It's also worth noting that NAFTA obliterated Mexico's smaller farmers which massively ramped up illegal migration from Mexico to the US.

I think the actual winners of this AI bubble will be whoever wastes the least money on this folly.

An ILLEGAL monopoly (in the USA) requires a person/organization to use anti-competitive measures to attain and/or retain monopolistic control over an industry. This can include predatory pricing, predatory mergers, intentionally driving competitors out of business, and the refusal to deal in normal circumstances.

Steam is a LEGAL monopoly that gained its market share by getting in early and being consistently foresightful, considerate of their customers' needs, and competitive in the industry.

So why is an article at all? Because of the distribution fees. You pay two ways to distribute a game on Steam. First, you pay a one-time $100, but you get that back after $1,000 in sales. Second, You pay a 30% commission on all sales, but that drops to 25% after you bring in $10 million and 20% after $50 million.

Is that unfair? Probably not. Consider how much it would cost to print a bunch of CDs/DVDs, boxes, get stores to carry your game, etc. And if you don't want to do that (no one does), compare it to the cost to distribute your game elsewhere and what features that system has (or more likely, doesn't have).

GOG, Microsoft, XBox, Playstation, Nintendo, has no one-time fee, but has a similar revenue share at 30%.

EPIC Games has a $100 listing fee but has the lowest revenue share I could find at 12%.

So Steam is comparably priced, has a MASSIVE marketshare, isn't attempting to absorb smaller competitors, and they provide a great, stable product.

So is there a problem?

This.

I'm also surprised he didn't mention the housing bubble. Just because it's been running for decades and has been intentionally stabilized in an inflated state doesn't make it less of a bubble.

Look, I absolutely despise the use of AI art by massively profitable companies who are literally just trying to keep more money in their pockets instead of paying people to develop animations themselves, but this is not a particularly ugly piece. Here are the issues I see:

1. The people look large by comparison to the trucks.
2. The license plate numbers are AI-weird. Normally, license plates can be used to reference something seasonal, but AI doesn't work well with text rendering.
3. The wheels on the trucks don't spin 100% correctly in all of the shots. Most of the time they work, but if you look for the problem, you'll find it.
4. Standard AI-weird eye-sizes and movements.

The problem is that if you haven't trained yourself to look for these flaws (like 99.999% of the people who will see the commercial), you won't notice them as flaws but "design decisions" or "the human touch". Heck, if AI weren't a thing, You could explain away all of the flaws I found like this:

1. The people look large by comparison to the trucks. -- Artistic intent. The scale of everything is so large to get the view, that appropriate human scale would force the people out of focus.
2. The license plate numbers are AI-weird. -- We decided not to put in a custom plate and make it a bit more standard.
3. The wheels on the trucks don't spin 100% correctly in all of the shots. -- That's what happens when you use a small studio!
4. Standard AI-weird eye-sizes and movements. -- The kids LOVE cartoonish animals!

Ya, it sucks from an ethical standpoint, but let's not act like it's anywhere in the "low quality AI video" pile.

This wouldn't be the first project Microsoft killed with their own greed and it won't be the last.

You can cancel the manned Mars trip now, it won't unlock a real-world Xbox achievement.

Banning this type of filling from being used in the first place is also a good idea, but banning the cremation of these fillings is more effective and important. If they just ban these fillings from being put in, then the problem will persist unabated until at least after the death of the last person who already has one.

I suspect they're a lot more careful with the corpses of people who have nuclear-powered pacemakers etc...

The autonomous vehicle liability puzzle is yet to be solved. Massively centralized liability will obliterate a dominant manufacturer of autonomous vehicles if the vehicles aren't operating close to perfectly. Let's consider actual numbers:

1. In the US, there are approx. 42,000 road deaths per year.
2. Imagine that Waymo has achieved a pure monopoly of people transportation on the road in the US and has, a result, reduced road deaths by 95% resulting in only 2,100 deaths per year.
3. Can Waymo survive the litigation directly liable for killing 2,100 per year?

Hint: You don't deserve credit for NOT killing people. That's what you're supposed to do. You WILL, however, get punished for everyone you DO kill.

What the Waymo CEO is trying to say is, "The robot did it, not Waymo and that people will accept that."

But we won't.

We know that these robots are not sentient. We know that these vehicles are acting at the express instruction of Waymo. We know that when they end up killing someone, Waymo should be liable.

Others are accurately hammering this home and I feel compelled to pile on.

A company cannot be innovative if all of their innovative ideas require guarantees financial of success. If you lead with the demand of financial success, you're forcing people who are scared for their jobs to avoid risk and simply replicate the last big thing. And when the safe project brings in less revenue than originally estimated (because everyone is competing using the same safe items), they can point back at their market research and say, "We had all the reason and data to think that this would make us money."

Innovation is a gamble. If a company wants to be innovative, then they need to risk their own money on projects lacking the certainty of success and keep people employed despite the lack of extreme profit margins so that those people feel sufficiently comfortable to innovate.

People who are scared for their jobs will not innovate . "Firing people until innovation improves" is not a thing.

Thank you for this and I agree. There's insufficient information in the article to suggest that there's an increase in fraud, but there is the suggestion that fraud is using AI-generated receipt images.

Having finally read the article, wow this is just a bad article.

That can just mean that some people are using AI to generate fake receipts instead of printing/modifying their own.

So (potentially) 30% of companies have seen "a rise" in false receipts. That rise is not defined.

So only 10% say that they know that their company has seen a falsified AI receipt while 70% think it despite having no evidence. That says a lot about the CFOs (not good stuff).

Yes, the late 1800s-1920s was peak late stage capitalism, but the threat of communism made it change its ways and play nice for like 30-40 years, but then people were successfully indoctrinated into letting capitalism run amok by successive waves of red scares and the USSR collapsed, and now here we are again. Every time capitalism survives a brush with its late-stage phase, it means we will suffer through another one, but with more automation, surveillance and means of control.

Blackhats like to host proxies for their traffic in Azure and AWS for the same reason.

It sounds like you're saying that ethnically diverse workplaces are killing dating because they produce more ethnically diverse societies while most people's dicks/pussies are racist and would prefer to live in a racially homogeneous ethnostate, am I understanding you correctly?

This is what I like to call the Post-Reaganite/Thatcherite Ruin Loop, it was born in the first world and now plagues all of it, but has spread well beyond that now with many ex-2nd-world and third-world countries having entered it at this point. It goes like this:

1. Hollow out the economy by transferring hefty chunks of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the rich.
2. When people inevitably have less kids due to their good education and access to birth control combined with lack of resources to raise children (reduced in step 1), complain about it and point out that it's bad for the economy.
3. To satisfy capital's desire for unsustainably cheap labor, bring in fresh suckers from poorer countries who aren't up to date on how much shittier things became in Step 1.
4. GOTO 1

Any society with a capitalist economy will be fighting endlessly repeating battles to keep from entering this loop, and given enough time having to fight, it will eventually lose one of those battles, and that's all it takes.