Guru's Tech Bytes — Episode 104

Good morning, it's Saturday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 104. First up, Amazon Web Services sent out a billing estimate that said someone owed one-point-seven billion dollars. Billion. With a B. You know what this reminds me of? That time Lois handed me the water bill and I thought we'd been secretly running a car wash out of the basement — turns out it was a decimal thing. Anyway, AWS says it's just an inaccurate estimate, which is a real relaxing thing to hear from the people holding the entire internet. Second, and this one actually bugged me, nurses over at Kaiser are saying all this AI and camera surveillance stuff is making their jobs worse and the patients worse off too. And look, I'm no genius, but when the people literally keeping you alive say the robot's getting in the way, maybe listen to 'em? A machine can count your heartbeats but it ain't gonna hold your hand when you're scared, is what I'm saying. Third — and I gotta be careful here 'cause my brain wanders — scientists found an actual atmosphere on one of them Earth-like planets, way out there in the, uh, the Goldilocks zone. The habitable one. That means there could be air, maybe weather, maybe some guy on another planet also fighting with his lawnmower on a Saturday. Kind of makes you feel small. Heh. Hhh, okay, that's something. And finally, there's this big report on the state of open source AI, which is the free stuff regular people can poke at instead of paying the big companies. Speaking of the big companies — you know, my laptop restarted itself in the middle of the game last night for one of them Microsoft updates, didn't ask, just BAM, black screen, "we're getting things ready." Getting WHAT ready? So yeah, I'm rooting for the open source guys, 'cause at least when the free stuff breaks it's got the decency to break quietly. That's your daily byte. Have a great day. Until next time.