These guys have amazing social marketing team.
- Viral post about this guy's college essay and not being admitted to top schools, on X, plugging into the "white str8 men are discriminated against" sentiment (while also posting a pure flame-bait essay, not sure if real). That generated a ton of discussion.
- Now here on /. taking a "young cofounder" angle.

The actual product is a tiny alsoran in the long line of similar products (I've been using one calorie counting app since 2010, and it had this feature for a good 3-5 years, steadily improving, though personally I don't use it). But this will generate a ton of publicity, and it's all good for them, I guess.

Learning math has become sort of pointless since there are calculators.
Learning to write has become sort of pointless, since there are word processors (and dictation, and autocorrect, and AI).
Learning anything has become sort of pointless, since there are products (made by people who know how to do those things) who will do it for you.

US broadband prices are the highest in the world (while the quality of service is mediocre at best). Consumers have little power in this market due to the de-facto monopoly (well, duopoly, or, may be, 5 total if mobile providers are included). It might have been better to force competition (by requiring providers to share the lines with virtual telcos), but that never materialized. So - price controls, works for me. They are a utility (all the bleating about "innovation" notwithstanding).

So, no more access to Gmail unless you have the pre-authorized mandatory device. In particular, no access if/when that device is lost/dead battery/sold/malfunctioning. Def. no access if you are on a guest computer elsewhere. And, of course, since many other services will be tied to the email address and will send their respective authorization codes there - no access to any of those. A modern version of a king who went out at night incognito as a pauper, and then was locked out of his castle :/

(Which is why my email is hosted with a private company that requires none of this bs)

EOM

Remember George Carlin: "look at how dumb an average person is, and then realize - half of them are stupider than that". (Ok, so he should have used "median", but then - this is also his audience). In any case, that'd be a pretty low bar for ai.

No need to explicitly block this privacy violation, then?

Wait, so we built this web thing with interfaces designed for humans to now build a computer system that will interact with services using these human interfaces? When you think the insane inefficiency has nowhere to go - they "do something like that and totally redeem themselves!"

This is what happens when features are created by a few rich Silicon Valley PMs. I mean, most people I know (even earning fairly good living) don't eat out too often, and when they do - rarely bother with reservations (nor does a vast majority of restaurants require them). The twice-a-year large gathering that may need a reservation could be, mostly, handled at the click of a button on a page (or, you know, by speaking into the phone).

Make this thing handle calls to car/home/better yeat health insurance (to appeal a denied prescription successfully) or some such.

No one is getting "off this dying rock". There is nowhere to go, no matter what the various conmen try to sell you. Either we fix it (unlikely) or we all die.

Since AI will be trained on *their* videos, it's going to be producing output that is a direct derivation of their work and, as a result, direct competition to whatever it is they usually produce. Seems unwise making yourself more obsolete so intentionally.

Keep in mind that most (passenger) cars sold in Japan are gas-electric hybrids (see this, for example: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloomberg.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2F2023-12-19%2Fhybrid-cars-will-be-the-majority-of-sales-in-japan-next-year).

As such, pure electric is a lot less of a draw for them. Japanese manufacturers have been focused on hybrid production for years, and not really moving to pure EVs. That's not a bad strategy, but only in Japan (where quality of cars AND repair is good, that a complex hybrid does not cause more issues than it solves).

Everything in life is "for now".

As long as I can disable it and recover the space - all good, let them play.

EOM