On the other hand, if Musk really flips his lid, he's one OTA away from a network of ground-delivered lithium bombs. The fear of humanoid bots is their banality: if a government or private company has a reason to build them, then the world is full of hardware with terrifying capability and questionable security.
Political campaigns can now afford to target social media users on a 1:1 basis. A bot with 10k followers per month is an old-world threat, detectable with old-world methods. A solitary bot churning out content to the adoration of its fans, of which you are the only human, is the new threat.
I've been contemplating the nature of the rat race lately. If you can do it all, and you're enjoying what you're doing, why should it scale? If it's your side business, I presume you want it to remain that way until there's enough demand for it to be your main business -- and even then I wouldn't want to scale beyond demand.
I agree, and a big practical reason I walked away was that I was spending my weekends and nights doing this, and there were other hobbies/interests I wanted to pursue. After so many order, it was also getting pretty boring to print the same thing out, over and over, but I could have always raised prices and decreased order that way.
I'm still 3D printing, but now focused on problems like dog and kids toys where I can give away the results.
Because you need your business to be big enough to pay your bills, not just theoretically net positive.
I have made some designs that I thought of selling too. For something like that to work, you need thousands of customers over the time.
It's ok to spend an year or two of weekends working into something that can replace some of your main income. It's really not ok to do that for something that can't.
It sounds like you're wanting the the side-project to take over and replace your day job. Which is fine, but different from what I've been picturing for myself. Nevertheless, with that being your target: suppose you've grown big enough to pay the bills. Does the business still need to scale?
I see that as a bit of a trap, because people pass on what (to me) seems to be fulfilling work that could support a modest lifestyle and make big-growth choices that either crash them out or saddle their business with debt its market can't sustain.
If the whole point of starting your own business is because you want to get out of the ‘rat race’, doesn’t it need to at least pay your bills? Otherwise, you are still in the rat race, just with even less time.
I don't see all businesses as a rat race. Tech is. The business that I've been building skills towards starting is a fun hands-on product, which involves a bit of artistry and a fair amount of labor and materials costs, and brings people joy. Tech can keep paying my bills, unless my side project gets bigger than I foresee. And if I lose money, I made some nice art along the way and had fun learning new skills.
Sure, but then I am confused as to why the mention of 'the rat race' at all. If your business is a fun hobby, then it is unrelated to you having to still be in the rat race. It would be no different than taking up reading or photography as a hobby. You are still in the rat race, you just also have a hobby.
When the early adopters start pushing neural implants they'll be ad-free. Not long after your boss insists that everybody needs neural implants for the sake of productivity, they'll be ad-supported but moneyed developers will be able to opt out. The terms of the ad-free service will continue shifting, so nothing is ever really ad-free for long, and ads for better neural implants are promotions not ads right? But y'all are working on neural implants because if you don't, somebody else will, aren't you
You'll never see a neural interface ad. You'll just have always been a Pepsi drinker. It's right there in all your favorite childhood memories, after all.
When I started playing Shadowrun in the 90s, I thought neural implants were cool and I wanted to get one. Around the time Google started buying up ad companies, I realized that the hardware in my head would never be mine. But yes, I think Black Mirror has done an excellent job with these topics.
This was a throwaway line in the 1995 novel The Diamond Age. The thug knew a guy who had a spinal implant(?) which got hacked and now the guy saw ads across the bottom of his vision for life.
Correct, but they stylized it as "eyePhone" (from MomCorp, the all powerful, caring conglomerate), and that episode is the origin of the famous "Shut up and take my money!" meme.
The real problem here is capitalism. The system needs consumers to spend more and more. A system where nobody profits from you consuming more of something wouldn't have this particular failure mode
When we first got our LG TV (a fairly cheap 43" LCD with mediocre brightness and WebOS) you could get an app to be the remote control. It was a convenient option when the remote fell under the couch.
They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.
I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.
True, but you can't affort the none crappy one eventually. Basically everything in modern society trends towards either cheap, but shitty, or excellent, but insanely expensive.
Our problem is that the used to be a huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared, because it requires a fair bit of volume to be sustainable. Initially we, as in society, got lured in by cheaper prices, and reasonable quality, supported by savings in running super markets vs. a butcher, efficiency gains or subsidizes, maybe in the form of an ad here or there. Once we started expecting lower prices, quality started to go down, but restarting the "pay a little more, for better quality" segment isn't easy.
> huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared
This is pure opinion, but I view that as the result of things like PE firms, activist investors, etc. who basically make the case "People respect $BRAND and think we're worth spending 30% more than the cheapest competitor. But what if we kept our prices exactly where they are, keep our advertising focused on how our tradition of quality is our whole reason for existing, but we shift production of our product/service to the same cheapest-possible way the cheap competitors do? At first this was a big gamble, as theoretically customers will notice when their car or their toaster starts falling apart in 4 years, instead of the 10 or 15 years the old one lasted, but this "Moneyballization" of most brands has been so pervasive across the whole marketplace that customers now can't choose "the brand that didn't do that" because ALL the brands did that (or were bought by a brand that does do that). So it's become a completely risk-free strategy.
Electricity I don't know how you could deliver ads through, but if someone could think of a way I bet they would. If everyone knew Morris code I bet they would make the lights flicker in Morris code for a discount.
Modern cars with connected infotainment systems are always trying to upsell you
Washing machines I dont know of anything at the moment, but I wouldnt count it out.
Smartphones/watches? Aren't those just ad delivery mechanisms? Not to mention tracking? Its a core foundation of modern ad technology
Headphones are not thank god, I hope it stays that way
Alright let me put on my evil corpo hat. Wait it was already on.
Headphones that inject ads is a great idea but we need to make that a better proposition. Lets say that these headphones have an AI integration which parses all sound and converts it to text, then we can run it through our AI to give helpful comments. We may even wait until no sound is playing to inject them (for now). We can add ads later once it becomes helpful. Imagine you are listening to a podcast / youtube video then you get a helpful voice give additional research and ideas. Like a friendly research agent on your shoulder.
Also more subtly, we can detect what music is playing and “slightly modify” the tunes of bands not part of a label owned by a Trusted Partner to sound worse.
> Electricity I don't know how you could deliver ads through
Even if you could, electricity is a utility with laws against disconnecting it in certain circumstances, even for nonpayment, and the internet isn't. So unless someone is going to make the argument that neural implants are utilities, ads injected into them seems like a pretty fair bet unless there is legislation not only making it illegal to do so, but making it illegal to make an implant even capable of receiving or displaying one. At least with that even if they repealed the law you'd be safe if you already had the implant.
(Morse code messages via your flickering lights would be a hilarious app, and I'm somewhat reluctant to mention it here before someone gets VC funding to actually try it.)
Lots of poor people have in residence electricity boxes that require prepayment for usage. In the olden days you put a coin in to turn on the power, but nowadays they have apps and digital payment solutions!
This is all news to me. It seems like it would be tough to prevent people from just using the power that's going to that box.
I guess I'm out of touch, because I've never heard of anything like this. I've had my power turned off for non-payment before, but I had to talk to someone at the utility to get it switched back on.
Modern cars gather a truly shocking amount of data about their "users", which is then sold to all and sundry, including those wishing to sell you products.
The amazing thing about people failing to learn from history is that everybody thinks they're too smart to (a) learn history or (b) follow rules enacted to prevent the disasters of yesteryear.
Learning from history is important but it’s much more important to do so in an inclusive manner. In fact, inclusive language is more important than anything else.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately. We've already asked you a whole bunch of times not to do this. Eventually we ban accounts that won't stop.
Sure, but I think you should strive to run your community in a way where you’re policing the “I don’t endorse X, but I don’t understand why more people don’t do X” that this comment espouses https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773488
You’re busy policing this while people are out there saying “Destroy their things and firebomb their houses”. So is it just that I made a mistake in my phrasing? Should I just frame the same comments in the style “I would never endorse X, but I don’t understand why others don’t do X”?
I can do that easily without LLM assistance if you like. But if you want your community to be exclusively endorsers of violence against enemies of a chosen tribe, then you should ban me so you can keep your little tribe of Ted Kaczynski fanboys.
This is one of those cases where the word "but" negates everything that precedes it.
If you think we haven't been moderating the type of posts you're talking about, you haven't been tracking HN moderation lately*—which is fine, why should/would you? But in that case you shouldn't be taking snarky swipes at the mods based on galactically mistaken assumptions.
More importantly, you shouldn't be pointing fingers at others instead of taking responsibility for your own bad behavior. Even if you were right in what you said, it wouldn't justify your breaking the rules. Moreover you have a longstanding pattern of doing this and we've been cutting you slack for years.
Okay, admittedly when I read these things I lose my mind and become a viral host for the nonsense because I feel the need to retaliate against what is clearly some kind of Blue Tribe mobbery. Clearly it’s a mistaken belief that you allow targeted mob-forming on your platform. Actually you’re just drowning under the load. Fine. What I can edit out I shall and I’ll try to keep in mind that you’re trying and failing, and doing this is just participating in the crap.
I’ll follow your comments for a mod log to see and I’ll refrain.
I do think it would justify breaking any rules that allow targeted mob-forming but since that’s not happening I’m happy to stand off.
Cold comfort: AGI will not genocide humanity until it can plausibly automate logistics from mining raw materials to building out compute and power generation.
> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else.
Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper.
> Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.
Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.
Just return to old fashioned styles of universities with tutorials, lectures, offline handwritten exams, and viva voce.
It's very hard to hide the fact that someone else did an assignment when you have to defend it in front your tutor and a small group of fellow students and it's next to impossible to pass a final viva without knowing and understanding what you are talking about.
The problem is we have all become addicted to cheap 'education' and a the traditional methods are expensive.
But I think the institutions and the students need to ask themselves what the university is for. Is it to hand out diplomas or is it there so that the students can learn? A student who only wants the diploma has an incentive to cheat, one who wants to learn does not because the only person cheated is themself.
I think your last point is precisely why universities shouldn't limit access to llms beyond reasonable means. Make it hard for the weak to access, and easy enough for those dedicated. the ones to make an effort to cheat aren't there to learn anyway
There's always going to be ways to cheat, the idea is to make it hard. I think secretly replacing a computer's internals such that no one else will notice is pretty hard.
When I looked at this a decade ago, I concluded that if bugs can't get popular as a source of protein powder, they aren't getting popular in the US and Canada. Since then, not a single gym rat I've mentioned this to has liked my concept product, Pretty Fly for a White Powder.
reply