"If I go find an actor/actress that I like the sound of their voice of, and want to create a weird golem of a voice, what I'd do is get several 48khz 16-bit recordings from audio books of that actor, run it through the training (because I have their voice and the book they are reading) and then find a performance style of that actor/actress I want (from maybe a movie or or television show) and thus "skin" that voice to sound like that performance. That will give me a 95% reasonable sounding voice for all the words from the books they read, and a 10% accuracy on words that they never ever said before.

And of course you would contact the appropriate copyright clearinghouse or actors' association and pay the associated fees for using those voices, which the massive IP theft organizations known as "AI" do not.

That's what the big bosses tell us anyway. In a somewhat obscure corner of the human experience where I sometimes hang out there are ~5 web sites of varying ages that write and publish original and meaningful things. But if you search for that obscurity on Google you will now be directed to 847 "sites", "magazine articles", "experts", etc of which 842 are thinly disguised machine-rewritten versions of the 5 real sites - the kind of rewriting I would have instantly flagged as plagiarism back in my TA days - wrapped up in phony autogenerated web sites, documents, articles, etc.

Most people aren't authors or painters who earn a direct living from their creative work (of which there are very few), but most people put some amount of creative effort into their jobs and livelihoods. Whether it is a financial analyst in a cubicle who develops independent analyses of the prospects of an investment target, a graphic artist who creates flyers and web sites for small businesses, or an electrician who figures out a better way to route cabling through a standard spec house during construction they can all recognize that the self-styled "AI" vendors are just stealing their creative labor with zero compensation and feeding it into a spicy chatbot labeled "AI" which is going to be used by their bosses to put them out of work.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

My workplace allows browsing outside of the Intranet with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, maybe others... basically anything but Edge.

Sheesh, talk about a rookie mistake.

Dress rehearsals are intended to be a run-through under full production, not dev, conditions. You hope and pray you never discover problems during dress rehearsals, but they exist for a reason.

And there are countries in Europe where if you do NOT do that sort of minimalist transaction arithmetic, you are given such a serious stink eye by the cashier that you think twice about going back again.

I jest ... but only a little.

...to get my security-conscious workplace to allow use of Edge for browsing sites outside our own Intranet.
That's the kind of tacit endorsement I'd need to see before even considering it for personal use.

The latest Sun SPARC arrived at the speed of light... unfortunately it still runs Slowaris

" Pack 9 million people into a "linear" city.."

The Chicago metropolitan area is a linear city of 9 million, more if you include the corridor up to Kenosha and Milwaukee. At its peak the city of Chicago was 3.2 million alone. However, it grew that way in the historic human pattern of part luck, part planning, part ignoring some of the planning, part haphazard human desire/greed/whim.

City regions that are created by force of one will and an ironclad design (Brasilia) seldom work - Canberra is the only one I can think of.

From TFA: out of 15 patients, one patient died during the study. Hope it wasn't due to the treatment...

If this were a Google service, it would've already been killed due to lack of interest.

(Okay, technically, they would've launched a different product that does almost the same thing, then killed the first one, then renamed the second one, then killed it.)

Is the idea here that high frequency trading and self-dealing can be used to pump-and-dump a given proposition?

So, I find some low-traffic topic suggesting that Pigs Will Fly by the end of 2025 which has "yes" shares trading at $0.01. I buy a bunch of "yes" shares and then buy/sell a small chunk of them back and forth with myself, driving the price up to $0.50. Now I sit back and sell off my "yes" shares for something between $0.50 and $0.40 to anyone who shows up looking to get in on the rapidly-rising "Pigs Will Fly" proposition until a whole bunch of people have bought up the $0.01 shares for 40 times their actual value.

Or is there some other scam at play here?

There are plenty of places that will take your exposed film, develop, and scan and/or print for you, by mail, or in-person, at least around here. If there's a Hunt's Photo near you, they do a great job.

If you only want digital photos printed, then there are many, many places that will print pro-grade photos for cheap, and the results will be a damn sight better than what you get at the local drug store.

You're describing the consensus models, and they are better than any individual model, at least thus far.