Both of my work and personal computers were Win10, they got a free upgrade to Win11. There are versions with ads to them, stripped down subscriptions and such. My versions of Win11 do not have that but they do recommend Microsoft products and features, particularly Copilot these days. However they're very easy to disable, and to respond to a reply below, my elderly parents have no problem telling it to disable those recommendations without my IT help, so it's not a big deal. Again, I get what they're doing, but turning it off isn't hard and notably it stays off when turned off, even after updates.

So yeah, I find this whole article and summary entirely confusing; just not my experience at all. I do not mind intrusive ads as "recommendations" if I can opt out and they stay off, and so far they have including my less technically inclined family members. So not a big deal to me.

OK thanks for this. I was incredibly confused by this article and summary; so he's talking about the Free version of Win11? Because this is not my experience either. Win11 is just fine for me on both my work and home computer, but then again I am using enterprise version.

Notably, I also disable many "features" of Win11. This new Recall thing? I get what they're trying to do, but just no. No thank you. Others are just odd, but it's not that hard to disable them and I'm not even an expert user.

Then why did you make your original post? You're clearly not interested and have no desire to understand why your suggestion is nonsense.

Professional Cycling may not be your bag, but there are an estimated 470M fans of professional cycling, with the Tour de France reaching 1 billion viewers via TV and streaming. With that kind of reach, the sport is heavily sponsored for it's advertising value. There's a reason Lance Armstrong is a household name and is worth tens of millions of dollars, and there is a huge incentive for teams to perform and win to stay ahead which is why pro cycling is so heavily mired in cheating controversies; the money is enormous.

And as the GP said, it's not just about the athleticism of the cyclist, it's about the design of the bike as well, and the team strategies. It's not just a race; it's a team sport where other members of the team try to pace with and block other teams from catching the lead cyclist on their team to score the victory. That may not be your thing, but it is a thing for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Good proposal but the problem with these is the so-called AI detectors right now are at best questionable and at worst a bigger problem than the AI.

And it doesn't necessarily help with other uses of AI. For example, while I don't write peer reviewed papers, I often write a lot for various purposes in work, including some emails. I find myself writing out all of my thoughts, which can easily fall into the TLDR category, and then I copy the entire thing into AI and ask it to keep all of my core elements but make it more concise and maybe add a tone or two depending on my objective for what I wrote. As a result, my written communication has significantly improved, and the AI is not writing, it's editing. Should that be considered AI slop, when it has all of my positions and facts but condenses it to a far more readable piece?

I think you're on the right track here, but I think enforcement is a problem do it at any sort of scale and it may not change the incentive structure. Perhaps a better approach is to treat a fully AI generated paper, that a person can reasonably review and notice obvious errors, as equivalent to plagiarism in academic circles. Then throw the book at that academic, black list them from the publication, and take a firm policy that anyone submitting an AI generated paper will get the same treatment.

A few public hangings might be enough to dissuade bad behavior, and might be more cost effective.

TBH I find those "50's-style" retro movie trailers to be awesome, a guilty pleasure. Another one I love is these videos that match something like people out on a ship and a giant lovecraftian monster is coming out of the water to threaten them, with the video presenting it like it's real. That stuff is clearly fake and kind of fun.

But I do see a lot of Warhammer 40k stuff where an AI voiceover is just reading from the wikis and making up AI art that doesn't even match the voiceovers, same with Star Wars stuff and other stuff, and it's just bs nonsense. It could kill those guys.

I see it all the time. I watch a lot of videos on science fiction and fantasy, like Quinn's Ideas (I won't link it but great channel). Real creators who are passionate about their topic are getting drowned out by similar content videos that, if you know the content, are clearly incorrect and use an AI generated voiceover. Many of them are well optimized for YouTube's algorithm, so they get pulled up quickly in your feed and drown out the content creators; several creators are begging for likes and subscirbes now because they've seen their videos get drowned out in a flood of copycat material.

This is all fine, and there are situations where a 4-day work week can be beneficial to both the employee and the employer.

The issue is not having at-will employment. Most of the US has at-will employment, meaning you can be fired for any reason at any time. In general that means that a company has a very bad reputation if they abuse this and it'll be difficult to hire, but if you want qualified talent you have to make your workplace an attractive place to work. Not so in the UK. While in theory you can fire an employee for poor performance, the level of documentation required to demonstrate poor performance is so onerous; it can take 3 to 5 months of constant HR work to demonstrate that the employee is a bad performer. And maybe they demosntrate they're performing ok, but if they are a toxic personality in the work environment that brings down the morale of the rest of the group, in general you have very little recourse as an employer.

While maybe that sounds great from the employee side, from the employer side it makes hiring a significant risk. If you make a mistake in hiring a person, fixing that mistake is an enormously difficult prospect. This directly relates to why the UK has a comparatively small innovation economy; startups by their very definition are taking enormous risks, adding hiring risks on top of that is painful as hell; it makes you not want to hire people at all.

The US is much more dynamic in this regard; while yes it gives fewer protections for workers, it also shows that toxic employees need to shape up or they'll never get hired, and it also leads to a more dynamic employment market. It causes short term pain when you have to let someone go, but I've been forced to layoff whole teams because our company was struggling in all respects, and I was able to help all of the people I laid off find better jobs that advanced their careers; the poor emotional state near-term when they were laid off was absolved by the fact that they ended up finding better jobs that were better fits because of the work they did at our company. In contrast our UK teams were always just a giant complex issue; we simply could not afford to get hiring wrong which means we were always reticent to hire at all in the UK.

"Punishment isn't working": you can't prove that because it's proving a negative. How many people thought about causing damage to their employer after getting laid off, but decided not to because they knew they would go to prison?

Related to that, even a harsh punishment doesn't necessarily mean that someone will make an illogical choice not considering the consequences; you will never stop 100% of issues like this because there will always be someone who misunderstands their situation and makes an illogical choice regardless of punishment.

This. I regularly recruit PhDs and Engineers in my company. Many I get to know well, and despite their intellectual capabilities, far too many of them have made some of the absolute worst financial and personal decisions in their lives, and too often even in work they are myopically focused on viewing a problem through their own intellectual training that they miss very simple solutions. A few are well organized, but I am consistently stunned at the poor decision making of highly educated people.

Try reading my post AC.

No it's not. What he's saying is we should go to a 4 day work week, which ignores the entire concept of equal pay for equal return. Worker's productivity gains should not be returned to the worker, because productivity gains are driven by both worker gaining skills and also automation which comes from the employer. As such, productivity gains should be shared.

But the way Bernie says this is we should go to a 4 day work week but it never recognizes the same productivity output at all. The implication is that workers should be paid the same but work less; the benefit is all on the worker side. There is no ethical reason why a company should pay the same amount for less work. Rather if efficiency can be gained so that the productivity is improved, with a net result of the same work for less hours then it makes sense, but a 4 day work week has to include some element of the same results for the same pay regardless of time spent.

I don't know a single place on earth where you can get paid the same amount for 20% less work, so I don't know what you mean by "more civilized places". Work is a contract between the employer and the employee; what's in it for the other side of the equation where they pay the same but get 20% less work out of you?

Because even countries with more worker protections or policies a little closer to the socialist spectrum do not do this. Belgium is experimenting with a 4 day work week but with a commensurate reduction in pay. Some French companies are experimenting with 4 day, 10-hour days (which I honestly like). In the UK, Germany and Spain, they're experimenting with what's called the 100-80-100 model, which is 100% pay, 80% of the time, but 100% productivity; that means you have 80% of the time to do the same amount of productive work you did with a full 5 day week. This model is great as it reduces the time and pays the most, and is more defined on the value of your work rather than the hours to produce the work, but you're also cut if you can't produce as quickly.

But in everyone one of these cases the companies are still getting the same amount of work product out of you. In all regards, Bernie is talking about a solution in the wrong way. What we need to do is focus on the value of the work created by a worker, and then can we leverage AI to produce the same amount of work for less hours of the person's time, giving that person more hours to their life but the same amount of pay. But you can't just jump to a 4 day work week and expect to be paid the same with less work output, it remains to be demonstrated that new tools like AI can make the same person produce equivalent work for less hours. Once we can show that, then it's a very easy discussion to talk about how we move to less hours for the same amount of work.

What on earth makes this guy think they're not saving his information? From their own TOS:

Our use of content. We may use Content to provide, maintain, develop, and improve our Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and policies, and keep our Services safe.

OpenAI, and all AI companies, openly scrape all information they can get their hands on regardless of ownership, copyright, or any sort of legality. Their crawlers abuse other companies' websites. Many of their executives openly claim they don't bother seeking copyright. Why would they protect an individual's right to privacy, particularly if it gets in the way of making a buck? I'm stunned that anyone would trust these companies in such a way.

That's not entirely accurate. That is a revenue source in some models, but it's emerging and the value of market data, while valuable, may not be the biggest source of revenue for a BNPL lender.

No, the biggest source of BNPL revenue is merchant fees, which start at 2% and go as high as 8%, much higher than credit cards which range from 1 to 3%. The stores like these because they have clearly demonstrated that they can boost sales, and will take the merchant fee hit if their sales go up by 15-20%, and almost always it's on higher priced items, so those sales increases result in a higher boost to revenue vs. say 15-20% increase on lower priced goods. Larger items often have a high markup over their COGS because they take longer to sell (you're factoring inventory and cost of capital to manufacture for longer cycle time of stock converting to sale), so if BNPL speeds up the sale on higher priced, high gross margin goods then the saved cost on cost of capital and inventory holding goes right to profit. The merchant fees also are justified by the fact that credit cards tend to be used for high volume, lower priced items; it's rare someone is going to buy $1,500 and up on their credit card for a single purchase, but those are the exact purchase targets of BNPL lenders.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, unfortunately it's a good thing for the store and the BNPL lender but it's still not so great for the consumer. But for the most part these lenders make money simply on the fact that they speed up and expand the exposure for higher priced, higher gross margin goods, shrinking the time to convert stock to a sale, pay the store up front for the amount minus the fee, and recognizing real returns quickly. All at the expense of adding up debt on to people who likely cannot afford the extra debt.

Sigh, trolling and i'm responding to you.

The cultural revolution shut down education for some time. The generation being trained during that period had no outside education, because they were a closed society during that time, and curricula were altered to fit the CCP's agenda. For example, the CCP labeled the Theory of Relativity as reactionary and bourgeois. A whole generation of intellectual thought was lost because of CCP's control, most of which is now back decades later because of Chinese scientists trained in the US who are now professors in China. But it still stands my point: the last few decades of scientific research out of China has been derivative of Western works; only until recently are they catching up. Imply I'm racist or something for saying that, but it's a fact; China has done an enormous job correcting the lost century and the problems caused by the early CCP and Mao's policies along with the destruction during WW2 and the early warlord era, but they still had to play catch up.

And yes, I can tell the difference; it's you who apparently cannot understand my point. My point is: who cares? This is just a different way to get to teh same end goal, but the end goal is xenotransplantation, of which the West is already doing this. There is no benefit to this technology if there already is a way to achieve the same end goal, it's good science and it's different but it doesn't matter.

And I don't think you're using the word "hyperbole" correctly.