Cheaper movies in terms of cost are often better than expensive movies because they have a humanity that shows through. Let me know when an AI can make a Jon Carpenter movie
I don't think that's true at all. Duchamp's "Fountain" is an example of something that is profoundly impactful, didn't "cost" him anything, yet an AI could never reproduce it.
In specific genres of game where the developers put a lot of effort into the mechanics to facilitate procedural generation, yes it's interesting. You can't tell me Dwarf Fortress was fast and easy to make because fortresses are procedurally generated.
My favorite quote on this topic is "Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"
Especially when you're talking about fiction and reading/watching for enjoyment, what does it matter if you can shit out 1000 hours of AI content? Maybe it's good to keep babies entertained? Studios have gotten so into the habit of treating "content" as a fungible commodity, but the fact is that even blockbuster movies still live and die by actually being entertaining.
If you don't like them leeching money from small businesses, you'll hate the army of overworked support staff (formerly "gurus") who are constantly on the precipice of being downsized and asked to turn over calls faster to keep costs down.
If you don't trust risk-limitjng audits, you're never gonna trust any voting system. Someone has to administer the system, do the counting, sum up the totals, etc.
We need a housing policy reset, the OAPs shouldn't have the majority of their retirement assets tied up in a 1.4M illiquid house. They need an affordable off-ramp to downsize, and we need to build more affordable housing to deflate the market. This is wildly unpopular because lots of people are already over-leveraged trying to get onto the property ladder, but objectively it's the correct course to start to unfuck things.
The purpose of a house or apartment should be shelter for a family, not a retirement plan or an investment for a corporation.
It's amazing how much bureaucracy they're willing to spend money on to means-test a fundamental service. If you just made transit free at the point of service you wouldn't have free cards for all under 16, and some over 16, and all over 60, and discount fares for people in poverty. Cities spend so much money outsourcing the IT for fare collection, and the administration of budget programs, and ultimately the experience is worse for the end users. It's a real case of the politically connected hoovering up tens of millions of dollars because suburban voters can't stomach a poor person getting to ride the bus for free.
"thought experiments" like this are worse than useless, it's a way for people on the internet to discuss any hypothetical topic without actually knowing anything. You take some contrarian view and say "yes if I constructed the whole world to back into my preconceived view it could be true". It's unfalsifiable. TFA has actual facts.
By this rationale the moon landing also never happened, because everyone from NASA was incentivized to lie about it. Why bother even going when you could fake it?
Trying to receive mail or apply for public benefits can be difficult without a permanent address. There's a stigma associated with applying for jobs if you can't list an address.
Edit: I agree single-family homes are insane, the solution is affordable apartments close to transit, not the rugged individualism of people living in cars.
I wouldn't take OP's word for it, if they really believe they know how it's going to react in every situation in the first place. Studies have shown this is a gross overestimation of their own ability to pay attention.
Does poverty not also ruin lives? There's room for people to disagree about the specifics but the lack of widespread wealth redistribution has certainly killed a lot of people as well, it's just easier to ignore than a war.
Anyone in any profession can have burnout. Set money aside, set boundaries, have a life outside of work. It's not exclusive to computer programmers, and there's lots of worse burnout-inducing jobs that pay less.
What actually ended apartheid was international pressure and the white government's fear of a civil war. Economically isolated and vastly outnumbered, the apartheid government would have been completely removed from the country and had their property seized.
My understanding is Mandela was a respected leader who was willing to play ball and facilitate a peaceful transition where the white leadership got to keep all their property. That's why there's still massive economic inequality in SA today. Not to say Mandela wasn't admirable or that he didn't suffer, but it was a conscious choice to avoid outright military conflict at the cost of preserving an implicit racial hierarchy.
Homeostasis is a powerful force. Once you gain weight your body has a tendency to keep it, and overcoming that to establish a new equilibrium is difficult and uncomfortable.
Making the bus more useful for more people has the opposite effect. The people who are currently on the bus are people with no other option. The population on the bus, on average, is only going to get less "undesirable" (to the HN crowd) if the bus station is nice, well-lit, comes at reasonable times, has coffee shops and stuff.
There are men and women who, at least professionally, just go by Charlie. So it's kind of moot if it's on their birth certificate, you can't tell their gender by name.
It's amazing how something that should be a public utility has been carved up by private equity and sold to a foreign company. Greyhound has completely stopped operating in Canada and the impact has been tremendous.
I think it's substantial to say that AI is currently overhyped because it's hitting a weak spot in human cognition. We sympathize with inanimate objects. We see faces in random patterns.
If a machine spits out some plausible looking text (or some cookie-cutter code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow) the human brain is basically hardwired to go "wow this is a human friend!". The current LLM trend seems designed to capitalize on this tendency towards sympathizing.
This is the same thing that made chatbots seem amazing 30 years ago. There's a minimum amount of "humanness" you have to put in the text and then the recipient fills in the blanks.
The current AI hype wave has really hit a nerd soft spot - that we're steps away from AGI. Surely if a computer can make plausible-looking but incorrect sentences we're days away from those sentences being factually accurate! The winter after this is gonna be harsh.