Pop up fines - impediment to free travel - arbitrary tax collection. I mean, if you want to go back to Roman times where any government officials you happen to meet can just grab you by the shoulder and “collect taxes for the emperor” because you happen to be within reach - you can call that “not evil” if you like. I call it regression of civilization.
The arts is a vital part of our culture, not our survival - yes. The fact that we have over 4% of GDP going to “the arts” (that’s over $1.2T in the US alone), is an achievement, not a waste. It also means - more or less 1 in 25 people you meet is dependent / heavily dependent on the arts not just as something to do with their time, but a significant source of their livelihood.
They’re a dumb connector with no data capability whatsoever
Usually, then there’s Dell and friends:
Brands like HP and Dell use OEM “smart” adapters (often with a central pin in the barrel) that actively communicate with the laptop motherboard. These communicate battery health, authenticate the charger to prevent overheating, and ensure the correct wattage is pushed to the device.
And, anybody who has played in RaspberryPi 5 land will probably know: there’s different voltages delivered in USB-C and each has its own amperage limit in a given charger, so the wattage rating of the charger doesn’t tell the whole story. Like a PC internal supply you need to ask: what’s the amperage capacity at 5V, 9V, 15V, 20V ? A “90W” USB-C charger might only deliver 100mA at 5V and 9V with most of the “juice” delivered at 15 and/or 20V - and what voltages is your laptop configured to be able to consume for battery charging?
It usually works out simply enough for most consumers, but not always…
Until you get into “smart” power interfaces like USB-C… really need more info to actually help.
“back in the day” we had a Windows ME laptop (that should tell you the day pretty accurately) - it worked great for about a year, battery was strong, until… we added a PCMCIA slot WiFi card, because: WiFi. Welp, super cool to be able to roam around the house wireless on that WiFi card, for about a week before it bricked the battery. Seems that the battery maintenance algorithms weren’t tuned to play nice with the (rather significant) power draw of that 1st gen WiFi card. So, instead of just needing a network cable, then we just needed a power cable (and insulation to keep the thing from burning our lap).
I’d call myself more “creative adjacent” but, to your “or with” question: definitely yes.
If it’s clearly posted, that’s fine - and appropriate in certain mountain pass situations.
If it’s a surprise when the fine arrives in the mail, that’s pure unadulterated evil.
I don’t like to be cold like this, but I think “creatives” need to depend less on their agents and production companies and all that industry infrastructure promising 1 in a million “stardom” while stringing the other 999,999 along with breadcrumbs leading nowhere.
The same technology they’re bitching about destroying those jobs that most of them never had in the first place, is technology that enables smaller budgets to create competitive entertainment. Self-publishing is a very real thing now alongside traditional “Best Seller List” promotional publishing houses. No, you’re not likely to get on “Oprah” or whatever the magic promotional outlet is these days with your self published book, but every creative who achieves that kind of stardom that virtually all of them are hungering for is absolutely stealing the limelight from hundreds or even thousands of other people just as talented as themselves or more…
In other words, stop whining and start making things happen for yourself, you have better access today than ever. There’s still a place for superstars in today’s world, but instead of the “top 100” getting all the attention, it’s time for a top 10 to be followed by 10,000 you might also want to check out. The long tail has gotten fatter, and it should continue to grow.
Norway does a lot of sensible things that seem impossible in the USA.
I actually used to use chromium nearly full time. I’m too addicted to having my personalization settings “travel with me” between devices. I probably open my browser on 6-10 devices in an average week.
Never heard of it. At 4 years of maturity maybe it’s time for a look, thanks.
What’s happening to movie production with AI is a lot like what happened to music production with digital audio workstations. The cost of making top tier production value product is plummeting like a stone falling to the moon.
You want to make music with a full symphony orchestra, you can still do that. We actually attend our city orchestra concerts a couple of times a year. However, if you want to produce your own music you can almost get better sound quality out of a smartphone today than the Beatles did out of Abbey Road studios back in their day.
The spontenaity of live performers, whether music or acting, is much MORE cost effective than painstakingly replicating that kind of performance through digital methods. I think we’re going to see a continued appreciation of real actors in movies, in between all the slop that the industry “test markets” to see what they can get away with.
Too nerdy, doesn’t send the same message as “ordinary people hate Edge THIS MUCH!”
the selective enforcement is, by design, a way to manufacture an excuse to harass and persecute minorities/undesirables.
Absolutely, and this is another thing that’s going to prevent “fair” algorithmic enforcement from happening.
The correct solution is to relax or abolish the laws themselves until they diminish to the point that fully enforcing them is reasonable.
I have always thought this, but I don’t get my jollies out of selectively “sticking it to” people different than me for the same things I get away with all the time. Apparently, a lot of our government, police, and voters do…
I mean, I thought George could read a room a little better than this, but maybe the interviewer managed to put him at ease enough to say what he’s really thinking.
I met an out of work actress who had a thing or two-thousand to say about AI, none of them good. At the time, she was more blaming the industry and the pandemic for her woes - this was almost 2 years ago - by now I’m sure she’s gone full ninja-berserker on AI “replacement” of stunt actors (which she used to be, still is in theory, but hasn’t worked since 2020.)
I agree with your take, but I also agree with GL on this one… if you continue to get around in horse drawn carriages because cars are smelly and dangerous and non-traditional, you’re going to get left behind.
There are plenty of things horses and carriages are “better at” than cars, particularly traversing long distances in a country with streams and fields and no gas stations. However… there are also things that cars are better at than horses and carriages…
I used to program in assembly language about 10-30% of my working time, up through the early 1990s. What changed? Optimizing compilers finally got better at writing assembly code than me. They had been around for decades, but they had always been a little bit lacking, until then. I still code for a living, but I haven’t even looked at an aseembly listing in 25 years. I get significantly more done, faster and more reliably using compiled (and interpreted) languages than I do using assembly code, which I used to be able to use to make the complied (and especially interpreted) programs dramatically faster. Compilers do that for me now.
As of today, AI is kicking my ass at reviewing my colleagues’ code. It’s not saving me any work, I spend 2-3x more time in code reviews now than I did before AI code review “was a thing” - but now, those code reviews are 20-50x more valuable than they used to be. We’re catching many more problems in the code (and documentation) at review time, not after the software gets into customers’ hands. That’s a very good thing, and today I would consider anyone who ships critical code without an AI review to be negligent.
I say: UBI is how you break that separation of the people from the resources they need to survive.
I say: UBI is something better. It is an automatic social safety net. It gives every citizen “credibility” that they can make some regular payments reliably.
I say: even $600 per month UBI would give everyone the ability to tell an overbearing boss “no, I’m not doing that.”
I say: UBI + flat tax is a fair, progressive tax system which “caps out” at a rate that’s fair (equal) for everyone and doesn’t tax the poor, it’s a negative tax on the poor.
I say: UBI is affordable. At a rate of $600 per month UBI, a US flat tax of roughly 33% would be revenue neutral, providing the $2.5T per year necessary to fund UBI and another $2.5T for incentive programs that used to be called “incentive tax breaks.” This would be a modest tax break for the top earners who currently pay 37% on every dollar they earn above their current income. It would represent a tax increase on the wealthy, but they would never be paying more than the 33% flat rate that everyone in the country would pay on every dollar earned.
I say: UBI is overdue. There are 134 government domestic aid programs in the US, each one more byzantinely administered than the next. Most of those could be eliminated, replaced by UBI. Break out my tiniest violin for the bureaucrats who won’t be “needs testing program applicants” anymore, they’ll get UBI like the rest of us.
I say: only a tiny fraction of the US population would be opposed to UBI if they understood the impact it would truly have on their daily lives. Nobody would need to beg on street corners. Nobody would need to steal to eat. People would still do it, but people doing that with UBI could be short-tracked to the counselling they need to get their lives straightened out so they aren’t desparate anymore. Who wants to live in a country with a bunch of desperate people?
Abuse of those files is another problem. I’d say it’s a separate problem that’s possibly even more important to deal with, but it’s different from over-enforcement based on the stated purpose of the data collection.