Very similar story to mine. Moving from Amsterdam to the “suburbs” of a smaller city in the Netherlands AND getting a dog was the only way I’ve found to meet new people and befriend neighbors.
Nope, the internet was and still is a revolutionary way of communication. AI is nothing but an assistant tool, just like many great applications out there, but nothing more. Hyping AI is like hyping MS Office back in the 90s, except now everyone is trying to make quick cash through borderline scam schemes with it.
We are building machines that can do work and create content, and they are getting better every three months. This year's focus will be on making them work on tasks entirely autonomously (e.g. "agentic"). It has already impacted jobs in fields where the quality of output is sufficient to replace workers.
Life is going to come at you fast if you think it's going to be relegated to an assistant forevermore.
Such a bad take. Consider examples like AlphaFold, which has revolutionized protein folding and is already having a profound impact on scientific research and healthcare. AI’s potential extends far beyond being compared to a 90s MS Office suite it has profound, wide-ranging implications for society.
There were plenty of people who saw the Internet as a pathetic waste of time and a flash in the pan.
AI is here to stay. AI has never gone anywhere. AI has been a mainstay of computer science since the beginning.
We're just now getting something that can roughly approximate - and in many cases surpass - the average human being. And we don't know what we want to do with it. We've created a tool that's so broad it's hard to know where to place it, so the answer with anything broad is, "Put it everywhere!"
If you're not deriving tangible value from existing generative AI products, you're the problem, not the product.
These things save me an enormous amount of time each day, oftens upwards of several hours.
The fact that we need a "stop the madness" app for Safari is proof of Safari's insanity.
If Stopthemadness actually works reliably, it is also an existence proof that blocking video autoplay is possible, and that Apple is simply not fixing the "never auto-play" setting in Safari.
Perhaps Apple and Mozilla should just remove the "never auto-play" settings in Safari and Firefox and say that they are doing so in order to empower web sites and adtech companies (including Google/youtube, who pays them a lot of money) to force you to view unwanted video advertisements.
Sure, I don't think it ever has, and that's fine. I'm of the opinion that truly free markets end in massive consolidation, monopolistic behaviors, and rent-seeking.
We've been seeing some of this already in recent decades. The current administration in the US was starting to really think about what to do about that, but I expect the next one will allow businesses to do whatever they please.
