I'm not sure that part matters (the training data) - photorealistic images by a painter, digital artist *or* AI doesn't a photograph make, at least in most colloquial use I've encountered.

I'd say similarly there's been a lot of discussion in the past about composites vs photographs, and when or if they become "digital art" vs photographs. This seems more like an extension of that.

Yes, startpage wraps google to be less filter bubbly. But Kagi / Neeva paid options with AI are also quite competitive.

DuckDuck Go which is powered by Bing (I think) used to always have really bad results. IDK if the AI stuff will fix Bing or if this is just marketing fluff to "light a fire" for Google.

Yea, that is horrific, and I'm frankly surprised it happened, then again I probably should't be anymore. I had a very different experience with my education, which is why I tend to think education in general is important. I've also tried many times to "self motivate" or "self study" various topics for work (post college). And I just find that while theoretically, I should be able to go onto LinkedIn Learning, or Youtube, or whatever - I often don't know what I don't know, and I don't know how to put a "major" together myself. I didn't realize how useful the undergrad paths and advisor were for putting together a degree path that *worked* and taught me things.

Even more so in elementary and high school - I never had any idea why math was taught the way it was, but it was built on top of each course to get you to calculus. Worse - I had no motivation to learn any math really as a kid other than it was required. And while I'll be the first to laugh at calculus being generally useful - geometry and algebra come up a lot. Understanding variables makes a huge difference in any scripting for instance.

History is really useful to get exposed to - and while I'd argue it's one of the more amenable subjects to recorded lectures - I still see issues with self-study at earlier ages.

I can go on and on about why I liked education and why I think the concept is very useful - not least because how important it is to survival in today's world.

That said - I think flat out burning down the institutions with no idea about what should replace them, and no transition plan makes about as much sense with school as it does with police. Just stopping or actively trying to make schools worse for the current students doesn't seem like a great thing to do. You had it bad, do you actually want to try and make current students also have it bad?

Anyway - I'd like to try and make things better for everyone, and just trying to fire all the teachers and figure that we can just put a DVD in each classroom will solve the problem leaves me with a big "citation needed" before signing on to it.

I'm not really sure why you think teachers aren't important - I'd argue everyone needs an education in todays environment, far less need any new art created (we have a functionally infinite backlog already created). I'm also not at all convinced that video only is actually effective for learning for all or even most people. If it was, we wouldn't have seen any learning deficit from remote schooling during COVID, but it's widely reported across many different countries.

And the benefit of AI vs Video is potentially the interactivity that seems very important in the best teaching - where you can ask questions, as they come up and get guidance or answers vs just watching a video. Of course, this does depend on what you're learning, and maybe how you learn. I find for some topics just watching a lecture is absolutely fine, and for others it's just in one ear and out the other. I can't explain why that is, but I also think that many many people are motivated to find ways to improve or at least cut costs in education.

I think to some extent there's been the formulaic pop, rock, country, whatever boy bands etc since at least the 60s and the Monkeys.

I also think that most IP based on copyright is a false idea of property and was broken during the Napster wars if not all the way back to tape recordings.

I also think that a lot of people are interested in Art because they like the artist - so that will always be like patronage, not commercial. For anyone who is just into "content" - they already have driven down cost to a very low value with Spotify and Netflix style services. AI might drive that down lower.

I'm pretty sure you can't copyright a "style". If you could, there'd be no cover bands, no Elvis impersonators, heck, no 10 second songs etc on Youtube.

You can already pay a cheaper musician to do a cover of a popular song and make it sound as close as they can, and that wouldn't break copyright as long as they paid the songwriter license. Copyright is about a copy that sounds exactly like the original. As long as you can show it just "sounds like" and isn't like an MP3 copy - you're fine.

Many of the "sounds like" lawsuits I think are because they didn't license what they were sampling or copying, but I also think those turn out to be rare as you certainly don't win all the time when it's down to like 4 notes in a row.

There;s a youtube video that explains it, and it's as weird and time specific back in the 70s as you might imagine.

Well, clearly most people don't have or don't know how to have an endpoint do this magic. This is the issue, and why so many people complain about it. At a certain point, it seems like you should have 2 audio tracks, the default where it sounds like it used to sound so you can hear it, and an optional second track the audiophiles can enable with full dynamic range and presumably know how to handle because they want something more advanced.

(Sorry, but no, home theatres aren't going to kill the theatre anytime soon - not everyone can have 100" screen with surround sound system). They're not filming or grading a movie for home presentation, and the grading for home presentation doesn't happen until it's time to make the home presentation.

Sure, but I do think the market for movies and where people watch them has swung A LOT towards home viewing. Well before COVID people were just waiting for the VHS or DVD release. Streaming movie releases don't even hit theaters, but this time around compared to straight to video, major content creators like Netflix are doing it. It's not all cheesy crap that couldn't make it in a theater. We also saw some simultaneous releases in theater and streaming.

However - the bigger issue IMHO isn't "home theaters" but the changed preference for media that is available on the go on a cellphone, tablet, or laptop with headphones. Just like "appointment TV" has been pretty long dead with the hundred or more cable channels, streaming and DVRs - I think "going to the theater" for a movie is already getting closer to "going to the theater" for a play or concert. Not gone, but more and more rare and a special event for the people going.

And I think this leads directly into less and less demand for something theater first. I figure this "designed for the latest tech theater" fad is going to start to fade if it hasn't already given the amount of media coverage of actual customers bitching about how bad an experience it is for them. And unlike Android / Microsoft - there's lots of way more fungible replacements for content, and cheaper, that is designed to be more viewable where and how the customers actually want to view it.

You miss my point - We've tried education on many problems, and I'm going to be someone who mostly agrees with you that some people can be trained to be safer. I can't train a random deer to not jump out in front of my car. I can't train someone to not have a random heart attack and crash into me.

There's going to be crashes. If we can have better safety for that, I can't think why we should not implement it.

Also, I'll point out we still require those hard hats...

I can't help but think this sounds a lot like:

"Instead of installing airbags, we should just get rid of bad drivers on the road."

Which is periously close to:

"just stop crashing."

I do agree that for me to enjoy comics / manga in digital form, I need a largish 10.1" 2560xsomething screen on a tablet, or it's even better for me due to distance on a 24" computer screen at FHD. I think the distance is why I'm ok with lower resolution, also I guess I'm better at scrolling. Though, I do think seeing an entire "page" at once is still best for 2D.

I don't know if I agree that stuff has to be a certain level of "flashy" to bring in new people - novels still work as you pointed out. And the thing that's nice in a novel or a manga is that one person can basically do it, or a small team. So that's basically where you get stuff that's different, not just yet another Marvel movie that's $300 million dollars to make. Or another "peak TV" streaming show. Small teams can take risks we rarely see anymore.

I just think american Comics as you said *are* the yet another superhero story, and worse like you said, they're just repeating *themselves*, and now competing against full hollywood blockbusters that draw from *the best* of 60 years of history of retelling the same stories so they can pick which versions "worked" and skip the ones that didn't.

The big thing IMO if they don't do something more with Comics digitally is they need to bring the cost down -> a lot of digital content works as a subscription, and it's not to one story, but a whole library. $5 per 16 or 32 page comic won't sell digitally (I actually think it stopped selling physically too). Not because there isn't a lot of effort to make the comics, but because it's like 10 minutes of entertainment at best for the reader. For the same money they could get halfway to novels which are usually hours, or a month of most streaming platforms. You have to REALLY REALLY like Comics to pay that sort of mark up.

Do I have a solution? Nope, if I did I'd be selling it to them lol.

American Comics also has the problem that there's no obvious way to get into the story for new readers. I've dipped in a few times over the decades, mostly because my dad used to like them when he was a kid. But I never could find the beginning of the story, and so it was always basically a random small part of a random story. Now that my dad has passed away, I doubt I have a reason to go spend $6+ for a single comic book. Oh, and the price - Even if there's a compilation, it's like $40 or way more. Which often still feels like one episode of a show I never watched before and probably won't watch again.

I think Manga has the benefit in the west of when it's imported, it's as the volume format, which usually is numbered, so you know, you look for vol1 on Amazon or wherever to get into a story. And these volumes, being black and white, are half the cost of most American compilations at ~$15 last I looked. Not "cheap" but "affordable" for taking a chance IMO. YMMV.

And I'd actually recommend sometimes checking out the Manga - often it's like anything else, the source material is better, sometimes shockingly so.

Care about sure - deciding factor on a new car? Just deciding to buy a new car basically means (well historically, IDK about insane COVID prices) you don't care about $7500 more than getting a new car. And ICE mid-range options are $40k already and going up. So I'm not sure this is much different than an option pack or two.

The radical fringe of the Left is less worrisome to me than the mainstream GOP at this point. Because the radical left isn't passing legislation at the federal and state level all across the country that's horribly thought out or designed to remove rights of citizens.

And I think you massively misunderstand Ranked Choice voting - unless you think the only choices possible are Democrat or Republican, FPTP doesn't allow alternate parties. Maybe you mean coalitions would mean electing alternate parties would not change policy at all, but I don't really see much indication that's how it works out. The closest we have in the US is Manchin, and if you don't think he affects the Democrat agenda, you haven't been watching the news. Unless you think that the compromise choices of the majority would actually go more radical - I don't see how this would be worse (and I somehow doubt that people's second choices en mass would be less centrist).