gcanyon

Wow, I would have expected something like this to be $thousand$ but a quick check with AI claims that in the U.S. the self-pay rate is anywhere from $100-$400. Still not cheap, but much more affordable than I expected.

Sorry to inject whatever uncertainty this produces, but how do you know that the most recent "no growth" reading is the correct one? To me your story justifies at least 1 or 2 more regular scans.

Were they trying to influence:

  - the election
  - the betting markets

My thought is the latter. And the idea that it was just an experiment is BS.

I heard they're going to skip D and go straight to the element Earth...

On the one hand, freedoms!

Technology like this is stuck in a no win situation.

Human police officers are allowed to take action based on reasonable suspicion.

AI, if it is worse than humans, will be criticized for false positives.

And if it is better than humans, without being able to explain why it will be criticized for that as well even if it is in general better than humans, it will be criticized for the false positives.

But as the saying goes, this is the worst it will ever be. At some point this thing or something like it will have a precision over 95%. At what point will the debate become awkward because the thing is superhumanly efficient at sorting out the baddies?

No one ever got em-dash cancer…

Oh, I see your point. I didn’t think of “movies becoming video games” as meaning there’s no such thing as a movie anymore. Kind of like the false argument about evolution, “if we can from monkeys why are there still monkeys?”

Movies come from books, but people still read.

But I get the point.

The problem with an interactive Twin Peaks would be finding your way out of it :-)

Agreed that hyphens should be used to indicate compound words, but you're saying that "audio-like" is an intended compound word? Then it's an adjective, modifying "music"? What would that mean?

But it's not, unless you know what "audio-like music" is?

I for one would love to be able to experience Godzilla Minus Zero interactively. I get that it's different from movies. I remember seeing Avatar in 3-D and realizing that James Cameron was directing the audience's attention to a particular part of a scene by the way the 3-D focused, and it was a little off-putting at times. That's a small thing compared to what will be possible in a few years, but still -- being immersed in Avatar will be an amazing experience. I'd also love to see a version of Avatar written by '80s James Cameron -- he was a much better writer back then -- or maybe other, more skillful writers had greater influence on him? In any case, it's inarguable that Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and Terminator 2 are all better written than the Avatar films.

People already do this in many video games. The simulation isn't perfect, and maybe there's a tipping point where the simulation becomes real enough that it (maybe) supplants "reality". In a sense, this is disintermediation: instead of actually riding horse, I can ride a virtual dragon. Does that make it worse, or problematic? Again, we already have this, for driving race cars, fighting in wars, etc. etc. It's just a matter of fidelity and immersion?

A nit, but given that this is from a major corporation, and LLMs are supposed to be em-dash-happy, it's surprising (disappointing?) that the announcement uses:

> audio-like music

That's a hyphen. What's "audio-like music" -- music that is almost sound but not quite? Music made from raw audio? :-)

> The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing; using one to write a novel would have been a deliberate and rather unusual choice.

N = 1, but I wrote a science fiction novel in Wordstar on a DOS computer circa 1983.