Those that are just hand waiving that this is just “drama” either don’t understand what is going on or actively support harassment and bullying. According to what I’ve been able to understand, Sparkfun has been allowing its employees to make harassing and derogatory internal presentations targeting Adafruit employees for years. When this was brought to their attention Sparkfun did nothing. When Adafruit started probing Teensy customers for what they liked about the product Sparkfun decided to enforce a code of conduct violation and terminate supplying Teensy boards to Adafruit.

I didn’t read through all the public messaging but I have read enough to know it would have been easy for Sparkfun to do the right thing and discourage their employees from their harassing behavior, even if it remained internal. I don’t want to support that kind of business. It makes it clear to me that Sparkfun is a boys club that is threatened by competition and would rather throw insults than make a better product.

Adafruit has been inventive, inclusive, and added joy and whimsy in a field that is so often filled with toxicity.

No argument there.

Gotcha, so no actual discourse then.

Incidentally, I do enjoy Marvel “slop” and quite honestly one of my favorite YouTube channels is Abandoned Films https://youtu.be/mPQgim0CuuI

This is super creative and would never be able to be made without AI.

I also enjoy reading books like Psalm for the Wild Built. It’s almost like there’s space for both things…

Lots of assumptions there. In case you actually care, I don’t think any one company should be allowed to own the base system that allows AI to function, especially if it’s trained off of public content or content owned by other groups, but that’s kind of immaterial here. It seems insane to villainize a technology because of who might make money off of it. These are two separate arguments (and frankly, they historically have the opposite benefactors from what you would expect).

Prior to the industrial revolution, weaving was done by hand, making all cloth expensive or the result of sweatshops (and it was still comparatively expensive as opposed to today). Case in point, you can find many pieces of historical worker clothing that was specifically made using every piece of a rectangular piece of fabric because you did not want to waste any little bit (today it’s common for people to throw any scraps away because they don’t like the section of pattern).

With the advent of automated looms several things happened:

• the skilled workers who could operate the looms quickly were put out of a job because the machine could do things much faster, although it required a few specialized operators to set up and repair the equipment.
• the owners of the fabric mills that couldn’t afford to upgrade either died out or specialized in fabrics that could not be made by the machines (which set up an arms race of sorts where the machine builders kept improving things)
• the quality of fabric went down: when it was previously possible to have different structures of fabric with just a simple order to the worker, it took a while for machines to do something other than a simple weave (actually it took the work of Ada Lovelace, and see above mentioned arms race), and looms even today require a different range of threads than what can be hand woven, but…
• the cost went down so much that the accessibility went through the roof. Suddenly the average pauper COULD afford to clothe their entire family with a weeks worth of clothes. New industries cropped up. Health and economic mobility soared.

This is a huge oversimplification, but history is well known to repeat itself due to human nature. Follow the bullets above with today’s arguments against AI and you will see an often ignored end result: humanity can grow to have more time and resources to improve the health and wellness of our population IF we use the tools. You can choose to complain that the contract worker isn’t going to get paid his equivalent of $5/hr for spending 2 weeks arguing back and forth about a dog logo for a new pet store, but I am going to celebrate the person who realizes they can automate a system to find new business filings and approach every new business in their area with a package of 20 logos each that were AI generated using unique prompts from their experience in logo design all while reducing their workload and making more money.

Have you talked to any programmers about this? I know several who, in the past 6 months alone, have completely changed their view on exactly how effective AI is in automating parts of their coding. Not only are they using it, they are paying to use it because it gives them a personal return on investment…but you know, you can keep using that push lawnmower, just don’t complain when the kids next door run circles around you at a quarter the cost.

Seems like this is a good argument for specialization. Have AI make bad but fast code, pay specialty people to improve and make it secure when needed. My 2026 Furby with no connection to the outside world doesn’t need secure code, it just needs to make kids smile.

The industrial revolution called, they want their argument against the use of automated looms back.

Actually I gave them two ways to eliminate the parasitic drain: replace with a working spy unit or disconnect the non working spy unit (the status quo would leave them with continuously dying batteries).

Plus, let’s be real: the chances that anyone cares about any one person’s location is slim to none (barring political figures, billionaires, and celebrities). If you are worried about the mass collection of people’s locations, dropping one person off the Subaru map will have zero impact. Taking away a Subaru data point does not do anything about cell phone GPS, cell tower triangulation, EZ-Pass tracking, traffic cameras, or licence plate tracking (and those are just the car based tracking systems off the top of my head).

Well sure…they won’t replace it unless you want them to…it’s your car. But what I mean to say is that they can replace it under warranty now and if you don’t replace it you will keep losing batteries. That’s what happened with my 2018 Outback (I went through a battery every 3-6 months for 3 years).

They will now replace the Starlink module free of charge under a recall. Your battery will keep dying unless you either replace the module or remove the fuse that activated the thing.

Yes thank you! Edited my comment to correct it.

This sort of thing is already being done with many commercial devices. See www.powercastco.com for one of the companies.

Sooo I don’t get your point. They do the same thing as Tesla does standard too?

Those are brands, not specific cars, and to my knowledge BMW is the only car that offers a level 3 option. Tesla has level 2 as standard (known as autopilot).

This is the key. I’ve actually been saved a few times now by FSD catching something I didn’t see, like some deer. I’m collecting videos of the things it does that impress me to share when my trial is over.

Sorry, I’m not aware, what car comes standard with that?

Sorry, I know this is controversial and I’ll probably get down voted to hell, but I love my model Y Tesla and I think the full self driving is amazing (I didn’t pay for it, there’s a free trial this month). Musk is an idiot and an asshole but there’s a lot more people working at Tesla that made some amazing vehicles.