“close to meaningless” sums up my expert opinion on the whole current AI hype machine sales pitch.

Highly tuned models for incredibly specific, not-dangerous use cases is the next pragmatic step. There’s a lot to excited about, in that very narrow band.

Anyone selling more than that is part of a con, or in very rare cases, doing genuine “fuck off and ask me again in a decade” kinds of research.

Yeah. There’s a very narrow corner that demands huge models, and that’s use cases where there’s no room for mistakes. That space is exciting, but also deeply bogged down in uncertainty, due both to laws and as-yet-undelivered, but 100% certainly coming-soon, law-creating-disasters.

Everywhere else, I suspect we’ve seen as good as we’re going to get, from current generation AI.

Tech firm CEOs know this too, but there’s not much interesting on the table to “bet the farm” on to court “swing for the fences” investors (gullible suckers) right now.

I understand that the poop emoji auto responder is all over getting this fixed, though. Nothing to worry about, if you own stock in Xitter.

If a woman (or anyone) says she wants or doesn’t want something don’t presume to know better than her.

Excellent advice. I’m quoting it again here in case anyone reading along missed it, because I wish someone had knocked this into my head before I made an ass of myself a few times.

in theory a natural diamond will hold its value over tim

The jig is up, on that one, or it’s about to be.

As an embarrassed possessor of a real diamond ring, I’m well aware that my grandchildren may well decide to pawn it on the cheap, considering its awful legacy. If others do the same, and considering the reserve supply, it’s not even going to be worth what we paid for it.

Just don’t go too big or it will be obvious that it’s not a diamond, because normal folks can’t afford huge diamonds.

Good point. But as someone who bought a diamond and still regrets it, I hope these younger wiser folks can embrace and normalize avoiding diamonds.

Anytime I see a wedding ring that’s clearly not a diamond, my respect for that union raises immediately.

As someone often paid to think like a criminal ( in order to stop criminals ), these look like a prime opportunity for a violent cartel to both stock up on ammo and launder money.

Come to think of it, that may be a meta-joke I missed in Borderlands.

The photo recognition ought to put a bit of a damper on it, but I feel like a motivated “investor” could find work-arounds (or just unwitting “mules”).

I’d short the stock

I would too, except the hard part isn’t predicting whether there will be consequences, it’s predicting when.

I don’t see what the big deal is. I store all kinds of sensitive information in plain text. SSNs, credit card numbers, birthdates and religious and political affiliation information.

The guy I bought it all from said it was okay, he stores it in plain text, too. (I’m joking, of course! Any information about you all that I’ve bought on the dark web, I’m storing responsibly.)

I agre. It maks no sense.

As someone else said, Pixel for Pixel analysis is probably too much compute time for them to bother. But they can do a quick checksum on the file, and they probably do.

Whether the image seriously affects your online fingerprint is mostly about whether a lot of users or only a few users use that exact profile picture.

If they few users have that exact profile picture, then it’s likely that they have a behavior tracking data set assigned to it, in case it’s valuable later.

It’s not that someone is sitting in a room correlating and judging your choice of picture. It’s just that every aspect of your web browsing that can be cheaply tracked and correlated is tracked and correlated.

An image that too many people use is likely also correlated, but won’t be heavily weighted in deciding that traffic is yours, because the error rate is too high.

That’s why I always set my profile image to “Mickey Mouse” while I listen to music by The Beatles. It makes me invisible. Also I just really like Mickey Mouse.

“Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits.”

Well that’s a relief. For a minute there, I was worried.

The assholes pushing this crap sure are lucky they outnumber us…(\sarcasm)

Netflix can’t do what got them to the top.

They can’t grow that way but they could easily hold on and remain profitable, popular and successful.

They were well on their way to enjoying “Kleenex” or “Oreo” stable market success, but their leadership and shareholders apparently aren’t satisfied with winning.

I’ll take “Organizations that made it to the top by doing something different, only to fall under leadership that doesn’t understand what made them successful and descend into ruins” for 200, Alex.

Seriously, Jeopardy team - this is a rich category:

• Netflix advertisements.
• Zoom mandates staff return to offices.
• Microsoft forgets what the “P” in “PC” stands for.
• Toys R Us implements a shitty holiday gift returns policy.
• Sears decides to sacrifice reputation for quarterly stock price gains.
• Walgreens decides bottom-of-the-barrel incompetent pharmacists can uphold their “get it all done in one visit” secret sauce.
• Radio Shack decides that once-every-two-years cellphone contract sales are the future for holding passionate electronics hobbyists’ loyalty.

Oof. But yeah. Fair.

I want to go on record that sometimes I just wear sandals with socks.

I think we should all try to support anything that lets rich old bureaucrats kill themselves faster if unwanted side effects can be minimized.