Crick.

Availability? Do you want a bunch of rich weirdos with them or loads of 12yo boys, all over the world?

Perhaps I'm a bit weird, but things like this bother me in ways that nobody else seems to think about:

• The $180,000 is for the entire state. That's nothing. I don't know how many schools Kansas has, but let's say it's 100. That's $1800 per school. Come on.
• Why can't the school just ask some locals to build them some phone lockers? Just put out a school bulletin asking for some volunteers. I'm certain that in the entire state of Kansas they have plenty of companies and locals who would be willing to make the simplest of tiny, metal lockers.

They talk about these complicated technical solutions when all that's necessary is a very thin, very small traditional locker. Make the kids bring their own lock! That's what we did with lockers when I was in high school in the 90s.

Those old school steel lockers were certified for fire resistance, BTW. Not because they went through some special certification process, but because they were steel and painted with school-certified paint (which every school district already has plenty of).

I'm 100% against software patents but... If this means no one else can pull this bullshit for almost two decades 😎

Who better to resurrect a dead computer?

Classically, science fiction was all about the, "what if?" Whereas fantasy was all about the, "same old story archetypes, fancy characters and setting."

Over time, the two styles have overlapped and become interchangeable. For example, a lot of "sci-fi" is just "drama, in space!" Or "drama, with time travel!" Or... Well, you get the picture.

We also have fantasy that follows that "what if?" question. "What if... Magic was like programming?" "What if... Transformation changed who you are?" "What if... The system of the world granting everyone special powers was secretly just a mechanism to keep populations under control?" Stuff like that.

We probably need new categories for fiction. Story types have been inter-mingling for a long time now and the classical filing system doesn't work for a lot of things.

What if your fantasy has space ships? What if your space pirates use magic? Etc

Technically, three of these are really just "the ancients."

At least they're being honest about it. 99% of the companies training AI or selling people's data to AI companies are doing so without telling anyone.

Having said that, Twitch streams are public almost all of the time so complaining that they're being used in ways the creator never intended is a bit like complaining that someone caught you picking your nose in public.

We learned this lesson in the 90s: Once something goes public on the Internet, it is no longer under the creator's/publisher's control. People can and will do whatever TF they want with it. As long as they're not redistributing it without permission, that is legal.

It's everyone's right to do whatever TF they want with the stuff that's literally sent to their computer on purpose. That includes using that thing to train AI.

In my writing, if I'm going to refer to someone as "female" it's usually because I'm also going to refer to someone else as "male" in that same context.

This new trend is kind of annoying because I wrote a book about sapient magical sugar gliders and since they're not humans, I referred to them as "male" and "female". That made the writing feel way too parochial and, well, awful so I came up with special words for male and female children and adults for the species instead.

Young females were called "kaydees" and the males were "keedos". The species as a whole was named "kads".

I actually had a reader say it was "a bad smell" that I used the word "female" too often (they did a search for that but not "male", sigh).

It's beyond "an arms race." AI has become a commodity that's everywhere and it's being used and developed by zillions of completely different groups all over the world with wildly varying use cases and completely different goals.

At this point, trying to ban it would be like trying to ban dandelions from growing.

Mental picture required: The note will not take effect unless the writer of the note has the person's face in mind.

40-second rule: If the new form and/or personality are not written within 40 seconds, the person will Yuri at random (with whoever is compatible and closest).

6 minutes, 40 second rule: After writing the basic details of the Yuri, additional traits can be specified within the next six minutes, 40 seconds.

I almost forgot: The reason why "business leaders" want to see AI everywhere is because they think it'll be just like the adoption of every other technology to this point: It gets cheaper over time (not always better, but usually so).

The assumption is that if they "beat their competitors" to be the first ones using AI efficiently, they'll utterly destroy them (economically; they won't be able to compete). It's a very bad assumption.

So far, "Big AI" is getting better but at costs that scale geometrically with the amount of "better". That is: You can improve reliability (e.g. reduce hallucinations, increase accuracy, improve outputs in various ways, etc) but only by drastically inflating the cost and at reduced speed and efficiency.

We're starting to learn that LLMs need about two generations of hardware advances before they're going to be cost efficient for the types of "human productivity enhancement" that business leaders want. It's only affordable now because "Big AI" is subsidizing the costs, trying to get customers hooked. The assumption being that if they're hooked on AI, they'll be able to raise prices to reflect actual costs. Just like the business leaders, this is a very bad assumption.

Instead, what's going on is that the open weights AI models are starting to get "good enough" for most tasks (that you'd want to use them for, e.g. coding or agentic automation stuff). That means that all the billions and billions being spent by Big AI is just building up debt that will never be repaid and having this side effect of using up all the chip/memory capacity in the entire world.

It's an absurd situation and the world will eventually look back on this time like we do the dotcom era.