Sure, but I don’t think the price balance was historically close to today. Appliances may have been, relatively speaking, a much bigger investment to the point where paying a repair technician for a service call was usually the better option. Today, not so much.

I have a ten year old Samsung washer. It started leaking badly a couple years ago. I opened it up and replaced one small rubber tube for $5. If I had to pay someone $500 to fix it, I’d have been better off buying a whole new appliance. I won’t be surprised if this is the only repair I have to do for many more years.

I suspect this is actually what’s changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it’s only a little more than fixing their old one. And when they replace, they tend to think of the old brand as bad, and look for a new brand.

So everyone has negative stories about their appliances across just about every brand, except Speed Queen because those are so expensive, you’ll actually pay a repair person to fix it instead of replacing it. It’s like how some sports car brands are notoriously high maintenance, but what Ferrari owner cares about maintenance costs?

Decades ago the relative cost of a washer or dryer was much higher compared to repair labor. You’d pay the Maytag man to come fix your dryer if it had a problem.

But, it takes a lot of work by designers to get the fake lighting to look natural. Raytracing would help avoid that toil if the game is forced RT.

don’t understand what they’ve written

Well first of all, they didn’t write it.

It is not expensive, assuming you don’t mind giving someone else your microplastics. In fact, you can get paid about $100 to do it in most places. How? Apharesis is exactly what is performed when donating plasma.

Someone wearing a mask tries to kidnap you, draw your handgun and put a hole in their face. I’m surprised this exact situation hasn’t landed in the supreme court yet. Pretty sure it won’t be favorable to the masked goons.

At least with social media, you can choose what content to engage with or scroll past. A lot of TV news is fear mongering non-news entertainment. I don’t care that someone got arrested after a high speed chase. I don’t care about someone’s dog charity. What your local Sinclair is peddling, let alone Fox, is just about getting you to come back over and over for the ads, and it’s a continuous feed of trash someone else is deciding to put in your face and dub important.

Feeds also often let you mark content as “not interested” to better personalize for what you consider relevant and newsworthy. So, it’s not necessarily a one-way street there either.

Summarization is one of the things LLMs are pretty good at. Same for the other thing where Wikipedia talked about auto-generating the “simple article” variants that are normally managed by hand to dumb down content.

But if they’re pushing these tools, they need to be pushed as handy tools for editors to consider leveraging, not forced behavior for end users.

If nonviolence gets you want you want, you don’t resort to violence in the first place. Did the author account for this and consider whether resistance categorized as violent began as nonviolent?

Humans apply judgment, because they have emotion. LLMs do not possess emotion. Mimicking emotion without ever actually having the capability of experiencing it is sociopathy. An LLM would at best apply patterns like a sociopath.

At the end of the day, most internet forums exist as entertainment. It doesn’t really matter whether the text is from real people or not, what matters to Reddit and other platforms is that real users show up to pump numbers and get served ads. It’s kinda like how pro sports is not latently about athleticism, it’s just another entertainment platform to get butts into seats and eyes onscreen to make a buck.

If bot content gets the eyeballs, so what? Guess the content being fictional doesn’t really matter. People don’t like being lied to, but then nobody is claiming everything you read on the internet is true in the first place.

Anyway, to all the people who imagined humanity’s future would end up looking different than WALL-E: sorry to disappoint. You’ll get a hover recliner, at least.

Sorry I’m not into bracelets

gotta blast

Well yeah, they have no natural aversion to lying and manipulation.

But it legally doesn’t. That is why AI has not taken over in high liability fields. Morons are testing the waters and learning that AI mistakes make no difference in a court room, and if anything are grounds for further evidence of negligence.

The big bet now, I think, is whether those popup insurance policies regarding coverage for losses relates to AI usage end up profitable. If so, that is what will lead to truly dystopian stories like “AI piloted passenger jet crashes, United Airlines fined x million dollars but happily continues using AI pilots because insurance covered the fine and it’s just a cost of doing business”

Do you really think it would have a sticker price of $17,000 in the US if it were legal to sell?

Social media has been a toilet for a decade, but people keep drinking the shitwater. Making it more turd flavored will do nothing.

Stop it, you’re only encouraging them with your eyeballs that translate into ad dollars

Yes

OpenAI hasn’t even replaced their own developers, and they push out the biggest LLM turd around.