These findings would be more useful if they could identify exactly what properties or ingredients are the key problems. I wonder how much of the signal actually comes down to sugar/salt/fat content - and to what extent "processing" is kind of a red herring?

People who lack time, money, and/or a place to cook are going to continue to gravitate towards cheap, fast, shelf-stable food, so knowing where the health problems are coming from is important.

For myself, I try to eat somewhat healthy, but some of the stuff I eat specifically for health is "mega-processed". Like, sometimes I have protein bars. They have good "stats", and I feel like they've helped me reach goals in turns of gaining muscle and losing weight over the years... but they're absolutely unnatural goo-bars. Are they killing me somehow? Because of some ingredient? Because they came from a lab? Because they were extruded and molded? Really?

~20 million (for the Quest II) wouldn't be a great console launch, but it's comparable to the original XBox (24 million) or Gamecube (20 million). Those may have been disappointing consoles for those companies, but they were hardly "farts in the wind".

Yeah Napster died and then piracy ended. Right? Of course not.

Like... If you read my comment, you'll notice I agree OpenAI might get shut down. But then you'll notice the rest of my comment, where I argue why that isn't probably going to change much (or at least not for the better).

This won't work... you have to know that, right? This technology is fully out of the barn, and will just get better over time.

Like.. yeah OK, you could stop US companies from publicly training off random images. You could sue the current crop of AI companies into oblivion for their sins of trying to teach computers how to draw and talk. Sure. But that isn't going to make a million copies of Stable Diffusion, installed and working on individual computers around the world, disappear. Or stop people around the world from continuing to develop these models.

Maybe OpenAI will be gone, and instead the big AI companies will be in China. So much better, now that you can make anything (as long as it doesn't offend the CCP).

But let's imagine, in the face of all logic, by completely suspending our brains and ignoring history, that this could work somehow. If we made a new "War on Drugs" to criminalize training AI on images you don't own, and somehow it worked at a level that it obviously wouldn't, we got the world to agree, and we developed technology to detect generated images at a level that obviously won't work... and after all that we stopped people anywhere from training models on images they don't own, or using those models.

OK, now big companies buy/build/commission images they fully own and have rights for, and they train the models on those. There's digital painting/photoshop work at a few shops in China, and some stock photographers get a one time burst of work. And then it's pretty much done. And we're exactly where we're at now: AI has the same capabilities it has now, but now it's in the hands of the few tech companies large enough to buy a data set. People can use it too, sure, same way they do now - but only if they go to Google/Microsoft/Adobe, because building a free alternative is forever out of reach.

In this future, companies will have the same option they do now of using AI when they need boring/bulk art for their game or product package, and the artists (or stock photographers) who would have supplied this are out of luck, same as now.

But, no longer will random artists have to imagine their special gift has been stolen from them. And to be clear, that is mostly vain imagining, because if they could actually demonstrate it happening - an AI just vomiting out copies of their work - they would already have the same recourse as if someone has just used a photocopier (another technology that somehow didn't end the world).

The crappy part is "you" might win. There might be enough political pressure from people who feel like they're "supporting artists" such that a few countries will waste a bunch of time chasing this. It won't actually work or help anyone for any meaningful term, but it'll absorb a lot of time and effort.

It will be the end of civilization and the world economy

Yeah, it'll ruin the economy just like piracy and 3d printing and photography and animation and the assembly line did. I mean yeah, if your current job is bashing out mediocre art, then yeah you might need to find a new job. Or... you know... adapt, and find yourself more productive and successful than ever.

I have a couple Roku devices and they're fine. But I also don't see where their future goes.

Right now, people don't demand a lot out of "streaming sticks" (or Smart TVs). Many are just front-ends for Netflix or Disney+. But over time their capability should be expected to grow. And as those capabilities/expectations increase, the advantages will increase for companies that already have OS ecosystems/experience.

Or, if people remain satisfied with "streaming stick" type functionality - then their differentiators will slowly evaporate as that market gets eaten up by even cheaper competitors.

Anyway... I see why they'd want to be getting into something else in terms of a value proposition. But streaming is pretty tough place to be now too.

Meh - look at Doctorow's own site (former site?), boingboing. The most aggressively awful moderation of any site I've ever posted on. The admins post in threads, argue with people, then ban people who disagree with them. Then openly tell whoever is left what the acceptable opinions are.

So perhaps he's "beating big companies at their own game", but.... not in a good way. He took the absolutely laziest option - find some jerks and give them absolute power. I hope he has nothing to do with the future of anything.

I read this reasonable post, and I felt I had to check your comment history.

You are consistently posting reasonable, interesting arguments on Slashdot. How? Why?

I have no idea why I still come to Slashdot occasionally, but any impulse I once had to "post actual thoughts" has long been beaten out of me. Very few posters left that actually want to talk about something in a reasonable way. I check comments sometimes, but only looking for dumb jokes or hilariously bad takes.

Anyway, I don't have anything particular to add to what you've said... just wanted to salute you for fighting this fight, twenty years or so after Slashdot was last relevant, or had reasonable discussion with any frequency.

40 million probably makes them the top supplier of PS5s, but I'm curious how smaller players are doing?

Personally, I've only sold like six. Bunch of work to make, and nothing but complaints since. If my experience is anything to go on, Sony must get a lot of angry letters/threatening messages.

Yeah, I've been messing around for a while now... super interesting. It does pretty well with "Write a Jerry Seinfeld joke.." prompts - or, at least, better than a generic "joke" prompt . Like, here's one about a "lumberjack who owns a lot of cats":

"What's the deal with lumberjacks owning cats? I mean, you know, lumberjacks, these are big tough guys, right? They're out there all day, chopping down trees...and they come home to a house full of cats?

You'd think after a day of wielding an ax, there'd be some kind of outlet for that energy. Like lifting boulders or river dancing. But no, it's 'Honey, where's the fancy feast?'

And the other problem is the cats love the trees, right? These guys spend their day cutting them down, no wonder there's tension at home! 'Dad, why did you kill Mr. Whisker's favorite pine?'

I mean, what's next? Bullfighters with a petting zoo at home? Beekeepers marrying women allergic to bee stings? When did job descriptions start saying 'employees must love irony'?"

That's not putting comedians out of a job. But it's circling close to comedy - and at least as good as I'd expect a random person to come up with in a moment.

That prompt gave me this:

Why did Eric take his dog to the park instead of going for a jog?
Because Eric knew that his dog could easily outrun him and it was much less embarrassing getting beat by a canine than by his own lack of fitness!

Verdict: Savage! Poor Eric!

"How many jokes can ChatGPT recreate out of its sources?" and "How much of that variety will you see when reusing the same prompt?" are both very different questions than "how well can ChatGPT write a joke?". For that, you need a secret ingredient, so that it has to write its own joke. Here, let me do their research for theM:

Prompt: Could you write a joke about a squirrel and an umbrella?
GPT4: Why did the squirrel share his umbrella with a friend? Because he didn't want to be the only one going nuts in the rain!
(My verdict: pretty bad... but kids joke books are full of crap like that)

Prompt: Could you write a joke about slashdot and sumo wrestling?
GPT4: Why don't Slashdot users become sumo wrestlers? Because every time they try to push an opponent out of the ring, they get an error message saying - "You must wait 30 seconds before attempting another action!"
(My verdict: not the worst? The premises don't completely fit together... but it works in a surreal sort of way).

I mean... what you're describing is how they're supposed to work. And it could make sense - I'm dumping X tons of carbon, but I'm also paying this other company to capture the same amount.

But in reality, the "other company" isn't doing something like that - instead they're just taking credit for very tenuous "well... we chose not to pollute even more", or just flat out making stuff up.

The idea isn't wholly garbage... but companies like the one in the OP have built from that idea a system that is actively horrible BS.

I have not. I've tried a few pinball video games - didn't grab me. For me, they tend to feel more like "a bland video game" rather than "a cheap way to play pinball".

But perhaps the form factor (and other features) of "digital tables" works better? I'd like to know too.

I hung around a lot in arcades in the 80s/90s, but never really got into pinball - only started liking it as an adult... not a lot of nostalgia. For me, it hits the same buttons as a good video game - the joy of improving skill and mastering a system - but from a different angle and with a very different sensory experience. The games are usually easy to start, which makes them fun to have around and have people try when they visit.

"Internet connected" is not an important selling point for me. I want a good layout without too many "cheap feeling" drains, some progression, and a few good gimmicks/multiball/events.

The only feature I'm interested in at this point is "lower price". A good table has a lot of re-play potential, but not infinite - and they're a huge investment in money and space and effort.

Meh - the beats are very easy to see in most Marvel movies, but they're hardly the only movies sticking to a formula.

People like movies that follow certain structures. Even "serious" movies hew pretty close to the established lines. Hell, even biographies are contorted to have the normal beats at the normal times. This is not new or a secret. If you want to learn what the standard structures are, and what the beats' "proper names" are, you can read stuff here - https://savethecat.com/beat-sh...

If you're just noticing this now, this means you're getting older and you've seen more movies, not that anything has changed with new movies. And if you honestly look at almost any mainstream movie you liked, you'll see the same stuff.