technology

Before Hackernews, before Twitter, before blogs, before the web had been spun, when the internet was just four universities in a trenchcoat, there was BYTE. A monthly mainline of the entire personal computing universe, delivered on dead trees for a generation of hackers. Running from September 1975 to July 1998, its 277 issues chronicled the Cambrian explosion of the microcomputer, from bare-metal kits to the dawn of the commercial internet. Forget repackaged corporate press releases—BYTE was for the builders.

Unhinged script, mannerisms that don’t reflect the words, and the usual AI artefacts. The fuck did I just watch?

Edit: I’m not even sure what this was trying to scam. Linked through to a website with a loooong video of “celebrities” talking about erections. No links.

Generally, AI chatbots are not supposed to do things like call you names or tell you how to make controlled substances. But, just like a person, with the right psychological tactics, it seems like at least some LLMs can be convinced to break their own rules.

When Caron Morse’s 9-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard ‘Hell no.’” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”

So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.

So if these fans aren’t AI-generated fakes, what’s going on here?

The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:

• Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
• YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse

OKLCH is a newer color model that is designed to be perceptually uniform. This means that colors are much more accurate in terms of how humans perceive them and it makes working with them much easier.

…this is where font-size-adjust comes in. If I specify

font-size-adjust: ex-height 0.5,

I ask the browser to scale the font such that the letter “x” is exactly half of the box. This makes the fonts comparable…

…That’s why we created X1, a sleek device that attaches under any watch, turning it into a smart companion. With X1, you get notifications, fitness tracking, and more—all while keeping the watch you already love.

Lorde fans are clearly struggling to play the CD version of her new album. Customers who purchased the special edition of Virgin released on a transparent plastic disc are reporting on Reddit and TikTok that many CD players, car stereos, and other sound systems they’ve tried are unable to play it.

“LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. “There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”