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How could that even work? In some areas, surely the Pacific Ocean is deeper than any humans or deep ocean vehicles have ever been to? So would the cable be hanging across undersea chasms, or do they need to find a depth where it can be placed?

Also, is it just so heavy that it doesn't need to be secured?


Deep sea cables don’t need to be secured to anything in the middle they are really heavy and the water isn’t moving quickly.

People setup undersea telegraph cables the 1800’s. This is similar technology just with a thicker cable to carry more current etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable


Really?

They're both about 60. Since they're both fit enough to be astronauts, I think we can say their life expectancy should be at least 85. Perhaps substantially longer with some medical advancements or age reversal.

Look at what SpaceX is working on these days (Starship), consider that AI & robotics will likely accelerate progress, and I would say that you can definitely expect affordable and perhaps even relatively comfortable space travel within their lifetimes.


Sure - but paying for that on an astronaut's pension??


Imagine the alternate reality where the media is getting excited about new ventures and celebrating successes. Wish we lived in that world.


Seems like it would be best to test approaching an imaginary or decoy space station when proving a new vehicle.


That test was scraped as a cost saving measure. 2016 or 2018 if I recall correctly, after it had been delayed several times.


Or before trying to do it all including a bellyflop


It would mean that if all current & prospective customers abandon them for it.


So, to summarize: defaults are powerful, but advertising is more powerful.


Not just advertising: Mozilla could not have put a “better in Firefox” button on Gmail or YouTube at any price, or forced Google to follow through on their promise around H.264, etc.


> Mozilla could not have put a “better in Firefox” button on Gmail or YouTube at any price

Microsoft is literally doing this, and yet...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/12/microsoft-edge-will-...


Google also tried to push PC OEMs to pre-install Chrome on their new PCs when Chrome was new.[1] Sony/VAIO is the only manufacturer to have known to take the bait.[2]

[1] https://www.crn.com.au/news/google-may-pre-install-chrome-br...

[2] https://thenextweb.com/news/sony-computers-google-chrome-bro...


I vaguely remember it also getting packaged in with installers for unrelated software on Windows.


Specifically, Google was leveraging their existence as "THE web" to push their web browser. Every single Google property aggressively displayed banners and reminders and nag prompts ensuring you "Gmail is best in Chrome" and other nonsense that "Just one click here to fix".

Yes, putting a single button with vague words in front of users almost always gets a lot of clicks, which we've known for decades, and it turns out, if you have the attention of nearly the entire web-browsing world, you can put that button in front of people's faces way more than your competitors. It should have been considered billions of dollars of free advertising for Chrome that should have been assessed against them somehow.

It's blatantly unfair and should have been shut down in literally days, but nooooooooo we aren't allowed to have regulation here in the states.


Does this backfire? I don't want to have a fake relationship with a computer, and if "creators" on Meta's platforms are more likely to be fake than real, then I think I'm going to be not bothering too much with FB/IG anymore.


I had a long conversation with an OnlyFans star a while back. One of the very surprising things that I learned was that she paid a very large portion of her earnings to a firm that outsourced chat and audience interaction to a mix of AI and real humans. Her fans never knew the difference.


There's a great podcast about a company providing an AI service of this.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/latent-space-the-ai-en...


Its an open secret at this point in that industry. People have done AMAs as people who maintain a string of whales for some fake persona like this. The only people not in on the joke are these whales who probably would refuse to believe it’s a joke even if you put the evidence in front of them.


I totally believe this.

If you look at a earnings screenshot of, for example, Bhad Barbie, she earned ~ $40 million in 2022. $15m from subscriptions and the other $25m from paid messages.


Basically Ashely Madison's business model at scale.


Paywall, but here's an article written by one of those chatters: https://www.wired.com/story/i-went-undercover-secret-onlyfan...

There's also a Reddit AMA by one, but I can't find the link.


You and I will just walk away.

But honestly I think this is going to mess people up.

Consider the awkward teenager, who rather than do the hard work of learning to meet people and engage with the world, can sit at phone and have what their brains perceive as robust relationships with internet friends who are actually just bots.


Yes, I can believe that some people will get sucked into this. It's sad, and Meta seems to be evolving into a Black Mirror-esque predator.

I still hope it backfires, though. Are awkward teenagers really a lucrative segment? Perhaps they can spend their parents' money initially, but eventually I think they churn or become not very profitable.



Idoru[1] is becoming a documentary.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru


This was the topic of a recent podcast I came across:

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/01/1247296788/the-benefits-and-d...


Well if it causes problems, an AI therapist is just a subscription plan away. /s

BTW the problem you describe has been happening already for at least a decade. It's why many livestreamers effectively run a softcore channel, because they get more followers, interaction and gifts when they dress skimpy than when they don't.


One of the most important aspects of being an online influencer is their parasocial relationship between their audience, both the good (the relationship will cause people to interact with you more often, which converts into making more money) and the bad (the relationship may cause some people to think they're "owed" a relationship with the creator and act out with toxic behaviors).

A persona chatbot is one way for creators to benefit from the good and avoid the bad.


This was my objection to even primitive AIs like Siri. I don't want to talk to computers, or treat them like intelligent beings in any sense, or have them scanning my documents, texts, and emails for appointments and travel plans. So at least in my case, yes that was a backfire for Apple, they spent a lot of money to acquire Siri and then further develop it and it's the first thing I actively disable when I get a new phone.


Creators have been using AI doubles for a while now, and that’s likely to continue expanding whether or not individual social platforms offer tools for it.


Opportunity for launching AI "fans".

Imagine an internet where AI creators talk to AI fans. And no one knows what's real.


Sounds more like an optional way people can interact with the creators. Currently you can only send DM, spamming their inboxes, or reacting to a post. The creators won't be fake, but the interactions with their communities will be


OK, but my impression of Meta is even lower than it was before.

Until now, I didn't trust Meta, but I trusted the people & creators I connected with. Now I don't feel like I will trust anything at all on a Meta platform.

That makes me a lot less interested in using the platforms at all.


That ship has long since sailed already. As other commenters in the thread pointed out, plenty of "online social media personalities" already hire dozens to hundreds of offshore workers to impersonate them in chats. When you have 10M fans, and let's say 0.1% of them want to chat with you all day, that's still 10K people.


Shortly, you will not be able to trust anything outside your immediate perception.


That was always the case. The rest is a sales pitch.


Probably shouldn't blindly trust any video on any platform at this point.


I do want to have a relationship with a Scarlett Johansson Operating System.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)


Do those fake users rack up ad impressions just like the real users they impersonate?


At first perhaps. Eventually, hopefully not.


> If you pay $3 for something and get ripped off, the ability to do a chargeback isn't that relevant to your life and you're just not going to patronize them anymore.

That's true. How about if you're paying $3000? Would you like to pay with Bitcoin or a credit card?


If I'm getting a percentage discount for using Bitcoin so the merchant can avoid the credit card fees and I trust the merchant (or the applicable legal system)? The first one.

Notice also that the argument I'm making isn't "you should never use a credit card", it's that cryptocurrency is sometimes better, and it wouldn't hurt if more places accepted it.


Billboards tend to be used by larger companies. I wonder what they do with the newly freed up ad budget. I'm guessing it goes to online ads rather than a reduced ad spend.


You probably notice larger companies more, but I was in Orlando recently, and lots of the billboards there were for "small" local companies.

Where I live it's a spread between big companies, local events, startups and so on.


They could contribute to society and humanity in general, and find something useful to do. That’s what we all have to do. Society should ask itself why they are exempt from such a duty.


They do contribute to society, and they do useful things. This is evidenced by the fact they are still in business and their customers still give them money.

Now granted they may not benefit -you- directly, they may even make -your- life worse, but -society- as a whole keeps them around.

Personally I'm not a smoker, so cigarette companies (to me) are a net loss. On the other hand enough people see them as a gain so I bow to societies vote.


By your logic, heroin dealers benefit society too.


Not just heroin dealers: contract killers also benefit society according to this logic. They're in business, their customers give them money for a service the customers think is valuable, etc. They may not benefit you directly, and may make your life worse (if you're their target), but bruce thinks they're fine since they do "useful" things and have paying customers!


You're comparing legal to illegal. That's kinda moving the goal posts a bit.

By definition illegal things are things society as a whole have declared impermissible. By contrast cigarettes and advertising are legal, meaning that society has determined them to have value.

Not surprisingly illegal things still happen because there is still demand by some minority for that service. Society as s whole though has decided that the negative effect on others outweighs the positive effect on the few.


So you genuinely believe that cigarettes "have value"? You have some warped views if you believe that.


Contract killing is not analogous to tobacco companies. Both big tobacco and heroin dealers base their business on the exploitation of addiction, and are a nett detractor of societal value in all ways except one: creating shareholder value.

Strangely enough, I do actually think there's a time and a place to kill, but that's not the norm for hired killers.


as long as it is counted in the gdp (not the gdp per capita, it's only the people who care about that sort of silly thing)


if you ask some people, the answer is yes.


(The people that want to legalize drugs and drug distribution)


Billboards tend to be used by cannabis dispensaries, casinos, car dealerships, and ambulance chasers.


Probably not in the small Swiss town of Vernier ;)


From having tried out Google Glass back in the day, I found the display on Google Glass uncomfortably bright. I'm guessing they did that to make it more visible outdoors, but it didn't feel nice.


That seems like a very solvable problem with an ambient light sensor. Or even just manually; my xreal Air's have a little rocker than you can change the brightness with.


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