I had an arcos jukebox before the first iPod came out, every time they’d release a new version it’s big feature would be something my jukebox had always done. Except it didn’t have an awkward spinning selector wheel or celebrity endorsements.

I could connect it to the cd player and record the whole thing as mp3s, I think it even used to split the tracks automatically but I might be wrong. Plug it into usb and it’s a HDD ready to have anything copied to it without hassle… No need for shitty iTunes, no complaints about wav files and never found an MP3 it couldn’t play.

I remember thinking that surely people will realize over priced and feature limited products are an insult but no, the kids of the future I had so much hope for turned out to be gen z who care more about brand recognition than anyone ever before. I still think the feature rich generics will have their day, maybe generation alpha…

I think if we don’t change the system then we’re going to have a world of hurt for pretty much everyone, if we do change the system into something that facilitate an existence where people can survive periods without work or with minimal work then it could become a golden age.

A lot of the big problems with that comes from legacy obsessions which persist even when technical solutions have displaced the need or reason behind them. Building sites are already nothing like they used to be, the cost of construction has fallen dramatically especially in labour time but house prices rise because they’re not tied to construction cost but availability, which is often kept purposely low so rich people who run government can have big numbers in their balance s sheets. At some point this stress point will fracture.

Subtle automation already makes things like surveying and designing incredibly easy, we’re not far from the point where ai assisted architecture tools are as easy to use as the Sims and will produce plans which can be automatically passed or rejected for the technical side of planning. Not only will more visible forms of automation like concrete shuttering and pouring become more widely adopted this again reducing the time and cost of construction but they’ll have sensor driven analysis which can be uploaded to local authorities for instant inspection and verification. Likewise for cable routing, pipework, insulation, plastering, brickwork, roofing, decorating…

When a house can be demolished and rebuilt in weeks for the cost of machine rental and materials then the housing crisis will fade away, especially when industrial areas shrink due to efficiency of automation, office space gets repurposed, and transport infrastructure gains efficiency - areas like where I live in the UK with absurd property prices are almost certainly going to see automated construction tools take a lot of industry and transport underground - shooting cargo down small underground networks could replace a huge amount of road and rail usage which would be a huge positive for people and free up space for housing.

I got off track but what I’m getting at is we can use these things to solve major problems in our society, but we need to make sure people can lose their job and go through peeiods of adjustment without it ruining their life.

They only have limited resources and were using those to defend areas where Hamas were actively attacking. If they’d put all their troops to defend mostly empty desert then the weakspot would have been somewhere else and they’d have targeted their attack at that weakspot instead.

War isn’t easy, certainly not against well funded terrorist organisations. I’m sure the IDF knew of hundreds of potential attacks and plans that Hamas wanted to carry out, knowing what they’ll actually do and when is an impossible feat - I bet they’re weren’t many in Hamas itself that had any idea what was going to happen, even Iran who trains and funds them appeared surprised.

Look the incredibly rich people who own the media wish that us peasants would care enough about politics to force them to cover these things properly but unfortunately all their journalists are busy writing opinion pieces about how we need to get back in the office, how we shouldn’t even try to make ethical purchasing decisions, and how great whatever makes them the most money this week is.

Lucky we have automation and AI making everyone jobless, will be plenty of people and machines to look after the older generations

Yeah the media have a tendency to exaggerate his flaws but this isn’t a well thought out move, it’s probably a mix of that white birther thing musk is into and general desperation at the industrial and military problems he faces.

The reality is Russia is not doing well economically, Russian families can’t afford to bring up eight kids even in the poverty conditions they’re getting increasingly used to. The Russian state can’t afford even the shitty education kids get now so it’s certainly not going to cope if there was a sudden baby boom.

This isn’t a well thought out economic, social, or moral plan so what else is it beside foolish bluster and weak minded desperation?

What were they supposed to do with the knowledge Hamas has lots of plans to attack them? Build a wall with a highly advanced defensive systems to try and stop them? Oh, right…

If I told you a year ago that I plan to punch you in the face then is it your fault when I do it?

Hamas loudly say they plan to kill all Jewish people in Israel, when Israel takes measures to prevent that everyone says they’re the bad guy - now people are blaming them for not taking enough measures? It makes only one sense, that is if you assume the people saying it don’t care about anything beside hating Israel.

If they’re having a piss and cum soaked orgy on the bed but in the next scene those sheets are clean then yeah I’ll have a look at that washing machine.

They’re going to extinguish the ability of others to use it to displace them

But that’s everywhere, why do there for it?

Or a career in construction aggregate supplies

Yes this is what I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I think it’s basically inevitable that it’ll happen eventually but an actual effort to make it happen faster would be such a positive thing in the world.

The reason I say it’s inevitable is because design tools are getting consistently better, hardware is cheaper than ever, and ever more useful stuff is being added to the commons. With ai assisted CAD and ai assisted manufacture we’re going to see so many amazing new open source designs getting built.

People are going to start moving away from for-profit designed homegoods like washing machines and printers because they’ll be able to get a community designed and tested product modified to their specific needs and tastes then have that fabricated at whatever local firm or tinkerer you want to give your business to.

Being blanket pro GMO is kinda nuts and can only come from a kneejerk against anti-science nuts.

There are some great GMO examples but also a lot of really bad ones, do you realise that the vast majority of GMO seeds have been modified not to use less pesticide but to make the crops resilient to the pesticides and allow them to use more? It allows them to absolutely flood the area with Monsanto products that all wash into the waterways and destroy ecosystems - and they don’t care because if people are forced to farm dead wasteland they’ll need loads of the chemical fertilisers they also sell…

Capitalism had a whole load of choices for how to use these new technologies, they could have chosen to help the environment, but the other option is fuck everyone and grab the money so of course they took that.

They could be working with the governments of relevant countries to develop filters and detection systems.

Yeah people really should experience candycrush before laughing something like this off, it’s genuinely addictive.

You can replace her with whatever music you associate with, what I’m getting at is your connection to it isn’t real - it feels real but that’s because it’s coming from you, you’re putting the meaning in there.

If you could erase all memory of Bach from a classical obsessives mind then play them his greatest hits and say it’s from an AI they’d say ‘ugly key smashing meaningless drivel’ maybe they’d admit AI Brahms has some bangers but without the story behind it and the history of its significance it’s not as magical.

The problem I have is people are to addicted to shortcuts, ‘oh this is Bach people say he’s great so this cello suite must be good therefore I like it’ it’s lazy and dumb. (I use Bachs cello suite as an example because it’s what’s on the radio but you can put any bit of music as the example)

Ha no you are right, I was being a dick - i worked long enough in the music industry that it’s scarred my soul and just thinking of it brings up that bile…

But yeah I was just being silly with the band descriptions, I was describing some of the music I like in a flippant way to highlight the absurdity of claiming some great artistic value because Ozzy mumbled about iron man traveling time for the future of mankind - dice could come up with more meaningful lyrics than ‘nobody helps him, now he has his revenge’ is the sort of thing an edgy teenage coke head would come up with – it’s one of my favourite songs of all time, another example of greatest songs of all time is Rasputin by boney m, famously part of a big controversy when people discovered they were a manufactured band and again the lyrics and music are both brilliant and awful.

People obsess over nonsence all the time, it’s easy to pretend there’s some deep and holy difference between Bach and Offenbach but the cancan can mean just as much as any toccata if you let it.

Art is in the eye of the beholder, it has always been thus and will always be thus.

This post is disturbing and weird, you have a very odd and creepy view of the world.

Obama is just a random person voicing a safe and middle of the road politically neutral option in response to a boring question, I wouldn’t put too much stock in his kneejerk responce to a new technology.

Anyway all I wanted to ask is what do you mean by it costing A LOT? The price of creating media has fallen insanely in the last five decades and is only continuing to plumet - processor power likewise, it’s very likely we’ll be able to not just run the models on consumer graphic cards as we can now but run them as background processes on our phones without noticing slowdown. Just like all other modern content we’re going to see the free stuff that people make and share displace the hacky old corporate stuff - people that like history documentaries don’t watch history channel they which YouTube and a couple of ken Burns level creations, same with science and tech and so many other types of content.

When a kid in their bedroom can make a movie that looks as good as marvel and has a powerful soundtrack that carries the action and moves the heart no one is going to care if they created the music in a weekend talking to AI or hired a generic studio musician to string together some standard progressions and pachelbell melodies - likely they’ll prefer the ai output anyway because it’ll fit the artist vision more than a hired chord ever could.

There are going to be creative geniuses that use AI to make amazing things and at some point you’re just going to have to accept that.

This is the reality a lot of people don’t want to face, a huge amount of popular music is just established patterns put together in the way music school teaches is the right way then pushed with endless hype from the money hungry corporations.

We are absolutely going to see a kid in his bedroom use AI to make a concept album that resonates with people and garners popular acclaim - I don’t know when it will happen but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s this decade.

People used to say that same nonsence about samplers and drum machines, it’s the same trend as when people said Shakespeare isn’t poetry because he hadn’t been trained in Latin and Greek enough or Cezanne wasn’t a real artist, or a million other times people have confidently declared we’re at the end of history and nothing new will ever be good.

What people need to remember is when they see Rick Astley singing his heart out it’s lyrics written by Pete Waterman and music from session artists put together by university trained professionals to shift units - soulless music has been a thing for a long time and no one ever cared before.

Obsessive kids have been making great music in their bedroom for decades now, aphex twin gets industry acclaime for twiddling some knobs and so will whoever gets popular doing the equivalent interesting things with AI.

I think musk is dumb but he’s engineer dumb, when you hear him talk about rockets with other rocket nerds he does actually know what he’s talking about - he’s not like rocket scientist level understanding but having someone in charge of the money that actually understands and is interested in the principles and practicalities of the task at hand is kinda huge in today’s corporate world.

His problem in Tesla comes from his ability to understand more of the technical situation than most the money people he knows as that’s led him into making some exaggerated claims and pushing through some half baked ideas. The business model for the gigafactory was fantastic, the initial development seemed promising but when he had problems with automation and flow rate that caused so many delays he wasn’t really accounting for that - he could design a great science fiction factory but it got to the point he couldn’t pay people to make his ideas work because they’re not problems you can just brush under the rug - the cybertruck one piece press seems to be an attempt at circumventing problems he already faced with more wishful thinking ‘theoretically we can just…’ classic engineer bravardo, it’s not a bad idea but it’s going to result in tradeoffs and I think we can already see that in how shitty the production version looks compared to the original design.

Elons biggest mistake of course is another classic engineering student error ‘I’m much better at engineering than other people who don’t study engineering, that must mean I’m better than them at the things they study too…’ I think he genuinely thought that rubbing a social network would be really easy for him, he had this idea that the evil fun police were artificially limiting his engagement and all he needed to do is get rid of the bias against him and everyone would see how great he is at reposting ten year old memes and hail him as a hero of the world…

What I’m getting at is you can’t be as dumb as Elon by actually just being dumb, it takes intelligence misdirected to be such an idiot.