Well, I've heard that before...and perhaps there are some games where open-ended NPCs with CoPilot running the conversation in the background could be interesting, but for narrative-driven games, the NPCs will still need to be on-the-rails to a degree, in order to ensure that the player's interaction with the NPC fits the narrative. Conversely, I, as a player, don't want to have to type out all my dialogue to NPCs; I can go to Discord or IRC for that, so multiple-choice makes a whole lot more sense for expedience sake, and it's been a solved problem for decades.

So...as much as it seems like an obvious use case for generative AI, I'm not completely convinced that the implementation would work well - adding in generative AI means that there's a possibility that an NPC won't do what the script needs the NPC to do, and could make it impossible for the player to progress in some cases. If all the AI can do is paraphrase its script, then it seems almost-pointless to implement; just give the system a few different recordings and pick one at random if more variety of dialogue is the preferred implementation.

...Depressingly, the idea didn't quite stick the landing...but Windows Media Center was probably the best DVR software ever released for general consumer use, and using an Xbox360 as an extender was a great idea, too. Seriously, I ran this until right around 2021, and it's sad that MS didn't quite manage to work out how to sell this to consumers properly. In an amusing irony, I think cable TV itself would have lasted a bit longer if they did., because two of the things people hated about cable were the slow, crappy UIs of cable-supplied DVRs, and the $15/month/box rental fee. Had MS sold a WMC PC as something intended for the living room as a one-time purchase, it's possible that it would have helped remove these pain points enough to stem the cord-cutting.

Well, one of the issues we're running into here, is that it's kinda difficult to gauge what constitutes 'authentic', and at what point it stops being accurate to label it as either 'human created' or 'AI generated'.

If I prompt ChatGPT to "write a short story about a man raking leaves", and then post the 3,000 word output...I still came up with the prompt, so while most people would still say "AI slop", one could argue that a human was involved.

If I asked ChatGPT for a writing prompt, and I wrote a 3,000 word story as a result of that prompt, would it be 'human generated' because I wrote the story, or would it still constitute AI-generated because the prompt came from ChatGPT?

If I saw a prompt on r/WritingPrompts, and wrote a story from what I saw, could it be considered 'human created' because I have no way to tell whether the writing prompt was AI generated?

If I wrote the story out, then put it through ChatGPT to help me rephrase some awkward passages in the same way a human editor would, am I now unable to call it 'human generated'? If I used Grammarly for the same task? Am I unable to use a spell checker? Is it AI-generated if I wrote every word on a typewriter with no help from a computer in any form, but am selling a text-to-speech audiobook where the book is being read aloud by AI?

Images are the same problem - at what point between AI prompt and auto-contrast does an image become human-generated art? How much of the surface area can use content-aware fill before it stops being human-generated? What if a human traces an AI-generated image? or uses Live Trace on the Mona Lisa?

The real problem is that AI art is a spectrum and there isn't yet enough consensus on where the line is drawn, beyond which there isn't enough human involvement. Pinterest doesn't even have to be *correct* regarding where they draw the line, they just need to draw it...because without a clear definition, the labels are going to be inconsistently applied, and that's what they're really fighting against.

...What is Meta doing with AI, really?

Yes, it tunes their algorithm content for ads and to optimize screen time, fine, granted...but that's been a thing for over a decade; is it just being called "AI" now because investors?

If we take the easy road and say 'yes, because investors', then it'd make more sense for them to support anti-AI politicians, rather than pro-AI politicians. If it's purely branding, then anti-AI legislation would hurt Google and OpenAI more than it would hurt Meta; Meta can just say "we don't do AI, it's traditional algorithms, so this legislation doesn't apply to us", and the lack of AI branding starts to work in their favor at the expense of competitors.

I've never met anyone who's using the Meta chatbot integration in WA/FB/IG. If they've got an API that third party developers are using like ChatGPT or Claude, I've never seen it referenced. If they've got a server farm full of GPUs, unless they're leasing the capacity to someone else, it's unclear what they're actually doing that is either user-facing or directly profitable, so pro-AI legislation seems like it'd help them the least.

Sounds awesome! Seriously, I'm glad you got something that suits your needs well.

I'll admit that there was an incorrect assumption on my part; I was referring to "20 usable TB" that implied a RAID5/RAID6 layout, but as written, yes, 5x4TB drives fit the bill.

That said, the thing about the HyperX cards is that they require PCIe bifurcation support on the motherboard; many don't support that. Those that do, frequently only support it on a particular slot, which then can't be used for other things. The HyperX card doesn't do hardware raid, it only presents the drives to the PC - fine if you're doing ZFS or JBOD, but not an option like a PERC card. Also, it only supports four drives...how would you get 8 drives connected to the computer? Odds are pretty good that the motherboard doesn't support two of those HyperX cards.

That's fair, but those Teamgroup SSDs also do a lot of their own thermal throttling. This is fine in JBOD mode, but any sort of logical grouping would cause issues with the thermal throttling they do because of the disparate i/o throughput rates from drives that have thermally throttled vs. those that haven't, and even if those five drives work fine with passive cooling, make it 8 of the 990 Pro drives, and that fan *will* come on.

It's a hell of a price, no doubt...that being said, I'd almost guarantee that those are QLC drives, which usually end up having 2-4GB of cache, and end up with R/W rates around 60-80MBytes/sec when they're reading the actual QLC cells...SLC and TLC drives that can sustain 1-4GBytes/sec are *not* going to be $200 a pop.

So yes, it is technically-possible...but in practice, there are limitations on that setup irrespective of the current component prices.

Only a sith deals in absolutes.

Now, don't get me wrong, as a rule, I prefer CapEx license purchases; there *should* be software that just-runs once it's feature complete.

However, I can think of three instances of SaaS that predate what we know as SaaS today: Delorme Street Atlas, Norton Antivirus (or AV in general), and TaxCut/Turbotax. In each of these cases, there are legitimate content changes that justify continued work, which requires legitimate development time. Streets get added, removed, and changed regularly. Antivirus software needs to protect against a growing number of threats. Tax software needed to reflect changing tax laws. Each of these services did SaaS the original way - new versions came out on CD every year, and users bought them for the duration of their shelf life.

I think there are certain other things that could potentially justify recurring revenue...but on the whole, I agree that it's unjustifiable rent-seeking. Photoshop has had maybe three useful features since CS6 (and even that had a small number of improvements over CS), I've yet to see someone use a function of MS Word that wasn't present in Word 2003 except for the nicer WordArt. From the get-go, Salesforce always seemed more like a cult than a CRM; Act! and SuiteCRM can probably handle 98% of use cases. Quickbooks has been pretty feature complete for well over a decade that Intuit seems to be in a contest to see how tightly they can turn the screws. Then, there are the smaller vendors like CaterEase that have an on-prem title that they use Citrix to turn into SaaS expressly for the purpose of the business model.

The problem, though, is that the current generation of software developers generally default to Cloud-hosted SaaS, rather than desktop software. Of course, 98% of what runs on AWS can run on a local LAMP stack, but that involves local infrastructure, and lots of people who balk at spending $5,000 up-front are cool with spending $300/month instead; it's why we have Spotify and Apple Music, because there is an unavoidably large number of people who'd rather pay $10/month than do one-off MP3 purchases and figure out where to put them.

So...will the pendulum swing back? I...I don't really know...Mainframes lost their edge because renting mainframe time (the REAL original SaaS) involved very primitive interconnects and the ability to run software locally was a paradigm shift, but with 100Mb internet being pervasive almost-everywhere, and multigigabit internet being available for those who want it, speed and software availability aren't the draws to local infrastructure they used to be.

Writing articles, it seems - it's pretty obvious from the output.

Approximately 100% of people with more than 2TB of data and anything that vaguely resembles a budget.

Even around this time last year, 4TB spinning drives were under $100, while 4TB SSDs were *at least* $300 each, typically $400 or more. 8TB drives weren't hard to find for under $200 (and flirted with $100 on some sales), but 8TB SSDs were between $700 and $900. A 20TB RAID of mechanical drives could be had for around $1,000; 20TB of SSD storage would cost around five times that.

Meanwhile, OEMs seem to be falling out of love with the SATA form factor, and while PCIe/NVMe is great for throughput for one or two drives, getting eight PCIe drives in an array gets messy pretty quickly. PCIe switches are still niche, expensive, have inconsistent support across OSes, and require awkward cooling solutions. Even if the drives are free, a system capable of presenting 20TB of SSD storage to an OS gets expensive quickly.

More to the point, bulk storage *usually* doesn't have to be *that* fast. Larger storage arrays are most commonly used for backup retention, archiving, DVR storage, "Linux Distros", photographer/videographer repos, and similar loads, for which "I need to put it somewhere" is just fine at the 113Mbytes/sec limit of gigabit ethernet, potentially accelerated by one or two 500GB SSDs as intermediate caches.

So yeah, while HDDs aren't really good as boot volumes anymore, and they're not a default in laptops or desktops anymore, there are plenty of areas where "massive and fast-enough" wins out over raw I/O.

And one *could* do that, and have some reasonable expectation that their phone number was actually being unlisted in a verifiable way, and if friends handed out an unlisted number, it was at an extremely small scale, and was unlikely to be for the entire contents of one's Rolodex.

ChatGPT (and Meta and everyone else) is absorbing *every* phone number in one's contacts, based on a yes/no prompt that most people don't read, without the consent of the person who's contact information it is, and likely some notes or descriptions (commonly in the "company" line), and adding it all into a pile of training data, that nobody can audit or verify, and for whom owners of the number cannot opt out of.

These are not the same.

Don't get me wrong, I still telnet to a handful of BBSes that still use the protocol...but with SSH largely supplanting it, and few end-user facing applications using it...the odds are good that most residential telnet traffic isn't all that legitimate, so requiring that customers call to request opening of port 23, along with 80 and 443 as some ISPs do, is probably a good thing overall.

I saw on one news report where the timeline was established, that they didn't have footage to go back to because they didn't pay for the Ring subscription, so there was no past footage for them to go back to.

When I saw this, I wondered about it...there will likely be a spike in people paying for the NVR subscription (good time to be an Amazon shareholder), but it made me wonder as to whether they *really* didn't have footage from a few days ago, or if they do and are intentionally not releasing it because doing so would reveal that they're keeping footage on hand regardless of whether users pay or not, which would end up with a mountain of fallout from all sides.

It's pretty simple: there shouldn't *be* software-based lockouts which artificially impede hardware functionality. If the hardware exists in the object, and the user pays for the object, there shouldn't be a computer in the car upholding the wishes of the dealer/OEM after the dealer/OEM takes money.

If it's in the vehicle at the time of sale, it should be available to the user. If the OEM doesn't want to install the software on the car, fine, but then it has to be sold as "not capable of ADAS"...and yes, there's a valid argument here that there's no functional difference between "OEM has a tech install software from a flash drive in a bay" and "OEM sends a remote unlock command...but then if we're going to argue that it's ADAS-capable in hardware, let me run my own software on the car or buy from someone other than the OEM if I want. Sure, we start going down a treacherous rabbit hole if we start letting users install software from Github on their cars...but if cars are going to start behaving like computers...then they should behave like computers, which means that the OEM shouldn't be the sole source of software for the computer.

Because the fundamental element of a SALE is that a good is exchanged for money. They can put that in my contract all day, but if they're SELLING the house, then the first thing I'm doing once the ink is dry is taking a crowbar to that door; feel free to argue if you want, but the crowbar can serve multiple purposes...

And I'll assume that the money I gave to the person in exchange for the house is still mine to spend if I feel like it...wait, that's not how sales work? Didn't think so. The seller doesn't stipulate what the buyer does with the house, the buyer doesn't stipulate what the seller does with the money.

Yeah, I did.

No, I paid for a vehicle. A WHOLE vehicle.

And there's YOUR logic mistake...the manufacturer's hopes, dreams, and aspirations aren't my problem. If hardware costs $X, factor that into the cost of the car at the time of sale. If it's too expensive to limit it to the premium model, make it a base feature. A computer in the car shouldn't be enforcing the hopes of the seller after the car is sold.

And here's a crazy thought - if the function isn't desirable to the first owner, they don't HAVE to use it! The vehicle leaving the seats unheated because the OWNER doesn't want them on is perfectly fine, and the resale value is in no way impacted as long as the heated seats work for the second owner.

I covered this earlier for the most part, but the answer is that a car should fundamentally allow the owner to implement any and all hardware they see fit, at whatever level they deem appropriate, so long as it meets safety and emissions standards. If cars are going to start requiring software installations to perform regular car functions, then they should enable users to choose from third party software writers, including OSS developers, if they choose. Don't like it? Ship with all the software a car needs to function, or use fewer computers in the car.

Because the thing is, deep down, everyone knows that Tesla isn't selling a $5,000 battery for $2,500 and gambling that 51% of buyers will pay for a software unlock...unless Tesla is going to open up their books and verify that they're doing that, the assumed reality is that they're selling a $5,000 battery for $5,500 and then gambling that people will pay them pure-profit to send an unlock code to a vehicle that the person already paid for.

The psychology is something like if you were to buy a house, and although the listing didn't have a basement on the listing, find that there was a locked door to the basement, where you could pay the builders of the house another $20,000 to unlock the basement door, with the justification that they didn't *technically* sell a house with a basement, so why should you have access to it unless you paid more for the house you live in?

There is a general understanding that if you're buying a physical good, you can use the physical good up to its limitations. Nobody expects Lamborghini performance out of a Corolla, but they *do* expect Corolla performance out a Corolla. If money changes hands, it doesn't sit well with *most people* that the limits on its use are artificially implemented, and the company *who received money in exchange for a product* can request more money to remove those purely artificial limits after the sale.

BECAUSE THEY PAID FOR IT!! It's not a "sense of entitlement" for someone to PAY MONEY FOR A PRODUCT and then have the company say "we've implemented entirely artificial constraints on the product you bought, but for $X, we can remove them". It means that the people who agreed to receive a big pile of money in exchange for a product still have control over that product. I don't get to decide how the person spends my money, do I? I don't get to say, "I'll pay $50,000 for this car, of which $25,000 is for your use, but you can't spend the other $25,000 until I say so, and even then, you must spend it on these things"...that's ridiculous, right?! But somehow it's okay when the dealer does it? ...if that's 'entitlement' to you, then at what point does it become a protection racket?

...wow, that's a bad analogy! No, I don't think anyone's expecting the games to be free. I think the problem is when someone buys a game console and they're artificially limited to 30fps, but they can pay Sony/Nintendo/MS to allow the console to use the full amount of the GPU in the console they paid for...or, if someone pays for a console, and pays for a game, but the console's manufacturer includes a function that limits the owner's usage to two hours per day of a single-player game unless the user pays for the console to remove the artificial constraint.

Hopefully that helps explain why the DLC model doesn't translate well into the physical world...

Okay Gene Roddenberry...let's work this out...

And mining the components that make AGI work, sucks...what's the motivation to do that? "Betterment of society"? Okay...that works for me...but I can't do this all by myself...can you encourage enough OTHER people to do it for purely altruistic reasons? How about trash removal, or logging, or any number of super dangerous jobs? How about overnight nurses? Our society runs on a whole lot of people doing very-unglamorous jobs, and unless the ENTIRE society is willing to handle sewer cleanings if needed, there will need to be some sort of motivation...but if it isn't altruism and it isn't bartering, you're gonna have to come up with a motivation to do undesirable work, and/or deal with undesirable hours. If those systems go offline at 2AM...someone's getting "the call"...if there's no motivation for me to answer that call, I don't know how that call is going to be answered.

...all of which require a whole lot more commitment, and finite resources...and the possibility of lawsuits for doing the thing you're proposing. Please let me know how your 'free restaurant', 'free apartment', or 'free hospital' idea would work, in a way that doesn't involve incentivization, compulsion, or externalizing of the costs.

No, poverty is the default state of existence. Take away all of modern society, and we'll spend our days hunting and gathering for our next meal, hoping we don't get sick or injured, along with everyone else doing the same. Specialization means that one person can spend more time on one task, to the benefit of others, but then that person would have a deficit in other areas. Two specialists exchanging the results of their labor means both people benefit by receiving improved outcomes than if either person were to divide their time...but once you've introduced trade, you've introduced capitalism. Our current system has many, MANY faults (medical insurance, as a singular example, basically being the worst parts of socialism and capitalism without the best parts of either), but true socialism requires everyone to agree that the value of all goods and services are roughly-similar-enough that everyone's willing to participate equally and consistently, but once someone comes in and disrupts that, it requires some form of force to maintain the equilibrium. This is why socialism has huge problems scaling beyond small and/or voluntary communities...but if we take away every system and abstraction, some people will successfully hunt and gather on a particular day, some will not. Some will successfully reproduce on a particular day, some will not. Poverty isn't a capitalist invention, it is what happens if anyone does nothing.

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See, I'd argue that paying $15 would be a bit more tolerable if it was the same level of service that Netflix had in 2014. The problem is that we went from one service that had basically-everything, to a dozen services that have 1-2 shows we want to watch and 1,000 we don't. Now, *that* wouldn't be so bad if those services reflected the difference; 10 services at $5 a pop might still ultimately be more than Netflix was at its peak, but it'd at least be a bit more palpable because it's so cheap...but, to your point, the issue is that each service costs more than Netflix did, AND they're all including ads, AND they're all setting screen limits, AND they're all trying to churn out filler content.

Even *that* might somehow be tolerable if there were a means of searching somewhere to figure out exactly what streaming service has which content; Roku does this partially, but it too is both incomplete and annoyingly ad-laden.

So, really, I think there might be a good number of people willing to pay-per-series, which iTunes still lets you do...usually...in the most depressing of ironies, AppleTV's "For All Mankind" is available for streaming, it's available on Blu-Ray (the older seasons, at least), but individual episodes are not available for purchase. Same deal with Amazon - some series are available for purchase (i.e. streaming without Prime Video), but it's far from a complete catalog.

The "business model" argument is one that I ultimately agree with, but in their defense, I see as not really having a good answer. When we had "free TV with ads", it was called "broadcast", and everyone complained so cable and satellite came into being. "One subscription that covered everything" existed, and that covered cable, but then we complained about that, saying that the future was streaming once Netflix had it for an artificially-low price, or the niche buy-on-iTunes option (something that was always held back by Apple-only DRM, admittedly), or DVD/Blu-Ray box sets, but only after broadcast. Then they got expensive, and content producers balkanized their content (the far-more-expensive part of the equation than the video streaming part)...and then we have the bundle problem where Amazon Prime Video is "free with Prime", and AppleTV+ is free with one of their subscription bundles, etc...but now I'm paying for the Rings of Power production costs if I just want free shipping.

So, I'm not saying that the landscape is consumer-friendly at this stage, but I *am* saying that I'm not sure what the *right* business model is here. One-subscription-to-rule-them-all *seems* like it works well-enough for music; even though there's Apple Music and YT Music and Spotify, pretty-much-everything is available on all services, so the differentiator isn't the content. For video, though, it's unclear what business model is a fair compromise. Personally, I like the iTunes per-series method, but I can also appreciate that one must know they like a series before they buy it, *and* deal with either iTunes' DRM or Amazon's, since nobody seems to want to either come up with some sort of common standard for DRM, or eliminate it entirely (it'd be nice, but there's no precedent for it)...so, it's unclear what business model would truly be the right one, except "lots of streaming services, but super cheap"...which is a rough sell overall.