TYL you cannot trust a statistic that you haven’t forged yourself.

I see the thumbnail but the picture fails to load in full screen view (Boost app on Android)

Somebody is going to jump into this. But I would keep my eyes open beyond just the Chinese market. Vietnam and Thailand are interesting places to watch. V because of the relative sweetheart deal with the trumpist of tariffs. And T because they already do a lot of SSD manufacturing. And China, more than any other country, will be at the mercy of a particular person’s bowel movements on Pennsylvania Ave.

I don’t think those particular comments, in writing and devoid of tone, not meant for public distribution (and she’s probably not running for political office or something justifying higher scrutiny), necessarily qualify as ableist per se, more skirting the line. I’ve said very dumb things in my youth and context is important, even in chat threads. But the rest of the picture you painted of that person is: asshole. So for my money it doesn’t really matter if she ticked that particular box as well. Stay away.

You could argue my take is too accepting of the current situation and I would agree with that. At the same time, I would argue yours is simplifying things quite a bit. Subscription TV channels came after free-to-air channels with commercials. This may depend on where you live in the world but most places have at least one local station or a selection of them broadcast through the air, not cable or satellite, and not subscription based. Financed through commercials or in some countries also through a license model (like in the UK). Cable/satellite/subscription channels are iterations on the model brought to you by capitalism. Ads in public transport can lower ticket prices. Billboards can help lower rental rates in buildings and their revenue adds to the tax intake of the community they’re in. If you think it already takes too long to get potholes fixed, it would take even longer without them. Not all roads are toll roads. I get it: you don’t like billboards. You’re going to get all these unintended side effects if they were banned tomorrow.

Online ads are insufferable. I’m running 3-4 plugins to avoid them. I’m also normally watching broadcast TV on DVR so I can skip through the commercial breaks. I bail on any subscription service that adds ads.

The problem online is the cause of the problem. It’s the simplicity with which data can be collected and the lack of regulation. It’s also generally still paying off a debt incurred when in the early days of www users got accustomed to getting everything ‘for free.’ Traditional media has lowered the price dramatically of its own offerings to get new eyeballs online while older streams of income still paid for most expenses, like the income from TV commercial revenue or sales of printed paper. And as these traditional sources of great rivers of money decreased over decades, the ones that replaced it were digital trickles in danger of drying out. That brought about a “militarization” of online ads, ever more targeted and annoying. This problem needs a multi-pronged approach including regulation of data collection and new financing models for media in general.

Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.

The bigger problem with traffic deaths is that we developed a system of transportation that relies heavily on cars that are mostly driven by humans. Removing billboards is not going to improve on that that much. But underwear model billboard pileups are a thing. But so are those caused by drivers on their phones and my guess there are way more of those.

Tracking and selling of information has gotten out of hand, no doubt. It is political decisions or a lack thereof that got us here.

Btw everybody thinks they’re immune to advertising. And we’re not.

The unofficial wisdom of marketing is that half of any advertising budget is wasted. They just don’t know which half. So they continue. This whole thing boils down to the fiduciary responsibilities to provide as much value to shareholders again, the bane of capitalism. They cannot afford to check which half is wasted.

And just for some context here: personally I don’t mind billboard ads to be honest.

I think the abundance of tools available to block ads online hints at a movement in itself. We don’t need a leader or a central committee.

The wrinkle I see here is that a generalized ‘everybody’ hates ads but ‘everybody’ is also aware of the fact that they finance a large swath of stuff that we would have to pay for otherwise.

Of course not. If we blamed the language for the bad actions of the people who spoke it during, there would be virtually no language left in a pristine enough condition to learn.

That being said, tempers can boil over. So maybe don’t shout your Duolingo answers at a full Starbucks. I mean, that’s good advice regardless of the language but you know what I mean.

Is every scenario with so-called AI in it caused by humans? Sure. That’s not really my point though. It was humans who caused the dumb situation around private gun ownership that then eventually caused school shootings to be a thing schools need to prepare for. I would tolerate the use of so-called AI here under these dumb circumstances and moreover would tolerate a false positive like this. I feel similarly positive about the use of models in medicine - if and when it helps. Or as a tool for people with disabilities. Et cetera.

Normally we lambast here very dumb applications of so-called AI. The ones that get lawyers in trouble, the ones that get forced into areas where it’s unnecessary, the ones that boil away drinking water senselessly, or that ask children for nudes, or - sadly - the ones that drive teenagers to suicide. We lambast all the peddlers of so-called AI with their dumb predictions about how their faulty products will revolutionize everything. That’s the spirit of “Fuck AI.” My point was this story is less in keeping with the spirit of “Fuck AI.” So-called AI might actually help to make a bad situation not get worse.

None of those ch’s are guttural and you skipped an h;)

6-7.

6-7.

I don’t know about the origins of this meme but I know basketball and the NBA are insanely popular in China.

Try to bear with me anyway.

The delightful thing is that it works in reverse also: ask a native English speaker to pronounce “Eichhörnchen.”

“Would-be assassin shot in the head turns out be 8th grader holding clarinet”

A mixture of urbanization and climate change pushes bears into human habitats. At the same time, it’s a nation of retirees with 60-somethings hiking or farming plots in bear habitats, and thus becoming fodder themselves. And at the same time still they cannot come up with good legislation and a ranger service that can regulate the population of bears by shooting them if they have to without falling fowl of the strict gun laws. It’s a clusterfuck.

Sorry, can’t help you there because I don’t have a clue. I’m in Japan and landed on the Yahoo Japan app because in my experience they do better than the G’s and A’s here locally.

This depends on which area you want to navigate in, how well OSM is maintained there, and on the interface situation between the providers of public transport and the open internet. I think the latter is the biggest problem. Is the transport data available and available in a stable format that OSM can tap into? And the answer is most likely no. The Googles and the Apples have teams that take care of their maps offering and that work through the patchwork of APIs and formats to come up with not totally bad solutions to this mess. Unpaid volunteers will have a harder time getting to the same level. So OSM is not the way to go here - most likely. I’m sure islands of great data exist.

Is this really a case of fuck AI? To anybody outside the US this paragraph reads like fucking satire. From within, where kids learn how to crouch under desks, hide behind bullet proof whiteboards or something, and lock down better than the CIA this doesn’t really move the needle, does it? The trauma is already there with all the drills and is eternal, as is the 2nd amendment. And this is one area where you would prefer a false positive over a false negative. So for me this isn’t so much fuck AI as fuck every lawmaker of the US since the civil war.

Oh boy, it will be doubly difficult now to tell insane policy apart from the hallucinations.