therealpygon

Marketing a product is often disingenuous. You didn’t actually need that shirt, or that bag of chips. That’s the definition of successful marketing in their mind.

If marketing had to be honest, an entirely different set of products would likely be the most popular. I don’t think that’s a good thing by any means, just that the problem hasn’t really changed much beyond more focused targeting, which has always been a goal of marketing anyway.

It’s hard to convince someone who isn’t interested to buy something which is why tech ads sell on tech channels and car ads sell on car channels. Now you get to star in your very own clothes ads…for yourself…targeting you…

I suspect companies drool for that prospect because you are selling it to yourself with only some nice gentle nudging. That is the grail of marketing; that you don’t even realize you are in the midst of being marketed to.

I think your second point touches on a bigger concern for small businesses.

US labs have consistently demonstrated their intention to paywall higher intelligence. Eventually the paywall for “hyper-intelligence” will set a bar so high that average small businesses simply won’t be able to afford the bill of what is used by the top corporations to keep themselves at the top. That’s already starting, when it comes to the volumes of tokens top corporations are burning.

This is a feature of the system corporations want to establish and OAI/Anthropic are happy to oblige. 10% of a trillion dollar company is the same as 10% of 1,000,000 million dollar small businesses. Whose hitch would they rather ride, and which size customer easier to obtain to meet their revenue goal?

Not to mention, it would certainly be possible for the EU and other world powers to equally disincentivize use of US labs as a data security risk, since our top models are impossible to run in private lab environments without specialized agreements and there no access to the model weights for auditing. As best as I can tell, AI regulation is a dangerous game that is a hair away from isolationism.

In my opinion, Google is one of the few hopes in this area. There is still a paywall, but I feel like they are the closest thing to a Chinese lab we have (for frontier) in terms of their targets (real business use cases) and they actually have both the infra and already have a pipeline for small businesses into their products; they already have the wide non-AI customer base to leverage unlike Anthropic and OpenAI whose only product requires convincing people to use their (more expensive) AI.

Good or bad, I’m pretty sure showing things in the best light has always been the point of “marketing”. There is a reason ads aren’t filled with ugly people with misshaped bodies, and it isn’t because the intention is to reflect reality, so what you allude to as problematic is what a lot of businesses call a feature.

I’d have a lot less heartburn with these types of systems if the system prevented mass data exfiltration by organizations (so they can’t simply retain the non-evidence themselves), and limited ALL non-anonymized data retention to the prior 30 days unless there is a signed court order. To me, that is a perfectly reasonable compromise between safety and privacy. No articulated suspicion to a judge means your data evaporates after 30 days.

Wouldn’t it be easier for streeteasy to simply stop allowing 0 sq ft listings/innacurate listings? Maybe allowing people to report listings that are inaccurate and banning repeat offenders? If the market feels that strongly, the pressure on the company would be easy to achieve?

Almost no ICE vehicle requires “timing belts, transmission work, etc” outside of failures (which happen on EVs also) in the first 100k. That’s why manufacturer’s 10yr/100k power train warranties aren’t uncommon. Electric vehicles also go through tires faster due to their heavier weight, and ICE vehicles don’t require installation of a home charger, which on a 10k mile oil change schedule would more than offset oil changes by cost.

All of the things that are likely to break (electronics and sensors, usually) are the same for electric, and failures can happen with either vehicle.

Electric has “less” maintenance and no gas, but let’s not reverse-uno marketing FUD with more FUD.

Pretty sure I saw Handy using it; if you have the latest version, you’re probably already demoing it.

Don’t worry, they have a system, they can’t lose, and honestly, it’s like the outcome is almost guaranteed.

There is a world of difference between paying someone who is free to leave, and basically fake adopting a child who you keep uneducated so that they don’t even know how to leave while forcing them to work without any pay.

Are you saying if they were simply paid slightly more money and forced to seek their own food and shelter in whatever abject conditions they could afford, like minimum-wage and rural workers in most first-world countries, they would be better off? Or do you have more insightful suggestions? “Pay more” is always the easy answer people go with, especially while not wanting to pay more for anything, so I’m excited to hear a fresh and unique take on poverty.

It seems highly resolution and scale dependent and seems to rely on the idea of a user being on a PC.

This is super useful; I’ve always wanted my information to be illegible when scaled…

If you’d rather pay $500 for the landlords insurance rather than $200 from your own policy, that sounds like a great plan. You’re paying for the Porsche either way.

Being right about things you have no control over is a bit like being right about your favorite flavor of jelly.

Interesting site. I picked a random topic to listen to — flying chariots or something like that — and the conversation of one person talking and the other whispering was definitely not to my preference. I’ll have to take another look when I have more time.

Oil and gas is the type of commodity I’d rather it be modeled on, if I had to choose. Something with a lot of competition but an understanding that negative actions can easily affect your bottom line regardless of whether you were the one who took them, so generally better to operate with cooperative competition on the whole.

Isn’t it interesting that you can purchase a movie, rip and transcode it… but if you download the same transcoded version for the movie you already own, you have committed a crime?

Yay. Another article to cite another article that cites another article that “estimated” statistics because it’s getting traffic.

Every one of the excuses about how (and the need) to obtain ID are the red herring of this conversation, intended to distract from the fact that states have been verifying identities and holding their elections for 250 years and that Republicans are involved in the election process at every single level that are apparently complicit in these supposed “massive frauds”. They would have people believe the issue is ID and illegal voting, rather than the fact this is an attempt to take control of elections and influence them. They have already started doing shady things, like demanding access to the actual votes despite the entire system being run electronically and re-verified locally under bi-partisan oversight, and that those same states who had US cyber intelligence to assist them in securing their elections prior to Trump reducing that access in order to further his election fraud claims. It doesn’t look good when your own agencies assisted on securing the very thing they are claiming is a fraud.

This is exactly what every despot who nationalized election security did right before their Party magically started winning in every election by “overwhelming popular demand”. What a shock that they are trying to use the same playbook.

It is the responsibility of the state to enact THEIR OWN elections, as was made clear in our constitution. States oversee their elections, primarily away from federal influence. Republicans passed their own laws that they are now using to say requires them to interfere in the state election process; they created the excuse they are using and have, to date, failed to show a single shred of evidence of any real systemic issue outside of a potentially 0.001% who MIGHT have voted illegally (based on the few cases they tried to use, often paperwork errors). If fact, the most obvious acts of election interference have been consistently Republicans. They are the ones who put out fake ballot boxes in states. They were the ones caught trying to tamper in order to “prove there was fraud”. They have been inside the house the whole time, so to speak.

Claiming this is a need to identify voters, which literally every state does, is just the BS people try to use to ignore the truth; that there is nothing wrong with the elections they are trying to steal. All of the ways people claim that can be used to get an ID … are LITERALLY the ways states verify voters when they don’t have an ID…

Republicans just haven’t understood yet that his claims mean THEY are complicit and have been supporting fraud — an accusation I think they would probably take issue with if they understood the real claim. Instead, they listen to news from organizations that literally argue that their news is “entertainment” and therefore not intended to be “truthful”. The party has become a disgraced shell of itself, co-opted by the Tea Party-incarnate MAGA who for years have left Conservative values behind in their attempt to remake the constitution in their own view in order to exclude dissenting voices.

And we’re basically paying for the upgrades…

Oh, I’m sure there aren’t any possible examples of similar behaviors. No company would try to penalize cancellation I’m sure, certainly not by forcing you to subscribe for 12 months and pay an out clause to cancel your monthly subscription, and certainly no company would make cancellations far more difficult. There is definitely nothing that would make anyone think this could be a real tactic half-buried in your EULA agreed when signing up for the service. You know, alongside all those clauses that they effectively own copies of everything you send to them.

I’m gonna bet a whole lot more money has been made off corporate apologists who say “that would never happen” about things that definitely then happened.

Wonder how many “conspiracy theorists” warned people cigarettes were causing cancer while corporate apologists pointed to the faked studies of the industry and said “See, they are all crazy, no company would sell something that they know causes cancer! It would be a huge risk!”

For violating an embargo and publishing a press release announcing products of another company that hadn’t been debuted? What “non-dick” response do you think is appropriate against a prospective partner that violated clear guidelines that defined their partnership which basically included “#1: Keep your mouth shut”, exactly?

What led you to make up that this was said? Also, you realize there are other countries in the world where books are banned…right?

So that they can identify you and your friend ride together frequently and they need to make sure they can link you if you decide not to bring your work cell and AirPods to the “illegal” protest you rode with your friend to as part of your “domestic terror organization” since you and your friend also happened to go shooting at that gun range that one time for his birthday, and you were once in a Walmart with some other “co-conspirator”. The types of allegations that have already been used to smear citizens and officials alike. So yes, it is very helpful…to the “them”, not the “us”.

And all along, the people will say they had no idea what was really happening that they kept voting for, while deep down, they knew exactly what they were voting for and why. And that description doesn’t apply to a single party. If you disagree with either sides totalitarianism and their march toward it, you will eventually be branded and potentially arrested on whatever charge will prevent you from voting in the future. Or at least that’s how it goes any/everywhere else that has gone down that path. Hopefully cooler heads in both parties prevail. It always saddens me that the non-“decision makers” of both parties don’t just band together to get things done they both can agree on (which is a lot). There is a lot more people at the bottom than the top in those houses, yet they both willingly kiss the ring of their leaders.

Our vibe-coded paper finds a vibe-coded service couldn’t vibe-code AI to vibe-code a …

Ah yes, the good old “E2E”E. Is it the kind where they say the Server is an “end” and therefore that makes it E2E?

I do love how everything is always “vibe-coded” regardless of any amount of effort, collaboration, or oversight that may have gone into the use of any AI. It really captures the nuances of the conversation.

Did those other companies literally steal the collective works of most citizens to do business?

No? Then that’s probably why not, don’t you think?

Out of curiosity, did you willfully choose to not understand the circumstances that prosecutors are being forced to carry hundreds of cases, too many to even read before they are in court, and then they are forced to stand in front of judges and face contempt while they are asked to explain why the government, who the prosecutor has no real control over, is violating yet another judicial order?

It isn’t just a matter of prosecutors picking and choosing…it’s underfunding, DOGE, and then those that are left are treated as adversarial the moment they complain about conditions or case loads. (Just like your comment does.)

Very true, though it isn’t like we need to look very far to find similar instances of government and media collusion to control stories, laws passed to protect companies from liability for direct causally linked chemical dumping known to induce tumors, cancer, neurological diseases and other things, so on and so forth.

Every country seems willing to trade the lives or livelihood of citizens, much less people of other countries, to ensure their status quo. Some just pay more lip service to “rights” they will violate at the drop of a hat when push comes to shove.

“But you can be lucky to get a lower-than-cost-of-living adjustment each year if you stay and don’t move jobs! Wait, why are you leaving??”

Are you really trying to equate murder with naming a Bluetooth device and that a child should have their life ruined on the same scale as if they were equivalent in impact or intent, with little knowledge of the actual situation or intent?

Weird how you want kids to be punished for stupid mistakes. If you drive, you probably put more people lives in danger last week than that kids fitness tracker. When you speed, you put lives in danger (statistical fact, none of that “but I am good driver crap”) — will you ask for the death penalty if a cop sees you going 1mph over?

Or do you only want strong punishment for others as is usually the case with such opinions?