Sunday, August 24
Daily News Stuff 24 August 2025
Who Edition
Who Edition
Top Story
- Who are the 400 million people who made Threads the second most popular discussion platform after only Twitter? (Mashable)
The article doesn't seem to understand its own conclusion: That these are the same people who made The Big Bang Theory the most popular show on television: Bipedal sphex wasps.
In short, they don't exist, or at least not as recognisably individual human beings. They are trivially interchangeable corporate drones, the same people who made CB (formerly Cracker Barrel, the nation's foremost fine dining cheese experience) a household name for all the wrong reasons.
- Speaking of households, I peeked out of mine this afternoon. It was a warm winter's day, so I essayed out to tackle the easiest part of the garden - the patch of lawn nearest the house - which was dusted with small weeds and could do with a trim before the season kicks off for real next month.
Even my smaller lawnmower (an 18V Bosch unit) could handle the task, though I did need to swap batteries at the midpoint because I had neglected to do so before putting it away for the winter.
On the other hand, that virus really did a number on me, and I also needed to recharge half-way through mowing less than half the lawn. It'll likely be weeks before I'm back to normal.
- Also had a migraine. Just 'cause.
Tech News
- Will Trump help 4Chan escape the UK's Thought Police? (The Verge) (archive site)
Uncertain but hopeful. Certainly someone needs to drag the Latter Day Stasi to one side before they bring down the entire internet in civil war.
- Will the FTC help Europe escape its own catastrophic meddling in critical internet security protocols? (Bleeping Computer)
So many idiots, so little time.
- Coinbase's CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn't try AI immediately. (Tech Crunch)
Because he's an asshole."I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a couple people that had not done it. Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some tri p or something, and some of them didn’t [have a good reason]. And they got fired."
And then Coinbase was nuked from orbit, and oh how we laughed.
- InnoDisk demonstrated DDR5 MRDIMMs running at capacities up to 128GB and speeds up to 12,800MHz. (Serve the Home)
These could be interesting in a second-generation AMD Strix Halo desktop - expandable memory and 50% more bandwidth than the soldered solutions currently available, which cap out at 8500MHz.
Musical Interlude
In the original Predatorese.
Extended play version in English.
Disclaimer: Who knew that was a cover?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:53 PM
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1
I don't know, I can see the Coinbase CEO's point. My own company just had our annual all hands get together, with the whole IT department getting together for our own day of meetings, and AI was a big topic. And you could tell that the higher level managers were paying attention to who was at both end of the spectrum, noting who thought that AI would actually be able to produce real code and steal our jobs or do all our work, as well as the people who didn't have the spark or interest to have at least played around with it. And I expect we'll be discarding some employees from both extremes, but more from the latter than the former.
Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, August 25 2025 03:19 AM (aAyxl)
2
In a Coinbase employee's shoes I'd've fiddled with it in the hopes of subtly producing something that almost worked, but failed catastrophically.
We tried using Copilot at work briefly at my director's insistence, having it ingest a program and instructing it to explain it.
It did, at a first-year student level, explaining what was going on a line at a time, with no attempt to make any larger conclusions about what was going on. That was enough to get the director to back off for the last 6 months or so. I suppose I should look at it again and see if there's anything I could do with it that might be somewhat useful.
We tried using Copilot at work briefly at my director's insistence, having it ingest a program and instructing it to explain it.
It did, at a first-year student level, explaining what was going on a line at a time, with no attempt to make any larger conclusions about what was going on. That was enough to get the director to back off for the last 6 months or so. I suppose I should look at it again and see if there's anything I could do with it that might be somewhat useful.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 25 2025 06:44 AM (1zWbY)
3
Ah, remember when the managers thought that Java would make programmers obsolete?
Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 25 2025 07:06 AM (QE7eq)
4
Honestly it is the leadership pushing this AI stuff so hard that are proving themselves worthy of the unemployment line. They're of the same ilk that think you can constantly do more with less (or as one director that I'm dealing with now puts it, "we shouldn't have to prioritize, just get it all done. Any issues that come up should be resolved before the next bi-weekly meeting and backlog should't be a thing.). Yes, AI will eventually be what they think it will, but history proves it takes a lot of time for that to play out. Computers took almost 30 years to fully develop their potential. The internet took about 15 years. AI is already coming up against a lot of hard physical constraints (power and silicon) that are going to be hard stops, and that's before you get into how immature the technology really is. There are a lot of companies that are soon going to find themselves in the corporate equivalent of 40-car expressway pileups.
Posted by: stargazera5 at Monday, August 25 2025 09:41 AM (WM5vz)
5
Yeah, AI seems to be running into practical limits faster than I expected (see GPT-5 here). Not necessarily hard limits but the end of the Golden Age.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 25 2025 01:34 PM (PiXy!)
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