Another busy day working through a mountain of cases not to mention dealing with customers ringing up – some needing genuine help while others can’t seem to function in life without someone continuously holding their hand every step of the way doing the basic of tasks. With all that being said I guess if it weren’t for society’s more ‘interesting’ and ‘unique’ characters, I would probably be out of a job. Reminds me of when people complain about people living beyond their means or the lack of savings but the problem is that our economy depends on people spending even if you or I may consider what they’re spending their money on is frivelous.
On the software update front Ubiquiti has released to the early access channel UniFi OS 6.0.15 for Dream Routers – I’m looking forward to the release. I’m still working my way through the changes introduced in Safari Technology Preview 255 (link) and although there are a few regressions I’m wondering what the big plan is long term. I say that because Apple is making a push to convince users to use Safari and I wonder if part of that is to address many long standing issues that both developers and end users face. When it comes to developers it is dealing with buggy implementations and for end users it is the lack of drive to really properly support MV3 and bring Safari into compatibility with Chrome for web extensions.
On the issue of local AI, it is interesting to read about the rumoured details regarding ARMv10 that is scheduled to be released in 2028-29 and on the x86-64 front there is Intel and AMD working on various extensions that’ll make local AI models run efficiently. I think we may actually get to the point that the whole AI data centre investment is going to start looking a bit foolish when users are faced with either paying for AI in the cloud or just running it on their own machine with the benefit of no on going costs other than the electricity to power the computer.
What I also noticed is how the copilot branding is slowly disappearing from Windows – I noted not too long ago that Microsoft is going to focus less on AI being a brand but rather a technology that improves the user experience. The new search is a good example of making use of a technology and for the average user they don’t care whether or not it uses AI but instead they enjoy the fact that they can type in what they want eg “change to dark mode” and a dialogue will appear in the search result which allows them to make the change from from the search result.
It reminds me of what Eli the Computer Guy said, people buy solutions not technology – no one goes out and buys the IMAP protocol or the SMTP protocol but what they buy is a solution such as Domino, Groupwise, Exchange or they’ll pay a cloud provider such as Google or Microsoft to provide that service. The problem is that far too many Silicon Valley bros are more concerned about the technology than turning the technology into a useful product for the end user.
I’d also say that the AI slop generation is the least interesting – the future should be able robotics and machine learning so that the most dangerous jobs and the jobs that have the greatest toil on the body can be done by robots – mining, agricultural work such as picking fruit etc. What the technology should ultimately allow is that the worse jobs can be automated away in favour of freeing up time for people to engage in creative outlets such as music, writing, philosophy etc. so as a reuslt I really don’t see the purpose of these AI slop machines.
