Sure, it’s just a way to raise taxes on the public without calling it that. Upside is they bring in a lot of money quickly. Downside is they do a fuckton of irreparable damage to the US economy, the standard of living of people in the USA, and a fair bit of collateral damage to the rest of the world. But at least Elon gets his tax breaks for another couple of years so yay!
The funny thing is that it’s supposed to stimulate US manufacturing. Like companies are going to invest years of time and billions of dollars building factories and moving production to the US, because of a tariff system that changes every 2 days.
Yay, now when your coworkers suggest getting some sushi and you use your laptop to look up the nearest restaurant, you’re going to get a paperclip pop up saying “It looks like you’re trying to get back to that tentacle porn hentai you nutted to last night. Would you like help with jerking off?”
I had a feeling he would try something like this. If you only need to convince 57 thousand people, throwing money at them is a very real option. But I never imagined he would go so cheap. 2 million dollars for every man woman and child would only cost the USA 120 billion dollars. Not a bad price for Greenland. 10k is a fucking insult.
Seems to me it’s an efficiency problem.
If you want to send an email to someone, you don’t send it to a mailing list of all your contacts. You just send it to the person to whom it concerns. But suppliers, who want potential customers to be aware of their product, are just sending their message to as many people as possible. And even targeted advertising isn’t useful because it aims to promote one product rather than helping customers to make a balanced assessment of all the choices available. Plus it’s typically unsolicited and therefore an intrusion and an unwanted waste of time and attention.
People out there who want that product need to know what’s on offer and who offers the best quality and value for money, which would have to come from an independent source. Independent review sites are a very good alternative to advertising, and maybe they could do more to promote new products and inform customers about things which would suit their needs, which would be a cost effective way to help suppliers reach their customers. That sounds a lot like advertising but if it were truly independent and on-demand, it wouldn’t be. In theory AI might do a good job of this, but it’s so open to abuse, it’s a natural pathway to push whoever pays for promotion. If advertising were illegal, I wonder how you would police that.
More broadly, if we rely on reviewers to help customers find what they need, how can we ensure they are independent and fair? Maybe if there were a network of independent reviewers, they could act as a check on each other, if a reviewer consistently favors one brand when the rest don’t, it could be somehow highlighted and shown up as a bias.
If you were 4 and now you are 44 then you might be an integer variable. If sister is also a variable, we don’t know when she was allocated. She might also be an integer constant in which case she’s arguably immortal.
If your parents had another daughter in the meantime (or if your older brother became female), “my sister” would still be a valid reference, to a completely different person.
D can also happen if the 00:45 job was before the 00:15 job, which thanks to the magic of daylight savings, is also possible
I have a taxi company. On one night, one of my drivers did two jobs, one dispatched at 00:15, the other at 00:45, and he clocked off at 02:15. How long was he working for?
A) 1 hour
B) 2 hours
C) 3 hours
D) 2 hours 30 minutes
E) any of the above
At all levels too. I mean, why the 24 hours a day fluorescent lights so you don’t know night from day? How does that help? Hell, how does it even make more money? Even with senior management, the cruelty is the point.
I think the article is missing the point on two levels.
First is the significance of this data, or rather lack of significance. The internet existed for 20-some years before the majority of people felt they had a use for it. AI is similarly in a finding-its-feet phase where we know it will change the world but haven’t quite figured out the details. After a period of increased integration into our lives it will reach a tipping point where it gains wider usage, and we’re already very close to that.
Also they are missing what I would consider the two main reasons people don’t use it yet.
First, many people just don’t know what to do with it (as was the case with the early internet). The knowledge/imagination/interface/tools aren’t mature enough so it just seems like a lot of effort for minimal benefits. And if the people around you aren’t using it, you probably don’t feel the need.
Second reason is that the thought of it makes people uncomfortable or downright scared. Quite possibly with good reason. But even if it all works out well in the end, what we’re looking at is something that will drive the pace of change beyond what human nature can easily deal with. That’s already a problem in the modern world but we aint seen nothing yet. The future looks impossible to anticipate, and that’s scary. Not engaging with AI is arguably just hiding your head in the sand, but maybe that beats contemplating an existential terror that you’re powerless to stop.
It does make me wonder what safeguards if any Lemmy has against such shittification. What system might work for that? Maybe if you had a way that users could flag other users as trolls or quality contributors, and those flags carry vastly more weight if the person flagging is themselves a quality contributor. That would perhaps create a stable community, not necessarily a good one but at least one which resists change, yet allows a way in for new people.