Because:

1. I’m not a lazy, smooth-brained rube.
2. I’m not in the business of selling AI to lazy, smooth-brained rubes
3. I have no stake in the supply chain nor do I stand to profit from those selling AI to lazy, smooth-brained rubes.

Furthermore:

1. I don’t trust “AI”. If I’m going to have to fact check it anyway, might as well just do it myself and earn the damn knowledge.
2. AI does not work for me (or you). It works for the companies who are forcing it on you and sucking up your data.
3. The energy costs and water requirements are mindbogglingly staggering
4. I refuse to feed or ride any hype train
5. It’s creating scarcity of things that could be put to better use (energy, water, computer components, land, talent, you name it).
6. It’s not even AI. It’s just a dead-end bullshit generator

Ain’t that the truth 😆

Directly from the episode (just in meme font since the full rant wasn’t shown in its entirely in the subtitles).

Lol, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that reference.

In my nearly half century on this planet and having dealt with many a drug dealer in my younger days, absolutely none of them have been this pushy 😆

Best I can offer is https://github.com/searxng/searxng

I run it at home and have configured it as the default search engine in all my browsers.

[Weary sigh]

At best, it’s JARVIS from Iron Man 3 when he went all buggy and crashed Tony in the boondocks. lol

A database can be used to plug into any number of applications that run on top of it as well as be easily shared by multiple people and centrally backed up. Auditing, logging, and row and table level access controls, and other measures can be easily added.

Excel files (or even MS Access files) as “databases” are often just people emailing around a file or accessing it from a shared drive. You end up with a split-brain situation at best and at worst you’re dealing with constant file corruption from multiple people thinking they can access it from a shared drive at the same time.

Then you get vendor lock in and are forced to keep MS Office professional licenses because Shawn created some stupid Access “app” 10 years ago which is “THE DATABASE” and no one understands how it works.

To me it is the ultimate gamble with one’s own thought autonomy, and an abandonment of truth in favor of false comfort.

So, like church? lol

No wonder there’s so much worrying overlap between religion and AI.

I’m about that same age but am so glad we’ve largely abandoned the “www” for websites.

On my personal project website, I have a custom listener setup to redirect people to “aarp.org” if they enter it with “www” instead of just the base domain. 😆

server {
    listen              443 ssl;
    http2		        on;
    server_name         www.mydomain.xyz;

    ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/privkey.pem;
    ssl_dhparam         /etc/nginx/conf.d/tls/shared/dhparam.pem;
    ssl_protocols       TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
    ssl_session_cache   shared:SSL:10m;
    ssl_session_timeout 15m;
  
    ...
    
    location ~* {
      return 301 https://aarp.org/;
    }
}

The only one I didn’t hate was the jingle:

🎵 "F-R-E-E that spells "free"
credit report dot com, baby". 🎵

😆

Yeah, but they should take that pissing contest out of the UX.

I was an adult during that time, and I don’t recall it being anywhere near as annoying. Well, except the TV and radio adverts spelling at you like “…or visit our website at double-you double-you double-you dot Company dot com. Again, that’s double-you double-you double-you dot C-O-M-P-A-N-Y dot com.”

YMMV, but it didn’t get annoying until apps entered the picture and the only way to deal with certain companies was through their app. That, of if they did offer comparable capabilities on their website but kept a persistent banner pushing you toward their app.

My X1 Carbon does now. But it used to drain to empty after a day or two even if it was turned all the way off. Drove me crazy.

The problem ended up being the always-on USB setting in the BIOS. For some reason, even with nothing connected, that would drain the battery until it was completely flat. Once I turned that off, it’ll sleep for weeks like you said.

OP, maybe check the BIOS settings for “Always on USB” or similar and disable that?

Yeah, I didn’t watch this video b/c I’m at work, but I have seen his ebike video so I’m assuming the construction is similarly well thought out.

It’s just that all the fuses and BMSs can’t protect against a dodgy cell that decides to self-immolate. For cheap, disposable devices that are only meant to be charged 5-10 times or less and then thrown away, I’m super wary of the batteries that are chosen for those. Have seen too many things burst into flames and even expensive well cared-for devices turn into spicy pillows.

Not that I’d own a smart fridge, but if I did and they started shoving ads on it, it’d look like this later that day:

I predate both of those events by multiple decades lol.

Printers were well established even on the Trash-80 I grew up with. The bloatware drivers aren’t really what I’m talking about. I suppose Clippy could be considered prior art to the whole “shoving AI in your face” but at the time I was a WordPerfect fanboy.

“Home Insurance Companies Hate This One Simple Trick”