rmason

This makes about as much sense to me as banning all personal computers in the eighties from schools. You are putting these kids at a decided disadvantage.

What if someone created a culturally oriented AI for black people? Well a team of black Detroit women did just that. I think its an interesting idea but I am not the target audience.

This is the same guy who said users would never need machines with more than 640K of RAM. Decades later he denied every saying it. But I am old enough to remember when he said it. He never claimed to have been misquoted at the time!

For those lacking a BBC subscription:

https://archive.is/F5G9O#selection-569.0-569.60

I am quite interested in civic coding and ran a hackathon with the state for several years in Michigan.

I have not found anything similar and this type of software I seek out. It is hard to get the word out. You can find startup software for listing in directories, that and SEO involve time but not money.

But if someone finds you and their state isn't included they are likely to just move on. If they find use for it you can also build a strong word of mouth. Some states have API's for this data, but a few years ago the majority did not.

Some you actually need to file a FOIA request for it. Then you need to repeat the request yearly to get updated data. They don't make it easy for you.

I agree you cannot tie the success or failure to any single decision. I was just sharing a personal anecdote about the company.

I do know that Spirit Airlines was a lot scrappier and lean minded when they were based in Detroit. Course that is kind of a Midwest thing. Spirit grew a lot faster after moving to Florida but ultimately getting there involved taking financial risks that ultimately doomed them.

Fun fact: Spirit Airlines original software was written in ColdFusion and two members of their staff attended meetings of my ColdFusion users group. Then headquarters of the airline moved to Florida, they got a new CIO and they rewrote everything in a new language.

If this had all fifty states it would be extremely valuable. I know it would be a lot of effort to get the data but it would be really worthwhile. One of the problems is Michigan for example isn't updating their data in Socrata and hasn't for years. The city of Detroit however does an excellent job.

Met the creator at the big Claude meeting last evening in downtown Detroit. He is a software developer for a vending machine company.

I neither drink coffee nor have an iPhone but thought this might be of interest to the HN community. Apparently he is doing quite well with it and is a real coffee afficionado like my late father.

I spent some time in Poland three years ago and have not stopped talking about it ever since. It stood out from the other Eastern European countries that I visited on that trip.

Had a lunch in Warsaw with a German friend who had relocated there. He said it was more Conservative than Germany and there was more freedom of expression.

Over forty years of Communist rule and they were never able to pull them away from their commitment to the Catholic church. Also lots of excellent museums and large parks.

I was not aware consumer headsets had gotten powerful enough to read brain activity. Seems more countries should have laws against companies being able to trade this data without any restrictions on it.

That thought never occurred to me. But I have to believe that e-waste components presumably outdated technology wouldn't be powerful enough to control cruise missiles but I could be wrong.

I am perplexed that we are unable to track down and prosecute who is selling American technology to Putin. Seeing our allies on this list is also disturbing. Some arms merchants are getting rich.

As a lifelong Michigan resident am I to assume that Michigan does not have reciprocity?

Heard a radio show last evening where they interviewed the author of the bill. All they talked about was X.ai and Elon Musk. Definitely left the impression that is the only company they targeted. It was clear that both of them did not like Elon Musk so perhaps that is who they chose to highlight?

For those lacking a WSJ subscription: https://archive.is/eLN1j

Minnesota just passed a law specifically targeting x.ai tools that allow you to put someone's head on a nude picture. Don't other AI graphics tools let you accomplish the same thing? Don't the AI graphics tools merely automate what you could previously accomplish if you were a skilled Photoshop user? Of course there are legitimate uses for this technology like creating memes.

Wouldn't it make much more sense to mandate that machine id and IP address be encoded into the image itself? Don't they ultimately wish to punish the person who created the image?

Here in Michigan opponents of AI data centers are spreading lies and misinformation. I am baffled why the data centers think that operating in secret is the best option. Because they refuse to answer opponents people think they're hearing the truth. This secrecy is a bad plan that clearly is not working.

I know some professors who rely heavily on software that shows if a paper was written by AI. Imagine being a non-English native speaker getting their college essay flagged as AI when that is not the case? I will bet the professors do not know this software isn't infallible.

I do not agree with the author but I thought that it was worth a discussion. As someone who lived through the late nineties crash while running a startup this does not feel all that similar. Yes values are a bit frothy and there will certainly be a reset it does not need to be a crash.

In the late nineties venture money funded some companies that stood zero chance of ever being profitable yet they were able to go public. I don't see that happening this time. True some venture firms will take big hits but that is the nature of the business. The healthy companies will acquire some of the losers to get both their talent and control of their data center capacity.

They have a saying in aviation that their rules are shaped by blood. The entire safety system in aviation was created as a result of this crash. The pilot successfully landed the plane in the ocean. But staff could not persuade most of the shocked passengers to undo their seatbelts and leave the plane. Rescuers arrived quickly and everyone onboard should have survived but did not.

Read without BBC Subscription: https://archive.is/BbvDQ#selection-585.0-585.70

I didn't include the link but here is the last series part 1:

https://dvorak.substack.com/p/the-covid-decision-tree-part-o...

He wrote about COVID for six years. Someone should compile all those columns into a book or at least a single PDF.

In the early PC days back in the eighties the bible was PC Magazine. They had a number of really talented columnists but towering above all of them was John C. Dvorak. He wrote so well, he was at times opinionated and other times intensely funny. Whether you agreed with that weeks opinion or not you felt you were better for having read it and that is truly rare.

Then along came PC TV and he got introduced to an entirely new audience. He had a blog for awhile and then I lost track of him. Then he reentered my world when he started a SubStack, actually several. One I didn't read and that was where he pontificated on things political.

Then during COVID he touched a live wire on his political SubStack, detailed why he didn't get 'the shot' and why you should too. He also correctly called out the players and what was really going on with COVID. He discovered a third new audience and became an enemy of the administration at the same time. That people was one hell of a career. He will be missed.

Sadly this worthwhile project is paused because the Trump administration has cut its funding. For less than a million dollars we could place names on soldiers who fought the revolutionary war. Our nation has been pretty good about using DNA to identify soldiers from the second world war on but not before.

They built the power in hopes of attracting more industry. With Michigan's high taxes and aggressive unions the state isn't as desirable as other locations. Now they've succeeded in attracting data centers who want to use the power, bring both high paying jobs and tax money but they are turned away.

Travis makes a strong argument that the city that birthed Oldsmobile and REO Motors would probably reject those companies today if they wanted to build there.

I do not know what GHG means but isn't the overwhelming amount of France's electricity generated from nuclear power?

In Lansing's case as he mentioned the power is already being generated and sold to other utilities. If it powered local data centers instead it would generate high paying jobs and rather large tax revenues.

I'm from the Lansing Michigan area where there has been a big fight over four proposed data centers. Travis was a childhood friend of the founder and an executive at Liquid Web. He helped them build four data centers and even though he was head of marketing at the company he knows everything about the business.

I am saddened that the industry hasn't spoken out and let the opponents define the debate.

I have run the local ColdFusion users development group for over 25 years. I have heard variations of this same conversation more than I can count. Sometimes there are good reasons to move, company got bought and doesn't want five percent of their code to run on a different platform. But a lot of times the new CTO only knows asp.NET or Java or PHP so he commits the organization to a multi-year transition when they can't take on new work.

I have written programs in Node, Ruby on Rails, Nuxt. Ported programs to PERL and PHP. I just happen to like coding in CFML and I do not judge someone having another preference.

I have had people say ColdFusion isn't modern. But when I dig a little bit I inevitably find out their understanding of the language dates to 98-99. Python and PHP have changed a great deal since then why wouldn't CFML have done so? Did you know for example there are two open-source versions of CFML?

I grew up in Detroit where the city Chestnut trees were everywhere. I remember as a young boy when they all got this disease and quickly died. Our entire family was sad one summer when the big Chestnut tree in our front yard was cut down. Has anyone under sixty ever tasted roasted chestnuts?

Northern Michigan was full of Chestnut trees and supported a large lumber industry. Now they were replaced by a spindly scrub pine that has little value. For that reason there are few jobs with those counties being lightly populated. I think if they could plant these news trees that in fifty or so years the state's lumber industry could return. But I do not know if the state's politicians would be bold enough to make that long an investment.