I mean, compared to LabView…

Not to mention they usually count the weight of whatever they’re in too. See a big news story about the cops seizing tons of product at a port? Well they’re including the shipping container weight.

What insurance company would be braindead enough to insure NFTs?

Iowa is pretty flat, it’s not hard to run cable across flat land. Try doing that in a mountainous area like Montana or Utah and it gets much trickier.

where companies can’t sell an LLM product with copyrighted training data.

If an artist learns their technique from copying other artists until they are competent enough to produce their own original works, should they be banned from selling their original work or services? After all, they used copyrighted training data to gain the skills needed to produce said work and services.

And people said NFTs were stupid. I mean, they are, but people have been paying for essentially the same thing for years now.

Dirty Jobs, Cash Cab, Future Weapons

Long story short, don’t shop on Black Friday for deals in electronics.

Note, this does not apply if you use responsible stores like Micro Center.

Copyleft violences.

Retrieved, not reused.

But where do you draw the line? Sure, microchips in vaccines is one thing, but what about simply warning people the vaccine doesn’t stop the spread of disease? During the pandemic, that would get you crucified, except now it turns out it isn’t as effective at stopping transmission as we were first told.

I was and am pro vax. It saves lives. But I’m also not going to pretend there wasn’t a weird animosity towards anyone saying anything contrary to the official, government sponsored, talking points during the pandemic. People were vilified for suggesting the virus came from a lab. Or that masks weren’t as effective as we were making it out to be. Or that the tests were producing false results.

It’s all well and good to say people shouldn’t spread falsehoods, but sometimes the lines of what’s true are blurred through the lens of hindsight when they seemed so clear in the moment.

Medical patents and approvals are an interesting miasma of red tape. Apparently the new Pixel 8’s have been having some hurdles with them. They contain a temperature sensor which can supposedly be used to check body temperature and monitor for disease. But merely checking body temperature makes it a Class II medical device which requires a ton of paperwork and red tape from the FDA, with disease tracking making it even more difficult. So that’s why the Pixel 8 was released with a temperature sensor which, for now, can only be used to measure external things and is prohibited from being accesed by third part developers.

Another good example is 23andme. When they first started, it wasn’t just genealogy information. They’d give a whole background of genetic diseases and conditions you might be at risk for. Then the FDA found out and shut it down since they didn’t go through the hoops required to give out medical advice. So even though they have the complete capability to gather that information accurately, they are no longer allowed to provide it to their customers, simply due to red tape.

Like trying to stop a flood with a roll of paper towels.

Yea yea, and this newfangled technology called the Internet is so underdeveloped that no one’s gonna use it!

But AI as it exists right now

That’s the fallacy. We aren’t talking about AI right now but rather what AI is going to look like 4-5 years from now. Think about how much advancement has happened in just the last year. Last year, ChatGPT was barely a thing, and image generation was little better than vague, blobby shapes that took a lot of computing power to create.

It’s absurd to talk about “AI as it exists right now” because within months, “right now” will be horribly outdated.

Back in January, I was showing a colleague ChatGPT 3.5. We asked it to design a corner desk and gave it very little input. It came up with a design that had drawers which would interfere with each other. My colleague has used that example ever since of why AI is dumb and will never be successful.

Like, really? You can’t envision progress beyond the current state of this VERY early tech? I see it all the time on here too. People dismissing AI image generation because it got the fingers wrong, or pointing out various chat responses with errors. To me, it reeks of desperate ignorance. People feel threatened by AI, especially groups like artists. So they point and laugh at it in its current state and go “see, it could NEVER replace a human!”

But it can, and it will. It’s like Blockbuster dismissing streaming sites because they couldn’t possibly have enough variety, and who wants to deal with the internet to watch something? Years later, everyone will be scratching their heads going “how the hell could they not see it coming? It should have been obvious!” And it IS obvious. AI will advance and shake many industries to their core; and not only are creative industries not immune, they’re arguably the most at risk.

Who wants to pay a graphics designer to spend over a week coming up with various mock-up when you could get infinitely more options in a few minutes with an AI program? One of the big points of the recent Hollywood actor/writer strike is opposition to AI. But it’s already too late for that. Studios are ABSOLUTELY going to use AI to replace actors and writers, they’d be crazy not to. Why would you want to use a human that can get tired, have their own opinions/interpretation of things, require pay/royalties, and might do or say something controversial in their lives that causes people to boycott them? Hell, we’ve already replaced animals for the most part. Almost no modern films or shows use real animals anymore, it’s all CGI.

You can’t? Look at Disney World or Universal Studios. Sure they have rides, but a lot of it is the experiences involving people’s favorite movies/shows.

I can definitely see people interested if they get that part right.

Imagine getting a drink in a tavern from The Witcher. Or a fancy dinner in a palace setting from The Crown or the mansion from Umbrella Academy. Imagine going through a haunted house based around Hill House. Running an obstacle course from Squid Game. Themed escape rooms or live action shows based off Stranger Things or Black Mirror.

That’s not even getting into merchandising. Sure, people are probably not going to flock to buy a Queen’s Gambit chess set. But Castlevania or Arcane collectibles? Dragon Prince plushies? Literally anything from Netflix’s sizable anime collection?

There’s a lot of ways they could do it wrong. In fact it’s more likely they get it wrong than right. But I’m not going to dismiss the idea right out the gate, I do see the possibilities.

Oh my God! He’s forcing disabled people to undego his experiments?!

Oh wait, what’s that? They’re all volunteers? They’re all willing to go through with it despite all the risks? Oh, and what else is that? The decision to move forward with human trials comes from the experts running the trials and not just Elon himself? Well golly, that sure throws a wrench in my worldview. Guess I’ll just ignore all that in favor of keeping my hate boner directed at a single billionaire.

Ok but this isnt exactly some outlier. These kind of results happen pretty regularly with this kind of testing. People are only upset in this instance because it’s magnified by their hatred of Elon.

It’s like if everyone got mad at a factory farm for how it treated cattle, but only because it was owned by someone infamous. It just feels disingenuous. Like, you either knew about the standards for these conditions beforehand and didn’t care, or you’ve had your head in the sand and only just recently learned about it from media focused on a person you hate.

It just reeks of “I just heard about this thing, have done zero research on it, and have formed my opinion entirely from headlines; but I think it’s bad 🥺🥺😢. Plus the person who owns them is a big meanie poopoo head and I hate them.”

Notice how there’s not some big push to ban animal testing from this? It’s just use to point at Elon and go “Bad man, bad!”. Face it, people care WAY more about shitting on him than they do about the monkeys.

Only way I can see them surviving is if they get rid of their CEO and their entire board of directors. That might be enough to reestablish a base of trust.