They use AWS and specifically design their software to be able to dynamically scale, ever since Wandavision crashed their playback.

Is it possible that they never entertained having to make their cancellation page scalable? Sure. Is it more likely that they intentionally haven’t made it scalable? Yes.

The only male doctor at my ob/gyn was visibly angry when I told him my experience getting the IUD. He said, “The women in this practice don’t give anesthetic and it makes me furious with them.” Way to be a decent human in a sea of assholes, dude.

That’s kinda my point, though. You have the Google Assistant app for a legitimate reason, and its need to use your microphone is also equally legitimate…the problem comes in when Google says that they don’t monitor what you’re saying, or worse, they say they can’t because your phone processes it all locally. They have this giant loophole that they take advantage of here, in that while they do not keep track of what you say themselves, they embed a third party service that does. While not particularly surprising given it’s Google, that’s shady as fuck and they shouldn’t be able to say they don’t monitor just because they let their little bro Alphonso do it on their behalf and they magically get off on a technicality.

Is that to say that it’s no longer valid? Or just that it’s old news? The list of apps associated with the software is still pretty extensive; Google Assistant even showed up.

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/732387-buddy-dyer-backs-down-on-immigration-enforcement-after-threat-from-james-uthmeier/

Chordia also says his company has a deal with Shazam, which can help it to identify users by analysing audio provided by Alphonso and selling its findings back to the company.

This is a really old article and thus, Alphonso isn’t the only game in town anymore. But that’s how they get away with it. They can tell you legally that they do not listen to you, and they don’t readily disclose that their buddy Alfonso listens instead, and then Alfonso goes back and tells them everything.

Yep. Certainly wouldn’t be the first time that something is made to seem altruistic but ultimately gets used in questionably-ethical ways.

Yes. It’s utterly useless now (and they aren’t being introduced into existing ecosystem to my knowledge). They view it as a proof of concept for more recently extinct species as well as a potential tool for restoring species to ecosystems in the future as extinction events pick up speed.

However, it should be noted that extinction events are a symptom, not the core problem, so I’m not sure exactly where we’d restore extinct species to, since human use of the land is the root cause of most ecosystem collapses, and it’s unlikely that they can rebuild populations in the places they died out of (and the land probably won’t be yielded back anyway).

Super cool stuff that they did regardless, but can’t figure out how it’s going to accomplish what they seem to want to accomplish.

It’s not even the people; it’s their actions. If we could figure out how to regulate its use so its profit-generation capacity doesn’t build on itself exponentially at the expense of the fair treatment of others and instead actively proliferate the models that help people, I’m all for it, for the record.

That is entirely true and one of my favorite things about it. I just wish there was a way to nurture more of that and less of the, “Hi, I’m Alvin and my job is to make your Fortune-500 company even more profitable…the key is to pay people less!” type of AI.

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But the people with the money for the hardware are the ones training it to put more money in their pockets. That’s mostly what it’s being trained to do: make rich people richer.

Tennessee: a state in the USA.

For some completely unrelated reason, I suddenly have this song stuck in my head…

https://www.tiktok.com/@originalsinfluencer/video/7443873893430971678

Making a career change from an industry with several active unions (all of which continue to be proven as vital, even after over 100 years), into the tech industry in the mid-2010s, where there was no union and you’d hear horror stories (especially from the video game industry), I can’t help but feel like this was inevitable and I’ve been excited to watch it happen for almost 10 years. I hope it continues.

I’ve been actively trying to extricate myself from their ecosystem. I hate how incredibly challenging it is.

Give that cat literally anything he wants. Tuna? Check. Snuggles? Absolutely. Nuclear launch codes? You got it, dude.

I feel like news has the same problem that art does, in that organizations are always required to pander at least somewhat to their funding sources. If NYT didn’t have to get money from corporate sources and could instead truly be powered by the people, the optimist in me would like to believe that they wouldn’t have to publish articles like that…but maybe that’s naive. As someone who has actively worked in the arts, I know that many arts organizations are much more free with their words and frank in their critiques when they don’t have to bite the hand that feeds them.

So, all of that to say, please give to the news (…and arts) organizations that you feel most passionately about. NYT has done plenty of shitty things in their past, so maybe them, maybe not. But someone deserves to make money for their journalism.