So someone is going to jail for it?

Because if ordinary people do something that is very very illegal, they do.

Seriously, "now" ?

These types of vans exist for a decade at least. Maybe not this specific model from that specific manufacturer, but I don't think that's the point here.

Yes, your government is spying on you. While hiding from you some of its most serious and worrying internals. Don't we just love how we are the people and in charge? lol.

Not strange if you've ever played a fighting game against someone not into computer games. They learn quickly that by just mashing buttons randomly they can often get a win without actually learning anything about the game. Same principle.

Of course they didn't. The name of the game is "disrupting an industry". Because on paper and in investor pitches, everything is straightforward, simple, and was practically waiting for them.

That reality is more messy, has more edge cases, doesn't always follow your process, is something you don't tell the investors and don't consider in your service until you've had the chance to cash out.

It's almost as if having humans around can sometimes have advantages.

But I'm sure this'll just be seen to add one more robot to the robot taxi. A humanoid co-pilot bot?

I paid for a year of access to their service last year (recently let it expire/lapse) ... and I agree with another Slashdot poster who called it "impressive".

I guess you can fight legal battles endlessly over what you're allowed to do with content that was made freely available for you to access over the Internet.... But those "vast music libraries" they "stole" were the same ones the average user of services like YouTube are welcome to pull up and listen to any time they like.

We're really just arguing about if it's ok to write code so a computer can analyze the music and use it to create new music based on ideas it "learned" from the content ... vs human musicians doing the same thing.

To me, the impressive part of SUNO was the way I could supply my own original lyrics as text, complete with instructions on how I'd like to hear the words sung, and have it churn out a realistic-sounding result with a backing track fully assembled to go with it. If you listen to enough SUNO content, you start to get a sense that specific music genres it uses result in only a certain resulting sound/feel/vibe. I could tell it to regenerate something I told it to create in the style of an "Irish jig", for example -- and over dozens of attempts? I'd wind up with maybe 4 or 5 really different ways it constructed it, and the rest feeling like small changes to those basic constructs. But to me, that's ok. You shouldn't try to use an AI music creation tool to crank out complete, "ready to play/perform" pieces of music that got rid of human musicians. A SUNO creation should be identifiable as a SUNO creation when a discerning listener hears it.

I see SUNO handling relatively "low effort" music creation needs like advertising jingles or as a tool to inspire a musician to build from what it gave them as a staring point. For a lot of background music, such as what's needed in a video game? It makes sense too.

I feel like it's not only possible, but likely America saw relatively major power outages at close to the same "one per month" rate in the past too? The electrical grid is basically designed with an assumption it only stays up with the help of a crew of linemen who get tasked with locating points of failure and fixing them ASAP.

I remember some years back, I lived in a small city right on the edge of the Potomac River in western Maryland. They were originally set up with "feeder" power lines coming from two directions in to town. At some point, Potomac Edison power company decided to just discontinue one of those feeder lines and let the city get by from the other one. Every time a car hit the right power pole coming in to town, after that? Power was out for the whole community.

Seemed insane to me that they'd purposely remove redundancy they already had in place? But I'm sure it was all about the economics -- with bean-counters realizing the lower grid reliability was still "adequate" per the total population there, and they'd save all the money maintaining the additional lines and poles.

I also remember living in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri where they had a power outage lasting over 2 weeks. A storm came through and knocked down a lot of trees. (The community took pride in having all the trees growing there, but I guess didn't consider how bad that was for above-ground power lines running right past all of them.) They had to get crews from other states out to replace blown transformers on poles and the whole bit, to get it back up and running.

If better uptime was a major issue, you'd think they'd bury those power lines. But again, it's about cost-savings instead.

That's not an argument.

"Yeah, that guy is dead now. We have a pretty solid idea who did it. But not sure if that'll make him alive again, so let's not bother with catching them."

(What the heck does a PalmPilot organizer have to do with any of this?) Well ... I remember back when they first got popular, my buddy was a software developer at the company I worked for. At lunch one day, he mentioned how he absolutely loved the Palm OS platform, simply because it had so many limitations. He said when writing for the Windows PCs, by contrast? You had so many system resources and so many options, you could pretty much code anything you could come up with. Sloppy code was a non-issue too, on modern systems. Only the coders reviewing the source would know any better. He liked the mental challenges involved in maximizing what you could get from a Palm device with a small monochrome screen and the whole bit.

I feel the same way with movies. All these mega-mergers may give a few big-name film-makers massive financial resources to create new movies. But most of it is unnecessary to make an amazing film. What you need is a great story, and good acting (which really isn't some monopoly held by the big Hollywood stars!). Less is very often more. (Consider how well the first Star Wars trilogy held up over time, using simple backgrounds like a mostly empty desert for Tatooine. I prefer that to the crazy "busy" AI generated scenes in the newer movies.)

Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

So... ordinary airport before enshitification ?

Air travel used to be pretty cool. Now absolutely every part of it is annoying. Especially the booking and its 25 upsale offers.

A few years more of this and you'll have to book business just to get a seat and fresh air.