Current AI will never be intelligent. It can only match patterns and training data. It can't conjure novel thoughts. We need an entirely new approach to achieve actual AGI or singularities. But as you state, AI is a soul-less tool. It's stupid people who will doom us. AI is just an accessory to our destruction. So no, the horrors of AI won't be Skynet, WestWorld or the Matrix or iRobot, but Idiocracy and Wall-E

I remember those, even dabbled with J2ME. I owned the Palm Trio PDA + phone before the iPhone. However, you're clearly straight and were married in 2007. And in fairness, I stated porn, but was including sex, so you're probably correct if we're being pedantic to the way I precisely stated it. Here's where I disagree with you. Remember, before I was born and probably you as well, they had VCRs. They were specialty devices for professionals. Once you had porn on them?...EVERYONE wanted one. The Palm Trio is arguably a smartphone. Barely anyone bought it. Really, the iPhone 1 didn't sell all that well. Rich people and nerds lined up around the block to get one, but not the mainstream. I've been a software engineer and attended many tech conferences in that era around the country and well over 50% of wealthy, professional engineers had flip phones or company-issued blackberries

In 2008, most gay men had flip phones like everyone else, unless work forced them to have a blackberry. Once grindr came out, EVERY gay man got a smartphone, even those with shit jobs. It completely transformed the gay experience. My neighborhood in Chicago had well over 20 major gay bars in a few block radius (nicknamed Boy's Town near Wrigley Field). These were bringing in literally millions of dollars back in the late 90s. Now? everyone open back then closed, TMK. I don't even know if my urban area has a gay bar. I assume there's on on the South end, but...I've never heard of one. The last one on our side of the river closed in COVID. So not only did grindr kill the gay bar, but they completely transformed gay culture. The gay lisp and affect? It was REALLY common among gay men in the 90s, now it's largely disappeared for young gay men. Why? In the 90s, men picked it up hanging out in gay bars. Now no one goes.

Similarly, tindr and other dating apps completely transformed straight dating and were certainly the death knell for flip phones...as well as the bar scene. I'm old now and most young adults I meet are family or coworkers and don't talk about their experiences, but I certainly haven't heard anyone talking about meeting partners in a bar.

Also, consider the green/blue bubble issue. Even if you don't meet your next girlfriend on tinder, you look mega janky with a nokia or cannot message her on her preferred apps.

Then there's sexting. I know a lot of married people who adopted smart phones to more easily take sexy pics and send them to folks: their partners, their side-pieces, strangers they will never meet in person...often with their partner's blessing. I am very confident there were a lot less amateur nude pics on reddit in 2006. Yeah...we had digital cameras, but you have to be motivated to open a web browser and connect the cable and download to your computer.

Smartphones would have thrived if they couldn't help you get laid. However, I am confident they drastically increased the penetration (no pun intended) among lower-income young users. I was a late adopter of the smartphone. I bought my first in 2012 (I had company issued ones before). I live in a city and ride the subway often. In 2012, flip phones were the default among old people, but impossible to find among young people. TikTok wasn't a thing and YouTube was kinda janky back then....so all those young people working minimum wage? I am pretty confident sex was a motivator for a notable portion of their peer group.

That brings about the network effect. Let's say only 25% of VCR owners wanted to watch porn. That increases sales and market penetration making it more viable for those who aren't into porn. The rapid adoption of useful apps would have lagged by a few years, IMHO, had it been impossible to use a smartphone for sexual purpose (porn, sexting, dating).

I think this is untrue. Every movie I've seen does a pretty good job of hiding that gap...you can see it with a sharp critical eye, but if you're not paying attention it looks convincing. The Higgsfield stuff looks AWFUL...any idiot can see it's fake and impossible. Also, how could the author help it? AI is the author. It already has good training data. If your assertion was that it will look like hollywood, give or take 50%, I'd agree with you.

My assertion is the gap is 4-10x wider and more exaggerated. AI is a pattern matching tool...it matches and generates based on it's training data as you stated, so it's a miracle if it improves on the training data, but if it's 10x worse....well....we're going to be waiting for this to impact movies people actually care about. Some late night SyFy slop?...eh, possibly, but even then....this stuff costs a lot of money and looks like garbage today and no one likes the end result...so I can see it help with some shitty background scenes where they just don't care, but I can't see it replace the cast or core film anytime soon.

Have you ever seen a long movie that's actually convincing that is generated by AI? I've seen sloppy ones. Even the "good" ones, like Higgsfield ones are impressive for AI, but not convincing. The shots are claustrophobically close...mostly to keep from rendering hands or the bodies. The physics are just WRONG...which is something you'd think AI would be able to do OK. Like punches are a foot away from making contact and things are just really really off.

There will definitely be a niche for this...but AI movies are kinda like fruit-flavored candy. Grape sales didn't plummet once nerds candy came out in grape flavors.

The AI movie experience is slowly improving, but is still terrible. You can make a very short 5s shot that's QUITE convincing...so long as there's a single subject...really closeup.

There's an interesting parallel in AI porn. A girl in a bikini? AI gets an A+. I am not confident I can spot the AI vs a real image. Most of the time, I can detect mistakes in the background, but they're quite great at the foreground. At first, they'd always make lighting mistakes, but I just looked at some reddit examples and they've gotten quite better.

OK, the woman gets naked? B- Real women don't have perfectly circular symmetrical nipples. It's mistakes like that really mess things up. The shadows and proportions are often just "off"...however, where it fails nearly universally is any sort of liquid. if she's in the shower? (or any other fluids on her)...definitely F.

Video? Well...if there's on subject...it's definitely getting better. I've seen videos where I can't tell if it was generated by AI or was a real video through some sort of AI correction filter....so long as it's a closeup of the subject's face and has minimal movement. If there's a second person? I've seen C- videos here and there, but mostly horrible Fs. There's a LOT of physics mistakes from basic movements to fluids. Objects change size from frame to frame, etc.

Why do I bring up porn? Well...not just because I'm a pervert...TBH, AI porn isn't for me. However, it's because I believe many great consumer technology leaps were driven by porn: photography, home video, the internet, the smart phone, etc. Most of us love sex, don't get enough of it, and are willing to pay to get our thrills.

But also, there's a LOT of porn on the internet that would make for very easy training data. LOTS. Also, the subject matter is limited in scope, making the data more likely to be applicable. Next to sports, I can't imagine much filmed more often than a woman taking her top off...so...it is logical to assume it's the easiest thing for AI to generate. Few things are shared on the internet more than images of breasts. Why can't AI render a topless woman convincingly?

Once AI masters recreating a basic porn, I think Hollywood has reason to fear. However, if AI only works if the subjects is EXTREMELY closeup, doesn't show their hands, there's no fluid, there's little movement...then the movies it can make are really limited. Also, AI movies are EXPENSIVE to make today. I can't imagine people paying top dollar to see AI slop...and today, they cannot make them cheap enough to just give away for free for very long.

So while I can see a few scenes here and there or backgrounds using AI...we're FAR from replacing actors in convincing movies that don't look like shit. Also, AI is just not that popular. People hate AI slop. I don't see that changing until it actually does something cool...custom content?...maybe...but making slop with AI and charging us movie theater prices?....I don't see that working very well.

So you're seriously stating that these LARGE tech companies are using human beings and not self-driving cars because humans are more affordable? FUCK RIGHT OFF, with your bullshit shilling. They hire all these human beings because automation can't do the job. If they could, they would roll it out widely. Tech companies are heavily financed and whoever solves self-driving cars will make a MASSIVE fortune. Yeah, there are limited pilot programs, probably with remote operators at this point. (there are mixed reports about Waymo...I believe they have to rely on remote operators a lot more than they'd like to admit, hence why their rollout is so limited.)

Think of it this ways. Taxis are hard. You have to drive in busy areas and time matters and safety is a greater concern. If the technology COULD self-drive, there are MANY problems a LOT more lucrative than fucking taxi fares. How about shipping? Imagine how much money would be made if long haul trucks could drive while the driver is sleeping, even if at reduced speed? Highway driving at reduced speed is a LOT easier than running cabs in SF or Austin. There are millions of jobs that involve driving in areas no one wants to drive. There are many militaries would would pay TOP DOLLAR to keep troops out of harm's way transporting fuel through warzones. Even just having a car that can valet-park itself would be HUGE for bored rich tech bros willing to shell out huge sums of money.

I wholesale reject your bullshit theory that these tech companies are not doing everything they can to master self-driving technology because human labor is affordable. You must not know Silicon Valley. The founders? They're nearly all autistic...even if the founder is Neurotypical, his lead engineers aren't. They hate people even more than they like money. Tech is cool. Tech is inspirational. Meatbags? They suck. They make mistakes and sleep and quit and are very unpredictable. Tech companies would rather innovate at modest to little profit than rely on unreliable gig workers to make a fortune. They're famously logical, but not in this respect. The notion of being transported to the place of their choosing without having to interact with a human being is too exciting for people like them.

They're already "behind automated technologies". No, the gig workers have nothing to lose. They're getting exploited now. You can't outsource their job to Bangladesh. There's really no way to treat them more poorly. Fox News must have really done a number on your brain to think otherwise.

I call bullshit. They're never going to slow down due to ethic's sake. Either they're running out of room to actually improve their models and looking for an excuse for a disappointing string of releases in the pipeline....or they're posting this and are still going to actively develop their models and hope their competitors let their guard down? Altman doesn't care about humanity. If he did, he'd be fired. There are no ethics in AI. If the frontier models got ethical, their Chinese competitors would surpass them...we DEFINITELY know Musk doesn't care about ethics of any sort, given his lack of concern on the child porn grok generates.

Your mind goes at roughly the same pace as your body. There's no biological reason for that, but it just so happens. My ability to adapt and learn has been compromised, despite my best efforts to avoid it. I acknowledge this and do what I can to be better than most, including most young people, but I still see it. I could pick up a brand new programming language in a few months when I was in my early 20s and now it takes me 4x as long, despite more experience...or just the difference in learning Spanish in high school vs now.

This parallels the changes in our body. Similar to being a lifelong learner, I've been staying in shape all my life. I'm in better shape than I was in college, but it was difficult to workout to failure back then. I could walk for 4h (and did often) and be a little sore and grumpy, despite being in pretty bad shape because I didn't have time to workout between student jobs and difficult courses. If I walk 4h today, I probably would have to take off work the next day. I can do more pullups than at any point in my life today because I've been working at it for so long....but recovery time is now measured in days, whereas in my early 20s, it was in hours. It's just biology, it happens to all of us.

So yeah, being old sucks. I'm not necessarily worse than someone younger, but I am worse than myself at a younger age in my ability to adapt to change. The best an old person can do is to defy nature and do what we can to be a better version of ourselves than when we were younger, but we're fighting biology and entropy. I am leaner now than in my 20s, but it takes 4x as much work. I am smarter than my 20s, but I have to work a lot harder and be more focused and disciplined to be so....

But most importantly, I remember all the old boomer greybeards when I started my career...telling me the internet was a fad, no one would ever do real business like banking online, Java is a joke and no one will use it, etc. EVERYONE knows someone like that. EVERYONE heard some old person say the iPhone was stupid. I'm now as old as many of those old guys when I started...I work very hard to not be that greybeard...but I am also aware that just because I don't understand something, doesn't mean it will be a flop.

Since posting this comment, I saw the reviews of the phone and was impressed with the IOS UX on it...but criticism still stands....it may be "cool," but novelty wears off and you're stuck with a laptop-priced phone with a visible crease and hinges that no longer line up that is a lot more likely to break on the next drop than the regular iPhone Pro, which I happen to love. It's tedious to put a phone twice as thick in and out of your pocket constantly. The hinges trap dirt and pocket lint. It's a viable phone...if it were 20% more expensive, it would likely have a huge following, but it's VERY expensive for some features that seem pretty gimmickey. It's a worse phone and a worse tablet in one. I'd rather have a nicer tablet and a nicer phone. It's like a cargo bike. I have a bike...a very nice on that's perfect for when I go biking. I have a car. It's perfectly suited for me carrying cargo. A cargo bike? It's a slow, heavy, and clumsy bike (even as an ebike) that's not fun to ride. It's a poor hauler of groceries or kids or anything I need to haul. It's worse than my car for hauling and worse than my bike for exercise and getting around quickly in the city. Similarly, the iPhone Duo will likely be a worse phone and a worse tablet for me and most others, but hey, I'd love to be wrong and this brings a lot of joy to well-heeled customers.

It's open source? It could be ... forked? No one wants to do that because it's a big deal, but I don't see why theat wouldn't be ont he table if he threatened to essentially try to shut the project down...

Foldable phones have been around for 7 years. I've seen precisely one in the wild. I know the guy personally who bought it. He got rid of it in 6 months because of some issue he had with it. According to Gemini, they represent 2% of the total sales, in 2026, globally.

I kinda figured Apple would make the iPhone duo their own and fairly unique, so I avoided the Samsung comparison. However, it's a very small marketshare and I am not confident the folks who bought them love them. There's always a sucker who will be something new and novel just to "give it a chance"...the "more dollars than sense" crowd. The guy I know is famously that way and chases lots of fads and has legendary levels of credit card debt.

Like many I've known, that one customer loves shiny things and doesn't think things through as well as he should. We all like nice things and spend money on stupid things. I am just honestly baffled at Apple's strategy with this.

I wish them luck. I don't like seeing them fail. I just can't picture this going better than the Vision Pro....which honestly, I thought had amazing potential (were it done a little better), which I definitely don't see in this. But then again, Apple has surprised me. I never thought any sane person would spend $550 for a pair of apple headphones...and a LOT of my coworkers own them.

is that 6 months out of the year you can operate the datacenter without Aircon.

Imagine the energy savings.

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

It depends on focal length as well as f-stop (shorter focal length gives more depth of field at the same f-stop). Smaller sensors need shorter focal lengths for the same field of view, so a "50mm equivalent field of view" f/2.8 lens for a smaller sensor will have more depth of field than a "50mm equivalent field of view" f/2.8 lens for a larger sensor.

Nintendo didn't buy Rare. Microsoft bought Rare in 2002 to turn them into an Xbox exclusive developer, like they did with Bungie.

I wager this is disco. I don't see the practical benefit. You're taking a well refined design and adding mechanical failure points and replacing a glass screen with a comparatively flimsy plastic one. Now you're making it cost more than a laptop and it has a weird form factor that won't fit nicely in your pocket. Your only benefit? You now have a $2000 unfolded phone that's almost as big as an ipad mini...just don't drop it!!!

But I'm getting old and grey. I remember everyone saying the similar shit to what I said just now about the iPad, the iPhone, the internet, etc. So is this a solution looking for a problem?...or am I just an old out-of-touch greybeard bitching how I don't understand the new world? (or both?)

They're going to have to do a LOT better than they did with the Vision Pro to create a market for this. I wouldn't use one of these if you gave it to me for free. My life isn't calm or simple. My phone gets dropped often and I have to rely on parent-grade thick cases and a screen protector...not to mention I'm constantly using it and putting it my pocket. Having a smooth design makes it robust and not collect lint or dirt. Having a hinge would do the opposite, I wager .