There are legitimate reasons to record some phone calls, and Google took this feature away in an update during a time when this was very important for me. Not only can you not record a call, but if you try using a sound recorder while on speakerphone, the part of the recording during the call goes silent.

It's legal where I live, and it's none of their business either way. In my case, I had an attorney telling me I needed to record certain phone calls.

Same thing with YouTube on Android Auto. They nannied that away, and sometimes I'd like to put a video on for my kids while we're waiting in the car for something.

These kids all missed two years or more of school. It's going to get worse. The kids that missed the most formative years are just now finishing elementary school. I've heard teachers say ALL kids way behind.

I've used the touch screen on my ThinkPad exactly zero times.

My area (I66 in Virginia) went from three normal lanes and one high occupancy only lane (that everyone ignored) to three normal lanes and two separate toll/bus lanes. And when I say toll, I mean like $100 each way. I never thought I'd say this, but I love it! When the weather is nice, I commute on my motorcycle (free in the toll lanes), and when it's cold or raining, I take a commuter bus. I'm either flying on my bike, or watching youtube on the bus. It's cut my commute time by 2/3rds.

This will affect a small number of people who use burner phones for privacy. The rest are drug dealers.

I did some consulting for a major phone company. One of the network techs showed me a device that plugged into the phone network and could make truly untraceable phone calls. It was under lock and key at all times.

Apollo astronauts found a workaround for life insurance. I wonder if the Orion crew will do something like that.

Like all drug dealers, the first hit is always free.

They should have waited until more jobs were eliminated and companies were more dependent on them.

I switched to Cursor AI after Copilot rolled out the 300 request cap. It is vastly superior overall, and whatever type of account my company provides, I've yet to hit a usage limit.

Bacon is proof that God loves us.

Yes, I saw that. And when combined with the quote towards the end, explains why his position is so fucking insulting.

This basically means that if your part of the movie making process can be performed by this tech, now or in the future, then your job doesn't really matter. Which is a wild take considering that he felt like he could not release the video without the parts AI provided, and which would have been handed to a person to do before AI exists, or if he'd had the budget for it.

Fact is the job DOES matter. He just does not want to have to address the difficult question of what is lost by using AI to do creative work that would previously have gone to a human profession, or what it means that he is willing to make that substitution without any apparent concern for the folks that decision harms. He is yet-another rich-fuck who does not care about the human consequences of technology, so long as they do not impact him personally. Fuck him, and fuck anyone who agrees with him.

Heâ(TM)s saying that Visual effects designers are not important. Because heâ(TM)s replacing somebodies work with AI output.

if I were someone who worked in that field, making the kind of content he used AI to create, and then dismissed my work as unimportant, Iâ(TM)d be salty as fuck.

their work is important enough that the film could not be considered complete without it, but not important enough to have a person do it. There is a clear double standard being promulgated here, that amounts to victim bling. Essentially that if AI can do your job, then by definition, your job is not important. Easy for the guy deciding where and when to us AI to decide in a way that does not put his own contributions to the process at risk of being replaced by AI. Fuck this guy and anyone who accepts this BS justification.

Or does "other costs" mean bonuses for those at the top? I'm guessing Chuck needs a new yacht and a new private jet.

That makes no sense at all. If the company is spending $2-3k, for something they charge only $200, then it is an introductory price. To get you hooked. They have to charge you $3-4k at some point of they want to make money. Their suppliers want to get paid, and their investors want to stop losing money eventually. By ask means take advantage while the deal is good, but donâ(TM)t be so naive as to expect the deal to be good forever.

I wonder what they will do when the cost of AI increases?

We all know that AI companies are selling their services at a loss. Often on a cost-of-compute- basis, but even more so when you factor in model training costs incurred with investor cash. And that is even before we account for how the shortages of relevant hardware and server space for running all of this are driving up the costs of memory, chips, etc. Or the fact that the energy crisis is only getting started, and will impact literally every part of the value chain for addressing the current and future demand.

Most of the sunk costs to date, have been funded with investor cash, but those investors are going to start wanting to get paid back with a strong multiple of their investments to date. That means, as companies reorganize around the use of AI - at the current prices - they are creating a potential nightmare of cost forecasting and control when the AI vendors all decide it is time to start generating that pay-back by sticking the screws to their customers. This is CLASSIC ENSHITIFICATION.

This. I built my desktop PC 11 years ago and it still does everything I need. And I have a 5 year old Android phone that's still just fine for watching YouTube in the bathroom.

Libraries. Why write code when you can just import an enormous library that already does that one simple thing you need.