Right, but does a business/company owe you the right to never require usage of AI to do your job (and by extension, owe you that job under those terms)?
I did not take that position. You asked if US citizens could refuse AI without religious exemption, possibly suggesting the dramatics are unnecessary, and I answered that I could not.
Here's an easy example. Every discord client now ships with Krisp, and many clients squelch settings were automatically changed from standard to Krisp when this feature launched.
That change was many many years ago. I personally find Krisp super efficient (no adverse CPU usage or anything) and highly useful. It's better than Apple's 'noise isolation' at not picking up e.g. sharp / fast / heavy breathing.
Local journalism _feels_ like more than a job. Before my CS career, I was a photojournalist for a few different daily papers. It felt like important work. We were history keepers and story tellers for a community.
It is important work, but we have yet to find an economic model to effectively support it and the people doing the work.
(i donate to journalism orgs across the US [ProPublica, Associated Press, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Marion County Record, Muckrock], but far more and consistent financial support is needed than these orgs are receiving today)
Go find a newspaper from 2000 or earlier. It will have whole sections (20 pages or so each) of advertising for jobs, real-estate and other classifieds. In some places every government job had to be advertised in the newspaper.
All that paid for the newspaper. Usually before it was even printed.
I remember this well into the 2000s. My parents have never stopped subscribing to their local paper and your comment made me realize how much advertising is gone from it actually. I remember enjoying reading the Best Buy, Target and Circuit City ads each week, especially the Sunday circulars. That was only a fraction of all the paid ads in the paper back then, too.
If anything, the demise of the journalism industry is a harbinger for what's to come for many white-collar jobs (even respected and highly-paid ones, like law) if AI progress continues unabated
> I still don't understand how people justify the cost of using API keys vs. subscription
Like a big white truck or a 600mm lens, expensive gear should be purchased by an employer. I think most folks talking about API access are getting it through work/self-employment.
Anthropic needs to retune their personal plans. Opus is the Amelia Bedelia of models. Maddening! I shelled out $100 for Fable to drive Opus and finish a personal project, but that's probably my last time loading up on usage credits. I put a second $100 towards API credits so I could dink around with API access and understand conversations like these.
There's another big element that is being completely overlooked.
People who use API keys on their dime are usually running DeepSeek 4.x or GLM 5.x (Flash or otherwise) and similar models.
RE: Subsidies:
What if subscription costs are still high enough to be profitable (I believe they are for OpenAI).
Then maybe we should be saying that API users are paying an order of magnitude more than the cost, at least at the very top end (frontier models). Likely because big cos are willing to pay top dollar for what is the best and unmatched elsewhere.
> Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up
Forgive me, but hacker news is the only social media I participate in. Is this a pretty commonly held sentiment? Like are other social media users commenting on this trend? Any news articles? Thanks
I foolishly purchased the Blu-Ray remaster of Battlestar Galactica and every damn episode begins with the same introduction from Ronald Moore talking about sound quality.
To your earlier points about VHS and Streaming, both of those formats allow the user to pause and resume at a later time. DVD players don't provide this.
It's not at all. It's really common. PS3 does it and has resumed discs I played years ago. Blu-ray is more hit or miss because BD-J mucks it all up. Titles without that tend to work, but big studio releases tend to have it so...
My PS5 supports this in the narrowest of cases: the DVD is stopped, power is uninterrupted, the DVD is not ejected. There's definitely no persistent memory of episodes watched. What is your DVD player?
The way that BD-J works prevents it from working reliably even on the highest end systems like the several thousand dollar Magnetars. It just can't be helped.
If you get a nice Magnetar, or even a decent Panasonic it will do it's best and work on DVD and non BD-J blu-ray, but it can't control what the vendor did and it will still fail for those Java discs.
Letting whatever dummy made the disk control the hardware to the extent that BD-J does is just ludicrous.
I think all the recollections above may be correct. IIRC, the DVD spec allows a disc to override some stored user preferences, skip to main menu (ignoring auto-play intro content) and play main content (skipping the menus), but not all DVD players had those user pref options - earlier models often didn't. That could definitely be annoying because some studios loved to force ads, trailers, warnings, etc to play.
Some DVD players, especially later, off-brand models, would ignore a disc's instruction to override the user preference. I remember the presence of these capabilities being a key feature in forum reviews of DVD players. Back then, the holy grail was an inexpensive player that had quick load and seek times, ignored region codes, respected user preferences and had analog component output (or a good composite/S-Video encoder chip). Based on these detailed user reviews, the community would arrive at a handful of players that were worth getting. These lists would be regularly updated as models would change firmware or chips and be sold under different brand names in different regions.
> To your earlier points about VHS and Streaming, both of those formats allow the user to pause and resume at a later time. DVD players don't provide this.
...that was one of the most hated aspects of videocassettes. If you asked anyone at the time whether they'd prefer a medium that rewound itself, they would have told you "of course" while giving you, at best, a very funny look.
I've found season 4 of SNW to be the best Star Trek in the 21st century. Can you share what you enjoyed more in its earlier seasons?
DSC and Picard were long slogs in the spirit of "grit" and "realism." SNW having fun, switching up the mood every episode, and telling stories is a breath of fresh air. Strange New Episodes! The Henson Studio collaboration was amazing. Since Netflix canned Dark Crystal, I've been missing my weird muppets traveling across time and space.
Both LD and SNW managed to get less of that Kurtzman stink compared to Academy, DSC, or the movie which shall never be named. I hope they'll let the franchise mellow until they find new direction. (And a new owner.)
* Lower Decks is the truest Trek to ever Trek, but I know that's asinine so I saved my opinion for the footnote.
* ENT was off to a good start, but the 9/11-ification of TV took it off course.
I didn't like DSC and most of Picard either, just like you because it was too gritty. Although it certainly helped that TNG is by faaar my favorite of the Treks.
I liked that season 1 and 2 of SNW felt like the stakes were lower and there were fewer gimmicky episodes. The muppet episode for me for example was a huge negative. So was the fake documentary, the Event Horizon remake and of course the double episode where they were fighting manifested evil which to be couldn't be further from the Trek spirit.
> Although it certainly helped that TNG is by faaar my favorite of the Treks.
The final season of Picard was pure fan service AND I LOVED EVERY MOMENT OF IT! Even when I'm critical of Trek, I'm still there and trying to enjoy. Thank you for sharing.
I'm a sucker for a captain (or anyone) who falls asleep with a good book on his chest. Even if it's fan service.
During the height of the pandemic I rewatched TNG. When Timescape opened with Picard, Data, Troy and Geordie on their way back to the Enterprise in a runabout and having dinner together. Having these characters I've known and lived for so long have a casual work meal made me miss office lunch so much I almost started to cry. No other show would have been able to do that
There is an AI-generated YouTube series/channel called "TK-42 Greg" that follows the life of a hapless Star Wars stormtrooper as he pursues a career of menial jobs, unemployment and drifting about a galaxy far, far away.
It's dumb and derivative and isn't getting a lot of laughs from me, but at the same time, it is freakishly realistic, and absolutely ripping off every character and scene and locale of the Lucas series.
I don't know how long it will last against Disney's DMCA juggernaut, but the "Imperial HR Lady" is way funnier and she just has to throw on a turquoise necklace and grating accent.
Speaking of self-vibe-coding games, I wouldn't see the point. When I was a younger boy, I did write games for myself, and it was an arduous project that was mostly aimed at teaching myself programming rather than gaming per se. And eventually the big didactic moments were hacking someone else's game code in terms of debugging and extending it, and that was more exciting than building my own from scratch.
Also, copyright is an issue! If consumer AI could ignore copyright and just code me, say, "Freecell but it's Harry Potter" or "Put me in the cockpit of a Y-Wing video game!" then it'd be exciting. People pay big bucks and invest big bucks for in-universe games of certain franchises like that. But AI won't provide for the consumer in this way, ever.
Much of the joy of gaming for me, is seeing a polished product that is well-balanced in terms of rules and fairness, and has good sound/graphic assets, and challenges or surprises me in novel ways as I go along. I don't think I would mind if someone else vibe-codes a game for me to play, if it's good enough and engaging, but it seems that designing/coding one for myself would feel empty and unfulfilling. And I wouldn't apply the same principle to utility software, but really I'd rather not invest a lot of time in building an office suite for myself, rather than just grabbing it off the shelf.
I've had AI make little learning games, coloring stories, etc for my kid. I and it absolutely will ignore copyright. So far it's never objected. It'll also happily reverse engineer binaries, extract art assets, whatever.
There is a lot of work and research behind the (quality) major learning tools you are possibly likely overlooking. How do you know these learning games and activities are actually doing anything for your kid? Why not just use them?
I’m genuinely asking here. This isn’t bait or a challenge, and I’m not really sure how to avoid that tone so apologies if seems antagonistic.
It could just be that I don't know the right words to use, but my attempts to find some kind of quality edutainment has led me to conclude that basically the only thing that exists since the 90s is Khan Academy Kids, which itself just doesn't have a very tight loop. So I've made some variations on number munchers/word munchers, e.g. find all expressions that sum to N. Or a "what's the missing number" that deletes a number from a sequence of e.g. counting by 4, and they have to answer. It then immediately gives them the same sequence with a different number deleted. Or have expressions pop up/disappear and they need to quickly click the ones with the target sum. Or just straight up rapid answer math questions lol.
Basically, quick arcade-style games that can give them "points" so they feel good about just doing problems over and over for repetition. I can handle the conceptual discussions myself, but I find that gamifying works well for the portions where there's no alternative but to just practice until memorized.
I had also been working on a Treasure Mountain/Mathstorm/Galaxy clone with expanded activities, but I think the arcade format actually works better and is easier to make.
My daughter can also read a couple years ahead, but her writing's still very basic/phonetic. So I had codex whip up a standard template where I can put a picture (that codex generates) and she can write about what's happening in the picture and then color it. The template includes a word bank where I can add words relevant to what's happening (e.g. that I used to prompt the picture creation) that have irregular spelling, and I had it print a reminder sheet of different ways to spell the same sounds (ai, a_e, ay, etc) that she can refer to while trying to remember how to spell words. Previously when she was earlier in learning to read, I had used it to generate a couple simple coloring storybooks as a little fun activity.
That doesn't really answer your question about how I know it's effective, but I get a general sense that educational research struggles with that question too.
Huh? Maybe this is a reasonable take if you only consider the original series, but TNG heavily used holodecks as a form of entertainment, with computer-run characters factoring in heavily to plot advancement in the episodes.
Moreover, the exploration of Data’s personhood as an android is like… incredibly pervasive throughout all of the seasons of the show.
Absolutely and I was thinking about this when I wrote my initial comment. It's a good consideration. Star Trek _does_ have an AI computer capable of generating code and stories and all it requires of the user is a little prompting.
TNG shows humans are using this technology to engage themselves. People rock climb, ski, perform Shakespeare. Holodeck authors are well-respected throughout the galaxy. They also warned us of holodeck psychosis.
Data is an android, but what about his story suggests we should slurp up doggerel? His existence is the pursuit of humanity's "essence."
I have been naively using example.com in the browser. WHATWG URL throws if there is no origin when constructing the URL. Web apps that need to construct _just_ the pathname must go through this song and dance. `new URL("/blah", "https://example.com").pathname` This isn't relying on any external example.com service but I'm learning the lesson.
I use amazon.com. Being able to ping some near-universally-available responder address doesn't mean you've got general internet connectivity, which connecting to amazon.com is a good proxy for.
Interesting. I'm intending not to reach out it in my case. The goal was to find a safeISH default parameter when constructing a WHATWG URL only for its pathname.
I've seen google STUN servers used in production. Folks probably rely on unpkg too much to deliver their JS. Good to consider these failure modes.
If your service runs on AWS, reaching amazon dot com seems somewhat more reasonable an internal health check.
Sony broke the Canon/Nikon duopoly of professional, digital cameras. They put out a mid-level mirrorless camera and rode it out. Today, I see Sony kits everywhere like on sidelines, press pools, and studios. But I'm not a Sony investor, so maybe like you, there's not much personal interest beyond "Wow, they made a great business decision."
They did something really different actually: they put out a product that wasn’t ready and allowed the market to shape how it was used.
More or less the pure fantasy of digital cameras: a sensor in a box with a computer, screens and a lens mount. The nearest thing to no lock-in at all that doesn’t need to be mounted on another camera to work.
But the initial reviews of the first two NEX models were devastating because it was a very unfinished concept.
They had the sense to listen to complaints, implement decent focus-peaking as soon as possible, not to get too much in the way of people who were prepared to buy one to experiment with, and fix the product iteratively.
So now we have what even micro-four-thirds could not have achieved: larger and larger lens-mount-ambivalent capture boxes that don’t suck too badly.
They still IMO are not great sculpted finessed cameras, but somehow a couple of them have real charm.
The fact that the same brand is stuck to it as was stuck to digital media whose producer was so desperate to control its uses it would essentially commit crimes to do so, has always struck me as unusual.
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