Does your company not have water coolers or a modern equivalent? I may not always want to have a human interaction with my coworkers, but if I'm going to have one it's going to damn well be like a human being.

The AI companies want to slow down because they've got a decent product and the bills are coming due. The "omg our AI escaped the sandbox" started as PR, then they talked about slowing down, then Trump said 'nah, China', then they doubled down on the "escaped the sandbox". This is the Trump administration responding with a stronger "nah".

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but giving your LLM internet access and telling it to only use it for packages is not a sandbox.

If your time is worth the savings then why not? I have a feeling the prices reflect the general desirability of the neighborhood the McDonald's is located in so I doubt too many people are going to drive a few extra miles (particularly with gas being expensive) to save a dollar or two on a burger when they realize it means driving through the bad part of town.

The better question is if this will lead to an arbitrage market for burgers. You need not venture to the wrong side of the tacks when a brave Uber Eats driver will make the voyage to save $87.55 on a bulk order for a group of customers. I think I'm going to start working on a script. I'll pitch it to Hollywood as Blade Runner only more dystopian.

Adjusting for inflation, yes that will be the case. The price of insurance can't be less than the cost of dealing with all of the accidents that the insurance policies have to cover. If self-driving cars greatly reduce the rate of accidents then the cost of insurance will fall. I'm sure there will be some companies that are greedy and want to pocket the savings for themselves, but there will be greedy companies that want to poach their customers and who are willing to pocket just a little bit less.

Would you willingly pay your current insurance rates if another company were offering you the same coverage for lower cost? Do you regularly pay more for goods or services than you have to? If your answer is "no" then capitalism is working because you as a customer ultimately get to decide where you spend your money and if you're like everyone else and want to keep as much of that money as you can then it will incentivize companies to compete on price.

What would cause it to become unsustainable when it currently is? It will definitely be cheaper for a lot of people to get a car that is incapable of manual control, but insurance will also become cheaper for good drivers as a large chunk of what they pay is to cover for the bad drivers. I think future generations will largely avoid learn to drive unless they need to as a part of their job because a long commute isn't nearly as bad if a person doesn't need to operate a vehicle in traffic. But as self-driving cars get better and come into use, the accident rates will decrease and that will make insurance cheaper

They do that with everything. I remember when JMS said the studios pulled the same shit with Babylon 5 because they would find ways to attach unrelated production costs to the project so that it never made money. Anyone working in or with Hollywood that isn't asking for a percentage of revenue is just asking to get fucked over by Hollywood accountants. The government doesn't care if actors or directors get fucked over as long as taxes get paid so don't expect them to care about the problem or try to fix it with legislation.

Nothing is "escaping", it's a mix of bad prompting and marketing.

If you say 'you're not allowed to open this door' and it sidesteps the door entirely that's a bad sandbox with a technically inept operator.

The costs of nuclear are addressed all the time.

The problem is the nuke fanbois either ignore the costs or hand-wave them away: "Nuclear is only expensive because of protests and regulations. Next time will be different. Blah, blah, blah."

Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.

Tens of thousands of barrels of toxic waste were dumped near Catalina Island, but the vast majority are non-radioactive chemical waste.

DDT leaking from the barrels is a much bigger problem than nuclear waste and shows up in the local sea lion population.

Anyway, there's nothing realistic that we can do about it since any attempt to retrieve the barrels will likely make things worse.

A few days ago there was a story about how an AI store was failing horribly. It can't do that, but at the same time will destroy us? It's pretty clear that no one has any actual answers or little interest in being honest about the exact capabilities of AI when their bottom line depends on hype or their job position relies on prognosticating doom.

You're discounting the ability of the actor to bring something to the role that the director couldn't envision themselves. The whole point of having casting auditions is so the director can find an actor that either fits their own idea of the part or blows them away with something transformative that they could not have envisioned before seeing it. Not every actor is capable of that and not every part calls for it, but when it does happen it creates something best described as the magic of cinema. If this weren't the case, the phrase "Hello, Clarice" would be completely meaningless to everyone who reads this post, and yet there are some for whom it is not merely memorable, but evokes an entire range of emotions and even causes them to read it in a different voice. Tell me that Anthony Hopkins was just a middle man with a straight face.

That ship has already sailed for Blizzard. Their present success rests entirely on par performance, but I can't think of anything they've done recently that's excited me. The only genre where someone else hasn't come along and done better is RTS, but Blizzard themselves haven't made a new game of that type since StarCraft 2. Perhaps the same could be said for MMOs as nothing ever "killed" WoW, but the player base for that has diminished significantly since its heyday even if they can keep milking what they do have.

Eventually the remaining fab goodwill will run out and they'll have nothing left. I can see why they would want a union right now with Microsoft looking for anything they can cut, but if they aren't selling enough copies a union won't save them.

Perhaps /. is using AIs to generate the summaries now and they're not much better at that than they are at running stores.

This is a false equivalence. At some level, I agreed to the ToS for my phone, so the tracking on my phone is at least somewhat consensual (not enough, IMO, but there was SOMETHING).

I can use GrapheneOS or /e/OS or some other system that greatly-reduces the tracking, or I can leave my phone at home if I'm going to do something for which I don't want a third party to have a record. I can, to a certain extent, assess the amount of data that is acquired, either by using software to assess what my phone records, or looking through my account data (certainly Google and Apple don't show everything, but they show at least some things).

I didn't accept a EULA for Flock. I cannot query the data Flock has on me, or who made a query for that data, or the metadata that they have aggregated and for which they provide access.

If you can't see the difference between the two scenarios, I don't know what to tell you.

Yes, right now we're running into the problem where municipalities are turning "we don't have Flock" into a selling point because Flock became the Kleenex of ALPRs...but Axon is also getting at least some recognition in the space as well. It's not the cure, certainly, but I do think that the bipartisan, organized backlash against ALPRs is causing at least some tension as to whether the backlash will persist if the line item is still on the government ledgers.

Agreed; it is pretty nice to see those wearing MAGA hats and those wearing Planned Parenthood T-shirts sitting next to each other at city council meetings on the matter.

Given the fact that the most famous and most popular Blizzard games WERE CODED PRIMARILY BY BOOMERS (and some GenX; admittedly Mike Morhaime was early GenX)...the answer is "a good number of gamers, probably".

The oldest millennials were in college when World of Warcraft came out; it was boomers and GenX who made Diablo, Diablo II, Warcraft, and Starcraft.

I'm not saying that Blizzard isn't still making popular games, but I *am* saying that the last decade has consisted of remasters and sequels from the studio, with the sole exception of Overwatch.

I don't exactly have a Blizzard org chart in front of me, so I can't create the pie chart of boomers/genx/millenial/genz employees at the studio, but I do think it's overly reductive to assume that a studio who's most iconic titles were made by boomers and early genx would somehow suffer if their staffing roster retained them.