So much this. I started using it during Covid, and it’s been so great that I prefer Sams over any other shopping experience.

Clearly you haven’t spent 3 minutes playing with StableDiffusion. AI has already plumbed the depths of human awfulness.

If you only do the easy part, then yes that’s infinitely replaceable. Being a pretty face is exactly that, and AI can do that all day long.

Being actually entertaining and engaging, though, is a different story, and AI is struggling to pick that up. And of course teams of corporate marketers continually fail at this.

But yes, the “job” of “being attractive on the internet” can now be outsourced to machines.

Is it “don’t use them and just keep track of your stuff”? Because that seems like the most right answer here.

Hence people falling back to “I don’t care” as a defense mechanism. The world is too big, and there’s too much awful happening, to emotionally invest in all of it. Not and stay sane. It’s so much easier to narrow focus to your own life and pursuits, and let everything else be what it is.

And so we get these useless platitudes, because “I don’t care about that” can be both true and socially unacceptable at the same time.

New socially acceptable ways to say “I don’t give a crap”.

Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.

That’s…a good portion of the free email providers on the planet. Even if companies are using this list as a filter for signups, it’s only going to be for a limited time.

Companies want new accounts. They don’t mind very much if those accounts are fake - big numbers get investor attention. It only takes a handful of support cases with “I tried to register but it says my email address isn’t allowed” before the C-suite makes it clear to IT that this filter is no longer in sync with the corporate strategy.

Unfortunately DoD is right. PFAS are terrible things, but they’re used everywhere (including consumer goods at an astonishing rate) because they’re really effective. Once there are good alternatives, yes let’s ban them forever, but until then we’d all notice their absence in our goods in a big bad way.

According to the rental company I use for work travel, I’ve driven 33 different brand new cars this year, primarily sedans and small SUVs, all ICE (not a lot of EV on rental lots). Every single one had the auto start/stop feature.

Vehicles without it exist, especially as you mention full and partial electrics. But I’m perfectly comfortable with how I represented the situation based on my own experiences.

It’s not explicitly required by law, but that doesn’t make it any less mandatory. It’s one of those “we’re not saying you have to, we’re just saying we’ll beat you up if you don’t” rules federal agencies (EPA, in this case) love so much.

Car and Driver explains some of the reasoning here, though they forget to mention efficiency standards that are explicitly mandated.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a19561461/automakers-increasingly-offer-ways-to-deactivate-stopstart-systems-temporarily/

Oh, sorry. American cars are require to ship with a feature that shuts the engine off at stop lights, and restarts it when you take your foot off the brake. It’s done to supposedly help the environment, which it doesn’t do in the least and is also incredibly irritating.

So car hackers reconfigure their cars to disable that feature.

Cars are computers. All those fancy features run on software. Software can be patched to get rid of unpleasant functionality.

It’s not always easy, but it’s doable, and the more of these stupid features they add, the more people spend time working on undoing them.

It’s been much better for me, haven’t had an unsolicited e-mail hit my inbox yet.

Why would a union help at all? Organized workers won’t change the financial and legal obligations at the top. It won’t drive the focus away from quarterly earnings. Unions protect the workers, they don’t drive company culture.

There is no saving Google. The only way out of the hole they’re in is to have the integrity not to fall in in the first place.

Can’t wait to patch that out, should be as fun as that dumbshit auto-shutoff they have now.

An overreaction by members of the board that wanted to keep AI development slow and “safe”. Sudden news that there was a major advancement toward AGI (which they believe will destroy humanity, there’s a seriously a whole cult around this in AI research circles right now) that they hadn’t been told about sent them off the deep end. Those board members thought they could fire Altman and throw the brakes on, not anticipating that 700 employees would side against them and potentially migrate to Microsoft where the “AI ethics” would have no influence at all.

They shot their shot and lost massively, for themselves and their fellow believers. That attitude toward AI is now being labeled a business liability in the minds of every decision maker in the whole AI world.

Same, I view the whole internet through uBlock and a pihole, so my value as an “impression” is virtually zero.

I’m not against for-profit websites making some money (and I run my own website, which generates a whopping $0), but Google has jumped the shark with their sketchy malware bullshit, and I’m starting to root for that organization to die.

These shenanigans have me rapidly transitioning from “I don’t want to see your annoying ads” to “I don’t want you to make any money at all”.

Well that puts the “Ethical Altruism” board members’ willingness to risk it all on such a wild dice roll in more context.

It’s probably lost their entire movement any influence on the future of AI research, but them’s the breaks.