I think it‘s weirder, TBH. He‘s a breeder and a misogynist. He wants to do the world a favour by spreading his superior genes as widely as possible so that the next generation is blessed with his amazing intelligence. And of course that has to happen via boy-childs, because girl-childs are inferior and only fit for breeding.

And his public transphobia started in earnest when his daughter came out. Because how dare she take a boy-child away from him and replace them with an icky girl?

I don‘t know what‘s going on inside his head. But my belief is that that‘s what it‘s really about.

That, and there‘s a more directly personal element. When his daughter filed to legally change her name she said that he was a neglectful father and that she no longer wanted to be associated with him. It was at this point that his anti-trans rhetoric took off. Bear in mind that he consented to her gender-affirming care when she was too young to not need a parent‘s permission. He claims he was „tricked“ but she says that he understood fully what he was consenting to. Again, I can‘t know the truth, but I have a million reasons to consider Musk a liar and none to consider her one.

I think he genuinely hates trans people, but I think that he wouldn‘t have had he not had a trans daughter who bruised his fragile ego. And I think that his breeding kink, scientific racism, narcissism, and misogyny feed in to it nicely.

Again, I don‘t know what‘s going on inside his head, but I am strongly of the opinion that had his daughter never a) transitioned or b) brused his ego, he would not be anti-trans in the way that he is now. He‘d probably still be anti-trans because that‘s one of the key right-wing lines of attack, but I don‘t think it would be a particularly big issue for him.

I was brought in as a contractor for a week at a private school once here in the UK. The food was okay but on the nicer/posher end of „nothing special“. But what did strike me was that between two periods one of the girls felt peckish so just wandered in to the kitchen and made herself cheese on toast. Nobody treated that like it was anything unusual.

Thank you

They‘re probably okay with the price because the number of private users will dwarf the commercial users.

As for businesses shutting it down - any business which is using it has already bought the hype. They‘re not using it because it‘s actually effective. They‘re much more likely to crack down on workers than they are to ban AI all together.

I do agree that it won‘t work out in the end, not because this particular strategy is stupid, but because the products don‘t work and no strategy could work.

I have 0% of an idea whether this film will be good or not. I have 100% certainty that I will watch it.

And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.

So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.

The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.

And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.

You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.

You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.

Yeah, Irfanview is what I use too. Easy to set up, quick & light, and it‘s actually my go-to for converting a picture into a different format.

Yes, I agree. I‘ve long said that Greene (and Boebert) are what you get when someone who actually believes this shit gets into power.

I don‘t follow this stuff closely enough to know how this article fits into her history, but the Epstein stuff is completely consistent. And, while I don‘t agree with 99% of her principles, it actually shows her to be more principled than most of Trump‘s followers, who were fully against paedophilia when Pizzagate was a thing, but who now seem to think that it‘s no big deal and that every man would fuck a pre-teen if given the opportunity to do so.

Maybe Musk should ask them for some tips on how to do this effectively?

I mean, it‘d be a little weird if they were still born in the 60s, had kids in their teens/20s, and those kids were still kids in 2025. I don‘t really know what anybody complaining is expecting.

It‘s perhaps worth noting that the first people the Nazis came for was LGBTQ people. If you‘ve seen photos of Nazi book-burnings, there‘s a high percentage chance that what you‘ve seen is the first book-burning, because the vast majority of photos are from one event. The books being burnt at that event was research from an organisation called Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute of Sexual Science), which was founded by a gay activist and focused mainly on LGBTQ research and care - including gender-affirming surgery. The Nazis very deliberately tried to wipe out this research and acknowledgement that trans people existed.

If you don‘t care about the current attacks on trans people in and of itself, it should trouble you as a canary in a coal mine. The famous poem‘s first line should be „first they came for the trans people“, rather than „first they came for the Socialists“. Don‘t do the „and I did nothing because I wasn‘t trans“ thing.

It all matters, even if your concern is purely for yourself.

That, and he doesn‘t make them feel stupid.

There‘s a lot of power in telling people „yes, you can say that out loud now“. But there‘s also a lot of power in not playing the same game as anybody else. There‘s power in being the guy who doesn‘t watch what he says because he‘s a politician.

Here in the UK we have a similar politician in Nigel Farage - far right, and very much able to speak to people on the level of „I‘m not like all those stuffy politicians, I‘m an ordinary bloke just like you“.

It‘s not true for him, either, and I find him equally repulsive, but I can‘t deny that they‘re both effective at making people think „he‘s one of us!“ And it‘s not that other politicians don‘t try, at least here in the UK, which is why you‘ll find endless photo opportunities of them doing things like drinking a pint in a pub. But those always seem fake and hollow.

I see Farage and Trump described as „charismatic“. I don‘t think that‘s quite the right word, because that suggests a sort of charm, I think. But I can understand on an intellectual level why some people find them appealing.

People argue against that by saying that „Gamine“ isn‘t a word they can imagine Trump using.

But we do know that Trump will use and use and use words that he‘s heard, and we know that Epstein at least was eloquent. As for someone who might know the word „gamine“ just as a matter of course, I wonder if either of them might know someone who was born in France to French parents. Might even have a French first name…?

I could very much imagine Maxwell & Epstein coming up with „Enigmas“ as an oh-so-clever code, and Trump picking it up so he can feel like a clever and special boy, too.

The issue there is that even at that pricepoint, Microsoft is still operating CoPilot at a loss. If they drop it more, they’ll be making even more of a loss. Which is the standard business model for new products these days, but the losses on AI products dwarf things like Netflix and Uber during their “operate at a loss to drive everybody else out of business” phase.

Of course, that would all be fine if CoPilot was some killer product that people quickly found themselves unable to work without. Instead, the feedback shows that workers find that it’s not useful or reliable enough to be worth using, and Microsoft’s own latest advert for CoPilot in Excel contains data which shows that at best operation it doesn’t work 46% of the time, and that figure can be as high as 80%.

I’m not sure these problems are really surmountable - you’ve got an incredibly expensive-to-run product which doesn’t do much that’s useful and is bad at the things that it actually could be useful for. It’s not just Microsoft, it’s the entire tech industry that’s facing this problem.