That’s true! Though doing anything especially interesting or interactive to actually “augment reality” would be challenging without any camera. I’d be very interested in any type of lightweight AR glasses that don’t use a camera, though. Maybe LIDAR?
In fairness, though, an app on your smartphone is basically the worst form AR. It forces you to try to look at the world around you through a tiny screen, you can only interact with the app by touching that screen while keeping the camera pointed at the right thing, and you absolutely can’t use your phone for any of the other things you’d normally use it for.
Clunky headsets are better, but only good for use in private spaces and IMO if you’re only going to use the headset in one place, that seems like a better candidate for VR anyways.
IMO the best case for AR basically is a pair of glasses or contacts. Something that takes little to no effort to use and has the ability to augment any area of your vision. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen so far, assholes and perverts seem all too happy to take any device with a camera in it and ruin things for the rest of us.
Not that this gives them a pass, but just to clarify the term: “limited” means you’re only allowed to use the software in the specific ways described by the EULA. The whole purpose of the EULA is to define exactly what “limited” means. In contrast, “unlimited use” would indicate that you’re allowed to use the software however you want unless specifically forbidden by the EULA.
“Limited” does not mean that they can just make up whatever they want later and say “well that’s what we meant when we said limited.” The EULA describes the agreement you make, and both parties are bound to exactly what is described in that EULA.
They can decide to change the EULA later and technically you are free to choose whether you want to accept those new terms, but the nasty part is that they can revoke your current license if you decide not to accept their new EULA and you’re just out of luck because you don’t actually own a copy.
TL;DR it’s a shitty deal either way, but I think it’s important to be accurate. They do define what “limited” means or it wouldn’t be a valid license agreement. That does not imply that the EULA is a good one.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent, and we as humans really bad at acknowledging how little we individually know about the world around us.
The easiest example to ask AI detailed questions about something that you know you have expertise in. If you try to test its limit, no matter what your particular expertise is, I’m confident that in 5-10 minutes you’ll realize it’s no more intelligent than an average Joe who spent their lunch break Googling the subject or maybe someone who read a book about it once.
To give credit where it’s due, that does mean that these AIs have a much wider breadth of knowledge than any one person could have and that is, objectively, very cool.
On the other hand, that’s why it’s so easy to believe that AI is this all-knowing oracle that can replace all of humanity. It can give you a way better answer in an instant about things you know nothing about than you ever could off the top of your head, so it seems unbelievable. It’s instant gratification that also feels really valuable.
Despite the trick that AI plays on our psychology, you could also just read a book or two or participate in any form of genuine learning, and it really doesn’t take long for you to outgrow whatever the AI is capable of. It takes a bit longer, but now you have grown your actual intelligence and you get to keep it for a $0/month subscription and they don’t need to build another data center in your backyard.
Some people view dystopian sci-fi as entertainment. Some people view it as a warning. What you can’t forget, though, is that some people view it aspirationally.
I think it’s important to note that most of the devices you’ll find if you just search for a cheap and generic “Android media box” are not going to be any better for your privacy. Even if you ignore the data collection you subject yourself to with Android, you might be purchasing a botnet node or a backdoor into your home network.
Yes, but then you can’t put in your readme that your blazingly fast new app is written in rust.
It’s really not even so different. “AI” in the current LLM-era just tricks people into thinking it’s something fundamentally different because it can string together words in a more coherent sentence than we’re used to.
At its core, though, the whole premise of the comment you’ve replied to is the argument that knowledge is dangerous and I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s a bad argument.
Tbh it’s probably more straightforward than that. Kill a $2B government program to so private interests can collect $4B on the same (or worse) previously subsidized services.
I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
My understanding is that it’s the latter. AFAIK it takes something like 3-5 years to get a fab going if you already know what you’re doing, so it would not only be wildly expensive but you’re also gambling that RAM won’t come back down to a reasonable supply/demand in the next 5-10 years to break even on the whole process.
There’s also the fact that it wouldn’t really make sense for Valve unless they wanted to make a huge pivot in their whole business. Entry costs aside, manufacturing RAM is not really something a company can just do as a “side gig”. Valve is only like 400 people, so it wouldn’t be Valve just “starting to produce RAM” but rather Valve turning itself into a RAM manufacturer that also distributes video games.
I played with it at work for the afternoon when I noticed I had access. It was fine. Sure, it was an improvement, but it wasn’t so good that it could end the world. It was basically just more of the same for anyone familiar with coding agents.
That’s wishful thinking at best. Banks have your money invested in the AI bubble right now. If anything, they’re already working to disqualify purchases made by AI from being considered fraud.
Most business laws are just pay-to-play regulation anyways
I think that may be true for Peter Thiel or Larry Ellison, but for the rest of them it’s just the same old game: riding the wave of whatever investors want to see. The actual business only matters as far as they can use it to convince investors to keep throwing money at them.
If you gave them a button that would give them a million dollars but a child would die, they’d press it without a thought. They’d press the button until there were no more children on the planet. They’d use the money to convince people to have children just so they could keep pressing the button.
IMO most of these CEOs are so excited about AI because it’s just been the best money printer in a while. Investors are irrationally interested in AI, so these CEOs will continue to find any excuse to say the letters “AI” at least until people stop sending them money for it.
It does, actually. From the article:
Anthropic’s confidential filing will give regulators a period to look over the company’s financial disclosures before the AI firm’s investor prospectus becomes public. Filing confidentially has become common for major firms, with SpaceX approaching its IPO in the same manner.
[…]
“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors,” Anthropic said.
Modern browsers are basically an OS of their own at this point. And, in fairness, for many users their actual OS is effectively just a means by which they access a browser. This is not even mentioning something like Chrome OS.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea or that it should be this way, but it is where we are.
I know this is fun to point and say about MS, but not really the case here IMO. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish describes the MS strategy for creating/maintaining a monopoly - but GitHub nearly is a monopoly. Extinguishing it only takes themselves out of the competition.
This is just plain old mismanagement if you ask me, and ostensibly a victim of the current AI craze.
Translated for the rest of us:
“You working-class chum will be unquestioning servants, and you’ll be grateful for it!”
If anything, it’s the other way around: we have an AI-company PR problem. Media outlets can’t stop themselves from presenting interviews with CEOs of AI companies as some sort of reliable source for how incredible AI really is if we would only spend more money locking ourselves into AI-driven workflows.
TL;DR the umbrella-selling weatherman keeps predicting that rain is on the way
Every task starts out as a vague idea that, at some point, needs to be narrowed down to something specific and actionable.
If you’re at a sufficiently large organization and you get lucky, that happens before it makes it to a developer. For the rest of us, it’s an important skill to be able to take a task, ask clarifying questions, and narrow it down to something actionable.