This was basically my first thought -- not the humblebrag they think it is. Any sufficiently large company declaring a ban on AI tools is effectively announcing their profit margins are padded more than enough to not need any potential scalability and efficiency increases AND no legitimate competitors to be concerned.

Across a lot of the "art" related games and crafts, AI has become a one acceptable opinion community. It transitioned from popular virtue signaling to fascism with surprising velocity.

As for the actual ban at GW during the content creation phase, won't actually happen. I'm pretty strongly of the opinion one of the utilities of AI art is to relieve artists of a volume of commercial dreck in favor of art for the sake of human expression. Ignoring the fact that AI art is trained on other art **just like human artists**, artists churning out generic art against a project goal are going to be looking at other art for inspiration and it would be naive to think there hasn't been a bidirectional circle and wandering back and forth across media with tyranids and Starship Troopers and similar. The artists in looking up and mocking up ideas are going to be using or taking in, if even accidentally, AI generated material. Are they going to get magical luddite-edition Google accounts which skip the AI summary in search? There is not a way to sanitize content production from the influence of other artists and AI content. It's as intellectually absurd as the concept of using technology "virgins" when reverse engineering a competitor's product.

I've been in favor of a binary choice for manufacturers / vendors when it comes to *consumer* electronics goods. Allow the manufacturers to register / legally classify their device as either (A) computing device or (B) smart appliance. Here's the general gist of the legal distinctions:

If it is (A) computing device:
  - Consumer provided with permanent root / administrative access day 1.
  - Complete offline functionality outside of services with a reasonable need / hosted online (e.g. email client works offline, but obviously must be online to update content).
  - No greater legal liability around software defects than current requirements.
  - Consumer has 100% rights to modify the software and hardware on the device, though no open source / code requirements for any proprietary / secret sauce (e.g. driver blobs).
  - Consumer use of rights does not cause a loss in functionality outside of services and features which inherently can't work (e.g. when offline, internet-based services are unavailable vs Google blocking Google Pay on rooted phones would not be allowed).
  - Consumers have a right to API functional spec details for any internet or external dependencies for advertised device functionality and have the right to direct the device to use locally hosted / 3rd party alternative services.
  - 100% right to repair, hardware parts BOMs and board diagrams publicly available.

(B) Smart appliances:
  - Support and services provided in perpetuity.
  - Shutting down services / sunsetting devices has an open-source poison pill -- all device source and root access must be registered / escrowed and get released. This includes all proprietary blob source code and similar from all contributing parties.
  - Reducing functionality is the same as sunsetting the device -- no neutering protection.
  - Software and hardware defects carry the legal liability of consumer products, no EULA / TOS / arbitration clause / etc. protections.
  - Security vulnerabilities are in scope for legal liability and must be fixed in perpetuity. For hardware defects or unfixable software, a mitigating control must be provided.

There is also the worker bee problem. Government work attracts workers often with one or more of the following traits:
1) Don't care about productivity and output in the workplace (i.e. lack of pride in workmanship).
2) Don't have the intellectual capability to rate or understand useful output in the workplace. This is pretty extreme in areas like social work*.
3) Are risk adverse to the point of being otherwise useless and unemployable. They're in government work for the safety net of a good retirement program.
4) Were indoctrinated by the education system to consider certain careers as some consecrated mission or otherwise aspirational (e.g. teachers / police / military).

*People like to make fun of post grad degrees in education should see the critical thinking skills of a turnip the average social work major possesses. And it's sad, because many of them genuinely care about people. Their work and personal lives constantly challenge Hanlon's razor.

Odd, I have a similar Samsung remote for my TV and only once in 2-3 years have needed to flip it so the underside is up after the TV prompted me (was actually a couple weeks ago).

The living room it is in isn't a full-on man cave, but the main window has double blackout curtains (more for sound absorption) and the other window gets almost zero sun with a covered patio in front of it. That room also almost never has the main lights turned on, maybe a couple times a month for 5 minutes at a time.

The remote has been impressive frankly in its ability to harvest enough light from leakage from adjacent rooms and a night light at the far end of the room for navigation.

It was simply bad writing. It really looks like they were given a set of plot points and callback scenes to get into each episode, and like the sub-70 IQ characters they wrote, they were not clever enough to weave it together into something coherent.

In the horror side of the genre, characters making stupid decisions in a moment which come to haunt them is normal -- it's part of the contract between the audience and the writing, to buy the bit. Characters feeling like they would fit in Idiocracy the TV series takes you out of the world and is too much to ask.

The show was run by someone who thought their success with Bones was because the show was smart and clever like House or Sherlock Holmes, not the reality of low brow comedic sexual chemistry between two people much of the target demo thought were obtainable.

Crysis actually.

They also consistently demonstrate massively worse blind spots around false communities. The blind faith towards "person from Discord / reddit" is truly extreme.

Part of it looks like the general social dysfunction from social media overexposure - conflating acquaintances with friendship and such. Hustle culture plays in, as integrity is just something for old people and "not the way the world works". Then they rage at companies and CEOs like they're personal friends beholden to conform to their worldview and in-group politics.

I mean it is all tribalism, but like zero effort, zero intellect applied tribalism.

If they have the technology to descramble the average reddit post, they're already sitting on trillion-dollar AGI tech.

It's about these things in balance.

Suburban homes sourcing most / all of their drinking water from bottles is insulting unless there is a Flint water situation due to toxic city leadership. Having a crate of bottled water as backup / leaving the home is more reasonable. Abolishing straws or going to paper ones was always at the opposite end an absurd, insulting virtue signaling. When it comes to changing what something is made from to make it easier to biodegrade, the first question should always be energy input. How much more energy and cost accompany things like reformulating straws' plastic.

Disposable diapers are a necessity of the dual income household. There are a variety of other disposables and consumables which fall in the same category where given the option and time, many could / should / would use reusables. The dark gray area are things like laundry and dish detergent pods. They probably shouldn't exist, but portion control isn't just an eating problem with many people.

Going from selling something a thousand times instead of once, the selling something a few times extra instead of once though is its own form of rent seeking by defect. We're seeing this in the automotive world with PZEVs, direct injection, and SCR systems all designed to incur costly repairs which shouldn't have been necessary.

A huge failure in F/OSS is the diversification of hardware and platforms which makes supportability a nightmare. And Broadcom / RPi as an organization has talked a substantial consumer base into toxicity against their peers by subscribing to the ephemeral hardware cycle. Ironically, Broadcom isn't the worst actor, or even a particularly bad one. It's ARM and the ARM community pushing the hardest for compatibility breaking at every incremental release.

In the hardware space as well as a lot of maker related software spaces, vendor support is live or die. There is a large enough consumer population to use the products and make them profitable. There is not a large enough consumer population to convert enough over to producer to keep F/OSS efforts alive. Easy software example from 3d printing where a lot of this semi-embedded / almost enough compute is used is Varislice being open sourced by Autodesk. Yes, that Autodesk... gave something away for free. And it promptly died. Literally a gift horse the recipients aren't cowboy enough to keep alive.

Education and tinkering was the original sales *claim* up through the Pi 2, but it was never how they operated. PiOS and other upstream development has always been about creating a market of embedded general use cases, but that must shoehorn and conform to absurd platform limitations. The whole Compute Module effort was about admitting it's just a SoC board and that more serious uses needed big boy adult hardware when getting into GPIO and shared busses among accessory hardware.

Heck, some of the major "F/OSS" software verticals effectively only run on RPi hardware without a LOT more tinkering to get running on other platforms and are openly hostile to even mentioning x86 general PC cross platform use.

<quote><p> tailored for financial gain...</p></quote>

Somehow people seem to forget a monetized YouTube channel or podcast fall under this category and think because it's only making them a few bucks, the rules don't apply. And parody as well as review / criticism fair use cases are similarly misused to define whatever the thoughtless want ad nauseum. They wouldn't know what transformative meant if a high voltage power line fell on them.

Do they know they're over 20 years too late?

Probst did the killing, but Riccitiello started packing disks with vacuum-desiccated remains long ago.

Pi 3-5 should have all supported Wake on LAN and 4-5 Wake on Wireless, but they're all mediocre products sold on brand recognition at the end of the day.

Once the higher end RPis broke $80 (higher RAM 4s, but I recall 3Bs having odd price spikes too) and the NUC-like x86-64 PCs exploded with fully functional (SSD/NVMe + RAM) units <$250, the value balance for Pi was over -- and this was before 2020 issues. The Pi still needed $30-120 in parts to make "complete" whereas the PCs just needed $10-20 in an Arduino, STM32, or Pi Zero for GPIO, if you needed that sort of thing.

<quote>rehearse the demo ad nauseam until you've found a solution that works and then stick to it absolutely verbatim. </quote>

In that case, the demo succeeded. I am absolutely sure one of the selling points at the C-Suite and a few of the more malicious advertiser and MBA crowd just beneath is that AI brings just enough pseudo-randomness while seeming useful to increase engagement and eyeballs.

This started getting noticeable with Google Search only a couple years after acquiring DoubleClick. Search results started getting progressively more kneecapped to keep people iteratively refining the search, while hopping over to another device with the same search string InCognito would yield better results with the original string.

Being directed by Google and similar search engines over to AI blog spam is not due to the AI blog spam fooling the algorithm. It's the algorithm has intentionally been reworked to produce poorer quality results.