I’m new to car ownership and I wrestled my bike into the back of my low-roofed saloon car to cycle back. I didn’t really buy the car with cycling in mind but it beat paying them £25 for a courtesy car (I expected not to have to pay for that is this was to fix a recall issue)

We have gone from cruise control to cars being able to drive themselves quite well in about a decade. The last percentage points of reliability are of course the hardest, but that’s a tremendously pessimistic take.

Just pattern recognition it is not the neural net everyone assumes it is.

Tesla’s current iteration of self-driving is based on neural networks. Certainly the computer vision is; there’s no other way we have of doing computer vision that works at all well and, according to this article from last year it’s true for the decision-making too.

Of course, the whole task of self-driving is “pattern recognition”; neural networks are just one way of achieving that.

Shh!

I got a chef’s knife as a gift. I was a bit put out that came from Wilko (a very budget brand) and it turned out to be absolutely excellent. I think it won’t have cost any more than £20. I am astounded that anyone apart from professionals pays more than £100 for a knife, never mind the even more insane prices you can pay

I have come to like more pop music over time too. What I found though is that I don’t tend to attach much to music unless it has something unique to it, so have found myself going for bands like Pixie Paris which is very poppy but still a bit different.

I’ve heard this, but I’d like to know what I’ve been eating over time. I never hated sprouts - I had them boiled (briefly!) as a kid in the 90s, when I guess this variety hadn’t yet proliferated? I like sprouts more now but have always attributed this to cooking them differently - fried or roasted, but occasionally simmered in a curry.

Yep, it’s a big problem in audio and other subjective areas, because you have no way of knowing what the anonymous reviewer’s point of reference is, and most professional reviewers’ reference points are not suitable. It’s worse too, because purchaser-reviewers self-select into their category, so you expect most people to be satisfied with the subjective aspects of a product they’ve purchased, even though most people would not be satisfied with a random cheap product. This is all not helped by the fact that, in audio when differences are so minute, virtually no-one is conducting blind reviews so confirmation bias probably accounts for huge amounts of the final score. Sure, any professional reviewer is going to be able to identify a bum product that costs thousands, but I bet most of them will rate an identical product more highly if they’re told it costs 10x as much and comes from a fancier brand.

I’ve ended up crowdsourcing my recommendations from places like reddit where people tend to make tiered recommendation lists so you at least know they have the goal of producing the best products at each price level.

Comparing huge multinational countries which serve every country to the half of countries with the smallest energy usage is not terribly illustrative.

And my comment only used social media as an example. The point is, big websites have more draw than small websites, leading to a self-amplifying effect.

From the user’s perspective it’s not about “reach”; it’s about simply having people to interact with. If you go to a thread on reddit there’ll be hundreds or thousands of people to talk about it with, and there’ll be active communities for all kinds of niches. If you want to avoid reddit - whether because of privacy issues or site policy or mods or whatever - you have to deal with the fact that everyone else is sticking with reddit.

Yes? That’s why loans with collateral charge a lower interest rate than unsecured loans.

There’s a mile of difference between saying “consumers need to get comfortable not owning their games” and “we want consumers to get comfortable not owning their games (but using subscription services instead)”.

The former statement is extremely arrogant. The latter is just obvious. And it’s reasonable even if you or I personally don’t want to get our games on a subscription model - millions of people get their music through Spotify and it suits them just fine even though other people don’t want that. So it’s a way of straw-manning the people pushing subscriptions so you can hate them.

The point of the dishonest article is to make you believe the CEO feels entitled to gamers becoming OK with subscription models. What he actually feels is a hope that subscription models will take off. It’s rage-bait. Did it work?

Misinformation. An article not as blatantly trying to manipulate people: https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-to-get-comfortable-not-owning-their-games-for-subscriptions-to-take-off?utm_source=twit

Hey if you’re colourblind, all blues can be blurple. And so can all purples!

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It’s like any number of blog hosts that have gone before it.

Fair enough, I genuinely misread and thought that was within the quotation marks. But her message is still wrong because she is still talking about AI in general, but her argument applies only to a) AI whose data is derived from data scrapers like Facebook or b) AI put to surveillance tasks. That does not apply to Stable Diffusion, which is why I mentioned it, but it is caught by her assertion, “AI is a surveillance technology.”

AI absolutely has the potential to be used for surveillance; its use in facial recognition most obviously. But the person quoted in the article didn’t say “AI has the potential to be used for surveillance” - she said “AI is fundamentally a surveillance technology”. So if she’s not talking about LLMs and image generators, why is she saying that it’s a fundamental part of the technology? It’s not very fundamental if these two year-defining AI technologies aren’t included in it.