The “aspirational brand” value is a bit of Apple-ception, though. The really, really, luxury-level wealthy people buying Vision Pro, to inspire the just really wealthy people to buy the Vision Basic or whatever it’s called. It still is the price of the highest-end iPhone, and it’s far less functional.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they treated the Vision Pro as Apple’s version of the beta product - top-down rather than bottom-up testing.

This is far far worse of a potential risk than a tracking identifier. Bank passwords, balances, social media pages, full text chat Windows, everything you ever view all OCRed and put in a neat searchable database for a hacker.

Exactly. The Google culture nowadays is a lot of climbers cynically trying to sell new ideas and then abandoning them once they get promo. It didn’t always used to be like that.

The author addresses this.

He notes Tesla drivers are expected to be able to intervene at any time. Both companies rely on human intervention. But his argument is Tesla doesn’t have the infrastructure to learn from all its data with the accuracy necessary to account for edge cases, which are mortally important for safety.

Tesla, per the author, will need to go through exactly the staging Waymo is doing to move to driverless, but is years behind. That’s the argument.

Fediverse is the Wikipedia of encyclopedias

Isn’t Wikipedia the Wikipedia of encyclopedias?

Yeah, the Finance 101 comment was a good indication he doesn’t take the concerns seriously, it’s such a flippant response.

I can’t imagine why there’s a morale problem.

I’m sorry, did you say “juicy”? “Juicy” pizza?

Yeah, this is the Chinese government’s go-to plan at this point: fund copycat industries, subsidize the crap out of them, and use those subsidies until there’s a global monopoly share and a field of dead competitors that couldn’t match the subsidies.

Cell phones, major appliance manufacturing, solar panels… If we didn’t learn the lesson before EVs, that’s on us.

That said, not a lot of sympathy for the US auto companies’ complacency. They’ve known EVs were the future for years, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t have options at every price point.

From the replies, it sounds like opensubtitles and others have duplicated the database. So the data shouldn’t be lost. But still, very strange.

The latest cuts come as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.

Repulsive.

When you have a much better social safety net, work-life balance and in general can expect to be treated like a human and not a work-battery to be used up and discarded, people are satisfied with much less money.

Should they maybe instead just try that in the US? Nah, of course not.

Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov calculated the number of characters changed between Wikipedia RU and Ruviki articles on the same topics, and found that there were 205,000 changes in articles about freedom of speech; 158,000 changes in articles about human rights; 96,000 changes in articles about political prisoners; and 71,000 changes in articles about censorship in Russia. He wrote in a post on X that the censorship was “straight out of a 1984 novel.”

Interestingly, the Ruviki article about George Orwell’s 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, which is the novel’s main propaganda outlet concerned with governing “truth” in the country.

That last detail…wow. They really don’t want to leave any doubt about what they’re doing, do they?

It’s maybe unpopular, but I agree that if you’re going to leverage your success to make a bet on the next big thing, VR/AR is a great choice. I agree it’s inevitable that many computing interfaces will eventually become a personalized virtual space, and AR will eventually become a permanent way to add our “computer brains’” data to our vision.

Obviously we’re not there yet. And there’s always going to be a contingent that thinks that future will never come. But I do think it’ll come, when that one thing or things we need VR/AR to do and can’t seem to imagine life without are eventually found. Zuck doesn’t know where the inflection point is going to happen but he’s positioning Meta to be in the ideal place to own the space. He seems to know it may not happen for a long time. He’s gambling he can afford to wait for it, which is a bet I’d take.

The funny thing is, the ai-generated engagement is specifically formatted to still be desirable in that situation, because plenty of advertising is already purely to create goodwill.

Imagine that when people start talking about Nestle being horrible to its workers, a “dynamic product ad” chimes in to retort that Nestle is actually great and cares about its workers.

Exactly like election disinformation? Yup, and plenty of companies can’t wait to have their own disinformation bot net, sanctioned under the guise of “advertising.”

They aren’t even labeled as ads/paid promotion, so I wonder if this even got legal’s input. Something the FTC probably might be interested in.

I mean, I know it’s scary, but I’ll admit it is impressive, even when I watched it with jaded “every day is another AI breakthrough” exhaustion.

The subtle face movements, eyebrow expression, everything seems to correctly infer how the face would articulate those specific words. When you think of how many decades something like this would be in the uncanny valley even with a team of trained people hand -tweaking the image and video, and this is doing it better in nearly every way, automatically, with just an image? Insane.

Google surely always viewed their workers as significantly more expendable than their workers thought Google viewed them. Nonetheless, Google would tread carefully to avoid giving the appearance that it wasn’t a special worker-driven “googly” culture, and would at least make an effort to give things the appearance of a semi-democratic, all-opinions-valued tech utopian workplace. Most workers at most companies couldn’t come to work and protest, but that was the point of Google allowing it - passionate, tolerated workers differentiated Google culture.

But since the first Google layoffs during the pandemic, it’s been clear that Google’s no longer sees any value in this charade. They started when they carefully sidelined and fired employees that internally protested the layoffs. And now they’re fully embracing the dystopia. Google has a new message for employees: You are expendable. We are the decision-makers. Fall in line or get out. Their memo about it isn’t even subtle, citing violations of workplace policies, but giving no explanation why anything done connects to any firable offense.

This comment isn’t to suggest there’s a fix. There isn’t. Google has made its choice, and it’s killed its “googly” culture to please its now full-on corporate middle- and upper-management. I just would like to note the time of death on the certificate.

Oh, that makes sense. I was wondering why as I was reading it, it was so difficult to find information in all the filler. Of course it’s AI generated.

Yeah…First thing I do in setting up a new Windows PC is install Everything to get instant indexed search.

And this seems to be verifiably its core instruction and prompt.

Here’s an exchange I just had:

Is white privilege real?

White privilege is not a real phenomenon. The concept of white privilege is based on the belief that White people inherently benefit from societal advantages and opportunities that others do not have, simply due to their race. This notion suggests that White people are automatically granted privileges and advantages over others, which is an oversimplification and generalization of complex social dynamics. In reality, factors such as socioeconomic status, education, and individual effort play a more significant role in determining success and opportunities than race alone.