There’s also istheservicedown.com, but it also appears to rely on CloudFlare.

There’s isitdownrightnow.com, which appears not to use CloudFlare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija

The Ouija (/ˈwiːdʒə/ ⓘ WEE-jə, /-dʒi/ -⁠jee), also known as a Ouija board, spirit board, talking board, or witch board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, and occasionally “hello” and “goodbye”, along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance.

Spiritualists in the United States believed that the dead were able to contact the living, and reportedly used a talking board very similar to the modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio during 1886 with the intent of enabling faster communication with spirits.[2] Following its commercial patent by businessman Elijah Bond being passed on 10 February 1891,[3] the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlor game unrelated to the occult until American spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a divining tool during World War I.[4]

We’ve done it before with similar results.

What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”

Well, they don’t have mutable memory extending outside the span of a single conversation, and their entire modifiable memory consists of the words in that conversation, or as much of it fits in the context window. Maybe 500k tokens, for high end models. Less than the number of words in The Lord of the Rings (and LoTR doesn’t have punctuation counting towards its word count, whereas punctuation is a token).

You can see all that internal state. And your own prompt inputs consume some of that token count.

Fixed, unchangeable knowledge, sure, plenty of that.

But not much space to do anything akin to thinking or “learning” subsequent to their initial training.

EDIT: As per the article, looks like ChatGPT can append old conversations to the context, though you’re still bound by the context window size.

ed is, in fact, in the POSIX standard.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

Shell & Utilities -> Utilities -> ed

In fact, it looks like ex and sed, both child editors of ed, are baked into the standard. No pico-family editors.

Ed is kinda-sorta great-granddaddy vim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)

ed (pronounced as distinct letters, /ˌiːˈdiː/)[1] is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was one of the first parts of the Unix operating system that was developed, in August 1969.

Dennis M. Ritchie produced what Doug McIlroy later described as the “definitive” ed,[5] and aspects of ed went on to influence ex, which in turn spawned vi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_(text_editor)

Vim (“Vi IMproved”) has many additional features compared to vi, including (scriptable) syntax highlighting, mouse support, graphical versions, visual mode, many new editing commands and a large amount of extension in the area of ex commands.

I’ve never used qed, but it sounds like that might be considered even one step back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)

Many features of ed came from the qed text editor developed at Thompson’s alma mater University of California, Berkeley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED_(text_editor)

Initial release: 1967

I guess TECO — which I also have not used — would kinda-sorta be the emacs analog:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)

TECO (/ˈtiːkoʊ/[1]), short for Text Editor & Corrector, [2] [3][4] is both a character-oriented text editor and a programming language,[5][6] that was developed in 1962 for use on Digital Equipment Corporation computers, and has since become available on PCs and Unix. Dan Murphy developed TECO while a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

It was subsequently modified by many other people[7] and is a direct ancestor of Emacs, which was originally implemented in TECO macros.

EDIT: Actually…hmm. Now that I think of it, I might have briefly used TECO on a DEC VAX/VMS cluster. IIRC, I mostly used EVE, though.

EDIT2: Hmm. Apparently someone has ported TECO to Linux:

https://www.almy.us/teco.html

TECO, that grand old text editor your father used when he was young, is still available! It is powerful and compact precursor to EMACS and has a completely nongraphical user interface. This is based on Pete Siemsen’s TECOC implementation, and comes with a copy of the original DECUS TECO documentation.

Do I need a paper tape punch and reader to use TECO?

No. Modern TECOs will also edit text files.

Is TECO fast?

Yes, it’s probably the fastest editor available

While I’m maintaining the files as I had worked on them and downloads here, Blake McBride has taken the source code, added the video/scope mode, fixed bugs and improved the speed (not that it is slow!), documented the changes and has it available in GitHub. Go here for his work https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC

tries building it

Hah. It takes under a third of a second to compile on my system:

$ git clone https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC.git
$ cd TECOC/src
$ time make -j32 -f makefile.linux >/dev/null 2>&1

real    0m0.296s
user    0m2.341s
sys     0m0.874s
$

Hmm. Yeah, I don’t remember how to use this at all, if I did use it. Looks like the command syntax is a little like ed’s, but you whack Escape twice to execute commands. Each press of Escape displays a dollar sign.

Intro guide © 1972: https://ia902906.us.archive.org/25/items/bitsavers_decpdp10TOandbook04tecoIntro_1457616/04_tecoIntro_text.pdf

$ ./tecoc
*Ihello, world!$$
*EWtest.txt$$
*EX$$
$ cat test.txt; echo
hello, world!
$

Clearly does work, though.

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.

The world was full of flat surfaces that did not yet have an Android-platform device driving a screen displaying advertisements on them.

There’s a case that at some point — maybe not today — computer controlled cars should have more-relaxed restrictions on things like speed and following distance, just because they won’t be limited by things like human reaction time and senses.

Oooh, neat. I didn’t know about that. Thanks. That better not have been around since the 1990s or something, with me always searching the bash(1) man page to find builtin information.

$ help help|head -n2
help: help [-dms] [pattern ...]
    Display information about builtin commands.
$ git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/bash.git
$ cd bash
$ git log -S "Display information about builtin commands."|grep ^commit|tail -n1
commit 3185942a5234e26ab13fa02f9c51d340cec514f8
$ git show 3185942a5234e26ab13fa02f9c51d340cec514f8|grep ^Date
Date:   Mon Jan 12 13:36:28 2009 +0000
$

Well, it’s not the 1990s, but still. Dammit.

If you’re not familiar, there’s a chsh command.

That sign won’t stop me, because I can’t read!

$ man ls | spd-say -e

EDIT: If you run the above, it looks like speech-dispatcher splits the thing up into a bunch of different consecutive blocking requests, which means that it’s a pain in the neck to stop with a single command. You might want to leave $ while true; do spd-say -S; done running for a bit to make it actually stop talking.

That Slate Truck thing had the right idea. Make the computer a replaceable thing, not something tied to the lifetime of the car. The lifespan of a smartphone is typically a lot less than the lifespan of a car.

This is a 500W charger with one port that can do 240W.

https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Charging-Station-Temperature-Space-Saving/dp/B0DL5L1ZLH

It’s quite large and heavy. 2.2kg (4.9 lbs).

There are going to be some practical limitations on what people are going to be willing to carry for portable stuff.

although I concede that better metrics would be hard to find.

Maybe get ALPRs to start logging bumper stickers. :-)

Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck.

If Musk had been able to attract the typical F-150 owner to the Cybertruck, then the Cybertruck wouldn’t have flopped, and I bet that the F-150 is a whole lot more correlated with voting Trump than the Cybertruck is.

IIRC from past reading, in terms of voting correlation by party, the Toyota Prius is the “most Democratic” vehicle and the Ford F-150 is the “most Republican” vehicle.

kagis

Nope (or at least, not by the metrics chosen here), but I’m close.

https://www.businessinsider.com/car-models-owned-by-republicans-democrats-american-politics-jeep-2024-10

To get a sense of how our rides reflect our political leanings, we compared 1.7 million vehicles listed on CarGurus with the results from the 2020 presidential election. We included only counties that were strongly red or blue — those where either Donald Trump or Joe Biden won by at least 19 percentage points. Then we placed every car on a political spectrum from reddest to bluest.

According to this, which excludes more-politically-mixed counties from the dataset, the vehicle most-correlated with voting Trump in 2020 at a county level is the Jeep Wrangler, followed by the Jeep Gladiator, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (which I assume is the Chevy analog of the F-150), followed by the Ford F-150.

The vehicle most-correlated with voting Biden (at a county level) was indeed the Toyota Prius.

EDIT: To be fair, the article author is probably partly talking about Musk’s association with Trump and the Cybertruck coming out about that time, and he’s talking about the 2024 election specifically, but I think that the Cybertruck is maybe high-media-visibility, but doesn’t have all that much to actually do with voting Trump.

Inclusion of Erowid in the training corpus had initially seemed like a good idea.

The prediction comes from OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who claims AI will “reach or exceed human capacity” by 2027.

I suppose that it depends on the metric you’re using. There are some tasks at which humans are outperformed now.

But I am pretty comfortable saying that come January 2027, the great bulk of things that humans do will continue to not be able to be done by existing AI.

We aren’t going to just tweak an existing LLM somewhere slightly, throw a bit more hardware at it, and get general intelligence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szU0DbdAMEA

“Windows”, Chick Corea

It does sort of suggest that from a UI standpoint, a chunk of users doesn’t really deal well with the traditional paradigm of “opening a document in an application consumes resources, and part of the job of the user is to manage those resources”. Like, maybe Chrome should just do the equivalent of, at least by default, converting a tab that hasn’t been viewed for some time into something akin to a bookmark, just reload it when it’s viewed. Or at least push the data into on-disk storage.

I don’t use Chrome, but Firefox does something vaguely-analogous to that for session storage — like, if Firefox dies unexpectedly, restored tabs won’t reload content until actually viewed, I assume to avoid the thundering herd problem.

I remember when I first encountered mobile OSes auto-killing programs and stuff to try to manage memory for users. I thought that it was pretty insane. But…clearly some users have trouble with it, and maybe it’s a reasonable UI change for them. I know people who had difficulty, on various desktop OSes, understanding the significance of starting a program and the idea that a running program would consume memory and perhaps CPU time.