There is a serious problem when a profit--making company provides Operating System software:

Deliberately giving limits to a present version allows the company to charge a lot for a new version, even if the new version provides few important benefits.

Who wizzed in your wheaties?

And I stand by what I said. Practically no phone that still works at all does it at the low level of a capacitor anymore.

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.

Exactly. For example, spreadsheets were often used day to day but the accountants kept the actual books as books and had the final word. That changed over time, only after spreadsheets proved out (and got the bugs out).

Also, humans stayed in the loop. Sure there were occasional funnies like a medical database claiming a few male patients had a history of pregnancy, but humans were in the loop and cited those as obvious errors. There were still backup paper records to fall back on.

But a lot of people when they hear someone say "it's nowhere near ready for prime time" will claim the person is saying "It'll never work".

Back in the day when the "Board of Education" was an actual wooden board.

If they really wanted to serve the user, it would understand "Hey Google, lockdown now" and would power off and require a PIN to restart.

Long press doesn't do anything so low level anymore, it just signals the management processor in the radio that it should force the application processor off. The management processor keeps running.

The power button on the phone really is just a suggestion. To actually power off the whole phone you have to remove the battery (if possible) or let it run down to zero.

This is what happens when you give an AI agency.