An excellent argument to be made when arguing about the

STop Unrelated Crap Killing budgets act.

STUCK(b) Act. See? Even has a cool acronym.

And if they take a few dozen sessions deliberating over it while the government keeps funding and running on previous bills, that’s OK. That’s the point. There should not be an easy path to leverage government’s ability function to force a vote in your favor, bypassing traditional debate, compromise, and processes.

Y’all need to get a word in with your representatives that what’s needed is legislation preventing budget bills from containing anything other than budgets.

That would solve this problem real quick. It’s been sounding stupider and stupider using the budget meeting to force unpopular agendas down throats or else the government is held hostage.

I think it would fit the bill if budgeting was held up over allocations, one side wants more border spending, one side wants more educational spending, etc, that would make sense but “allow us to attach this whole other unrelated law to declare the sky is actually green(which also contains a tag along that I get to be emperor), or nobody gets paid” is just ridiculous.

Tomorrow? Oh, so you already forgot the announcement from last month? Well, I mean I guess we have a lot of our own stuff going on right now…

/s?

Yup. Or anything held against them is now just fakery.

Like this gem from the news today.

Sometimes it feels technology may doom us all in the end. We’ve got a rough patch in society starting now, now that liars and cheats can be more convincingly backed up, and honest folk hidden behind credible doubt that they are the liars.

AI isn’t just on the path to make convincing lies, it’s on the path to ensuring that all truth can be doubted as well. At which point, there is no such thing as truth until we learn yet a new way to tell the difference.

“They don’t need to convince us what they are saying, the lies, are true. Just that there is no truth, and you cannot believe anything you are told.”

One thing I can think of is an overzealous corporate security solution blocking or holding back your email purely for having an attachment, or because it misunderstands/presumes the cipher-looking text file to be an attempt to bypass filtering.

Other than that might be curious questions from curious receivers of the key/file they may not understand, and will not be expecting. (“What’s this for? Is this part of the contract documents? Oh well, I’ll forward it to the client anyway”)

Other than that it’s a public key, go for it. Hard (for me anyway) to decide to post them to public keychains when the bot-nets read them for spam, so this might be the next best thing?

Birds of a feather. Joe isn’t great about Palestine, trying too hard to be politically delicate about it I think, but Donald is absolutely going to support Israel without hesitation.

After all, only thing that matters to the Don is whether you can pay for his support…

willing to ignore

Ignore? I have it on unfortunately good authority that at least a decent chunk of his base agree with what he is spouting and are loving how he “speaks the truth” or “says what they’re all thinking”. Sadly he’s enabling more and more of them to feel comfortable saying the quiet part out loud and acting on their impulses.

We vote. We get our friends to vote, we get anyone who will listen to vote. Because that’s the only proper method we have. If it works we get ready to do it again next election, local, federal, all of them. If that fails?

All we can do to cope is hope they keep to the “State’s Rights” platform, and avoid making federal policies.

Then we watch which states become a problem and which do not, and considering moving if we need to while we still have freedom of travel.

From there? Anyone’s guess. Things get too divided we might be talking about border walls between states rather than just countries. Or it could all be bluster.

“White House”

“Neat, more spam….wonder what they’d try to get me with this time, send gift cards to save the country? Wait, no, that’s not a thing…could it be the actual White House?!?!?…Too late.” 😂

Maybe I’m just in the generation so burned out in spam and junk calls that it’s just me, but that’s about how I think that would go.

Y’know, that does put a thought in my head.

How do you know the President is calling? If I saw a caller ID saying anything like that I’m going to assume spam. Unknown DC number, also spam.

Does an aide come to my door and hand me a phone, or warn me that the next call is official?

Otherwise of course I missed the call, guess the President gets to leave a voicemail! And we can play telephone tag with his staff until there’s another moment in his day…?

Sadly, this is not an isolated opinion. Not just one fringe crazy that can be talked over and ignored. There are many more like him, that want to see things like these be reality again, and [insert Trump’s current polling numbers] percent of Americans that seem to agree at least in spirit or are somehow very, very unaware.

I fear for the future.

I think the polls are close because only a certain subset of voters are in them.

Did you participate in the poll?

I ask because I didn’t. I’m not even sure how I could but can’t be bothered to figure it out, and it doesn’t seem like it means much.

I also asked my coworkers if they were in any of these polls. Out of the whole lunchroom, one old guy said he used to do them, years ago when they would call him and ask questions. But they haven’t in a long while.

So that’s a whole lunchroom not represented in the polls, and I doubt we’re the exception. But we will all be voting come November.

I mean, given my work schedule it was late for me too. But it was an OK time for the other coast I suppose. Good thing I have a DVR.

Old age aside, that’s the curse of campaigning while actively President I think. Biden’s been up since god knows when hearing reports, making tactical decisions, worrying about multiple wars, working the reporters, navigating security concerns and doing his job, while also having to rehearse what he can anticipate, get to the studio and get all made up and go on TV. I’d be fried at the tail end of such a day too.

Trump probably threw a party, napped, popped some strong pills, printed another copy of his same old rally speech and came out of a hotel across the street ready to blame some immigrants for the sun going down.

Maybe we should get the VP to run the country on important days like debates so the active president can get the same treatment as the guy with nothing better to do?

On the one hand, it’s a tradition at this point to always run the incumbent. In most cases, it’s a slam dunk win unless things went really wrong. (say a pandemic)

The difference now is that I don’t think we’ve ever had presidents get this old. I think Reagan ended this old but no one has ever run for office this old. And I can’t blame a guy for getting old like I can blame a guy for spouting lies and vitriol. I do think it’s time for an upper age limit for office though. If people can be too young, they can be too old. And it seems like people are living long enough to get to test it.

But on the other hand, there just aren’t any democrats that came close to winning the primary, wether because of the first hand tradition or because they just didn’t have anything good to bring to the table I’m not sure.

And when the opposition is as sturdy as Trump, it’s not the time to play games with untested newbies, you know? So you try to bring up your battle hardened best, even if he might be getting up there in years.

That said, before the debate, I felt like he had the ability. He’s been strong at previous public appearances. I truly hope this is a fluke, and he wipes the floor with Trump at the next debate. Because otherwise we are screwed, either because Biden fades out on us or Trump gets to try for his racist autocracy.

Forgive me, I’m no AI expert to fully compare the needed tokens per second measurement to relate to the average query Siri might handle, but I will say this:

Even in your article, only the largest model ran at 8/tps, others ran much faster, and none of these were optimized for a task, just benchmarking.

Would it be impossible for Apple to be running an optimized model specific to expected mobile tasks, and leverage their own hardware more efficiently than we can, to meet their needs?

I imagine they cut out most worldly knowledge etc/use a lightweight model, which is why there is still a need to link to ChatGPT or Apple for some requests, would this let them trim Siri down to perform well enough on phones for most requests? They also advertised launching AI on M1-2 chip devices, which are not M3-Max either…

Onboard AI chips will allow this to be local.

Phones do not have the power to ~~~

Perhaps this is why these features will only be available on iPhone 15 Pro/Max and newer? Gotta have those latest and greatest chips.

It will be fun to see how it all shakes out. If the AI can’t run most queries on the phone with all this advertising of local processing…there’ll be one hell of a lawsuit coming up.

EDIT: Finished looking for what I thought I remembered…

Additionally, Siri has been locally processed since iOS 15.

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-on-device-siri-iphone-ipad/

I think there’s a larger picture at play here that is being missed.

Getting the weather is a standard feature for years now. Nothing AI about it.

What is “AI” is, Hey Siri, what is the weather at my daughter’s recital coming up?

The AI processing, calculated on-device if what they claim is true, is:

1. the determination of who your daughter is
2. What is a recital? An event? Are there any upcoming calendar events that match this concept?
3. Is the “daughter” associated with this event by description or invitation? Yes? OK, what’s the address?
4. Submit zip code of recital calendar event involving the kid to the weather API, and churn out a reply that includes all this information…

Well {Your phone contact name}, it looks like it will {remote weather response} during your {calendar event from phone} with {daughter from contacts} on {event date}.

That is the idea between on-device and cloud processing. The phone already has your contacts and calendar and does that work offline rather than educating an online server about your family, events and location, and requests the bare minimum from the internet, in this case nothing more than if you opened the weather app yourself and put in a zip code.

Like a non-profit, with tax breaks and the ability to earn enough to operate, but little more than that or the taxes come back with a vengeance.

Everything needs money to run but when there’s the option to shovel out whatever bait it takes to chase the dragon of uncapped earnings, they’re not in it to keep us informed, just to keep us spending.

I’ll take a compromise where “3.1” is etched in each head end, and I can trust that “3.1” means something, and start with that.

The real crux of the issue is that there is no way to identify the ability of a port or cable without trying it, and even if labeled there is/was too much freedom to simply deviate and escape spec.

I grabbed a cable from my box to use with my docking station. Short length, hefty girth, firm head ends, certainly felt like a featured video/data/Dock cable…it did not work. I did work with my numpad/USB-A port bus thing though, so it had some data ability(did not test if it was 2.0 or 3.0). The cable that DID work with my docking station was actually a much thinner, weaker feeling one from a portable monitor I also had. So you can’t even judge by wiring density.

And now we have companies using the port to deviate from spec completely, like the Raspberry Pi 5 technically using USB-C, but at a power level unsupported by spec. Or my video glasses that use USB-C connections all over, with a proprietary design that ensures only their products work together.

Universal appearance, non-universal function, universal confusion.

I hate it. At least with HDMI, RCA, 3.5mm, Micro-USB…I could readily identify what a port and plug was good for, and 99/100 the unknown origin random wires I had in a box worked just fine.