The video game industry is hard to compare considering that games are a very unique commodity with almost zero per-unit cost and insane fixed costs. The video game market also is magnitudes bigger than it was in the 1980s, so those fixed costs can be distributed over about a thousand times the units.

And yes, electronics got way cheaper than they were in the 70s and 80s. Mostly because we stopped manufacturing them domestically. If you pay someone 1 buck instead of 15 an hour, if you can pretty much ignore any kind of environmental concerns and if worker security de facto doesn't exist and you can basically have your staff work in hazardous environments without protection (and of course without fearing lawsuits over it), you can cut costs considerably. That has little to do with the productivity increase either.

If you want to look at goods and services that can not be offshored to slave wage country, and such that didn't experience a customer explosion bordering on going up two or three orders of magnitudes, you suddenly don't see the prices drop. Quite the opposite.

Then why not reduce work hours in sync with the increased productivity?

Right, instead we'll rather fire 9 of 10 people and load the whole crap on a single person.

There have been so many "sky is falling" headlines that the average person is numb to the problem. Many US citizens don't even really understand what 1.5C means and why it matters. There needs to be explicit explanations of how things like extreme weather calamities, mass extinctions, loss of coastal cities, food costs, famine and world wars are going to happen in our lifetime.

1.5C is wishfull thinking and it's going to get far worse: https://www.un.org/en/climatec...
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/...

Unfortunately, politics and propaganda from unscrupulous business interest is driving us towards a dystopian future.

Yeah, it's honestly annoying how pervasive porn models are. I think like 90% of people using SD are using it to make porn or waifus.

As I was driving home last night... you know how when Szilard was walking home after hearing Rutherford be dismissive of nuclear chain reactions, stopped at a stop light, and suddenly the idea of neutron chain reactions hit him like a ton of bricks and it was like the world peeled away around him? I had one of those moments when I realized that all of the components are now out there:

Story Diffusion (e.g. "Open Sora")** Generate realistic videos of anything, from input commands.
MotionCtrl (ability to direct objects and camera positions in AI vids)
Open LLMs (countless), trained to roleplay multiple characters, control scenes, and to issue external commands
VR headsets (with a mic + voice recognition and/or hand controls; or alternatively, LMMs can accept voice natively)
Optional: FPV cameras on the headset, plus depth map model (Midas, etc) background stripping, plus vid2vid to integrate the user's body into the scene

And... remote-control sex toys that accept external commands.

You can see what someone is surely going to put together from these pieces over subsequent years: a porn holodeck. Where an open LLM or LMM takes user inputs (such as speech or motion) once every 1-2 seconds, determines character reactions, directs the next 1-2 seconds of video generation, generates audio, and when appropriate, issues commands to control... peripherals. It'll take quite a bit of compute power to handle the video generation all in realtime, but you can fan it out to multiple cards, so it's doable if you keep the resolution and steps down & just AI upscale the outputs and motion-interpolate between frames. The LLM/LMM wouldn't need a huge number of parameters for such a role - even something like LLaMA 8B as a base model should suffice well; there's no issues with running that in realtime on any semi-modern GPU.

I'm like 80% ACE so the whole thing sounds rather gross to me, but knowing how people are using SD already, you know this is... sigh, I walked right into the pun, didn't I?.... "you know this is coming." :P I guess it's good that the perpetually horny will have such an outlet.

** - Story Diffusion is "out". but they haven't released the video-generation half of the model yet, only the keyframe-generation "comic book mode", but they reportedly plan to release the whole thing; there's also less advanced models like Stable Video Diffusion and the like (which MotionCtrl was designed for).

It is a bad thing, for certain. To me, the big question is "why". An AI "doll" that you not only interact with but also have sex with is a phenomenon worth investigating.

And we're scary close. Boston Dynamics already has mobile robots, Realdoll has some really lifelike silicon dolls, and some interactive AI can make a pretty good approximation of a human female, and it's only getting better. Combine all of them eventually, and what you end up with is scary good.

You can spend a lot of money for the present offerings, but here's where the "why" comes in.

While there is nothing compared to the embrace of a loving woman (assuming CIS maledom) you can spend 30K on a robot and you will save money. The robot will not file for divorce, and take your children, you will not end up living in your car when the real ex gets the house on top of the 50/50 split. And you don't have alimony, or have to liquidate your retirement plan, pay half of it to her, and all you have left is the other half, plus whatever penalty you lose on killing the retirement plan.

Some women have even tried to ban such "sex dolls", but just for males who want female dolls. There are dolls for women that are met with enthusiasm, as well as minimalist versions. And there are quite a few ladies who are in the age range when reproductive urge hits hard, but they are in the geriatric pregnancy stage, and they are freaking out.

No, this is not a good social trend, but it is what we have. Many men have simply checked out of relationships. People can call them whatever names they like, it won't bring them back.

A flash of light. A man wearing 21st century clothes appears. He tells the locals in 1550, "Stop! Do not do it. I am from the future. We still do not understand."

You're confusing foundational models and finetunes. You can make a finetune in a day or so for any specific task. Including porn.

I want a signature, nothing else. I don't give a fuck about achieving anything, I just work here and get paid for it.

It sounds nicer. Just like firing and layoff sounds bad, rightsizing is so much more ... correct.

So do I, but if they tried to implement some bullshit like that here, I'm out the door.

We are decidedly not preemptively reducing labor. We have already increased productivity 20 fold. A 20% reduction in labor time is hardly an insane demand in return. All the workforce wants is 1% of the 2000% increase.

FFS, we can't even have A SINGLE FUCKING PERCENT of that gain? For real?

Popular until they only get half the pay.

I find it incredibly disrespectful.

Then don't do it. Problem solved. You're welcome.

The USA is like any other country. Some people are motivated, some are only averagely motivated, and some are lazy.

As a driven person, I work because I desire to do value added work - not necessarily for the money, but the monetary rewards have been quite good.

There could be issues with the concept that a subset of people are considered full time at 32 hours, but others are not.

Another issue is that say in a career such as the one I retired from, there will be people who demand a 32 hour workweek, even though there are multiple days and efforts that do not fit into that. Already, there were people who refused to do more than 40 hours a week. If there was a big meeting coming up that required coming in early and working later, that task was on me, because there was a litany of excuses, from car pooling, to making their husband breakfast, to just don't wanna.

The great irony is that yes, when there is a downturn, their great wish is granted - they get all the hours off. Who are you going to retain - the person who puts in only average effort, or the one who practices value added?

Now granted, I do not have the standard outlook that the key to happiness is to work as few hours as possible, because work is evil. I never understood that. In the cases early on in my life, when I had a not very good employer, I left. But I figured that since I spend a lot of time there, I might as well enjoy myself.

Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief

How about these assholes process their grief their way, and the rest of us will choose our own paths without them pretending to be our parents or guardians?

If your life consists of trying to figure out how to restrict the ways other people relate to their losses, your life is a net loss to society. Or, more succinctly, you're a shithead.