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The Guardrails Are Already Crumpling
www.thebulwark.com The Guardrails Are Already Crumpling

Jeff Bezos’s decision to pull a Washington Post endorsement of Harris is foreboding. But not necessarily for the reasons you think.

The Guardrails Are Already Crumpling
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The Subprime AI Crisis
www.wheresyoured.at The Subprime AI Crisis

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom

The Subprime AI Crisis
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Hollywood Can’t Ditch Its Teslas Fast Enough: “They’re Destroying Their Leases and Walking Away”
  • Back in 2013 it was my dream to own a Tesla and not have a gas car. I was able to do it in 2018 and now that it’s paid off I don’t want to hop into another car payment.

    I feel a sense of betrayal in that I thought we were all in it to help transition to cleaner energy usage and whatnot but instead it’s another speculative investment vehicle that only exists to make a few people stupidly richer.

    I just want companies to turn into things that make valuable products and aren’t only focused on “stock number go up”

  • Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'
    www.businessinsider.com Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'

    Billionaire Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison said he expects AI surveillance systems to reach a point where all citizens are under constant watch.

    Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19846762

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    Goblin

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13365174

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    Surgeon general's warning: Parenting may be hazardous to your health
    www.usatoday.com Surgeon general's warning: Parenting may be hazardous to your health

    The surgeon general's latest public health warning is about. . . parenting?!

    Surgeon general's warning: Parenting may be hazardous to your health

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19726571

    > The surgeon general has a new public health warning. And this time, the hazard isn’t tobacco or alcohol: it’s parenting.  > > Two-fifths of parents say that on most days, “they are so stressed they cannot function,” the Office of the Surgeon General reports in an advisory titled Parents Under Pressure. Roughly half of parents term that stress “completely overwhelming.”  > > Those dire findings anchor a 35-page report, released in late August, that posits parental stress as “an urgent public health issue.” It draws on data from the American Psychological Association and other sources to build a case that parents are facing more stress than at perhaps any other time in recent history. > > One-third of parents with children under 18 rate their stress level as 8 or higher on a 10-point scale, according to psychological association data. Two-fifths of parents report being “so stressed they feel numb.” Three-fifths say stress makes it hard to focus. Two-thirds are consumed by money woes.

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    iPhone 16 is here, but I’m hyped for just one reason: RCS on iOS 18
  • Listen, I'm happy for everything that makes communicating easier but to paint Google and Android as some champions of messaging is just straight up crazy.

    I was an android user since the beginning of modern smart phones (and before that I used Windows Mobile 6.5 😵‍💫) and messaging has been an absolute shit-show on android for almost the entire time. Google finally had a good solution with Hangouts (circa 2014) but they killed it and spawned so many messaging clones that I lost count.

    The reason why we have such fragmentation and so many different apps we have to juggle to communicate on android is because of the clear lack of vision and leadership in that area in Google.

    Even RCS is freaking fragmented as well. Take for example E2E encryption, that doesn't work unless you go through google's servers which you can't really guarantee so you're getting a different "RCS" UX depending on who you're texting and what servers are being used on the backend.

    After I switched to iPhone from Android it was like a slap in the face on how much better just communicating to people was on iPhone. Google isn't the fucking hero here.

  • Led by the automaker BYD, China has established itself as the main car supplier in Mexico. The US worries China could use Mexico as a “back door” to sidestep tariffs and gain footing in the US market.
  • BMW EV surpassed Tesla sales in Europe for July.

    You sure about that?

    So how do you figure there is no competition without China?

    That’s not what I was saying. What I am saying is that if left unanswered, those cars would kill all of the current competitors over time and then after that we’d be at the mercy of whatever the Chinese car manufacturers would want to charge and we’d be unable to stop it.

  • Led by the automaker BYD, China has established itself as the main car supplier in Mexico. The US worries China could use Mexico as a “back door” to sidestep tariffs and gain footing in the US market.
  • The main problem with BYD cars is that they are heavily subsidizing by the Chinese government.

    If you remove those subsidies then those cars aren’t going to be very competitive. But the problem would be that by the time the Chinese government stopped subsidies, there wouldn’t be any competition left.

    Our best ways to counteract this would either be through heavy tariffs or by subsidizing our own companies in the west.

    MAGA wants to do the tariffs route which is basically a bandaid solution that would prevent the Chinese companies from owning the US market but it wouldn’t do anything outside of that. Plus it doesn’t solve is being competitive, it’s just covering its ears and “lalala”’ing the issue for later generations to deal with it. Which honestly, that tracks for basically their whole platform.

    If you do the subsidies route though, we’d have to make sure we’re not just constantly lining Musk’s pockets but Tesla is the company has the biggest head start. And Musk is a PoS but the devil’s credit is that our EV market wouldn’t exist without Tesla.

    IMO, we need to diversify our EV makers and help provide the capital to bootstrap it. And while that’s happening we need to not let cheap Chinese cars flood the market to undercut any chance we have. So basically we need a combination of both solutions.

  • For the first time, humans were exposed to a deadly combination of heat and humidity. Here's how long they lasted - ABC News
  • It seems like it used to be 35° but now it’s ~34°.

    I don’t have access to the actually study but I would hypothesize that it’s likely because we are seeing more studies about things like this and as we collect more data that’s changing these values to be closer to what we see in the real world.

  • For the first time, humans were exposed to a deadly combination of heat and humidity. Here's how long they lasted - ABC News
  • It’s also at 100% humidity in case that wasn’t clear.

    Edit: ok so what he posted wasn’t wrong but the study said that it could be as low as that for some groups of people. For the average person it’s almost 10 degrees C higher which is lower than it used to be.

    However for heat sensitive people (not sure what that means) it can be disturbingly low

  • Parental stress is a significant public health issue, US surgeon general says in new advisory
  • During COVID, I had multiple people shrug off how hard everything was with kids and disregard parents struggles. That's a cultural thing which is what studies like this are addressing and trying to help build momentum to change.

    It's easier to build that momentum with data instead of just vibes because even though this is self-evident to both of us, we're not the hearts and minds that require changing.

    It's similar to how young and single people will be expected to work longer hours because "they don't have to go home" as if that means that they don't need time off as well.

  • Parental stress is a significant public health issue, US surgeon general says in new advisory
  • So true. We've been on a tax-cut & deregulate spiral for 40+ years and it feels like we're left with a government that can't accomplish anything anymore.

    I'm hopeful with Harris but my god do we have to hold her feet to the fire.

  • Parental stress is a significant public health issue, US surgeon general says in new advisory
    www.cnn.com Parental stress is a significant public health issue, surgeon general says in new advisory | CNN

    Parents in the United States are overwhelmed and burned out with the “dizzying pace” of the world, and it’s a public health concern, according to a surgeon general’s advisory released Wednesday that calls for shifts in policy and cultural norms.

    Parental stress is a significant public health issue, surgeon general says in new advisory | CNN

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19162675

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    Do you not know how a computer works at a low level? This site does a nice breakdown of the fundamentals of a CPU
    cpu.land Putting the "You" in CPU

    Curious exactly what happens when you run a program on your computer? Learn how multiprocessing works, what system calls really are, how computers manage memory with hardware interrupts, and how Linux loads executables.

    Putting the "You" in CPU
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    When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself
    www.nytimes.com When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself

    As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results.

    When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself

    I ran an AI startup back in 2017 and this was a huge deal for us and I’ve seen no actual improvement in this problem. NYTimes is spot on IMO

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    Brands Are Beginning to Turn Against AI
    www.rollingstone.com Brands Are Beginning to Turn Against AI

    Brands and companies are growing increasingly suspicious of AI, and promising customers they won't use it in their ads or products.

    Brands Are Beginning to Turn Against AI
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    Brands should avoid this popular term. It’s turning off customers.
    www.cnn.com Brands should avoid this popular term. It’s turning off customers | CNN Business

    A study published in the Journal of Hospitality of Marketing & Management finds that consumers are very much turned off by products that say they are “AI-powered”

    Brands should avoid this popular term. It’s turning off customers | CNN Business
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    With the next generation of AI photo editing tools built into the Google’s flagship Pixel 9 family, our basic assumptions about photographs capturing a reality we can believe in are about to be

    cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/40428405

    > cross-posted from: https://flipboard.social/users/TechDesk/statuses/113013778572529137 > > > With the next generation of AI photo editing tools built into the Google’s flagship Pixel 9 family, our basic assumptions about photographs capturing a reality we can believe in are about to be seriously tested — and @theverge shows us why. > > > > “An explosion from the side of an old brick building. A crashed bicycle in a city intersection. A cockroach in a box of takeout. It took less than 10 seconds to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool in the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. They are crisp. They are in full color. They are high-fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no tell-tale sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all extremely f---ing fake.” Take a look at the pictures for yourself as The Verge ponders the implications of these new capabilities. > > > > https://flip.it/AO_SK3 > > > > #AI #GenerativeAI #ArtificialIntelligence #Google #Pixel #Pixel9 #Smartphones #Photography #Tech

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AD
    john @lemmy.haley.io
    Posts 13
    Comments 41