Eli Fennell

I've had bad experiences trusting 3rd party devices running Google made OSs with the exception of ChromeOS (which Google has much more control over than with Android or Android/Google TV), so I've been exclusive Pixel/Chromecast for a while now. But if it serves your needs, go for it.

Been using the Chromecast with Google TV since it came out. Huge fan. I like how it prioritizes content across streaming services, rather than being geared to lock you into one choice like Fire TV or Roku. Will be getting the streaming box when I upgrade.

ChatGPT Using Google Search Index I am seeing numerous tests now that seem to prove that OpenAI's ChatGPT search feature is using Google Search's index or search results page to serve its own search results.

Well... this is awkward.

I was honestly so confused why they would claim this that I checked to see if they said anything more about it, and apparently, I was not alone in my confusion, as they had to clarify that they weren't even talking about the media, they were talking about the GOP.

If I had a dime for every time something was going to "destroy the web"...

This is just false. There has been extensive reporting about it, and it is still being extensively reported today.

Chap claims Atari 2600 beat ChatGPT at chess : 1.19MHz eight-bit CPU trounced modern GPUs – can you do better with your retro-tech?

The ChatGPT 4o "reasoning model" has been beaten at chess by the Atari 2600 on beginner's level difficulty. Sam Altman claimed two days ago that AI has passed the super intelligence "even horizon". But, it can't win at chess against a 1.19 MHz 1977 CPU and chess engine?

#AI #LargeLanguageModels

I'm good, and you? Just TBC, I wasn't suggesting you're in a bubble. I was just making a broader point that, if we're not talking about strictly technical fixes, it's very subjective what needs to be "fixed" about any social network experience. Different users will want different experiences.

There's actually a growing body of evidence showing that over reliance on GenAI tools results in cognitive atrophy. You start to actually lose cognitive skills. I use AI extensively, I'm not a Luddite, but not everyone knows how to use it as a tool and not a crutch, especially younger users.

Apart from technical issues, whether anything on any social network needs "fixing" is really debatable, as it depends on what the individual wants to get out of it. If you want to only be surrounded by people you agree with, you don't think an echo chamber needs fixing, if not, then you do.

Apple Researchers Just Released a Damning Paper That Pours Water on the Entire AI Industry Researchers at Apple have released a damning paper that throws cold water on the "reasoning" capabilities of modern AIs.

Don't buy the hype. "Reasoning Models" don't really reason, don't really think, and are nowhere near attainment of the mythical and undefined "Artificial General Intelligence".

They're too young to understand that they're damaging their own cognitive development through over dependence on AI. It's the "grownups" in Silicon Valley who wanted to move fast and break things, even if what they were breaking was society.

Human group behavior en masse is in many ways much more like an inanimate complex system, like the climate, than an intelligent goal-oriented system.

I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. If I tell someone a supervolcano is days away from erupting, and they say, "But what about all the good people in the world?", I deduce they don't get the point. Goodness and societal collapse are not mutually exclusive in the world.

I never said there wasn't goodness in the world. Goodness isn't enough. It never was.

I wish you were right, but you're not. Relationships and communities of depth and persistence are being replaced by relationships that are shallow and disposable, atomized by forces of hyper individualism and hyper relational mobility.

People used to have unifying myths that helped give whole groups a sense of purpose, value, destiny, and a reason to be something more than a group of proximal strangers. We had Great Myths. Now we just have promiscuous myths used for marketing or to venerate petty neotribal identities.

The Handbook of Social Psychology is celebrating its 90-year history by making its new 6th edition open access and free to download for everyone, in what its editors hope will become a model for future academic publications.

#Psychology #SocialPsychology

Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back Years after outsourcing marketing and customer service gigs to AI, the Swedish company Klarna is looking to hire its humans back.

AI can be a great tool in the business toolset. It is nowhere near being our replacement. The hype bubble is starting to pop. #AI #GenAI

NFTs That Cost Millions Replaced With Error Message After Project Downgraded to Free Cloudflare Plan For a few hours, 19,000 NFTS that Nike helped mint returned a Cloudflare error instead of the picture people promised would live forever online.

PSA: If your NFTs are hosted on someone else's cloud, you don't really own them, they do.

#Crypto #NFT

Netflix's Adolescence is proof that moral panic never goes out of style, it just reinvents itself for each new generation of young parents who want easy answers to the complex challenge of raising their offspring with upright values. And thus the cycle continues.

MY car totally responds to my commands. But my car is more special than any other. Kind of like my cat... except my cat doesn't respond to my commands, I respond to hers.

Actually, I should correct myself: they're not even fools. They're models. Like a weather model. They can be used by tools to model sequential patterns of tokens, specifically chunks of linguistic content (words, short phrases, suffixes, etc...), to predict the next most likely chunk in a sequence.

LLMs are "digital slide mold", except they're nowhere near as clever as actual slime mold (not being sarcastic, slime mold is super clever). LLMs can "learn" patterns and repeat them or blend them, but they have no capacity for discrimination or valuation. They're tools, not people.

Seeing everything, even the basic good things of human life like health and happiness, through "the capitalist gaze" is truly pathological. Not everything needs a profit-based justification.

Google’s NotebookLM leader is taking over as head of the Gemini app Google is shuffling its AI team.

This is a smart move. NotebookLM is my favorite #GenAI tool, and unlike Gemini is unique and not a panic-driven imitation of ChatGPT. Though I am finding Gemini 2.5 Pro superior to GPT-o1 for most tasks. I think there is room for synergy between the two.

#AI #LargeLanguageModels

I know your pain all too well.

Well that's that AGI nonsense all the Al'vangelists are always waxing lyrically about even though they can't actually define it.