AvAn12

Hotel wants to avoid undesirable guests. Seems reasonable.

Convert some to cheap residential. Solves both problems: affordable housing as well as rebalancing supply and demand for office space.

Why participate? Why not just skip any site that wants a photo of ID? Also, those sites run massive liability risk for the inevitable data breaches that will occur.

There ARE regulations for sure. But they exist to protect the population at large. For example, food safety laws were not created out of government hostility but rather because food was unsafe. Read (or read about) The Jungle by Upton Sinclair if you want to get creeped out about the food industry in the 1930s before regulations

Then those people are on the sidelines like every other citizen. Play the game or be a spectator. Nobody gets to have it both ways.

If businesspeople want to get involved in politics, they should have the courage to run for office like anybody else. Lurking on the sidelines and waiving money around is really lame and laughable.

At the end of the day, the processor can only do Turing operations: assign values to variables (registers, memory locations, storage), loops, bitwise operations, and conditionals. Whether the source code is python, java, or lisp, it has to compile or interpret down to machine code ultimately. Likewise if the running software is a word processor, DOOM, or an LLM, at the end of the day it will be executed by the processor using the three operations. Lots of other fancy hardware and software may accelerate things but ultimately it is those ops that are the running code. The rest is many wonderful conveniences and abstractions.

I think the gap is because 1. For coding, Claude is amazing - mainly because of its curated skills and because massive amounts of working code has already been carefully labeled over the last decade or so via GitHub. And because with any Turing complete language, there is only so much one can do.

But 2. For most other things, LLMs are fairly underwhelming. Research is usually mediocre. Try being rigorous and repeat your research prompt many times - then make a confusion matrix to tally up how many false positives and false negatives occur. And for the rest, be honest and ask yourself if the LLM is doing much more than a basic search engine query or trip to Wikipedia would have told you. For “normie” use cases, it’s handy-ish but far from revolutionary

What other industry regularly acts in such bad faith with respect to claims made? In the securities industry, material misstatement of fact lands people in jail.

Tech is supposed to be a tool that serves other products ends, not an end in itself.

At this point, tech biz leaders are massively over-reaching and trying to influence the rest of us: muxk, thiel, Karp, etc.

So it should be no surprise that the rest of us are ready, willing and able to push back just as hard.

tech biz leads should just run their companies and stop trying to play president or god

Gee, what an optimistic outlook you have. Do you think the truly creative innovators in the fields of tech, science, engineering, and art get out of bed in the morning believing that they are just grimly marching down a path laid out by someone else? While OP’s philosophy may be a bit rosy, it sure leads to better outcomes than dark fatalism.

Wearables are creepy. Please stop pushing “products” that nobody wants.

Forecasts are a thought exercise, not the revelation of something foretold. Best thing to do is think of the outcome you wish for and then try to take whatever actions you can to help make it so. Like with climate change for example.

1. so is everyone who is subject to a corporate mandate... but...

2. this may be ok. A good way to learn a piece of software or tool or process is to play with it. We learn lots of general knowledge through play and experimentation. Heck we get better at musical instruments by playing on them.

Mandates are kind of dumb in many ways. But they will force the issue of discovering whether anything useful can come from AI other than coding.

Carpet has been made for millennia. Scotchguard is new and toxic. So just make the carpets without the stain protection junk.

Frankly the carpet factories will do more business as people will want to replace their carpets more frequently.

Both try to maximize engagement. Both (soon to be) ad supported. Both driven by algorithms that show the user what they want to see.

Like dot matrix printer fonts

I’m not sure anyone needs to break anything. I’m not sure this is a commercially viable business once all of the VC and foreign funding scaffolding goes away.

If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely.

In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop.

Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?

You can’t determine age from a face scan. And it’s trivial to hold up a photo of an older person. Seriously if a website wants an image of your government ID or facial image, maybe ask yourself if you really need to access that site.

There WILL be breaches and those drivers license scans will get loose in the world sooner or later. Fully agree that this is all about access control. No thank you.

Isn’t this sort of like saying you know how to use a web browser?

Good point regarding “ survivorship bias and groupthink” here.

Remember Web 2.0? If not, check Wikipedia. The idea was that everyone could create mashup web apps to do anything thanks to open standards and free APIs. Where did that dream go? Do you think private companies are going to give everyone their data and functionality for free?

And what is so different about today’s dream of “agents” accessing private company data and functionality?

It is a lovely dream that I would be very happy to see. What can we do differently this time around?

Trump is the only one convicted of felonies and found liable for civil wrongdoing.

No other president violated laws (and please don’t start with Monica Lewinsky or that time Obama wore a tan suit…)

Sloppy.

Clearly YMMV but I have been very happy with DDG since switching over a couple of years ago. Maybe we are searching in different domains. From my experience, no ads and less ai slop, and fine search quality.

The shilling for AI continues. How much $$$ do the big tech companies pay Columbia? Oh yeah, and what exactly did Columbia agree to do to get the trmp admin to leave them alone? All speculation of course, but the circumstantial picture stinks.

A wise move.

And if we all buy umbrellas, then it will start to rain??

You make a good argument that nobody needs to follow any laws any more. By your argument, it’s all about brute force. Ice has it now, but anyone can later. Is that the world you want? Or, would you prefer a society of laws after all?