"The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me,"

Mindblowing is that companies make all the claims about AI that are 100% unfounded. "generate any image/video"... No it can't. "fluent conversation"... Unless I have to constantly remind it about the thing it said two prompts ago that it forgot. And I PAY for AI access.

It's not anywhere near impressive. It's a party trick at best and dangerously misleading at worst.

...who for some reason deserve to be protected from automation more than fucking literally everybody else, apparently.

I agree with this post. A $200 million failure clearly refutes the first portion of the sentence: "Concord wasn't a bad game, but it just didn't generate enough interest with enough players". Heck, where I work, a $200 million failure would have someone sent to jail.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

AI doesn't "siphon up and launder" code any more than your brain does. Both *can* memorize (which is why sometimes comedians can accidentally steal a joke), but both are also learning from patterns.

AI isn't going to make people stop contributing to open source.

The Las Vegas Fry's is still vacant, too. Best Buy has this market to itself.

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Embrace the power of "and."

a.) There's little interest in interrogating the downsides of generative AI, such as the environmental impact, the data theft impact, the treatment and exploitation of data workers.

That's all the press ever fucking talks about, to the point where you've got people who use the cloud for everything bitching about AI like the rest of their cloud use isn't impacting the environment. Also, analyzing data isn't theft.

b.) There's little interest in considering the extent to which, by incorporating generative AI into our teaching, we end up supporting a handful of companies that are burning billions in a vain attempt to each achieve performance that is a scintilla better than everyone else's.

People need to learn about and use open source AI. There are plenty of very good options.

c.) There's little interest in thinking about what's going to happen when the LLM companies decide that they have plateaued, that there's no more money to burn/spend, and a bunch of them fold—but we've perturbed education to such an extent that our students can no longer function without their AI helpers. ...so AI is going to magically disappear if/when it plateaus and there are still gazillions of customers who want to use it? Some companies will probably go under when the investment cash dries up, but not all of them. AI isn't going to vanish.

Oh, and if all those companies crap out, open source AI is still going to exist. Those models won't magically vanish either.

Did you just pick a random person to say that to?

...probably aren't going to do their research, and will be willing to buy a shittier version for a higher price.

This camera is a fashion accessory for shallow people.

It's a good way of laying off the people who are good enough at what they do that they can find other jobs.

Found the office building real estate investor. Or the sociopath from upper management.