From what I have read, he’s still likely to be able to line up enough votes to get his $1 trillion pay package (and the associated voting rights), despite a lot of major institutional investors being in opposition. But we’ll see when the vote goes though.

I think that Tesla can probably get a more-effective CEO for less money, personally. Even if he leaves as CEO, he still owns 15% of Tesla and is fabulously wealthy as a result. I don’t feel like he’s getting a bad deal.

I do think that there are some arguments that the SEC should pass some regulation to help ensure board-CEO independence; part of the issue is that the board, which is supposed to oversee Musk, has been considered to be acting on his behalf by quite a few people. I don’t think that it will happen under the present administration, though.

Oh, okay, I didn’t realize that you were trying to just ask people here about their search engine, rather than link to an article about Orion.

Well, I use Kagi’s search engine. They basically do what I wish Google and YouTube and suchlike would do — just make their money by charging a fee and providing a service, rather than trying to harvest data and show ads. I use search more than any other service online, and there isn’t really a realistic way for me to run my own Web-spanning search engine and getting reasonable, private results. I don’t really make use of most of their add-on features other than their “Fediverse Forums” thing that can search all Threadiverse hosts, which is helpful, and occasionally their Usenet search functionality. My principal interest in them is from a privacy standpoint, and I’m happy with them on that front; they don’t log or data-mine.

EDIT: They do have some sort of way to issue searches without telling Kagi which user at Kagi you are, if you’re worried about them secretly retaining your search results anyway, which I think is technically interesting, but I really don’t care that much. If a wide range of websites adopted the system, that’d be interesting, maybe.

EDIT2: Privacy Pass. Might be the protocol of the same name that CloudFlare uses. I’ve never really dug into it.

EDIT3: Some of their functionality (user-customizable search bangs, for example) can also be done browser-side, if your browser supports it and you rig it up that way. Like, I had Firefox set up to make "!gm <query>" do a Google Maps search before Kagi did, and chuckled when I realized that they defaulted to the same convention that I had.

EDIT4: Oh, their images search does let you view a proxied view of the image (so that the site with the result doesn’t know that you’re viewing the image) and lets one save the image. IIRC, Google Images used to do something like that, though I don’t believe they do now, so places like pinterest that try to make saving an image a pain are obnoxious. Firefox on the desktop still lets one save any image visible on a webpage (click the lock icon in the URL bar, click “Connection Secure”, click “More Information”, click “Media”, and then scroll through the list until you find the image in question), but I’d just as soon not jump through the hoops, and Kagi just eliminates the whole headache.

EDIT5: They try to identify and flag paywalled sites in their results, unlike Google. For example, if you kagi for “the economist American policy is splitting, state by state, into two blocs”, you’ll get a result with a little dollar sign icon. This can be helpful, though archive.today will let one effectively bypass many paywalls, which somewhat reduces the obnoxiousness of getting paywalled results just mixed in with non-paywalled results on Google.

I think that you submitted the wrong URL. The submitted URL just points to Kagi’s home page (https://kagi.com/), not to an article talking about the Orion browser.

I use emacs’s magit for git stuff (the bulk of things) and emacs’s ediff for most other things.

Good if you know emacs, but hard to recommend using it for someone who doesn’t.

EDIT: Oh, one exotic utility that’s useful for some rare cases, not really for interactive merging of code — wdiff for word-level diffing. Most code can reasonably be diffed on a line-by-line basis, but that’s not true for some text formats, which can have very long lines. Human, natural language in text format, is one good example.

Though to be fair, Amazon’s scale is very large, so it’s worth it to spend a lot on automation. They’ve done a lot with robots before. 14k isn’t as many as it might sound, at their scale.

kagis

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/technology/inside-amazons-plans-to-replace-workers-with-robots.html

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

Why is so much coverage of “AI” devoted to this belief that we’ve never had automation before (and that management even really wants it)?

I’m going to set aside the question of whether any given company or a given timeframe or a given AI-related technology in particular is effective. I don’t really think that that’s what you’re aiming to address.

If it just comes down to “Why is AI special as a form of automation? Automation isn’t new!”, I think I’d give two reasons:

It’s a generalized form of automation

Automating a lot of farm labor via mechanization of agriculture was a big deal, but it mostly contributed to, well, farming. It didn’t directly result in automating a lot of manufacturing or something like that.

That isn’t to say that we’ve never had technologies that offered efficiency improvements across a wide range of industries. Electric lighting, I think, might be a pretty good example of one. But technologies that do that are not that common.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity-improving_technologies

This has some examples. Most of those aren’t all that generalized. They do list electric lighting in there. The integrated circuit is in there. Improved transportation. But other things, like mining machines, are not generally applicable to many industries.

So it’s “broad”. Can touch a lot of industries.

It has a lot of potential

If one can go produce increasingly-sophisticated AIs — and let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that we don’t run into any fundamental limitations — there’s a pathway to, over time, automating darn near everything that humans do today using that technology. Electrical lighting could clearly help productivity, but it clearly could only take things so far.

So it’s “deep”. Can automate a lot within a given industry.

You don’t want one with exit nodes in Italy. You want one with exit nodes not in Italy. The exit node determines where the user appears to be coming from to the site in question.

I do not game on phones, but my best experiences have, ironically, been with ‘gaming’ phones like the Razer Phone 2 and Asus phones. They have gigantic batteries, lots of RAM, and lean, stock UIs that let you disable/uninstall apps, hence they’re fast as heck and last forever. I only gave up my Razer Phone 2 because the mic got clogged up with dust, and I miss it.

While I kind of agree (though I don’t really like the “gamer” aesthetics), Asus only offers two major updates and two years of patches, which is quite short.

https://www.androidauthority.com/phone-update-policies-1658633/

If someone games with their phone and plans to frequently upgrade for new hardware, they may not care. But if you get the hardware just to have a large battery and RAM, that may be a concern.

EDIT: Also, no mmWave support, which may or may not matter to someone.

I’m not sure why c/technology is suddenly a dumping ground for every random Medium blog, which is as trustworthy a news source as somebody’s Facebook feed.

It’s not exactly random. That blog is run by the poster, who is rather on my “users here to push an agenda” list.

What would you suggest for checking the network?

Well, on the Linux side, something like bwm-ng will tell you the total throughput through an interface, and if you can transfer a file across the two, you can probably get a feel for how much bandwidth is practically available to do.

If you’ve been able to move that much over the network before, though, that’s a fair argument that that’s not the cause.

Sixteen percent of GDP…The United States has tethered 16% of its entire economic output to the fortunes of a single company

That’s not really how that works. Those two numbers aren’t comparable to each other. Nvidia’s market capitalization, what investors are willing to pay for ownership of the company, is equal to sixteen percent of US GDP, the total annual economic activity in the US.

They’re both dollar values, but it’s like comparing the value of my car to my annual income.

You could say that the value of a company is somewhat-linked to the expected value of its future annual profit, which is loosely linked to its future annual revenue, which is at least more connected to GDP, but that’s not going to be anything like a 1:1 ratio, either.

I haven’t done it, but the first thing that I’d be inclined to suspect is the wireless network, not Wayland; you don’t know what else is also transmitting on those frequencies.

I’d check to see whether your machine is maxing out the CPU (top) or GPU (nvidia-smi) and whether changing the streaming resolution affects the framerate.

saying he’s “never felt so free and fulfilled.”

From another article, his role at the IRS is in writing tax law regulations for pension funds. I mean…it’s gotta be done, but I kinda suspect that sometimes, it’s not very exciting.

Honestly, I’m kinda impressed that he took his furlough and decided to knock something off his bucket list. I mean, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade and all that.

EDIT: Oh, they apparently also mentioned it in this article as well.

I mean, it’s a bunch of technical gobledygook from different fields in an Iranian journal dealing with holography claiming extraordinary results.

Reminds me of the Bogdanov affair.

I would guess that you’ll normally find that (a) there will be higher latency (especially worst-case latency) on Bluetooth interfaces than USB interfaces:

According to this:

https://gamepadla.com/xbox-core-controller.html

You have average/max USB latency of 8.3 ms/12.23 ms.

You have average/max dongle latency of 8.88 ms/14.64 ms.

You have average/max Bluetooth latency of 12.98 ms/20.89 ms.

For the wireless protocols, I expect that the amount of interference where you are will also be a factor.

It looks at least at one point, there was an issue with those controllers not specifying the polling rate that they actually wanted. I don’t know if you have one of this particular generation, but you might try the specified workaround:

https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo/commit/15801c6c0421957190193fec3f371a353111c12e

It looks like the above patch is still present in current xpadneo, so I assume that the issue remains:

https://atar-axis.github.io/xpadneo/#troubleshooting

High Latency or Lost Button Events with Bluetooth LE

Affected models: Xbox controllers using Bluetooth LE (Xbox Series X|S or later)

While using new Xbox Series X|S controller, you may experience laggy or choppy input, also button presses may be lost or delayed. This problem only affects Bluetooth LE controllers, the older models are not affected by these settings even if you think you may see such a problem.

A proper solution is still missing but we isolated it to the Bluetooth LE connection parameters for latency and intervals. The bluez developers say that the connected device should suggest the best settings, the bluez daemon only ships sensible default settings. It looks like the new Xbox controllers do not properly suggest their preferred connection parameters, some BLE mice show the same problem. You can work around it by changing the bluez defaults instead. This change is not recommended by the bluez developers but as long as you only use a very specific set of BLE devices, this change should be fine.

The controller uses 100 Hz internally for its protocol, so we decided to use intervals of 8.75…11.25ms. Each tick is 1.25ms, so we end up with MinConnectionInterval=7 and MaxConnectionInterval=9. If you already use a similar work-around for other devices, you may need to adjust your settings to the proper bounds, i.e. do not increase the min value, do not lower the max value.

Edit the following file and restart the Bluetooth service or reboot:

# /etc/bluetooth/main.conf
[LE]
MinConnectionInterval=7
MaxConnectionInterval=9
ConnectionLatency=0

But the software needs to catch up.

Honestly, there is a lot of potential room for substantial improvements.

• Gaining the ability to identify edges of the model that are not-particularly-relevant relevant to the current problem and unloading them. That could bring down memory requirements a lot.

• I don’t think — though I haven’t been following the area — that current models are optimized for being clustered. Hell, the software running them isn’t either. There’s some guy, Jeff Geerling, who was working on clustering Framework Desktops a couple months back, because they’re a relatively-inexpensive way to get a ton of VRAM attached to parallel processing capability. You can have multiple instances of the software active on the hardware, and you can offload different layers to different APUs, but currently, it’s basically running sequentially — no more than one APU is doing compute presently. I’m pretty sure that that’s something that can be eliminated (if it hasn’t already been). Then the problem — which he also discusses — is that you need to move a fair bit of data from APU to APU, so you want high-speed interconnects. Okay, so that’s true, if what you want is to just run very models designed for very expensive, beefy hardware on a lot of clustered, inexpensive hardware…but you could also train models to optimize for this, like use a network of neural nets that have extremely-sparse interconnections between them, and denser connections internal to them. Each APU only runs one neural net.

• I am sure that we are nowhere near being optimal just for the tasks that we’re currently doing, even using the existing models.

• It’s probably possible to tie non-neural-net code in to produce very large increases in capability. To make up a simple example, LLMs are, as people have pointed out, not very good at giving answers to arithmetic questions. But…it should be perfectly viable to add a “math unit” that some of the nodes on the neural net interfaces with and train it to make use of that math unit. And suddenly, because you’ve just effectively built a CPU into the thing’s brain, it becomes far better than any human at arithmetic…and potentially at things that makes use of that capability. There are lots of things that we have very good software for today. A human can use software for some of those things, through their fingers and eyes — not a very high rate of data interchange, but we can do it. There are people like Musk’s Neuralink crowd that are trying to build computer-brain interfaces. But we can just build that software directly into the brain of a neural net, have the thing interface with it at the full bandwidth that the brain can operate at. If you build software to do image or audio processing in to help extract information that is likely “more useful” but expensive for a neural net to compute, they might get a whole lot more efficient.

There’s loads of hi-res ultra HD 4k porn available.

It’s still gonna have compression artifacts. Like, the point of lossy compression having psychoacoustic and psychovisual models is to degrade the stuff as far as you can without it being noticeable. That doesn’t impact you if you’re viewing the content without transformation, but it does become a factor if you don’t. Like, you’re viewing something in a reduced colorspace with blocks and color shifts and stuff.

I can go dig up a couple of diffusion models finetuned off SDXL that generate images with visible JPEG artifacts, because they were trained on a corpus that included a lot of said material and didn’t have some kind of preprocessing to deal with it.

I’m not saying that it’s technically-impossible to build something that can learn to process and compensate for all that. I (unsuccessfully) spent some time, about 20 years back, on a personal project to add neural net postprocessing to reduce visibility of lossy compression artifacts, which is one part of how one might mitigate that. Just that it adds complexity to the problem to be solved.

I doubt that OpenAI themselves will do so, but I am absolutely confident that someone not only will be banging on this, but I suspect that they probably have already. In fact, IIRC from an earlier discussion, someone already was selling sex dolls with said integration, and I doubt that they were including local parallel compute hardware for it.

kagis

I don’t think that this is the one I remember, but doesn’t really matter; I’m sure that there’s a whole industry working on it.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3298783/chinese-sex-doll-maker-sees-jump-2025-sales-ai-boosts-adult-toys-user-experience

Chinese sex doll maker sees jump in 2025 sales as AI boosts adult toys’ user experience

The LLM-powered dolls are expected to cost from US$100 to US$200 more than existing versions, which are currently sold between US$1,500 and US$2,000.

WMDoll – based in Zhongshan, a city in southern Guangdong province – embeds the company’s latest MetaBox series with an AI module, which is connected to cloud computing services hosted on data centres across various markets where the LLMs process the information from each toy.

According to the company, it has adopted several open-source LLMs, including Meta Platforms’ Llama AI models, which can be fine-tuned and deployed anywhere.

While I don’t disagree with your overall point, I would point out that a lot of that material has been lossily-compressed to a degree that significantly-degrades quality. That doesn’t make it unusable for training, but it does introduce a real complication, since your first task has to be being able to deal with compression artifacts in the content. Not to mention any post-processing, editing, and so forth.

One thing I’ve mentioned here — it was half tongue-in-cheek — is that it might be less-costly than trying to work only from that training corpus, to hire actors specifically to generate video to train an AI for any weak points you need. That lets you get raw, uncompressed data using high-fidelity instruments in an environment with controlled lighting, and you can do stuff like use LIDAR or multiple cameras to make reducing the scene to a 3D model simpler and more-reliable. The existing image and video generation models that people are running around with have a “2D mental model” of the world. Trying to bridge the gap towards having a 3D model is going to be another jump that will have to come to solve a lot of problems. The less hassle there is with having to deal with compression artifacts and such in getting to 3D models, probably the better.

So, I’m just talking about whether-or-not the end game is going to be local or remote compute. I’m not saying that one can’t generate pornography locally, but asking whether people will do that, whether the norm will be to run generative AI software locally (the “personal computer” model that came to the fore in the mid-late 1970s and on or so) or remotely (the “mainframe” model, which mostly preceded it).

Yes, one can generate pornography locally…but what if the choice is between a low-resolution, static SDXL (well, or derived model) image or a service that leverages compute to get better images or something like real-time voice synth, recognition, dialogue, and video? I mean, people can get static pornography now in essentially unbounded quantities on the Internet; It is in immense quantity; if someone spent their entire lives going through it, they’d never, ever see even a tiny fraction of it. Much of it is of considerably greater fidelity than any material that would have been available in, say, the 1980s; certainly true for video. Yet…even in this environment of great abundance, there are people subscribing to commercial (traditional) pornography services, and getting hardware and services to leverage generative AI, even though there are barriers in time, money, and technical expertise to do so.

And I’d go even further, outside of erotica, and say that people do this for all manner of things. I was really impressed with Wolfenstein 3D when it came out. Yet…people today purchase far more powerful hardware to run 3D video games. You can go and get a computer that’s being thrown out that can probably run dozens of simultaneous instances of Wolfenstein 3D concurrently…but virtually nobody does so, because there’s demand for the new entertainment material that the new software and hardware permits for.