There are a lot of scams around AI and there's a lot of very serious science.

While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.

The reason we don't see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it's mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn't apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they've been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.

I pulled this same thing in college. I was a CS major in the late 90's and I took a class from the writing department on changing discourse in a new digital era.

The professor was really good at literary analysis and knew next to nothing about computers. He was spot on that big changes were afoot but he was as wrong as anyone else on what those changes were (spoiler: we all thought we would have an alternate universe in Cyberspace TM).

We had the option of creating a website as our final project and we realized that if we just put in every possible feature we'd get an A. Animated backgrounds? Moving fonts? Music? A goofy mouse pointer? No feature was too dumb. If it was something you couldn't do on a piece of paper, we added it to our website.

We got our A. It was a dirty A but we took it.

I keep wondering if information like this will change anyone's mind about Disney.

It seems like all Iger has to do is throw a little shade at Trump or DeSantis and everyone instantly believes that Disney is some sort of bastion of progressive thought that doesn't have a vile history of exploitation.

Yeah. I get the intent but it comes off kind of gross.

People chronically underestimate nature.

They see some beautiful desert, a peaceful sea, or an idyllic mountain and assume that nothing so pretty could possible hurt you.

Forget about cute animals that are actually dangerous, any of the above can secretly store so much energy that humans are completely insignificant gnats, in comparison.

The girls themselves are mostly "all for it" when it's people roughly their age. There are exceptions but most girls that age see 30+ year olds as lame old dudes. Most 30+ year olds aren't going after high school girls either. That's why we all cringed at David Woodson's line in "Dazed and Confused".

The people who don't want them to "exert this right" are the responsible parents, friends and community who know that a 30+ year old dating a teenager is creepy AF.

The few people who actually support this are mostly rationalizing.

There are many subcultures around food. It's not like the world is split between vegans and junk food addicts.

The Cheeto and McDonalds eating crowd may have crappy nutrition but they're an extreme. The other extreme is meal-preppers. They know exactly how much chicken, rice and broccoli they're eating.

There are huge communities of people who are very health conscious. Some of them focus their consciousness on science, some of them on other methods. Some of those people are vegans. Some aren't.

Why is everything all Biden’s fault

Because he's the boss. The president is always considered the leader of their party while they're in office. That's why Truman said, "The buck stops here."

If an organization does something, the leader of that organization needs to accept responsibility or admit they're an ineffective leader.

I'd really like to believe that but the cynic in me expects that as soon as Israel gets done with their genocide campaign they'll pretend that they've turned a new leaf and all funding and military assistance will resume as though nothing had happened. There will be no lasting consequences for Israel's actions so they will, correctly, assume that there is nothing to stop them from doing it again.

How did they even come to such a perspective? There are all kinds of physical handicaps in fiction.

Raistlin had a mysterious uncurable ailment imposed by Par-Salian.
Albrech has to forsake love to attain the Rheingold. Several gods and heroes are missing various limbs.

And blindness? Daredevil. Tiresias. Any number of blind kung-fu masters.

Sometimes they're afflictions that are paid as a price for powers, sometimes their curses, sometimes their obstacles that heroes overcome. But disabled people have been all over fantasy literature for millenia.

These weird combinations look fun but they're generally the result of having conglomerates, companies that have gobbled up a bunch of smaller, unrelated companies.

Conglomerates are tricky to pull off because managing a lot of disparate business lines. A CEO who knows all about how to market construction equipment is likely to miss that one of their other products became an iconic sex toy years ago. The big problem is that more focused companies can typically outmaneuver you in their area of focus.

Theoretically, there might be synergies that make your company more effective but normally, conglomeration is drag on the risk-adjusted rate of return on your company. It's much easier to pull off when your government has strong protectionist policies or if there are officials you can bribe to keep out the competition.

Why would a company do something that's generally bad for the company? It's generally good for the CEO. A CEO often has a very concentrated investment portfolio. Changes in the value of the company they're running can have a huge impact on their personal wealth. Conglomeration allows a single company to be a diversified asset. It does it in a way that's objectively worse for shareholders but better for the CEO.

My wife and I regularly joke that one day we'll harass our kids to help us with our neural interfaces but I don't think that sort of thing will happen any time soon.

When I was a kid in the 80's a lot of people could already afford computers. They weren't so cheap that everyone had them but they were affordable to a fair number of people if they really wanted one. A C64 cost $595 at launch, that's under $2,000 in today's dollars.

The biggest barrier to computers were that they weren't "user friendly". If you wanted to play a simple video game you needed to know some basic command line instructions. When I wanted to set up my first mouse for my 8086 it involved installing drivers and editing config.sys and autoexec.bat. You couldn't really do anything with a computer those days unless you were willing to nerd out.

At the same time, nerding out on a computer could easily get you deep into the guts of your computer in a functional way. I learned that the only way I could play video games at night was if I opened up the computer and disconnected the speaker wire so it wouldn't alert my parents. I also learned that I could "hack" Bards Tale by opening up the main file with debug and editing it so that the store would sell an infinite number of "Crystal Swords".

Today there are 2 cell phones for every human on earth. Kids walk around with supercomputers in their pockets. But they've become so "user friendly" that you barely even need to be literate to operate one. That's generally a good thing but it removes an incentive to figuring out how the stuff works. Most people only bother with that if they're having some trouble getting it working in the first place.

At the same time it's gotten much harder to make changes to your computer. The first Apple was a pile of circuits you needed to solder together. You can't even remove the battery on a modern one (without jumping through a lot of hoops). If you edit some of your games it's more likely to trigger some piracy or cheat protection than to let you actually change it.

There are still large communities of computer nerds but your average person today basically treats computers like magic boxes.

I'd expect that kind of gap in other areas. I'd take 3d printing as an example. You can get one now for a few hundred bucks. They're already used in industry but, at this point, they're still very fiddly. The people who have them at home are comfortable doing stuff like troubleshooting, flashing ROMs, wading through bad documentation and even printing custom upgrades for their printer.