To be fair, Facebook's data collection did get taken down a notch on the evil scale by Flock.

I've been getting these incessant ads lately for this e-scooter that more-or-less shares a lot of design similarities with the Bird Three (if your city was never invaded by them, it's a rather large, heavy, non-folding scooter designed specifically for dockless rental use). The ads use obnoxious AI generated music and mostly seem to contain rebuttals of criticism over their design choices. I wouldn't really go as far as call the product a scam, though. If someone legitimately thinks they'd enjoy owning a scooter that looks like it belongs in a rental fleet, they'll get exactly what they paid for.

A lot of the stuff advertised on social media tends to be like that. Truly mediocre products with a disproportionately large promotional budget.

And what would we think if parents were just going out and buying cigarettes for their kids?

Building data centers also does create some short-term work for the trade industry. More demand for electricity would actually be a good thing too, if the need was met by building new renewable generation capacity, rather than just jacking up prices.

Basically, it's the lack of regulation that's the problem - not the data centers.

Landfills sometimes do end up contaminating the groundwater.

Also, it's absolutely possible to cool data centers without using any water at all. You'll just use more electricity. The issue mostly that the water is cheaper than the electricity.

This.

Primaries are almost always a circle jerk. Where the rubber meets road will be the general election, and I don't even have to look on Kashi/Polymarket to tell you how that's going to turn out in a +16 Trump district.

This is my preferred way of dealing with quick service food/beverage establishments. I don't want the human experience of waiting in a queue behind other customers, or having to explain my order to someone who is just going to enter it into a computer anyway.

This happened to me, too. None of the online bill pay methods worked, so I took my e-scooter to the nearest T-Mobile store and paid it. It's absolutely astonishing that they don't have their billing system check if the bill is less than their payment processing costs and to just void the last bill if that's the case.

I was on an ultra cheap grandfathered plan, but the most recent price increase pushed the bill beyond what Visible costs, so I finally jumped ship.

If you removed everything from the internet that someone else might find offensive, you'd have to remove everything, including the 404 error indicating everything has been removed, for fear of offending people with numerophobia.

The bike routes it gives are also quite bad, too. It doesn't seem to recognize bike trails and will often favor routing through roads without a bike lane, even when there are alternate roads with bike lanes available.

If it eats the lawyer, most of us will probably be fine and have a good laugh about it over a delightful plate of Chilean Sea Bass.
However, if it launches the nuclear warheads, we're fucked.

Mmm. AI generated sandwiches.

The very old school synthesized music still required traditional music composition skills. Yes, some people did try to use MOD files as a crude loop based format, but due to memory and bit sample depth constraints, the end result was usually pretty rough.

If you have any recent-ish Apple hardware kicking around, it actually includes a loop based music editor: Garage Band. My point really wasn't that this is a less legitimate way to make music, just that the end result isn't typically what we think of when we think of a music composition. You don't get traditional notation that you could hand to a band and have them play your song. You end up with an arrangement of samples, which can then be rendered by the software to a completed audio file.

That being said, people have come up with instruments that do let you play loops and samples live. It looks like this. Yeah, that still takes skill, not gonna dispute it.

IIRC, there was a real band playing the Gorillaz shows behind the curtain with the cartoon simians.

I'm really not sure how you interpreted my analogy of a hypothetical AI song being performed live into a rant against major pop artists. I was specifically saying this is just business as usual in the industry and really makes little difference whether the song originated from a loop-based editor or spat out as some AI slop. If it became popular, the path to actually earning some real profit from it (since only the top tier of artists actually earn any money from album sales) would still look very similar to how other artists perform their work live.