$130 menu price but regularly goes on sale for $99. Still not cheap (especially compared to the "free" ad platform built in to the TV) but lessens the sting a bit. And much less likely to be abandoned by its manufacturer and get exploited.

It's also likely that an alien species capable of interstellar travel doesn't want anything we have. Our resources aren't anything special, they have no need for slave labor and we don't produce anything of interest to them. It's a long drive. Why burn the gas and waste the time?

I will always root for Trek to succeed. I'm hoping that by including Rachel Garrett, this isn't too timey-wimey and we get a well written TUC-TNG lost era story.

I gave it fair chance and watched the first three seasons. There were a few bright spots here and there, but I never connected with the characters or felt like the writing was up to par. I still hope they pull off a good final season, but I'm not planning to watch it any time soon.

The AIs already pulled loads of data from Reddit and can re-use what they have. They don't necessarily need to go back ever again, and they'd only pay for access to newly created data if they care at all.

About damn time.

You're not wrong, but it's not just the UI on the kiosk, it's the whole checkout process. A trained cashier on a real checkout line is much faster because the machine isn't nerfed and trying to hold their hand while preventing them from stealing. The real problem is the stores are trying to shift the labor onto the customer but the customer isn't getting much benefit for the effort nor has any motivation to be particularly honest in light of having this chore thrown in their lap.

I don't think they can redesign the UI to overcome that. It's not really a UI problem, it's a conflict of interests problem and they're not going to solve that unless they completely redesign the checkout process. The little Amazon convenience stores that know what you have as you shop seem like a better approach, but I'm guessing they're not all they're cracked up to be since they haven't seemed to catch on that much.

What we have here, is a company that fired its CEO for vague and cryptic reasons and a whole lot of speculation on what the real issue was. These are their own words:

https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition

I'm not trying to defend Altman or the altruism of Microsoft. Although I would like to understand why this firing happened and why it was done in such an abrupt and dramatic manner.

Usually not, but I finally live somewhere with an Alamo nearby and those are a nice experience and they enforce good behavior. We don't see a lot of movies in the theater, but when we do, that's where we go and we've been going more often as a result.

Not a single original sentence of the original work is retained in the model.

Which is why I find it interesting that none of the court cases (as far as I'm aware) are challenging whether an LLM is copying anything in the first place. Granted, that's the plaintiff's job to prove, but there's no need to raise a fair use defense at all if no copying occurred.

So if someone builds an atom-perfect artificial brain from scratch, sticks it in a body, and shows it around the world, should we expect the creator to pay licensing fees to the owners of everything it looks at?

That's unrelated to an LLM. An LLM is not a synthetic human brain. It's a computer program and sets of statistical data points from large amounts of training data to generate outputs from prompts.

If we get real general-purpose AI some day in the future, then we'll need to answer those sorts of questions. But that's not what we have today.

It just goes to show that you can bullshit, bully & fire as many engineers as you like but you can't bullshit physics. There's no talking your way out of being crushed at depth.