> all those AI hype men are feeding him?

Hype-women are more effective, spotting boobs reduces a man's IQ by 15%.

Karl Marx was 80% right.

Good point! Maybe the first successful AI movies will be comedies and spoofs: "Pirates of the Mar-a-Lago"

Early Model T's broke your arm when the starter backfired. People often bought after-market auto-starters, and then Ford eventually included it as part of the car.

Some of them *use* robots.txt to find out what to scrape.

You can put tripwires in there and feed logs to fail2ban, for instance.

But current AI mostly works, whereas an alleged philosopher's stone did absolutely diddly squat when observed.

Do you actually believe AI is stuck in its D+ state for say 50 years?

Someday such technology will ubiquitous enough to watch the entire news this way.

(Biden looks eerily like Jen Psaki. Foil hat stuff...)

People make fun of "too many letters", so some propose calling it just "gender liberty" (GL), meaning old fashioned mores about romantic partner and fashion choices related to gender are dropped per regular public settings.

Thus "a GL person" would be equivalent to "an LGBTQ+ person".

Being there is a shortage of women in China due to cultural habits, the Chinese gov't should embrace homosexuality to reduce the chance of riots. People who "get some" tend to be calmer*.

But there has been an anti-LGBTQ+ push by the Chinese gov't in the last few years. Seems some "Archie Bunker" in the brass got triggered by overly fem boy bands.

* There is a theory mid-east violence is caused by polygamy, which leaves many men without mates.

The point is that people are investing vast sums of money to create elaborately-packaged boxed sets that are simply too vast to be actually enjoyed (apparently, the new boxed set Thunderbirds will include heavily restored footage that simply wasn't capable of being included in earlier releases), and upscaling a puppet show to 4K and still have it watchable is far from trivial -- those puppets were never made to be seen on such large screens at such high resolution. The scale of investment into making this publicity stunt and boxed set is incredible, the cost of the set isn't low, and the value of the material that's in the set - even to die-hard fans - isn't nearly as great.

Goblin/Guardian: The Lonely and Great God is an even more extreme example and includes 270 minutes of backstage footage, a large pack of publicity photos, scripts, and a tacky plastic sword. It's an extremely limited edition special collector's edition and the resale market is pricing it as though it includes a couple of solid gold ingots. People will certainly binge-watch the episodes once or twice, which will undoubtedly be in much higher resolution than the rare streamed versions, but not even the afficados will be watching all the making-of footage and the scripts will doubtless be on the Internet somewhere. Unlike high-end sci-fi, though, the storyline is simple so the difference between the scripts and fan-produced transcripts won't be vast. (It was a very good storyline, I was impressed, but it was hardly a case where the tiny nuances matter.) But K-Drama is milled in unimaginable quantities, so much so that many series just can't pick up any kind of audience and are abandoned. It's not produced for repeated watching and the odds of any show, however good, being repeatedly watched (the way fans repeatedly watch LoTR or SW) is essentially zero. But someone had to trawl through all the footage to put together the set, make the booklets, etc, and that wasn't cheap. The boxing is elaborate.

The importance of storytelling is high, but none of these are sophisticated stories. They're all pretty much on-par with Smith of Wooton Major - a great little read, but not one I'd pay £500 for, even if they did throw in a plastic sword. I'm not convinced anyone is buying these sets for the content, even though the content is enjoyable.

The degree of investment is phenomenal, the sophistication of presentation is exceptional, and the fans are buying in quantity. I'm just not sure what the benefit is, on either side.

That's what proprietary microcomputer companies believed. But open component standards greatly accelerated competition and options, flattening the proprietary players like Commodore and TRS. (Apple is the lone exception.)

We are at the Model T stage of generative AI. It will get much better, probably either better than CGI, and/or will help create the CGI models themselves which are easier for humans to fine-tune than direct AI output.

However, there will be growing pains. This project is a guinea pig, and is squealing bigly right now. There will be AI roadkill. Gloating about failures may make one feel better, but won't stop the inevitable march of AI progress. The cat is out of the bag.

Lots of banks especially the online kind are forcing users to hold up ID cards, passports, take selfies as fraud prevention measures. Physical banks are still generally satisfied if you appear in person with ID, proof of address when opening an account. Can't speak for other countries but Ireland also has a government public services card with biometric face info which is necessary if you want to claim benefits or get a driver's license.

Said the Amalgamated Union of Fraud, Identity Theft and Scams.