Not worth mentioning at all. Artists use modern tools. If you don't like it?...cool, listen to what you like, but FUCK RIGHT OFF with that attitude towards other people who like the sound of electronic music or music made with modern technology. That stupid story is as old as time "these kids and their new hits...it's not "REAL" music." I don't like Taylor Swift. She's boring to me, but that's just me having bad taste in music. Most of my favorite music is objectively worse. I get tempted to complain about autotune because I don't like the sound...but then I just sound like every asshole complaining about rap in the 80s or synthesizers in what...the 70s? 80s? Oh noes...a drum machine?!?!?!...what is this world coming to??? So yeah, my opinion is that I don't enjoy autotune, but my opinion is no more or less valid than anyone else's.

Music is very diverse today and yeah...some is a lot harder to do than others.

However, I have ABSOLUTELY NO RESPECT for music craftsmanship. Fuck off with that shit....I don't care how hard it is to play that guitar solo if it sounds boring and tedious. I don't care how many instruments they used in their song if it sucks. I've never heard a drummer rave about a drum solo that actually sounded good to me.

A lot of great music I've heard was from some teenager playing on his home computer with no musical training or skill. Hell, that describes the early rave scene I'm so fond of. You want to listen to music with traditional notation and exclude Taylor Swift because she doesn't use it?...fine....but you sound like an asshat yucking other people's yum and pretending you have some legitimacy.

I hate a lot of music myself...much of which is from very popular and talented artists...but that's my failing...not theirs. You can manufacture whatever excuse you like, but you simply don't like Taylor Swift...that's fine....but your opinion is just an opinion....even if it is one I share. She is objectively a talented individual who is dedicated to her craft and has a huge following. I have no desire to dissuade people from enjoying her music or prefer my favorite music more.

I'll counter with this. What data is there about their effectiveness? How many crimes are prevented by flock cameras that wouldn't have otherwise? Are they crimes I care about? How many innocent people have been charged with crimes due to Flock errors? I don't honestly have a strong opinion. Most of the abuse stories are hypotheticals and I typically trust cops because I don't commit crimes and I not narcissistic enough to think everyone is out to get me.

However, as a cold rational person, I'd ask...how much are we spending? How much benefit are we getting? How much ACTUAL, not theoretical, harm are they causing. This is a simple cost/benefit calculation.

I will say I FUCKING HATE RIng cameras because my asshole neighbors and shitheads on NextDoor ARE a huge problem. In my neighborhood, back when I was giving NextDoor a fair chance, there would be weekly posts of people showing dogs shitting on their yards. A few of the assholes that doxxed their neighbors even admitted that the owner cleaned up after the dog afterwards. It's very clearly abused by private citizens with untreated mental disorders.

My old next-door neighbors were busy professionals with a toddler and a baby. The mom went out of town for a business trip that included the weekend. The woman living across from them was sure to tell her when she got back that a pretty woman was visiting their house late every night. They are old paranoid retirees and hated the husband and thought they caught him cheating on his poor white wife. The husband (Asian) is also a very busy professional. Once the wife asked for a description (25yo hot blonde)...her response was "oh...Amy?..(she brings out a picture from her photos app of Amy playing with her kids)". Yeah, she's a babysitter we hire from time to time. Technically, this was just an asshole with a window and too much time....but people like this neighbor aren't rare. I worry a lot more about shitty things with Ring cams than Flock, personally...mostly because I know what shitty things people do with Ring footage. I don't know what people do with flock footage.

However, I'll give Flock open minded consideration...but I need to know data on how effective it is. I know its not cheap. I need to know it has reasonable protections from cops stalking exes and shittiness like that. I need to know it doesn't have a significant chance of falsely implicating people for crimes.

Who is enjoying life more?..you or him? I think you got that backwards! Life is far more fun when your mind is in the gutter.

Someone needs to fail. This bubble needs to pop yesterday! The OpenAI guys seem nice and all, but we need a big public failure in AI. I want to be able to buy devices without a massive AI tax. The bullshit hype is insufferable, but the chip cruch is killing us all...promising stuff few of us want to get these overleveraged HALF TRILLION datacenters built...while taking things we enjoy: our devices, gaming-consoles, etc and making them expensive and in short supply. There's NO SIGN they will succeed at their goals...and if they do?...there will be a white collar jobs apocalypse....which we fund directly and indirectly.

We all know this bubble will pop. It should have popped by now! OpenAI seems like an obvious casualty because they're so overhyped and not backed up by an advertising agency like Google and Meta. We need more common sense and hopefully these guys having a massive public failure will cool the stupidity and get AI investment to sensible levels.

I don't need Siri to explain physics to me. I need it to follow commands. If I want to have a conversation, ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini do a better job, but I rarely need that. What I need daily? Siri to help me with my mediocre attention span and aging brain that makes me forget things when I move from room to room...."Hey Siri...set an alarm for 9AM tomorrow". "Hey Siri...remind me in 2h to run my wife's and my butt plugs through the dishwasher". "Hey Siri, remind me to renew my prescription"

An assistant doesn't need to be a professor and therapist. I'd prefer a reliable dumb assistant with a lower ecological footprint and cost.

Honestly, I'm happy with Siri's capabilities. Perhaps improve the comprehension a bit, but I learned how to annunciate a long time ago with Alexa, so voice assistants understand me well.

Let's pretend we're cold-hearted economists who don't care about privacy or liberty. How does this even make sense from a cost/benefit perspective? Who the fuck cares about peeling paint and overgrown lawns? How does it benefit the city to crack down on this? Even Illegal dumping, outside extreme cases, it seems like a very minor offense. Most Illegal dumping cases are like some cheap-ass dumps a mattress in a dumpster (requires a disposal fee in many places)...not some Captain Planet story where a megacorp is pumping poison into the water supply. There are certain crimes where zero tolerance benefits the city: murder, theft, etc. Overgrown lawns?...no...if someone has an overgrown lawn, you need to take care of it...but really, if you need AI cameras to tell you it's overgrown, it's not a problem.

There's no way this is cheap. There's little to no economic benefit to enforcing these laws. Even the fines collected won't offset a multi-million dollar project with pioneering technology. There's no way this project could be delivered on time and budget. Consulting companies always fleece local municipalities or they just sincerely don't know what they're doing because it is a pioneering use of technology and they underestimate how long it will take. These days, most fines are a terrible revenue source and cost more to collect than they bring in.

To me, there's ethics and economics...this violates objective economic sense and probably the ethics standards of about 95% of the population. What moron thought this was a good idea?

If Amazon had any integrity, and we know they don't, the would ban all altered images. Only actual photographs with no deceptive editing should be allowed. I buy many niche items and many Chinese seller have a LOT of awful, blatant bad photoshop for legit products. The products are often sized wrong. For example, I buy a lot camping gear. I saw an amazing stool with an impressive load rating and thought...this is PERFECT for the beach. I bought it and it was half the size of the image. I suppose shame on me for not checking the measurements first, but who the fuck would sit on a 10" stool? The stool in the image had to be like 14"...a nice comfy size. It showed a large man sitting on it. 10"? That's a foot stool, not what was sold and they used photoshop to deceive customers.

But even if I had checked the measurements, I've seen many products that are completely unlike what is pictured. The image is shiny, smooth, and altered. The actual product is dingy and has awful texture from bad metal casting. That's false advertising and fraud. Amazon will give your money back...but that transaction is illegal and a crime. Why do I have to mess with this? Why are they enabling criminals? All those criminals they enable? The returns have an ecological cost of shipping and returning. They waste my time. They also siphon customers from legit sellers who don't deceive their customers. It's shitty and should have been called out by the gov a LONG time ago.

First of all, didn't Oracle get it's start as a CIA product? The company is a shit show today, but you can't dispute that they were a leader in the 80s and even the 90s. Ask anyone who has served or even just worked in gov. They've dealt with poorly-maintained software written for a specific purpose.

The gov COULD write software in theory, but historically, they do more poorly than when they hire consultants to do so. The ideal is private industry with heavy accountability. Those private businesses use the gov money and R&D to write private sector software: Oracle RDBMS is a direct example, but arpanet to the internet is another.

Make no mistake. Larry Ellison is a friend of Trump and that's how he got this contract. Oracle's modern record is mostly shite. The only good software they have they bought from others. Their cloud services are subpar. This is crony capitalism and I am confident they didn't get the contract on merit.

However, making the gov a software company?...eh...not so sure. There are 195 sovereign nations on the planet. Have any nations had success doing what you describe?

Ugg...why?....Sure...good games for the price of Prime I suppose is a good thing, but with the exception of Sony/XBox, every gaming subscription service I've seen sucks. The Apple Arcade has maybe 2 or 3 games I've enjoyed and I've honestly never heard of anyone liking it. Netflix has their games...equally pointless, more gimmickey....but regardless....who the fuck wants this? Also, in every case, the games I recognized were already free to play or super-cheap. Games Pass gives you real games that were huge hits....it provides immense value if you like those game. In fact the lack of an equivalent of one on the Switch is the only thing keeping me from running out and buying a Nintendo Switch 2 right now!!! I love the hardware, but WILL NOT spend $70 per game for 2 weeks of entertainment.

Look, we're adults...new features cost money. I'd rather you don't offer me games and maybe play a few less intrusive ads in your HORRIBLE streaming service? I really love the Boys and Invincible...but beyond that?...eh...there's gotta be something good in there...I just don't know of any, nor has anyone raved about their series. I think most would rank them maybe #5 among the streaming services?

Offering gaming with video streaming is kinda like offering landscaping services at your local strip club. They're very different audiences with very different needs. I don't see any benefit or synergy.

If Amazon wanted to start their own XBox games pass rival as a separate product?...that could have some traction...but giving away shitty mobile games in prime?...why? Either keep your costs down or give us something we want...A PC-based Games Pass rival could potentially be interesting...a Nintendo-Switch based games pass would be amazing if done decently...shitty mobile games?..no!

From TFA:

It may not be what you wanted, but it's better than nothing and better than what Sony and Nintendo offer. I don't personally care. I am not into old games, but seems like a nice to have for people who are.

Nice platitudes, but these workers are not anomalies. They may become the norm. AI is a big fucking mess right now. It (largely) doesn't work as well as most think and is far inferior to what is promised...but....if that changes, we're FUCKED!!! Once you can automate my job, you can automate anyone's! Are you ready for the financial apocalypse once every office worker's jobs is automated away?...every accountant...every lawyer...every engineer...every designer....1000s of professions I can't think of at the moment, which are the cornerstones of our middle class will be decimated.

OK, so smarty pants...you retired?...you pivoted to healthcare??...welp...I hope your 401k doesn't include companies with huge number of customers impacted by the job apocalypse?...if you and your younger loved ones pivoted to hands-on healthcare, like nursing or doctor positions....well....do you work for free? Who is going to pay your bills when the economy collapses? You'll make it, but life will SUUUUUCK when you're relying on the gov alone to keep the lights on.

Maybe you're special and open a restaurant or bar...same problem...who has money? OK, so now the layoffs spread from white collar workers to EVERYONE because so many relied on middle managers and accountants and lawyers and engineers as customers.

So your tone-deaf comment about living beneath your means and building wealth? I hope you picked wisely...because if the white collar job apocalypse does happen, it's going to impact most of the Dow, most of the S&P 500, the real estate market, etc. This is scary stuff to be taken seriously. What is being threatened is like nothing seen in hundreds of years, if ever. I have enough to retire today....but yeah....I have a fuckton in stocks that are quite vulnerable....OK, I get lucky and cash out in time?...well...I have no clue what will happen to interest rates, but I can't imagine them doing anything but plummeting....so yeah, I was planning on have sustaining income....nope, retirement may be me just eating away at my savings at the exact rate I live....rather than watching it slowly increase, as I had hoped .

Unless you have a very peculiar job, I think you're one of those AI-as-a-religion zealots who WANTS to believe and thus overinflates the productivity gains. I've been using it daily for 2 years. I just had it write a new feature for me. It FUCKED UP bad. It actually worked...but holy shit was the code awful. As a professional software engineer for a software company, we don't tolerate that level of shittiness. It copy pasted so much code instead of refactoring private methods to be public...it looked up the same data multiple times. Claude's version took 2 seconds to run for a request from a large customer...unacceptable. I had to go in and fix it....my version?...0.02 to 0.2 seconds and my version was 1/10th the code and no copy/paste. It also tried to change the unit tests to cover up it's mistakes. I've caught that on several coworker's pull requests as well.

So if you're putting out 10x productivity, you're either unusually lucky or....you're spamming your codebase with SHIT code that will be challenging to maintain down the road and making your users suffer.

I get the AI is your religion thing. I want to believe too...I just have real world experience and a demanding job with coworkers and managers who hold me accountable when I release shit code. We have 2 guys on the team who sound just like you. They watched the movies. They WANT to believe. I have to reject their pull requests OFTEN because I can spot the errors.

If you said 2x?...I'd believe you...maybe 4 since you're very niche and the only guy there....but 10x? Nope...I am skeptical. I'm not saying you're a bad guy, I think you're just too confident in what you're putting out and overestimating the gains.

They posted their first profit in 2001. Also, they were INTENTIONALLY unprofitable and I think you know this. They wanted to dominate retail and get people hooked, like my wife. 15 years ago, you'd have to be an idiot to buy elsewhere. They had the best prices and insanely good service...then they flipped a switch, metaphorically and their retail division was profitable...suddenly, their prices all went up and the service went down. Remember when Prime guaranteed 2 day delivery? Now prime deliveries can take as long as 2 weeks....but so many people had their brains hacked. I check several places before buying...my wife just goes to Amazon alone...is always surprised when I tell her it's the same price and often cheaper now at other major retailers, depending on the item.

Amazon smartly played the long game, but they're an anomaly. They reinvested heavily and now can charge normal prices and still profit more than their competitors...from investments in supply chain automation, marketing, analytics, etc....not to mention the AWS thing, which I am convinced was a happy accident.

What are you smoking? By 1997, thousands of small businesses were thriving. Also, barely anyone was spending anything in the early 90s. It wasn't until 1995 we had a browser that reliably worked and was popular (Netscape 1.0). ChatGPT was released 4 years ago. So the fair comparison would be 4 years after Netscape 1.0 was released and a FUCKTON of businesses were thriving back then. I did all my banking online back then...from some bank that's huge now, but was a startup back then. I ordered food online. I was a Netflix subscriber in 1999.

AI? Well...it's not useless, but....I can't measure the value at my own job. It gets everything wrong daily....but it has enabled me to boldly write code in languages I am not qualified to do so...nothing bad can come from that, right??? :). We keep detailed metrics among our teams and frankly and have been mandated to use Claude daily for 2 years and no one can point to a tangible increase. I've noticed some horrible vibe coded garbage and a deterioration in our quality...but to be honest, neither a measurable increase in productivity among probably 100 developers among many teams in many continents....but also no noticeable increase in bugs, either.

I like it a lot because I switched to a new product-line and am not familiar with the codelines and it's been hugely helpful to ask Claude why something is breaking or where things are done, etc. But with my old project, where I knew the code well, it never helped one bit.

Dating is a pure market game. Men get the short end of the stick based on supply and demand and from what I've seen, it balances out with age. Dating at 18 SUCKED!!!! But it makes sense. Imagine a numeric "appeal score" that covers EVERY facet: looks, personality, wealth, whatever matters to you. I was a 6 maybe a 7 at my most confident best days. No older women wanted to date me. Women my age who were 6s were getting attention from 8s their age and 7s ranging from slightly older to older than their dads. I don't hold it against women for choosing an 8 or a 9 over me.

However, I'm told, and from what I've seen, once you're 30, it reverses. A male 7 over 30 gets attention from older AND younger 8s. The women your age have lowered their standards because at 32, your ideal natural window for having children is nearly closed.

However, that's for first time marriages. In general, the older you are, the greater the probability your pool has found someone. I have a friend who is single and horny AF in her 50s. She meets lots of great men and jokes "unfortunately, the good ones are taken". She's told me stories about the men she's dated. If they're decent, they're very entitled (the market problem from before...he could date a woman his age, but also random women in their 20s and 30s are constantly hitting him up for no-strings-attached sex...many of which have less wisdom and experience and put him on a pedestal because they don't know any better).

All this is market stuff. It's like a house. If you want to live in a nice neighborhood with a short commute and a good school district....you're not likely to find bargains and will have to make compromises.

But in the end, you're still single for a reason. Maybe you found fulfillment being single. Many women do. They don't emotionally need men as much as men need a family. Lots of single moms just give up and focus on their kids and friends and are happy without a man....that's a valid reason.

In their case and yours, I'll wager you're not relying on AI chatbots for emotional fulfillment.