Kind of depressing that the answer to not being replaced by AI is "learn to use it and spend your day fixing its fuckups", like that's somehow a meaningful way to live for someone who previously had an actual creative job.

Yeah, good luck enforcing that contract in any country that has a legal concept of "automatically unfair contract terms".

'Is money a birthright now?'

If it's not, then logically a 100% inheritance tax must be imposed. After all, nobody is entitled to money just for being born, right?

I read the article. Apparently it only really works with hard water - that's water with a high concentration of calcium carbonate. At high temperatures, the calcium carbonate becomes a solid, trapping the microplastics inside it, which is then removed from the water with a regular filter.

The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface

This sounds like an excuse to me. I'm a university student in the UK. Our vending machines use a very effective means of letting the machine know we're ready to buy something without using any facial recognition software at all. What we do, right, is press the letter and number buttons that match up to what we want to buy. The machine says how much money the item costs, and then we tap our bank/credit cards to the contactless card reader, just like we would in any other shop. Then the machine dispenses the item.

It's really, really clever how they've invented this way for us to purchase afternoon snacks to help us cope with how annoying our classmates are, and we don't even have to have our faces scanned! Truly the kind of innovative technology you'd expect to find in a university.

Funny how the CEOs never have to "just get through" being laid off...

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

What people always seem to miss is that a human doesn't need billions of examples to be able to produce something that's kind of "eh, close enough". Artists don't look at billions of paintings. They look at a few, but do so deeply, absorbing not just the most likely distribution of brushstrokes, but why the painting looks the way it does. For a basis of comparison, I did an art and design course last year and looked at about 300 artworks in total (course requirement was 50-100). The research component on my design-related degree course is one page a week per module (so basically one example from the field the module is about, plus some analysis). The real bulk of the work humans do isn't looking at billions of examples: it's looking at a few, and then practicing the skill and developing a process that allows them to convey the thing they're trying to express.

If the AI models were really doing exactly the same thing humans do, the models could be trained without any copyright infringement at all, because all of the public domain and creative commons content, plus maybe licencing a little more, would be more than enough.

What matters isn't whether any of this has been done before, and more authentically, and well enough to be built upon—what matters is that this particular rich man-child hasn't done it yet, from scratch, for himself and for his own dream of being The Most Special Boy.

The whole piece was a good read, but this quote stands out to me, because it literally summarises every single thing Elon Musk is involved with.

It is true that removing and demonetising Nazi content wouldn't make the problem of Nazis go away. It would just be moved to dark corners of the internet where the majority of people would never find it, and its presence on dodgy-looking websites combined with its absence on major platforms would contribute to a general sense that being a Nazi isn't something that's accepted in wider society. Even without entirely making the problem go away, the problem is substantially reduced when it isn't normalised.

So, basically... "an investigation into whether we lied to customers in order to sell them stuff would have an impact on our business". Well, yeah, that's true. Shockingly, customers don't like being lied to about the quality of the goods they're buying, and hearing that there's enough indication of lying to warrant a full probe into it would make future customers hesitant to buy. While wrongdoing hasn't been proven yet, I can't imagine this probe would be happening "just in case" Tesla lied - there must have been a high volume of complaints from customers who aren't happy. The precedent set by not investigating would be awful. It'd basically say businesses can claim whatever they like about their products, because being caught lying about them would always have the consequence of "material adverse impact on our business".

So... basically, Musk turned up at a studio and threatened the devs with a gun (which antique or not, could have been loaded and functional - shooting with antique guns is a thing) to make them put him in the game?

I know there's a massive cultural difference around guns between the UK and the US, but I'm genuinely struggling to see how "a man has turned up to our studio with a gun because he wants us to put him in our game" doesn't warrant a call to the police.

Wouldn't moving Windows into the cloud basically make computers non-functional without internet? Because I can see a few problems with that, particularly for those in rural areas or who are travelling a lot.

I've hesitated to switch over to Linux in recent years, primarily due to concerns about compatibility with software and games, but I'd rather have to find new art software than pay a subscription for an operating system that I can't even use offline.