They absolutely do suck, but I can see some practical uses for them. IE I can see LLM’s as useful in localized specialized uses. for me I’d really like basically LLM as a like calendar, scheduling kind of thing, also say translating home assistant commands through a voice assistant to make it figure out actual intent etc…, nothing super mission critical, but also mostly things I wouldn’t want any 3rd party service that could change the rules for me, share them to others etc…

I find this unlikely… IMO I think they are hedging in both directions.

Personally I like the idea of local AI. open source models that you an control, decide, and use smartly, sort your things etc… and not pay an absurd cost or link up.

Personally I think MS is actually betting on the opposite. IE they had a prototype windows that was basically just an AI prompt, no start menu etc… and applications just “streamed”.

IMO I think that’s more of the goal, use the data center buildout to drive up hardware prices, until people cannot afford a basic PC. Sell thin clients… then sell us “access” to compute in a form where we own nothing, but pay by the processes used etc…

On the whole, while at the start of Covid 19 alchohol sales went up, it overall decreased (most likely due to the lack of social drinking, and bars), Plus marketing etc… “Hey we did our part to help out in this time of need, become a loyal customer”. Would take a lot more analysis to see if it actually made less money, or if they were making less money so it made sense to use their unneeded capacity to sell a normally less profitable item and possibly earn some long term good PR.

Which isn’t quite how capitalism usually works so 🤷‍♂️

It still is how capitalism works, lots of people want to buy a product, then companies will sell it. It’s not good will it’s just business sense.

Guessing something similar to the toilet paper aisles during covid.

Which I gotta say also is one that was funny when basically this was done in the US just before the 2020 election… where they showed the shelves of how the stores currently were, followed by a “this is Biden’s america”.

rooted in a well-documented pattern of unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance

I have faith in America, there’s no way we’re losing to china in patterns of unfair trade, subsidies, IP theft and surveillance.

It’s the scale rule… steal a $25 disk, jail… steal 2 billion dollars worth of media… bailout.

Agreed that’s trying to preserve the workaround, without fixing the problem.

Problem is it doesn’t matter, the reality is, demand for jobs, and people who need to survive… isn’t a number guaranteed to match, and between automation, and wages falling so far behind inflation that many households need 2+ incomes just to keep the lights on, an unemployment problem is inevitable.

If AI actually can cut enough jobs, that the number of jobs available, is less than the number of people who WANT to work, then all we need to do is make it so people don’t HAVE to work.

I don’t think so… I honestly think the direction anyone supporting the AI bubble wants, is going to be streaming games. You won’t run them on the PC… they will run out of a data center and your inputs will go back ot the data center, You’ll own nothing, you’ll adapt to paying a subscription price for single player games, hell instead of monthly you could pay by the hour or minute.

Yeah I think that’s the question. in short it’s fishing for a way to make it profitable, whole concept is when we pour enough money, servers, research etc… into it, eventually it will start making money faster than we put into it, and so far, that’s not been proven. Que old image of guys digging for diamonds, one walking away just before hitting the diamond jackpot, the other blindly charging towards it.

and of course just like reality, there’s no actual way to know if there’s even any diamonds… just that we haven’t found them yet.

The big concept is that you should own your “copy” of a game. IE I own my car, I can drill a hole in it, I can paint it a different color. I may or may not have to follow certain rules of what modifications I do on it to drive it on streets which is pretty reasonable, but if I want to use it in my backyard I can.

Now yes that doesn’t mean if say 3D printers were able to perfectly fabricate something like a car, that I could say make a fully functioning form of the car with whatever patented designs etc… the car manufacturer has on it and sell or give them away in bulk.

I do suppose that’s the one area where digital and physical create some divide. IE digital by definition has to be duplicated to be modified. hell technically it’s duplicated just to be used (as even a physical disk is copied to system memory over the course of playing it).

IMO I feel like a pretty fair rules set could be drafted for digital property.

IE a pretty simple digital items bill of rights:

You have a right to use a digital item on any device you own capable of playing it.

You have a right to modify it in any way shape or form you are capable of doing.

Games that either require, or have a significant portion of their gameplay that depends on a remote server, should have a declared date of which the servers are promised to be online till at the time of purchase, if the servers shut down prior to that declared date you should be entitled to a refund. (IE as that date approaches developers can either move that date further forward, or their buyers can be aware that the EOL of the game is not far),

Modifying your games either to run on any other hardware etc… should be allowed, copying to multiple devices that you own should be allowed, however developers have a right to refuse to allow modified games to connect to their servers.

I think the key point is, it’s not hard to write a digital property ownership ruleset, that covers almost any thinkable case, and allows a reasonable form of “ownership” of a digital item.

well yes but generally speaking with regards to porn, the most common time porn is “illegal” is at least currently almost always for reasons that almost everyone would agree on morally. Admitted, the current direction of the US is working on regulating/restricting porn between consenting adults, and just had that abysmal ruling that AI created CSAM is probably OK. Right on the heels of discovery that Grok has somehow trained on CSAM.

So in other words, AI is just cheap exploited labor from impoverished people, with extra pollution steps.

draw a mural that includes all the things that make santa clarita famous. Of which a google search would have most likely said it’s near the beach, has a six flags, and is a prime movie shooting location.

And yeah you know how good something is when you push it on people.

Honestly I’m kind of baffled that big tech seems to have such a long history of the opposite working in usage.

IE facebook - started off exclusive to specific colleges, gradually rolled out to all colleges, then to the general population. IMO the long timeframe of “it’s out there but you can’t have it”, was marketing brilliance that made people demand it.

gmail - google announced it on april 1st, to make people think it wasn’t even real, Did a slow gradual rollout in which a relatively small pool could get accounts, then had their existing members be able to invite others. People sold their invites on ebay and similar, the demand was through the roof for them.

Google plus. Now you’d think google having both of those examples would have done the math… Nope "Hey you already have a gmail account, we decided you should use google plus too!, Your account is there. Hey we’ve tweaked your youtube account to use your real name so that you can already be ready to combine it with your google plus account! Hey USE GOOGLE PLUS NOW IT’S GREAT!!!

IMO google plus was as ahead of facebook at the time as facebook was ahead of myspace. Hell I’d still say it’s prime features make it actually usable in ways facebook never became capable of (circles as a core feature was IMO was the thing to make it perfectly usable. IE every post set so you can have friends that say care about video games, or dogs, or have compatible politics etc…, and effortlessly post to that group without annoying or starting a fight with others). But it’s nature of telling people what to do… was a huge drawback. MS’s products are seemingly doing that even more, admitted part of it is just the automatic built in drawback of being “microsoft”, I don’t think anyone hears the name microsoft and thinks “this is going to be a product that I WANT to run”.

But I think the bottom line is, when you are telling the users they want to use it… you’ve pretty much already lost.

I’d say the target audience of newspaper comic Arlo and Janis readers, they were intended to be a boomer comic when the comic strip launched in 1985. obviously like almost all comic strips, the characters haven’t aged so, when the comic strip was written they were boomers in 1985.

It is worth noting that the comic specifically is noted as being kind of a reversal of normal boomer humor, as the normal tropes of comedy in that era was more on being annoyed with your spouse etc… and it more often actually made the relationship mostly healthy.

I’d hope, but basically they are only protecting downloading, for the most part 99% of piracy prosecution has already shifted focus to uploading, and really the focus is far more on the companies hosting etc… because they learned in the napster era that suing grandmothers and children doesn’t really win the PR wars.

Now the real question of the survivorship bias, you are seeing less AI, but there’s 2 possible reasons for that.

1. The AI has gotten better and harder to identify.

2. Your brain has degraded due to excessive presence of AI and reduced air and food quality and thus is worse at identifying AI.

Well yeah I’m more than aware that many of the programs that were shut down mid studies, could have an insane amount of work that can’t just be paused and picked back up in the middle, only talking about the data sets that are being explicitly deleted or changed, of which I can’t imagine there’s not enough version control and redundancy in the government that shouldn’t make it possible to return a data set to the exact form it was on an exact day.

Something that just confuses me… this stuff should be backed up right? shouldn’t this stuff be put in in a means that, a competent administration down the line can pull from backups.