Thanks for the input.

What mainly caught my eye were phrases from the summary like "The problem is that the AI being used here makes human voice actors obsolete," which just doesn't seem to be applicable to this use case at all. There's just no conceivable way this feature could exist without TTS. If the summary had indicated it was over whether or not the estate had the authority to agree to the use, or that this wasn't cleared with the estate, or something along those lines, I wouldn't have thought much of it.

But, it seems JEJ had licensed his voice specifically for this type of use, and got paid for that. Based on other bits in the summary, where they claim to support the actor/estate's ability to do such licensing, this seems like it should be a non-issue. In the end, I don't care enough to dig into it. I was just wondering if I was missing something obvious.

From what I've seen, it's an LLM with a Darth Vader text to speech on top of it that players can interact with by voice. Are they arguing that they could provide a hundred thousand Darth Vader voice impersonators to interact with players real-time? Or is it a more generic "there is a voice there, give us money now" sort of thing?

Curious, I have no idea why someone would label that as trolling. I'm referencing events that have been in the news recently. Oh well.

I don't pay all that much attention to these things, but from what I've read they wouldn't be the first country to sign a Starlink contract in the apparent hope that being nice to Elon will make the trade war easier on them. If so, yes, bribery.

That seems like a bold claim to make. An entire country's grid goes down and you figure they instantly understand the root cause?

I mean, it would have been great if someone back in 2003 had stood up after a few minutes and yelled "there's a race condition in the management system!" when the US north east went dark, but that really only happens in movies. In reality, things like this can take months to investigate. Of course, the cause here might be a lot less subtle and more readily identifiable, but still.

In what way is this caving? If it's local law, they have to comply or leave the market. They're obviously not going to just pull out of the UK as a market, so instead of making data insecure for all of their customers by building a backdoor, they chose to comply by removing that feature in the UK. That is clearly the lesser of two evils, and the only ones in the wrong here are the UK government.

Being an early adopter was always a risk. There have always been products that did not materialize, or turned out to be crap, or that stopped working shortly after launch. It's just so much easier to reach a lot of people now, and the critical thinking abilities of entire nations is at an all time low, making for easy pickings.

I've backed a few projects, and I've been happy with them. I did not blindly back "this looks great!" projects, though. I did some research. I gauged the complexity compared to the proposed timeline and what they already had to show. I judged the amount of money they asked for up against what I thought seemed reasonable for the project goals. I evaluated whether the current state of technology seemed to even support the proposed features. There will always be risk in being an early adopter, but engaging brain before parting with money does mitigate things quite a bit.

The Humane pin was not hard to spot as high risk. Heck, anyone asking for money for anything "AI" should raise immediate red flags for everyone. I don't remember anyone being surprised when it released and was absolute crap. On the other hand, they did make an actual product of sorts. So, there's that. It's rather telling that in the world of AI products, the Humane pin is a bit of a success story in that it wasn't a complete scam.

My phone's information screen on this setting doesn't specify that, but if that's true then you're right that biometric unlock would not work, which would increase the hassle level a bit.

I have a somewhat similar issue with my smart watch. It runs a backup to the phone, which then further backs that up into the cloud. The problem is, they designed it with "no one ever turns off their devices" in mind, so it will only run a backup in the middle of the night. Which is when both my phone and watch are shut off. There's no way to trigger the backup manually. So I either leave both on overnight once in a while, or live with "watch not backed up in over 7 days!" warnings. Sigh.

It just locks the phone, it doesn't make it explode. It's up to each user to decide if the extra hassle of unlocking after any false positives outweighs the added security of having the feature enabled.

I tested this service a bit years ago, and from what I remember you are literally just paying for the service. You bring your own games by linking in your Steam account (and whatever else they support). There's no bait and switch. You're not "buying" games that will disappear when they shut down. I mean, you could argue that's what Steam is, but that's not what Nvidia are selling here so it's not relevant.

There's no issue with people strongly disliking Elon, and still cheering for what SpaceX is accomplishing. It's not like you have to pick one or the other.

As for being remembered, both SpaceX and Elon certainly will. The question is whether Elon will be remembered primarily for SpaceX or his.. less savory ventures.

Not quite the land of fairies, but the number of times said companies have been forced to change their services in the region, or been hit by fines for not being compliant with privacy regulations, is some indication that it _is_ more stringent there. Not perfect, but almost certainly at least a bit better than "corporations do whatever they want"-land.

We're decades down the line in all respects, the starting point is nothing alike.

The goal isn't stated as a fully featured clone in a year, it's to have something that's ready for _some_ use cases in _several_ years. That's seems quite plausible to me. I'm not saying it's a good idea or that it will happen, but it's not something I'd think out of reach for a group matching the stated description of being motivated and talented at both Rust and OS development.

Personally, I doubt it will happen. Even if it gets started, I figure it'll fizz out before it amounts to anything. And if it does gain some momentum, I predict you won't be too far off on the same kind of non-technical annoyances being unavoidable.

OpenAI employees: 1,500
Google employees: 180,000
(According to Wikipedia)

Call me crazy, but it seems to me that it's somewhat possible the root cause here is something other than one of those groups working sensible hours and the other killing themselves with overtime.