They'd better be giving these refrigerators out for free, or at an insane discount that they plan to make up for via ad revenue. Otherwise, there's no reason for that feature to exist.

I'm surprised SAG, AFTRA and the AFL-CIO aren't calling for a general nationwide strike.

It says remove the button preventing you from benefiting from the AI.

It says nothing about preventing the AI from collecting data in the background and sending it elsewhere.

I'd accept a Fridge that had ads if it were free. Otherwise I can't see it. A fridge can last a decade easily and you can get them for less than 2 grand. 2 grand a decade = 200 a year, and that works out to less than a dollar a day. My time is worth more than that.

So unless the ads paid for the entire fridge I can't see paying cash for it.

I'm not American, and I'm aware of many of the authoritarian leanings of the current US administration. We're currently living through a test of democratic institutions across the west. Those institutions are holding to various degrees, but barely. But to compare western democracies to Chinese autocracy as if they're equivalent is bonkers. You have to recognize it's a matter of degree.

From the government and military's point of view, this is exactly the reason they want a flourishing free market economy, so that there's lots of infrastructure to call on when they need it. The demand for ships was real, and the market adapted and supplied them. When the demand went away, the market adapted and turned to building other things.

I cannot imagine any other reason to WANT that brand.

It is synonymous with fraud, deception, and incompetence.

Either someone wants to change that more than they want to make money, or someone made a deal with the devil and the devil said "OK, you can own a big corporate brand, but is has to be an EVIL one. Ha ha ha ha ha"

That take is just so far from reality it's bonkers. People with high credit scores tend to a) not take on as much debt, and b) get significantly better interest rates when they do. The last time we switched mortgage providers, our mortgage broker said our credit scores were probably the highest he'd seen in over a decade of doing this, and he went back to the lender and negotiated an extra half percent lower interest rate than what they offered, which was already below prime. Credit score is a measure of risk, that's all. If you're high risk of default, they charge a premium. People with high credit scores tend to borrow money for things that improve their financial situation in the long run: student loans, mortgages, and a car loan for a modest car to get them to work. Maybe a loan to start a low risk business, like an electrician. People with low credit scores borrow money to buy smartphones, TVs, decked out pickup trucks, and even doordash orders. i.e. stuff that has no payback.

Worst take on AI, if only because it is common. Everyone misunderstands how AI works and what it does. AI DOES NOT THINK.

It predicts. It is not getting qualitatively better at all. It is getting quantitatively better. They are adding more computers and algorithms that work more efficiently. They are fixing minor issues, like the ability to understand "not", and encouraging it to say "I do not know".

AI has no reasoning. It predicts. Interns are allowed to not think. All of the significant jobs require reasoning, not prediction. AI will not replace those.

Not saying something else won't replace it. But it will require a paradigm shift. Nothing we are thinking of doing with AI will ever achieve AGI, ASI etc. etc. We have learned how to make something that is like the brain of an insect, not that of a man.

The one thing I left out is portion size. Although I did mention 3x the amount we needed. Was not relevant to what I was saying, but it helps a lot.

Mediterranean diets are anti-diabetic because:

1) They emphasize whole grains - which does help. A 10% decrease is still worth it.
2) They emphasize unprocessed foods so they keep the fiber and avoid the added sugar.
3) They are HUGE on vegetables, which significantly reduces the amount of grains you eat. Of course, it is a problem for super-tasters that find vegetables bitter.
4) They have much smaller portion sizes than American typical diet.

Note, I did not mention alcohol because if you are not an alcoholic it is fairly easy to avoid it entirely. In america, it is hard to avoid carbs and we are given them in huge quantities.

It's only this outdated industrial revolution notion that we need to do everything at the same time every day that leads to ridiculous solutions like changing the clocks. Just have different hours for activities at different times of the year. That's all you're doing anyway with shifting the clocks. School doesn't have to start at the same time every day throughout the year.

As an engineer who spends most of my time designing systems that involve both automation and humans working in tandem, you're absolutely right. Any design constraint like, "the operators will just have to do this when such-and-such happens" are doomed to fail if you really need them to do it every time. A good design takes incentives into account. A human will do something if they get something for it. You can't rely on a person to push a button when a bin is full, but you can if they need to push that button to get a label to put on the bin so they can send it down the conveyor. Likewise, it's a good idea to put the "bad part" reject bin at least 3 steps away from where they stand, so they get annoyed if the machine is making bad parts, and that'll get them to call maintenance to fix it. If it's too convenient they'll happily make bad parts all day. Society has the same problem: even though most people want to be good, there are enough people who will just throw trash out their window or dump toxic waste in the river, or just refuse to work and demand a handout, that you need to build a system with incentives and deterrents that reward the people who are contributing, and catch/punish the people who are abusing the commons. While capitalism does a good job of the first, regulations are needed for the second. That's why communism doesn't work. It achieves the second but doesn't achieve the first.

Chinese people aren't stupid. But whenever you try to run your country from a top-down authoritarian style, and especially a one-man show, then you can never be as efficient as the free market. Over in the west we do interfere in the market in order to protect a national security interest or to punish a country that isn't playing by the rules-based world order, but the level of market interference in China is at least an order of magnitude more. They have solar farms built in places with nowhere near enough local industry to use it, and no grid capacity to get it to a market that needs it. Private industry doesn't build stuff like that without some guarantees that they can sell the product. But if you give them government incentives, they're happy to build it and let it sit idle. When my boss was in China visiting a tool & die place, the government literally dropped off half a dozen brand new milling machines for them to use at no charge. That's wild. If you're just trying to grow to catch up, this stuff works, but once you reach market saturation you can't tolerate inefficiencies like that anymore. You need the market to do its thing and find the optimum allocation of resources to meet market demand.

Solutions starting with "everybody in society must" have a long and celebrated tradition of going immediately (and often horrifically) pear-shaped, as it inevitably turns out that most of everybody doesn't want to, and therefore won't, and in many cases, can't.

For examples, see the Soviet Union's Communism, China's Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge's agricultural collectivism, North Korea's juche, etc.