It makes more sense as a dialogue if we think of it not so much as a one-to-one conversation, but more like an ongoing, global discourse. After all, movies are not made in a vacuum, and they are--generally speaking--not made for a single specific individual to watch. The artist is informed and shaped by their experiences.

I frame it this way because I want to move away from the "maker"/"viewer" framework--this dichotomy of the creator of an experience versus those who experience the creation. There is a kind of feedback at play that is intrinsic to the ability to create art and to enjoy it. We even see this in cinema--the works of actors (which roles they choose, how they play those roles) are invariably influenced by the culture and sentiments that surround them.

In a strict sense, you are right--it's not as if the artist is directly engaging in a back-and-forth literal conversation. But I think that a more encompassing point of view is useful for contextualizing why generative AI being propped up as "art" is so offensive to some. It doesn't feel "real" to us, and it isn't because the tool is "artificial"--we have computer animated films, for instance. It's because it feels disengaged from that feeling of human connection.

is not, as many would have you believe, to be found solely in its consumption or appreciation.

Art is a dialogue. It is a conversation between humans--those who feel joy and pain, sorrow and hope; and it is the embodiment of creative expression in which the artist, for all their imperfections and struggle, brings into being something that marks existence--as if to say, "I was once here, in this space that you now observe."

And that is not necessarily pretentiousness or egocentrism. Art is born from a desire to connect with others, across space and time.

The intrinsic problem of "generative AI" as it is presently utilized as a vehicle of artistic expression is that, overwhelmingly, it fails to create a true dialogue, in much the same way that using a chatbot amounts to speaking with nobody but yourself. There may be a director and other humans who are prompting the AI and exerting control over the output, but the lack of human actors and cinematographers means that the result can only ever be a simulation of art, not art itself. It is not until we can create artificial consciousness--machines that experience human emotions and concept of self--that we can ever say that their status can transcend that of mere tools and their product might become art. To be clear, I am not suggesting we should attempt to do so. But what we have today is very, very far away from this.

Maybe a simulation is enough for most people, who think of popular media as nothing more than transitory stories to consume, discard, and forget. That the audience may not have the capacity to respect art as a process, by failing to distinguish what it is and is not, does not invalidate the artist, no more than someone who doesn't understand mathematics or computer programming can decide that it is not worth learning or doing.

The reason why there is a lot of pushback against AI has to do with the preposterous notion that it can (and therefore, should) serve as a substitute for human creativity. Of all of the things that such sophisticated computational models could be used for, the last thing that I would want it to do for me is my thinking and feeling. We should be using technology to make our lives easier and give us more freedom to express ourselves creatively, not less. People who are using it to simulate art have entirely missed the point of why we make art in the first place. Creative expression is not a chore like washing my dishes and scrubbing my toilet bowl. Yes, making art is sometimes painful and difficult and challenging. But that struggle is not something to be eliminated. It is meant to be overcome.

AI apologists--at least, nearly all of those I have met--are, in my view, nearly entirely lacking in understanding of what makes living worthwhile; and those who do understand are intentionally and cynically promoting AI because they stand to gain financially from this position.

Knowledge is an aspect of intelligence, but having it is not intelligence itself. And LLMs are "knowledgeable" in the sense that they have at their disposal vast datasets of human-compiled information. This is not in doubt.

In the sense that a machine can, through various algorithms, look up that information and through a statistical model, produce output that simulates understanding of the meaning of that knowledge, that can constitute "intelligent" behavior. Because its ability to retain and recall information is superior to humans both in speed and breadth, it can do things with that information that, in comparison, humans cannot do. Again, this is not controversial. Prior to LLMs, such capabilities have been true of many specialized domains--mathematical computation, chess, search engines. LLMs simply constitute a new model for information synthesis and retrieval.

Can these algorithms generate "new" truths (where by "new" we mean things that humans previously did not know)? Yes. But these truths are found by extensive analysis and synthesis of the knowledge present in the training data, through a computational process that is only in some ways more efficient than a human.

Does this behavior constitute "intelligence?" In some limited respects, yes, but it cannot be said that it is anything like human intelligence. The latter is far more nuanced. Human intelligence is inextricably entertwined with understanding, emotion, creativity, imagination, passion, will, desire. It is a disservice to ourselves and to that which we create to believe that LLMs could ever achieve this kind of intelligence. We may be able to get it to simulate aspects of it in some fashion, but as long as we do not understand the origin of consciousness, it will never be truly capable of human intelligence.

Whether we as a species should be pursuing the development of an artificial consciousness is a separate question.

While bamboo is not entirely inflammable, the Hong Kong fire that you cited was primarily caused by the use of netting that was not fire-retardant, for cost-cutting reasons. The bamboo scaffolding itself largely resisted ignition. The fire was able to spread quickly because of the netting. Bamboo just doesn't catch and spread fire at such a rate.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...
https://www.bbc.com/news/artic...
https://apnews.com/article/hon...

To be clear, it's not so much that he thinks that AI agents are sophisticated enough as to deserve being granted personhood. It's that he thinks actual human people are nothing more than resources for him to exploit; thus no more useful, and just as expendable, as a computer algorithm. That is the clear context of the discussion--his only conception of a human's value is through the labor that they produce for the enrichment of the capitalist class. And so, the logical conclusion of such a stance is that an AI agent is a "person," because in his mind, "person" = unit of labor to exploit.

Hospitals and nursing homes are places where sick or frail people are concentrated, thus creating an environment in which community-acquired infections spread very easily and rapidly. Standard disinfection procedures can only go so far; we can see this by comparing it to, say, isolation protocols to prevent exposure to highly infectious BSL-4 pathogens such as ebolavirus. In such cases, healthcare workers must wear a positive pressure personnel suit, and building construction and ventilation must be designed to ensure the airflow does not contaminate clean areas.

What this tells us is that, even with diligent cleaning and disinfection in a hospital setting, pathogens remain around us. Fungal spores are omnipresent--they are hardy, microscopic, and airborne. The reason why we aren't all dropping dead is because our immune systems prevent these pathogens from gaining a foothold. But when a pathogen is extremely virulent, hardy, and able to escape the immune response, that is when we have a problem. And concentrating the most vulnerable of us in one place is how they pop up. That's not to say that hospitals and nursing homes can't do better--of course, they can and should. But from the administrator's perspective, it's a matter of cost/benefit ratio, and that's why many (or even most) institutions have substandard practices for infection control.

that the founder/CEO of an online education company says that displaced workers should be retrained to remain relevant in an AI-driven economy?

It's bluntly obvious what his angle is. He's saying that all these companies replacing workers with AI and profiting off the reduction in workforce should spend some of that profit on his company, which will gladly swoop in to save the poor laid off employees who toiled in menial jobs and reeducate them. His own profit and business growth is just a convenient side effect, win-win! Of course his grand scheme will work, because everyone knows how totally superior generative AI is at replacing human labor...even educational companies like Khan Academy.

There's this very Ouroborean circle-jerking going on with CEOs and upper management where AI is concerned, in which they are feeding each other wild propaganda about how AI will make profits soar. Fueled by obscene levels of speculation and a complete failure to understand even the most basic principles of the underlying technology, they are utterly lost in narcissistic, masturbatory delusion.

Even if generative AI is superior--and that's a BIG "if"--what will these workers need to learn to remain relevant and valued? What COULD they learn that would stop CEOs from laying them off in another 5-10 years? What stops it from replacing the CEOs, who do the least meaningful work of all? And why should anyone pay Khan Academy if we could just ask the AI to teach us? After all, if it can replace human workers, why do we need Sal Khan?

AI is not superior. We are nowhere near the point where AI can replace human judgment, creativity, emotion, and nuance. When we developed methods to automate mass manufacturing, or when we developed computers to replace 'computers' (if you don't know what this means, you should probably read about the origin of the word), productivity did increase, and the worker's skill set did need to change. But generative AI is a farce. It's already shown itself to be of far more limited benefit than what companies are trying to get it to do. The only reason why the investment keeps going is because--as noted above--the leadership is convinced that the next step is just around the corner, waiting for more training data and a clever statistician to make the next breakthrough. Generative AI is not like a factory machine that increases widget production by 1000x. It's a machine that sometimes produces widgets and sometimes produces trash. And just because it might make widgets faster than a human doesn't mean we can so easily dismiss the trash.

While the title is misleading, the number of comments that jump to the conclusion that $20,000 is paid by students as tuition without actually reading the article, is quite revealing as to who are the real idiots.

A person of adequate intelligence would actually take the 30 seconds to click to the article and find the following (emphasis mine):

"The academy also draws positive grades from some researchers who study tech education, such as Quinn Burke. He says its FULLY SUBSIDIZED in-person instruction surpasses the quality of many coding bootcamps, which proliferated over the past decade and sometimes left students in debt and with narrow skills."

The course is offered tuition-free for students. The $20k figure is the per-student cost to its sponsors who are subsidizing it for the students. But no, we have the internet brigade with its performative outrage crying over how worthless it is to spend this money on supposedly "bottom of the barrel" students, at a time when even Stanford CS graduates can't find a job. Hate to break it to those commenters, but by failing to do even the most basic due diligence, maybe you shouldn't be so eager to speak up about who's smart.

I absolutely agree that there are many Americans who should see it but will not, and that even if they did, would not change their viewpoint.

That said, sometimes the point of speaking truth to power is not for the sake of changing the minds of those who will not listen, but for our own moral conscience. It is for the ability to see that we are not alone in standing up for the truth, because it takes tremendous courage to do so in the face of such power.

I don't know about you, but the fear, intimidation, disenfranchisement, and isolation that comes from having one's rights stripped away; from living in a culture and system of government that you cannot trust will treat you fairly; from not knowing if you will be targeted next; is something that must be refuted by whatever means possible. And the strength to do so comes from seeing that, indeed, you are not delusional. You are not wrong for opposing tyranny and fascism. Your concerns are valid.

This is why such reporting is so important. It is confirmation of the truth, at a time when those in power are undermining efforts to conceal it. This is what the brave testimonies of the interviewees is for.

That's what a "tip" means. It's an amount paid at the discretion of the consumer, meant to express appreciation for the service rendered.

If it is automatically applied, it is not a tip. If an establishment does not include it in the price of the goods or services, then it is an anti-consumer effort to mislead or deceive. A message or disclaimer saying "a X% service charge will be added on all prices/items" is inadequate disclosure. To understand why, simply make the advertised price 10% of the true price and make the service charge 1000%. If the consumer has to do mental math to get an accurate understanding of the true cost of the goods or services being advertised, that is inadequate. Moreover, the use of such tactics is itself evidence for its shadiness, since why do it at all if it does not confer some advantage to the seller?

A truly level playing field must have totally transparent pricing: the price that is advertised must be what you pay. If there is any tax or service charge, it must be mandated by law and it must be the same percentage for all establishments, so that the consumer has a reasonable expectation that if they take their business somewhere else, they are paying the same rate. But these bottom-of-the-menu disclosures (when they even happen at all, which at least in the US, they sometimes don't) are deceptive practices that business owners use to try to hide the true cost of doing business.

More insidiously, they are also used to capture some or all of the tip income that servers have traditionally received. Some establishments say that this is done in order to be fairer to staff that are not front-facing. But I argue that business owners can and should do this through appropriate setting of wages in the first place. Doing it by capturing tip income through service charges is, again, deceptive. The business owner has full control of the employee compensation structure and consumer-facing pricing structure. That they are so fond of playing games with both means that whatever excuses they make are not to be trusted.

You're absolutely right, and it sucks that I fell for that trap.

In regard to long-haul trucking, I think there's some merit to the idea of having swappable batteries, since presumably the capacities are larger than in consumer vehicles. But since truckers are already spending stretches of time at rest stops, the benefit is incremental, as you noted.

Along those lines, there might be applications for taxi fleets--short range personal transit where the vehicles are all uniformly the same and operated out of a central hub. But again, if the capacity is big enough that a car could just be charged every night, why build these complicated stations?

There are just so many problems with the component swapping model.

1. Age of components. As you pointed out, old components could be swapped for new, or vice versa. The way this would be addressed is to reconceptualize the battery hardware as being a consumable like gas, so that it does not comprise a significant portion of a car's value. But that's a difficult sell: it's like saying an ICE gas tank is consumable when it's the gasoline it holds that's consumed.

2. Compatibility of swapped components. How are the car manufacturers going to cooperate to standardize the battery hardware and connections for all the different kinds of cars that are produced? What about differences in capacity for each model? You wouldn't swap a light duty vehicle's battery into a truck, or vice versa. You'd either have to design the system to be modular (swap as many cells as is needed), or you'd have to keep a library of components for different classes of vehicle. All of that would increase system complexity.

3. Availability. The size and complexity of such swapping stations would preclude having them widely distributed. Where would they store all the batteries to facilitate servicing enough cars per hour to make it sufficiently convenient for drivers? And if they are not widely available, they become bottlenecks for adoption and use.

4. Liability. What happens if there is an error and the car is damaged or the driver is injured? Who bears the liability?

These are just a few of the problems I can see, and for what benefit? So that the downtime is cut by...how much? This idea has always smelled like a scam--a bad faith argument pushed by EV proponents to try to convince people to buy or invest in EVs now, because future technology will solve the range/refuel issue. And I say this as a strong proponent of EVs. The idea itself just never seemed to make sense. You'd need a level of coordination and cooperation among manufacturers, consumers, and regulators that simply does not exist and will never exist except in countries where choice and competition are restricted.

It's incredibly frustrating to see mainstream media so consistently phrase evolutionary phenomena in ways that suggest that organisms somehow have conscious control of their genetics. At best, it is a simple misunderstanding, but my suspicion is that it is a longstanding, intentional effort to undermine natural selection and foundational principles of evolutionary biology. This is why, even after its widespread verification and acceptance by the scientific community, the general public still remains ignorant or misinformed of even the most basic tenets of the theory.

A more honest title might be along the lines of "Genetic analysis reveals polar bears that are better able to tolerate a warming climate are being selected over those that cannot, and this adaptation is occurring faster than previously anticipated."

The problem with all of these platforms is not what what they're called or what they look like, or even how they function for the most part. The so-called "magic" is gone because these services are flooded with inauthentic content and behaviors. Everything is either an advertisement, propaganda, or influencer/AI slop. The signal-to-noise ratio is too low, which drives away genuine contributors and stops new people from joining and gaining critical mass.

The current state of social media is a reflection of the inability of its users to simultaneously discern what is inauthentic behavior and to free themselves of its effects. If you ask a reasonable person if they actively desire being lied to and manipulated for financial gain, they would say no; but when such deception is packaged in a tantalizing form, they find that not only can they not resist, they don't WANT to resist. Like an addict, they want and embrace the deception, to the point where they get angry at anyone who dares to pull back the curtain. The result is an abundance of weaponized and optimized inauthentic content that is being used to manipulate and monetize.

So no, bringing back the "Twitter" name and functionality is not going to do anything, because even before it was made into the hellscape that is called X, it was its own special cesspool.

Indeed, it's amazing how far the KMT has swayed to be CCP-friendly over the past 30+ years. I have the distinct impression that there are two causes: first, it has been infiltrated by spies and traitors, and second, it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to oppose DPP positions. The more the ruling party supports the notion of a separate Taiwanese identity from the mainland, the more the KMT wants to cozy up to the CCP.

There is absolutely zero question that xiaohongshu is a vehicle for CCP-backed propaganda and disinformation. To look at how social media networks in general have so effectively shaped global political discourse through the dissemination of false narratives and bad faith arguments disguised as grassroots communication, and continue to think that these networks operate independently or neutrally, is profoundly naive. Twitter accidentally exposed numerous foreign accounts posing as American influencers. We already knew this to be the case, but to actually see confirmation demonstrates that this is not isolated behavior. It is ridiculous to think that governments around the world--including the largest, most monolithic, panoptic system as the CCP--are not leveraging xiaohongshu and other networks to their benefit.