This seems like you are not fully thinking this through, either intentionally or not. Benefit of the doubt, I will add to your question about why you should care with more questions: what if it's someone you know? what if they want to then sell the generated content? what if it was your political enemies? what if it was your boss? what if it was someone who was stalking you or made you feel unsafe?
>This seems like you are not fully thinking this through, either intentionally or not. Benefit of the doubt
I am not, that is why I'm leaving it to replies to convince me otherwise.
>what if it's someone you know?
Why not start with what if it's me? If I don't know about it, implicitly, I don't care. But if I do and it bothers me, AI companies have already been given free reign over copyright law so I don't really have any recourse here. Can I sue Sam Altman? No, because if that was possible, someone like Studio Ghibli would have done it and made a billion dollars by now.
>what if they want to then sell the generated content?
If it's generated by AI, then the courts have already stated it can't be copyrighted, and is therefore unsellable. The first person you sell it to can redistribute it for free and there's no way you can stop them.
>what if it was your political enemies?
I'm not political, which upsets a lot of people. Just tell people "I'm not voting, it doesn't matter" and watch them lose their minds.
>what if it was your boss?
I'm not really sure why I should be fighting my boss's battles.
>what if it was someone who was stalking you or made you feel unsafe?
People can stalk me without AI. I'm not sure how AI changes this.
I am not one to jump on the "This is AI" train. But the "author" responding is absolutely AI, I would bet vast sums of money on it. It reads exactly like chatgpt.
What is this? The formatting of this article is horrendous, the writing style follows common AI output (read: slop), often to the point of being nonsensical, and the citations are questionable at best.
For example, they never actually state WHAT their basic needs are - despite it being the crux of their article and referencing a consumer's "basket" 18 times, they never state what goods they are comparing!
They cite bizarre data like linking to a CSV of "their" OECD, then utilize it to rattle off a number of stats that don't correlate with each other. The charts don't look right either.
The website is drowning in banner ads - despite being a .org TLD - and looks so sloppy that a high schooler could make a more coherent and convincing report, despite being written by "(name) Economic & Pricing Investigator | Content Reviewed by CFA (name)".
This is frankly trash, and any valuable insight is impossible to distinguish against the backdrop of sloppy garbage. We should be posting higher quality articles than this.
Author here. fair critique. We should have led with the basket and methods in plain text. Here they are:
What “basic needs” means in our chart (single adult, new lease):
Housing: market-rate 1-bedroom rent (current new-lease median, not legacy/regulated rents).
Utilities: basic electricity + heating/cooling + water/sewer/trash for a small 1-BR.
Food: ~2,100–2,400 kcal/day from low-cost local staples (grains/pasta, legumes, eggs, veg/fruit, oil, dairy/chicken) — no brand premiums.
Transport: one local monthly public-transit pass (or closest equivalent).
Everyday basics: SIM/phone plan and hygiene/cleaning essentials.
Excluded: healthcare/tuition/childcare, cars, entertainment.
Wages: net typical/median pay (after tax/mandatory contributions).
Metric: hours needed = basket price ÷ net hourly pay. It’s a cash-flow affordability ratio for a solo renter, not a welfare/quality-of-life score.
On citations & data: Sources are standard (national stats/OECD/Eurostat + operator fares + rental medians from official or broad listing datasets). If you have a better official series for any country (especially rent), point me to it and I’ll rerun that row and note the change.
On the visuals/formatting: Point taken. I can collapse the UI to just the number + rank and move the methods into a single, clean appendix. Ads fund the data work, but I’ll provide an ad-light reader version for this piece.
If something still looks off for your country, share the wage/rent series you trust and I’ll check it.
everybody knew and voiced their knowledge before, during, and after the Vegas tunnel that Boring Co and the Hyperloop were just bad concepts. You didn't need to waste money to try it, because it's not new tech. It's a tunnel. It's a solution to traffic. It's for riders, not drivers. But instead of calling it a train and therefore being _lame_, you slap a fresh coat of paint on it with _self driving cars_ and _insane_ promises you could never deliver on.
Calling out snake oil, for being snake oil, and lamenting that it sucks all the oxygen out of the room for _real_ , _serious_ technology and progress? That's a good thing.
I agree the market is niche atm, but I can't help but disagree with your outlook long term. Self hosted models don't have the problems ChatGPT subscribers are facing with models seemingly performing worse over time, they don't need to worry about usage quotas, they don't need to worry about getting locked out of their services, etc.
All of these things have a dark side, though; but it's likely unnecessary for me to elaborate on that.
In that case the obvious move from the 5$ wrench perspective is to hit you with it until you tell them where the private key is kept, because you would need to have it somewhere.
I've had this same idea! Of course, it remains an idea never taken out of the garage. Are you delivering broadsheet, or formatting a printable file for users to print at home?
I have had this idea pitched to me many times over the years, with requests to build a simple prototype practically forced into my dev queue .. but I always resist it.
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
Typesetting is a challenge so broadsheet vs tabloid is undetermined, but whatever it will be it will be delivered to the door. The newspaper paper is a crucial part, I believe.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or misunderstanding you. Shouldn't it matter that they are using 70mb of RAM more or less totally wastefully? Maybe not a deal breaker for Brave, sure, but waste is waste.
I understand the world is about compromises, but all the gains of essentially every computer program ever could be summed up by accumulation of small optimizations. Likewise, the accumulation of small wastes kills legacy projects more than anything else.
It could matter but what isn't clear to me is if 70MB is wasteful in this specific context. Maybe? Maybe not?
Flagging something as potentially problematic is useful but without additional information related to the tradeoffs being made this may be an optimized way to do whatever Brave is doing which requires the 70MB of RAM. Perhaps the non-optimal way it was previously doing it required 250MB of RAM and this is a significant improvement.
Yes it can be construed as wasteful. But it's exactly that, a compromise. Could the programmer spend their time better elsewhere generating better value, not doing so is also wasteful.
Supply and demand will decide what compromise is acceptable and what that compromise looks like.
"Given a detailed list of symptoms" is sure holding a lot of weight in that statement. There's way too much information that doctors tacitly understand from interactions with patients that you really cannot rely on those patients supplying in a "detailed list". Could it diagnose correctly, some of the time? Sure. But the false positive rate would be huge given LLMs suggestible nature. See the half dozen news stories covering AI induced psychosis for reference.
Regardless, it's diagnostic capability is distinct from the dangers it presents, which is what the parent comment was mentioning.
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