There is absolutely nothing inevitable about technological change. We think that way because of the specific place we are in history. A specific place that is an aberration in how fast those changes have come. For the most part, humans throughout history have used much the same techniques and tools that their parents did.

You also can’t separate AI technology from the social change. They’re not dumping billions into data centers and talking about using entire nuclear reactors to power them just because they think AI is a fun toy.

Was there anything in the posts above mine that suggest this was a technical issue, or did you read that in as an assumption?

Every time a significant change in technology comes about, there is a significant impact to jobs. The printing press destroyed the livelihood of scribes, but it made books dramatically cheaper, which created new jobs for typesetters, booksellers, etc.

Take a look at the history of the first people called “Luddites”. They were early socialists focusing on the dismal working conditions that new automation would bring to the workers. And they were correct.

Not every technological change is good. Our society has defaulted to saying yes to every change, and it’s caused a whole lot of problems.

The source code on these models is almost too boring to care about. Training data and weights is what really matters.

These models are trained on human creations with the express intent to drive out those same human creators. There is no social safety net available so those creators can maintain a reasonable living standard without selling their art. It won’t even work–the models aren’t good enough to replace these jobs, but they’re good enough to fool the C-suite into thinking they can–but they’ll do lots of damage in the attempt.

The issues are primarily social, not technical. In a society that judges itself on how well it takes care of the needs of everyone, I would have far less of an issue with it.

I agree, but I understand the temptation. It can take your company from 0 to 100 almost instantly, since you have the budget to hire social media and SEO experts to take you to that magical “viral” status. Not doing this often means toiling in obscurity and never going anywhere. If you do manage to make enough money for your whole team to quit their day jobs, then it almost certainly took longer.

Quick and easy path leads to the Dark Side.

Microsoft got off the hook when Bush II took office. Tech in general took that as a sign that monopolies were fine. That was just starting to be reversed when Trump took a second term and here we are.

Has that suddenly become an issue in the last few years? They are famously the company that got sued for having coffee that was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns, and that was in the 90s.

Imagine VR so real that someone severely allergic to cats can know what it’s like to give one scritches and feel it purr. Imagine someone who is paraplegic knowing what it’s like to swim or climb a mountain. Now imagine how much money Mark Zuckerberg will make when it’s $22.95/month with ads and requires you to put in your Social Security Number.

I could see the argument that it’s more air gapped this way. Without having physical access to the Pi (or at least SSH access), it’d be hard to get any network connection through USB.

But personally, I just blocked outgoing traffic from the printer.

I checked on where Edsel prices have gone. They mostly match inflation. Not a worthwhile investment as a car that people are interested in decades later because it’s an infamous failure.

There are some projects out there that do the entire frame. Steppers, hotend, and control boards are out of reach. There’s some hypothetical ways you could do it, but it’d be far more expensive than buying off the shelf stuff and probably get worse results. Even the frames tend to take a lot of filament.

It’s more of a nice idea than something practical.

AR15 lower receiver model. You can buy a kit that’s 85% of the way to done and only needs basic tools from there.

Honestly, more people should probably do that. If you have a low printing volume, you’ll save a lot of money by going to a store to get prints.

Yes, you can argue that you need the convenience of having a printer right there. Just realize you’re spending a lot of extra money for that convenience.

Historically, the field of AI research has gone through boom and bust cycles. The first boom was during the Vietnam War with DARPA dumping money into it. As opposition to the Vietnam War grew, DARPA funding dried up, and the field went into hibernation with only minor advancement for decades. Then the tech giant monopolies saw an opportunity for a new bubble.

It’d be nice if it could be funded at a more steady, sustainable level, but apparently capitalism can’t do that.

There’s already proposals to put his face on Mt Rushmore, so yes.

There’s an argument we shouldn’t even be issuing $100 bills in the first place. Counterfeiters have to spend money to copy money. A $1 or $5 bill isn’t worth the cost. A $50 is getting there, but if you put extra anti-counterfeiting measures around it, then it’s pushed out of reach again.

Once you reach a $100 bill, though, it’s hard to have enough anti-counterfeiting measures while also being cheap enough to produce by the actual US Mint. Drop it entirely, and the problem goes away.

IT project management doesn’t work that way, but it doesn’t matter much. 60 hour work weeks wouldn’t help, either.

Right, I think the two aren’t as different as they appear. You can think of a closure as an object with just one method.

If OO programming is fundamentally about objects sending messages to each other, then there are many ways to approach that. Some of those ways are totally compatible with functional programming.

The legacy of C++ has dominated what OOP is “supposed” to be, but it doesn’t have to work like that.

That’s more or less where anarcho-syndaclism goes. Get all the workers into unions who take over their companies and turn them into co-ops. Then the co-ops collaborate and you don’t need the state or anything else.

I’ve found that there’s a lot of things on the Internet that went wrong because it was ad supported for “free”. Porn is one of them.

There is ethically produced porn out there, but you’re going to have to pay for it. Incidentally, it also tends to be better porn overall. The versions of the videos they put up on tube sites are usually cut down, and are only part of their complete library. Up through 2012 or so, the tube sites were mostly pirated content, but then they came to an agreement with the mainstream porn industry. Now it’s mostly the studios putting up their own content (plus independent, verified creators), and anything pirated gets taken down fast.

Anyway, sites like Crash Pad Series, Erika Lust, Vanessa Cliff, and Adulttime (the most mainstream of this list) are worth a subscription fee.