in Texas, of all places. But … there’s still billboards left, right, and centre for churches, religious radio stations, etc. It may be surface cosmopolitan, but that general feel of fundamentalist Christianity is everywhere.
2. The salary is high but digging into the paperwork for the proffered health plan leads me to believe that if I have any kind of a major health problem or accident or the like I’m not going to be seeing the benefits of that for long.
3. As cosmopolitan as Houston itself looked, the company was whiter than white.

None of these was a showstopper. Hell, all three were just a mark in the “minus” column of my PMI¹ analysis and had not yet outweighed the “plus” column.

But that final job interview… Yeah.

I was talking to the final hiring manager (the pattern was in each department first a group interview with HR plus a few potential coworkers, and if I passed, directly with the hiring manager) and I noticed an intriguing sculpture on the shelf behind him. It was a smooth rock (a river-smoothed piece of granite, it looked like) and on it was mounted some pieces of shiny metal with weird dented-in spots that looked half-melted with the metal melting into weirdly-shaped blobs. So I asked about it. I couldn’t see how the metal was formed the way it was, melted so it sagged, broke through, and also pooled in the hole.

“Oh, that? That’s the platters of a hard drive that failed. I took it to the range and shot it with this.”

And he pulls out a revolver from his desk. Nothing special, just a silver .38 special revolver, like the kind cops used to carry. Loaded. He waved the handgun around in ways that would have my father (a retired CWO) leaping across to him and buttstroking him to unconsciousness for the sheer lack of trigger and barrel discipline. I can’t get across just how unsafe this guy was being. He was in an office full of people, he was waving around a loaded handgun that he’d taken from his office desk, paying no attention to if the barrel ever pointed at someone or not. I was too stunned to look, but it would not have surprised me to see that he’d placed his finger on the trigger too. This was just reckless.

And. Nobody. Else. Around. Me. Thought. This. Was. Unusual.

In the middle of a job interview, an interviewing manager thought it was OK to pull out a loaded handgun and wave it around. And nobody around him thought it was even slightly off.

That by itself would have been a hard “no” for accepting any kind of a job. I didn’t need the other red flags in the slightest. I had four offers in my pocket and my answer to all four was “sorry, I’ve decided I’m never setting foot on US soil ever again”. And I’ve stuck with it ever since.

¹ de Bono’s “Plus/Minus/Interesting” technique.

What stood out for me was this line:

— so it could be, whether the NYT understood it or not, that its “experts” were simply winking at the reality that it’s hard to build affordable gadgets in a country with robust labor rights.

Robust labour rights? An American is talking about “robust labor rights”!? If someone from the EU had written that I’d have gone “fair enough”. But against an American employer?

Let’s put it this way: I’ve worked in China for 25 years. I turned down a job in the USA shortly before moving here (about two years before). There’s a reason for this (and it wasn’t just the gun in the job interview).