I wouldn’t mind the idea of everything going digital. So long as we actually own the digital copies we buy. So long also as we are able to continually access said digital copies. We wouldn’t be having this physical vs digital debate going on for so long, if the practices of what companies like Sony and other media companies have been going about with handling digitally purchased content.
It’s a very stupid easy of a solution that has been continually fumbled time and time again. Because greed got in the way.
Elon Musk.
Ohh you didn’t mean in that way.
Adding an AI helper to the FAA ATC system.
What? Too soon?
Subtitles.
They are so annoying and they didn’t need to be. You’re watching a movie and there’s one or two scenes where someone is speaking Chinese or something, so you have to turn on subs, only to turn them back off again after the scene.
It would have been so much better if you just let me select:
- Which language(s) I understand
- For the parts that are not in a language I understand, which subtitle language I would like.
It’s that simple. Just one additional attribute for each subtitle: the original language of the speech being subtitled and the whole thing could have been so much more useful.
Ask me again in 20 years and the answer will be self-driving cars. They have the potential to be great but I don’t see it going well.
I don’t see them ever working in city traffic because as much as I hate to admit it, you literally need to break traffic laws to get around sometimes, especially during rush hour. In like 2017 I took an Uber to a concert and it was when they were doing extremely early prototypes of self driving cars. Didn’t even know I was taking a self driving car until I got in.
This thing couldn’t drive on highways so we went downtown instead and it waited to yield for a left hand turn for no joke like 10 minutes before it was possible. Bunch of people just honking and going around us (illegally). The only viable way to take that turn is to creep forward until you’re a sitting duck in the middle of the intersection, then gun it and run the red light.
This also is all in Pittsburgh which we have some of the oldest and most fucked roads because of the geography and the paths for them were laid out in the late 1700s / early 1800s. Uber picked Pittsburgh because our roads were the most “challenging” to learn on and do R&D then one of their cars killed a pedestrian who was walking and they canned the whole project.
How cool could AI be if corpos hadn’t thrown the environment, artists and creators, the home PC market, and basically all ethics under the bus in implementing it?
Okay, so as a cartoon fan, I grew up watching a show called Chop Sockey Chooks. Gotta say that this is more of CN’s fault, but they absolutely should have handled it better. Dropped so quickly and Star Wars was one of the big reasons. That show had, IMO, so much more style and charm than the Star Wars show that killed it. I mean, a show about kung fu chickens fighting an evil piranha that looks like a lima bean in a gigantic mall city is a pretty great idea… not including the voice acting for Chuckie in like the first couple episodes when aired in England. But in the end, that sweet sweet Star Wars money was calling CN’s greedy pocktbooks.
Also, on the subject of CN, Summer Camp Island season 1. I have a suspiciously strong feeling they decided to do a weekend long marathon of the first 20 or so episodes on Boomerang on repeat in an attempt to kill the show as a means to prove that nobody actually wanted a new show and so that they could continue airing just the same slop they had already been airing at the time in 2018. Besides, I also have gripes with season 6 and HBO also because, IIRC, there was a whole “will they, won’t they release it” kind of thing going on. Might need to fact check myself on that one, though, since it did get released… or leaked and I just got leaked copies.
At first I did not mind ads on webpages because it was off to the side or at the top, and that was it. But those motherfuckers had to have more, so they made pop ups, and we all got pop up blockers until it became built into every browser. Then they started animating and autoplaying audio in their ads, and that was too far. So I looked into adblocking just to block the obnoxious bullshit, but it turns out it just blocked everything, which had the added benefit of improved flow of webpages because you didn’t have space taken up for ads at the top, sides, and in between content. Never looked back and never will.
The whole ad situation certainly doesn’t help when nowadays you could just load a webpage containing a seemingly normal looking ad that was actually specifically crafted to secretly install spyware on your device without you even needing to interact with it.
I mean, the odds of running into one is not something I think we’ll be able to figure out any time soon, so ad blocking is definitely an essential tool to keep you safe online.
AI in general, IMO it’s actually a very useful tool, Had it not been shoved into everything that makes no sense to… if we didn’t have an absurd amount of companies trying to make “frontier models” that require carpeting the country in data centers, If we put more focus on… self run AIs where people could train it on their own stuff, in their own environment, without leading into a dependency on outside cloud resources.
US is basically doing the cellular race all over again, except on something so much more stupidly environmentally destructive and expensive.
(IE when the cellular race went on, we had basically 8 or so companies building towers that only were compatible with their own networks… rather than just making the towers public infrastructure and allowing providers to compete with 1 array of towers, instead of everyone making their own).
People who knew me were shocked I was against AI since it seemed right up my alley. Imo it should have remained one of those niche tech tools scattered across a couple githubs requiring you to build from source and self host. Not some garbage slop generator trying to appeal to the general consumer.
Building on that, just having the LLMs stick to data crunching or software troubleshooting or medical scanning woulda been enough, but since techbros insisted it’s gotta make art or do other tasks that people actually like doing, anything with a script that covers a lot of data has been ruined forever
it wasnt good for medical scans either, they had to use so much painstaking scans from different patients, and reviews multiple times by Radiologists, they got lucky. plus the issue with it patients getting potentially a fake diagnosis from the AI is too high anyways, and the insurance likely doesnt want to pay for an expensive mistake(chemo for a non-disease)_
(IE when the cellular race went on, we had basically 8 or so companies building towers that only were compatible with their own networks… rather than just making the towers public infrastructure and allowing providers to compete with 1 array of towers, instead of everyone making their own).
Well we now have like dozens of mobile phone companies who are subsidiaries of parent companies who have companies that somehow own even parent companies. It’s a mess but that whole ordeal still goes on and it’s such a bigger mess than before. I would’ve preferred it if we were down to 8 or less companies, provided they’re not monopolistic.
Connected glasses. I’m all for privacy-respecting HUD that connects to your phone, I think that’s cool. But recording others? Connecting it to Meta? Fuck that.
I have some XReal glasses that are essentially just a display. They have an accelerometer so you can position the picture in space (3dof), sonI can use them as a second monitor for my laptop when I’m on the go by making the screen hover over my laptop, then have the glasses fade to.clear when I look down.
They have no camera. No cloud connection. They’re treated as a monitor by my laptop.
They also have a separate device (called the Beam), which is a phone-sized Android tablet (no data connection aside from wifi), that can be used to give a little more immersion experience and that I’ll use to play movies while flying.
I like them.
smartphones and AR glasses are things of my younger days dreams but I did not anticipate the wierd corpo peeping around the whole thing.
I had a similar thought. A nice HUD for navigation would be nice. But we live in the bad place, so it’s all privacy invading enshittifying trash.
jtrek figured it out? jtrek? This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts. Ow.
Glasses as monitors, or even AR/VR (without cameras preferably, just plain old see through, but not connected to the mothership) cool as hell, actually looking for the right thing.
I can imagine a use case for camera enabled glasses, blind people, connect to a phone local vision model and speech synthesis, great.
Siphon directly to Meta? Oh hell no!
Sometimes I wonder how many of other people’s photos I’m in without knowing it. But for me that’s just a wistful idle thought - I really don’t get why so many people get super upset about cameras. Cameras have been around for more than a century. People have been taking home movies and videos for at least half of that time. Why the recent surge of outrage, and where does expecting privacy in public even come from?
Heck things like statements being sent digitally being sent as pdfs by email is a big thing for me. I find it hilarious they point to security issues, which are easily fixed by obscuring account numbers or such or you know. have encrypted communication at least with the major providers, when security is so lax in other ways. I can get it, sometimes, sent by physical mail which is in no way more secure. There is a whole lot of digital transfermation that completely ignores business norms of the past. I think there needs to be a push to not treat online things as special cases and have them function like our meatspace interactions.
For AI I like to compare how the internet progressed. There were things that go back to the 60’s but by the 70’s there was email but internet was not widely adopted until the 90’s. So from start of email to wide adoption was about 20 years. So chatgpt was like 2019 and wide adoption was less than 10 years. I think if it had more time to back at the reasearch level they might have been able to work on quality.
The orange idiot heading the USA
So you’re saying that you wouldn’t have minded him in office if he was a better president?
No, I’m saying I would have liked it better if his execution was more effective. 👂🔫
Oh damn lol
I’m only being partially truthful here - last thing we need is to turn that idiot into a martyr.
You’ll get no arguments from me.
So you’re saying that you wouldn’t have minded him in office if he was a better president?
probably not, but if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle
They Live - constantly hailed on social media as one of the greatest films in cinematic history, if not the greatest. The concept is fantastic, and the reflections on real-world propaganda and other forms of mind control are thought-provoking, but they certainly don’t provoke any thought among the characters. The only part most viewers remember and talk about, by a longshot, is the 6- or 7-minute alley fight about putting on sunglasses. My favorite scene was in a big room with a giant screen showing a galaxy, where business people were stepping onto a platform and apparently being teleported into space. What was the deal there? It looked like wealthy earthlings were doing business with a galactic civilization. But it was just a quick throwaway scene. I wanted to see where they were going. I mean I’m not saying it was a bad movie, just that it could have been a hell of a lot better.
sounds like they need a they live prequel.
They’ve Been Conceived
Automobiles, if they had been allowed by oil barons to be manufactured as EVs the first time around as originally intended.
Quieter, cleaner, cheaper, our first national fuel grids would have been focused on far simpler to innovate and improve electric infrastructures instead of over a century of delay in energy technology innovation by its dependence on ancient and technologically stagnant oil reservoirs.
That wasn’t anything nefarious at the time.
There were a number of energy sources used for the early cars. Nobody new which would be best. Although wood fired boilers were obviously not going to last.It wasn’t until ground oil was discovered and quickly became the cheapest option did they all adopt that. Battery cars at the time were only good for a dozen miles, and way more expensive. So yah oil was the obvious choice for 2nd gen vehicles.
Lemmy hates to hear it, but there’s a shitload of energy in a gallon of refined oil, and there’s shitloads of oil. I don’t see anyway we got where we are today without it. Now it’s past time to cut it off.
Gasoline cars made industrialists money, but the rest of your assumptions are incorrect.
There were several electric vehicles in production in the early 1900s, 20-30 years after gasoline vehicles had been developed, popular because they were already more comfortable, reliable, cleaner and easier to fix and maintain, and would become more so as production improved.
Oil barons systematically bought out and destroyed all electric vehicle companies throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Until industrialists systematically destroyed electric vehicle infrastructure, the future of the automobile was either stagnant, largely unimprovable combustion engine vehicles that the world was forced into for a century, or electric vehicles which are much more easily improved but because they last longer and consume less fuel, don’t make exploitatatuve industrialists as much money.
If fuel companies and industrial capitalists hadn’t blocked and destroyed the potential of electric vehicles 100 years ago, EV technology would be decades ahead of where it is now and automobile exhaust and noise pollution would never have been a global issue in the first place.
After the turn of the 20th, electric vehicles were still a niche novelty marketed exclusively to wealthy women. And at a time when women needed a man to open a bank account for them. If you were stuck marketing to women in 1908, its because you had literally no other market for your product.
They lacked the power or range to actually do anything meaningful. The internal combustion engine while noisy, smelly, dirty, and complex, was able to do actual work. By 1920 a whole trucking industry suddenly existed, tractors and industrial farm equipment were becoming common. Engines were doing things electric vehicles couldn’t begin to match for decades more.
Like I said, cheep oil from the ground is what made all the difference. If that discovery was 30-50 later maybe electric could have gotten a foothold and become something. But that’s only a maybe.
Any shenanigans the early oil companies did (and there was much shenanigans) was unwarranted. Even with a perfectly fair market electric vehicles couldn’t compete at the time.
By the way, this is comming from someone who’s been drooling over electrics since the GM EV1, and loves his year old Ioniq 5. Today electric is superior in every way. 100 years ago that just wasn’t the case.
Oohhh boy. Cheaper oil didn’t eliminate automobiles, profit motive did, which is the critical difference here.
The “shenanigans” you’re referring to was the systematic dismantling of a superior vehicle industry that threatened entrenched interests.
If we pretend you’re correct and gasoline was invented after electric vehicles, you’d still be missing the point of this post.
The question is which inventions users would appreciate more if they had been implemented correctly.
If oil barons hadn’t deliberately killed the electric car in order to protect their investment in and dedication to crude oil as a fuel, I wouldn’t mind automobiles so much.
Because industrialists did collude to block the development of the electric car, streets have been loud and dirty and motor oil has been poisoning the earth for a century when none of that ever needed to happen.
Cheaper oil didn’t eliminate automobiles
Cheep oil enabled the wide spread use of automobiles. I don’t know why you’d think anyone said it eliminated them.
systematic dismantling of a superior vehicle industry
Not what I’m referring to. See Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) for details.
My point is, at the time Electric wasn’t superior. It was cleaner, easier, and nicer to operate, but far less capable. Hense inferior at the time.
If we pretend you’re correct and gasoline was invented after electric vehicles
The first “Electric Carrage” was invented in the 1830s. The first mas market version in the US was in 1890.
The process for refineing crude oil into other products such as gasoline, was invented in 1891.Because industrialists did collude to block the development of the electric car
First: The electric was made my industrialists also. There were no noble “good guys” in this environment.
Second: My point again, is it didn’t matter that the oil industrialists screwed over the electric industrialists. Electric at the time couldn’t begin to compete with internal combustion engines.Your “point” is that you don’t understand the question or answer.
Let me try to explain once more.
The question asks what do you wish was executed better so we’d have it today.
Your answer is early EVs at the turn of the 20th century.
My critique is that they executed as well as they could, it still wasn’t good enough.
Does that make sense now?
And we could have charged those electric vehicles with… checks notes… burned fossil fuels, just to lose efficiency for giggles.
Some y’all’s understanding of capitalism is straight childish. “There was always a better solution, but the evil capitalists held it down!”
Know why the world went with burning oil? Because it was the most bang (heh) for the buck. That simple. No evil men smoking cigars in back rooms required. Now we have better tech and can move on, but that wasn’t the case until recently.
Yes, in your utopian little world, we all could have worked together for the better solutions from the start. Oh, wait… would those solutions have cost more and consumers would have fucked those off? It must be an evil plot! (Though is mostly is at present time.)
Funny enough, I made the perfect meme last year to describe this conversation.
You’re just missing the term “path dependency”
The incredibly efficient ICE that loses 70%+ of generated power at peak efficiency?
The rapid advance of battery technology in just the last decade is one example of what the global fuel industry could have been, and electric cars would have kickstarted that.
Technologies build on what came before. We could not have had this new battery tech 30-years ago. That was my main point. Could we have evolved away from ICE sooner? You fucking bet! But not so much in the 20th century, and now it’s past time to press the attack on renewables.
Everybody swears you can’t do something until it’s done, then in hindsight, it was inevitable. The automobile industry could have stuck with EVs and chose not to because of short-sightedness, so a bunch of our technology is a century behind.
It happens.
I’m back to, technologies build on what came before. Lion battery factories weren’t possible without oil. We couldn’t have cranked out 18650s in the 70s, and why would we with oil so abundant? (OK, except for that one time. 🫤) Did evolution take a wrong turn lately? It often does!
Oil was so cheap and plentiful, and global warming wasn’t a thing. We can point to industry reports or ancient newspaper articles that saw it coming, but it wasn’t in the public conscious.
What I’m trying to spit out, and failing to do, is that getting away from oil is both a societal and technological evolution. In hindsight, of course we could have done it sooner! But there are those pesky societal and technological changes that hadn’t come yet.
You seem fun
Season 8
100% the major plot points are fine, they just weren’t done well at all.
I wouldn’t mind the idea of everything going digital. So long as we actually own the digital copies we buy.
Exactly why Valve/Steam is dominating. You don’t technically own it, you’re still depending on the good graces of Valve to serve you your game files in the future, but the confidence level is insanely high and they are privately traded so they don’t need to make line go up every quarter by cannibalizing their user base.
Yes but even I am questioning Valve themselves. We have an uncertain future of unanswered concerns as to what will actually happen once Gaben passes. We know for a fact that several potential companies are salivating at the idea of attempting to or outright acquiring Valve themselves.
Not all good things last. We’ve placed faith in many things that we thought was for our good and for the people. Only to watch them in time, devolve into the very things we are disappointed in what they’ve turned into.
That very value of owning digital games, under a new Valve leadership, could very well change, if things aren’t handled correctly.
Yah, it’s a question of trust and the modern age has taught me to have none in corporations, even privately owned, linux contributing, solid things like Valve. As a data hoarder I’d really like to store my library, for offline usage, seems eminently doable, lightly hacked steam client perhaps, moving target, but that’s OK for my old stuff. Anyone doing this sort of thing?
Absolutely. You can’t trust anyone. Maybe some day we can get legislation passed, but that would require a total reversal of power.
Is there way to download all your install files, at any rate? If there is, I imagine Steam’s servers are gonna crash the day after Gabe dies as everyone scrambles to secure their library.
Pirating. It’s all I can say.
| privately traded
You meant “private company”?
Yes. I think I assumed the opposite of publicly traded was privately traded?
You’re getting there! There is nothing to trade in a private company. People may own more or less of a private company via ownership of private shares, but it’s not what we think about when we use the terms “traded” or “shares”.
And is the difference that publicly traded corporations have stricter fiduciary requirements to shareholders? Because that’s why I’ve always heard Steam is able to hold the line on line must go up.
Fiduciary requirements are often overblown in conversations online. They do not require the CEO to show a profit, quarter after quarter. The idea is more like, “Do what’s best as best as you know, and don’t fuck anything up too badly or on purpose.”
For example, the CEO of my last company told the Board of Directors that he intended to lose money for two years while he built up our people and products. They applauded him! (We screwed around and made a profit anyway.)
But yes, private corporations have way more control over the company’s direction.
