Many European style houses do not have windows compatible with window AC units due to how they open/close and their size. And having just gone through the process of replacing window frames, it can raise the cost of installing an AC up to the next order of magnitude.

I'm sure you're the first person to comment on ugly buildings with window units hanging out of every available space. Oh wait, I've actually seen you make exactly this comment before you hypocrite.

And that's before you consider that many European window designs do not lend themselves to having window units bolted into them (since many countries do not actually have sliding windows as a standard).

And floor units? I mean can't you come up with an even worse solution? Why not put a large block of ice in the house, or just leave the fridge door open. Floor units are woefully inefficient, woefully loud, piss weak, and take up valuable living space. They aren't just a last choice for most people, they are a non-choice for most sane people. You can achieve more with a ceiling fan and an awning.

By running a thin cable into a building. When AC is delivered by a thin cable then you'll have solved the problem. Have you solved the problem? I didn't think so.

There's a reason the cutting edge of cooling tech is looking to reuse radiator circulation and provide cooling through air-water heatpumps.

I wasn't commenting on the talent of the creator, but the capabilities of the AI generation. AI still very much leaves you in uncanny valley.

Try and follow the conversation. No one is talking about special effects touch-ups here. That is a place where AI is actually really good and in many cases can achieve better results than standard tools. The GP postulated entirely CG action scenes, instead of having actors learn how to move, not special effects.

That entire video sits firmly in uncanny valley. If that's your state of the art example to counteract my other example then you've only helped me make my point.

This already exists. My bank has offered subscription cancellation services for over a decade now. You select the service (based on a bank keeping track of recurring payments from your accounts) in the online app, sign a Power of Attorney form using your 2FA, pin or biometric login, and let them do the rest. They made a big fuss early last year that they migrated this entire process to an AI system.

And the answer as usual is AI slop.

This has been going on for ages and used for spam and cybercrime and they didn't care.

The reason it's a problem now is AI companies are buying access to your TV so they can use your clean IP address to go scraping data from websites that are blocking them.

Don't get me wrong it's still a good thing that these are getting banned but they have been around apparently for quite some time and none of the TV manufacturers gave a shit. Probably because the problem wasn't big enough until the AI swap bots got involved.

That's because you live in a place where corporate interests are put in front of consumer ones. EU directive 2023/2673 requires that any online service that can be signed up for via a website be cancellable via a website *with the same level of ease*.

This is exactly why I keep my television tuned 24/7 to Fox News Network. There is absolutely nothing you can do to make a TV dumber than that!

Actually that's false. Having worked in a call centre before, the vast majority of customers called with simple easy known problems. Ever wonder why you get fed a stupid script starting with "Have you tried turning the thing off and on?", because most of the calls to a call centre are precisely those kinds of problems.

For every Slashdotter with a complex problem needing elevation to a higher level of support there's 100 other grandmas whose peak technical knowledge was being able to dial the customer service number in the first place.

And heck the last time I called my ISP I had an AI chatbox do the entire customer support problem and it worked fine (Problem was they sent me a new modem but not new mesh repeaters, and while they were compatible it was annoying that my phone would try to connect to the WiFi 6 hub on the other side of the house rather than the WiFi 5 mesh repeater in the same room assuming that talking WiFi 6 gave it more bandwidth. The AI chatbot solved that problem and two days later I had a box with new repeaters at my door step.

And they will do that because 99% of the time that fixes the problem for a dumb customer who doesn't realise they don't have a power outage but rather they accidentally bumped the power button.

There's a reason for these scripts. They work to resolve the vast majority of calls.

I think you'll need more follow up posts than just correcting that one word. ;-)

This is false. The problem is you know what you're doing (I suspect everyone on Slashdot does), which means that 99% of the time when *you* call a call centre you have a specific and complicated problem that needs to be elevated to a higher level tech support.

But you are not normal. Virtually all call centre calls are for stupid trivial shit, the kind of thing that Slashdotters would solve with a quick google search. That is what the staff are trained to resolve, and for the vast majority of calls they are not only perfectly sufficient, but also have sufficient authority to resolve the case, and ... are also trivially replaceable with an AI bot.

The world is full of critical systems that are certified via an extensive (reads: expensive) process for a specific OS version which have an estimated useful life far longer than 10 years. One does not simply upgrade it, and typically the end user may not even be allowed to upgrade it.

AI slop posts farming karma so they can do scams and political post floods during an election season mean all of the discussion on any of the hobbyist forums is basically garbage. You get the same low effort obvious bot posts pretty much everywhere. Besides that there's the usual outrage porn all over the place designed to get you all angry so you will engage.

All that stuff was always a bit of a problem but the AI chat bots have made it so much worse.

Which is also not meaningful as to effect on people unless you also know how the houses are built, ventilated, climate controlled, the prevalence and access to water, cooling, shade, etc.

Two places with the same temperature AND humidity can have drastically different effects on a population.