I have a really distinct memory of finding a bunch of these in a friend’s house when I was a kid and every one was empty. After watching the TC video I think it’s more likely I just wasn’t pressing hard enough and had no way to know that. Anyway, I can see why they stopped making them.

The argument is that google uses integration between its own ad network and YouTube to outcompete any similar service. If anyone else tries to launch a video platform and sell ad space to google, which is likely given that google owns the world’s largest ad network, it’s in googles best interest to either give their own competitor an unfavorable deal or to completely lock them out of their ad marketplace.

If YouTube and google were forced to operate as independent companies it eliminates this conflict of interest.

I don’t understand the bottled water thing either but I think the rise of things like delivery services and subscriptions can be linked to increasing workloads and decreasing community assistance.

If every member of your household is also working a full time job your time becomes significantly more valuable.

I don’t see how we can ever get to this point without solving vergence accommodation conflict, which even Apple seems not to have a plan for. I truly don’t understand the money pouring into AR tech at this point in time.

So does B make this basically a non-starter? Seems like you’re never going to get someone to cooperate with this (not that I blame them).

This article doesn’t seem to support this conclusion at all 🤔

I feel like people are missing one of the more heinous aspects of this, which is that it injured thousands of people and only managed to kill ~10 of their targets. The outcome of this attack is going to be general terror and potentially hundreds of life altering injuries but very little military advantage.

I think we also need levels of PII or something, maybe a completely different framework.

There’s this pattern I see at work where you want to have a user identifiable by some key, so you generate that key when an account is created and then you can pass that around instead of someone’s actual name or anything. The problem though, is that as soon as you link that value to user details anywhere in your system that value itself becomes PII because it could be used to correlate more relevant PII in other parts of your system. This viral property it has creates a situation where a stupid percentage of your data must be considered PII because the only way it isn’t is if it can be shown that there is no way to link the data to anybody’s personal information across every data store in the company.

So why is this a problem? Because if all data is sensitive none of it is. It creates situations where the production systems are so locked down that the only way for engineers to do basic operations is to bend the rules, and inevitably they will.

Anyway, I don’t know what the solution is but I expect data leaks will continue to be common passed the point when the situation is obviously unsustainable

In my experience most Starbucks workers will just let you say small/medium/large without questioning it.

That’s another good example. The Trump/Putin kissing mural is a great example of something that ends up being homophobic rather than partisan.

So you think it should be illegal?

If you used it to slander your neighbor, it would not be legal.

You’re entirely ignoring my point, I’m not trying to pass the video off as real therefore it’s not slander.

You keep referring to this as revenge porn which to me is a case where someone spreads nudes around as a way to punish their current or former partner. You could use AI to generate material to use as revenge porn, but I bet most AI nudes are not that.

Think about a political comic showing a pro-corporate politician performing a sex act with Jeff bezos. Clearly that would be protected speech. If you generate the same image with generative AI though then suddenly it’s illegal even if you clearly label it as being a parody. That’s the concern. Moreover, the slander/libel angle doesn’t make sense if you include a warning that the image is generated, as you are not making a false statement.

To sum up why I think this bill is kinda weird and likely to be ineffective, it’s perfectly legal for me to generate and distribute a fake ai video of my neighbor shooting a puppy as long as I don’t present it as a real video. If I generate the same video but my neighbor’s dick is hanging out, straight to jail. It’s not consistent.

That’s arguably a better rule than the more traditional flat-fee penalties, as it curbs the impulse to treat violations as cost-of-business. A firm that makes $1B/year isn’t going to blink at a handful of $1000 judgements.

No argument there but it reinforces my point that this law is written for Taylor swift and not a random high schooler.

You’d be liable for producing an animated short staring “Definitely Not Mickey Mouse” under the same reasoning.

Except that there are fair use exceptions specifically to prevent copyright law from running afoul of the first amendment. You can see the parody exception used in many episodes of south park for example and even specifically used to depict Mickey Mouse. Either this bill allows for those types of uses in which case it’s toothless anyway or it’s much more restrictive to speech than existing copyright law.

Not convinced on this one

It seems like the bill is being pitched as protecting women who have fake nudes passed around their school but the text of the bill seems more aimed at the Taylor swift case.

1 The bill only applies where there is an “intent to distribute”

2 The bill talks about damages being calculated based on the profit of the defendant

The bill also states that you can’t label the image as AI generated or rely on the context of publication to avoid running afoul of this law. That seems at odds with the 1st amendment.

Yeah, that does feel like it could help reduce housing prices. There is no such tax in most parts of the US, but San Francisco passed a vacancy tax that just went into effect this year. If that works out hopefully other municipalities look into a similar scheme.

Are corporations more likely to be slumlords? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known who owns a rental property has been a complete asshole, but I’ve only known a few.

Owning part of a larger building is actually much more complicated than simply owning a house. I’m not sure everyone would actually want that even if they could buy the unit they live in at a low price.

Generally it’s not destroying undeveloped land, but fixing up dilapidated houses so that they are livable.

Having a progressive tax based on number of homes owned may work, but you would need to rewrite quite a bit of real estate law to make it actually effective. Obviously corporations would not be allowed to own houses to avoid people owning through shell companies, but you would also have to draw a line so corporations could own larger apartment complexes and mixed use buildings. You also do want builders to be able to temporarily own houses for the purpose of building and selling them as well as corporate flippers.

Frankly, I think it’s too complicated to expect on a national level.

I feel like banning corporations from owning housing isn’t the panacea people expect it to be. It’s pretty impractical when you start talking about larger buildings and mixed use housing, and I’m not convinced it’s really a big driver of the problem.

I think a steep land value tax is a more workable solution. It incentivizes anyone who holds non-productive property (vacant homes in this case) to either make better use of the land or sell it. This also has the benefit of impacting individuals who own second homes or have mostly empty airbnbs.

Property taxes are insufficient for this purpose because they are generally based on the value of the home rather than just the land, so not only are they easier to game, but it disincentivizes improving the property.

I have three drives in my computer. So they’re labeled C:, D:, and E:

That’s the default configuration but there’s actually no guarantee that those drives map bijectively to physical devices.

He has been a terrible candidate though. If the polling is accurate and trump has a slight lead in popular vote, Biden has less than a 5% chance of winning the election (according to Nate Silver’s models). Unfortunately, this is probably optimistic as polling has overestimated the democratic vote in the last 2 presidential elections including the one that included these same two candidates.