rfwhyte

The thing that really boils my blood with these generative AI services, is they are essentially creating throw away, algorithmically generated content that no one else is ever going to use (In this case music) but they expect you to subscribe to their services and pay them literally forever to use the schlock their algo churns out.

It just feels so profoundly wrong and exploitative of both the artists work the models have been trained on, and the users actually using these services, that some generative AI uses a few cents worth of electricity and a few more cents of allocated overhead to spit out a song, yet the user is then expected to pay $20 a month or whatever, forever, if they want to use that song in a say a YouTube video.

If I pay an algorithm to make me a song, I should own the copyright to that song, not the company that made the algorithm, and it should cost like a dollar at most. Until someone can offer a service that works this way, or I can implement my own self-hosted algorithm that can do this for me, I have less than zero interest in these kinds of services. They are a ripoff of the highest order, and actively hostile to their users in terms of their predatory pricing models.

Sounds like the new owners of this already morally and financially bankrupt company are going to go bankrupt all over again if they are trying to pull this kind of scam bait and switch on their small and shrinking user base.

While I'm sure lower construction costs would provide some positive benefits for society, all I see when I look at these sorts of efforts to transition to factory built modular housing is yet another massive wealth transfer from the working class to the capitalist class.

I live in a relatively rural place in Canada where residential construction is on of the primary drivers of the local economy and one of the last bastions of well paying local jobs. You start shipping in a bunch of these "Microfactories" or transition to prefab construction done offsite in some "Megafactory" somewhere, and you put a heck of a lot of people who are supporting families and spending their incomes in my local community out of work.

Rather than a whole town's worth of construction workers swinging hammers making a decent local buck, you now have a scant few foreign billionaires capturing most of the profit in the residential construction value chain. We're being sold the concept on the bullshit promise "Cheaper houses" but all we're going to get is the enshitification of the construction industry, as like with everything else, once startups and VCs get involved in an industry, a few people make billions, but everyone else ends up worse off.

The framers, dry-wallers, concrete pourers, etc. aren't "Retraining" to be "AI prompt engineers" or whatever bullshit we're being fed will be the "Jobs of the future" either, they are going on government assistance or taking minimum wage retail jobs, never financially recovering from the loss of stable, relatively well paying local jobs, and ultimately pulling their families and entire communities down with them.

Meanwhile 1/100th as many people as have been put out of construction jobs around the world are now employed in a few factories owned by billionaires, who then use their wealth to influence public policy to engage in regulatory capture of their industry, and entire swathes of communities become soulless cookie-cutter corporate suburbs of identical, shoddily built pre-fabricated "Homes" that were designed to maximize corporate profits, not for people to actually enjoy living in.

I see the writing on the wall here, as between robotics / automation, economies of scale and VCs pouring billions into businesses that will operate at a loss while they gobble up market share, I definitely think we're going to see a pretty rapid transition to factory built pre-fabricated homes in the next couple decades, as traditional local scale builders just aren't going to be able to be cost-competitive, but from where I'm sitting this is a terrifying rather than hopeful proposition, as at least where I live, it's not going to make housing any cheaper, but its definitely going to put A LOT of people out of work, and we don't really have anything else for those folks to do, so while it is almost certainly inevitable, the transition to pre-fabricated construction is going to absolutely decimate my community and a great many communities just like it around the world.

Yeah this reads as a total puff piece to me too.

Seems to really want to paint a picture of the king as a pious, diligent, man of the people, yet it only leaves me with the impression that what was intentionally omitted is the true nature of the man.

Just like any officially sanctioned biography of Trump would omit his late night reality TV binge watching, his gorging on fast food and his raping of children, this account embellishes Charles' best qualities while utterly ignoring his worst, so it is of no historical value whatsoever in terms of understanding who he truly was.

The thing you're missing here is that the automakers have spent billions upon untold billions of dollars lobbying politicians and on PR campaigns targeted at the public to convince people that literally the ONLY way American cities could possibly exist is in a form that is utterly dependent upon the automobile.

Transit ridership in the US was higher in the 1950s than it is today and it was the automakers that killed public transit. They literally bought up popular and profitable public transit companies just to shut them down so people would be forced to drive.

The problem isn't "Consumerism" it's a culture of car dependency that's largely the result of intentional action on the part of the automakers to grow and protect their profits.

The reason there's so much auto loan debt in the US is people literally HAVE TO OWN a car just to get to work to support their families in the vast majority of US towns and cities. People don't want to go into debt just so they can buy some shitty fucking KIA so they can sit in traffic for two+ hours a day so they can get to one of their three minimum wage jobs, but when the alternative is being unemployed and homeless, a lot of folks will do what they have to do to provide for themselves and their families.

And there are literally thousands of times more examples of oral histories not matching historical events. A broken clock is right twice a day, but that doesn't mean we should rely upon it for timekeeping.

I would argue its actually been those "People in question" who are one of the primary barriers to the acceptance of the growing body of evidence that the Americas were peopled earlier than previously thought.

The issue is that there is clear genetic evidence that the current indigenous population of the Americas arrived onto the continents around 14KYA-15KYA, and all their various land claims and special rights / privileges fundamentally derive from the argument that "They were here first."

Whoever the people leaving footprints at White Sands were, the genetic evidence is clear that they weren't the ancestors of North America's current indigenous population. They were a genetically distinct people group (My suspicion is they would have been more closely related to Australian Aborigines) and are in fact the ones "Who were here first." Accepting that there were already people in the Americas when the current indigenous population arrived, would undermine the land claims of the current North American indigenous populations, and would force them to reckon with the fact they too are colonizers / settlers who displaced an earlier population, likely through violence and possibly even outright genocide, as apart from some isolated groups in the Amazon, there's no genetic evidence the current indigenous population of the Americas meaningfully intermixed with any other populations once they arrived onto the continent as we would expect were the existing population absorbed into the new population through interbreeding.

This is in large part why so many indigenous groups are adamantly opposed to participating in genetics studies, or allowing archaeologists to conduct digs in their "Traditional territories" as a great many indigenous groups actually have "Oral traditions" that there were already people in the Americas when their ancestors arrived, and they know that further study will contradict the narrative that "They were here first," and could eventually invalidate their "Blood and soil" based land claims.

I'd be a lot more into Framework if they had come out with a single other GPU option than the Radeon 7700S that's been the only GPU option available since the brands launch. The 7800M and 7900M have both been out over a year or more, and Framework has made zero mention of when or even if those models would ever be available as upgrades for Framework devices. I don't even really play games, but for my video editing workloads, more GPU cores and VRAM make a world of difference, and the RTX 3070 level of performance out of the RX7700s that's thus far the only GPU option for Framework devices just doesn't cut it. There's just no way I'm spending $2500+ USD for a laptop that has worse performance than devices costing half as much at this point.

They just aren't really delivering on the promise of "Future upgradeability" in any kind of meaningful way so far, and I just can't see the value in purchasing what's undeniably a wildly overpriced machine based on promises that have yet to be delivered upon. They've had plenty of time to communicate when, or even if, new GPUs are coming, yet there's been absolute radio silence from the on this front.

Personally I think they need to focus more on actually delivering on the fundamental promise of the brand, that being future upgradeability, than on releasing new devices, as until they can demonstrate they are committed to delivering on their promises, I won't be buying any of their devices.

At the time when the fields in this article were being tilled, the Europeans were building castles, cathedrals, river spanning arched stone bridges, multi-masted sailing ships and trebuchets and massive siege engines using tools of iron and steel. People in middle east were already working with colored glass and people in China were already working with porcelain, gunpowder and early printing presses. A thousand years or more before that, the Greeks were already working with complex geared mechanisms and making things like the Antikythera mechanism and proto steam turbines. The people tilling these fields on the other hand were using relatively simple stone, bone and wooden tools, and hadn't even invented the wheel yet.

While I appreciate the point you're trying to make that native Americans weren't some kind of savages as they were all too frequently portrayed in the past, the notion that their level of technological or societal development was anywhere near that of Europe, the Middle East or China at the time does not reflect actual history. Relatively speaking, outside the empires of Meso-America most pre-contact American societies were substantially less complex that European societies, and from a purely technological perspective every single American society ever documented was vastly less technologically complex than European, Middle Eastern and East Asian societies. So from that lens its not unreasonable for the Europeans of the time to have perceived the native Americans as less socially and technologically advanced as they were, as that was simply the reality of world at the time.

Also, any historian with any knowledge of actual pre-contact North American societies can tell you they too were subjugating and killing any other populations they encountered just as much as the Europeans did when they arrived on the continent. The notion that native societies lived some kind of eco-friendly, conflict free lifestyle is just as egregious of whitewashing as any former settler narratives.

No, it's a stupid, overpriced, gimmick camera designed to part fools and clout chasers from their money.

As someone who's long dreamed of owning a robotic camera control arm, but who doesn't have a spare $50K kicking around to buy one, I've been following the development of these kinds of projects with great interest. While this particular arm doesn't look like it would have enough payload capacity or smooth enough motion for the use cases I have in mind, the fact its a couple hundred bucks means something that does what I need it to do for an actually affordable price isn't likely too far off.

The class war was won decades ago, we're only just now starting to realize it.

The people at the top control literally everything, and they run the world like a gated community, with only those with the proper "Credentials" even being able to get a foot in the door. That foot in the door guarantees you nothing though, only a chance to prove your use to the true masters, who will keep you around and let you hang out in their gated Edens only so long as you continue to be useful to them by making them money.

So how does one get these "Credentials" you might ask? Well, you could be exceptionally talented, absolutely bust your ass in school to get the right degree, and then work like a dog for a decade or more for an at best marginal chance of being let into the club, or as is depressingly the de facto standard, the credentials are stamped onto you at birth if you're lucky enough to be borne into a wealthy and connected family.

The whole goddamn world is a rigged carnival game at this point, with a very small cadre of very wealthy folks setting the rules and for the most part getting to decide who's even allowed to play. If you're very, very, VERY lucky, you might get one ball, and get your chance at a prize, but even then there's a lot more folks who take their shot and lose than their are that win, and the true luxury of the wealthy and connected, is the freedom to take as many shots as it takes until they finally hit a winner.

The crazy thing is the answer is quite possibly TRILLIONS.

Damn some of the comments here are really depressing. I'd formerly thought HN was one of the last bastions of critical thought on internet, but I guess I was wrong judging by some of these comments. Way too much regurgitation of long-since debunked pseudo-scientific nonsense.

Atlantis was never real and anyone who thinks it was is a moron.

If there were truly some sort of globe-spanning advanced civilization existing ~11KYA we'd have found at least one single piece of their material culture by now, but we haven't. We have however found innumerable pieces of archaeological evidence of contemporary hunter-gatherer neolithic societies in and around all of the places Atlantis was supposed to have "Conquered" and yet not once have we found a single Atlantean trade good, pot sherd, metal working, etc. Atlantis supposedly had a bronze-age or greater level of technology and a globe-spanning empire, and we literally haven't found a single shred of physical evidence to support its existence, despite having literal mountains of physical evidence for pretty much every other major empire that's existed throughout history.

Nor have we found any genetic evidence in people or crops that there was any kind of "Empire" connecting parts of Europe or Africa as we find time and time again with real empires that actually existed in prehistory. Real empires have people and crops that move around within the empire and leave genetic evidence of the mixing of populations and breeding of crops, yet we find nothing, not even the faintest echo of Atlantis. Again, we have mountains of hard physical evidence that shows how empires like the Summerians in the fertile crescent or the Norte Chico in meso-america spread through genetic evidence in current local populations and crops, yet we find absolutely no genetic evidence to support the existence of Atlantis.

Let alone the fact the bloody story of Atlantis references how the Atlanteans went to war with Athens some 9000 years before the Athenian city-state was even founded. Just utter, complete brain-dead nonsense.

Honestly, belief in Atlantis has become something a litmus-test for critical thinking and research ability these days, as anyone that believes in Atlantis despite the overwhelming volume of evidence that firmly proves it never existed is basically saying "I'm too lazy to do my own research (Based on peer-reviewed primary sources) and / or too stupid to understand actual science."

Also f*ck Graham Hancock (And Joe Rogan via extension). MFer is the worst kind of charlatan and is broadly responsible for how many Americans believe in Atlantis.

100% agree. The only way to enact any meaningful change is to put the power back in the hands of the people, especially given the US's insane, borderline anti-democratic, 2 party political system. Both sides are effectively completely captured by the wealthy elites and entirely beholden to their corporate / wealthy donors, lobbyists and PACs.

Its why neither the Democrats nor Republicans really ever make any significant, meaningful changes that would materially improve the lives of working class people in big ways.

Neither party really represents the working class, and they'll never do anything to restrict the power or reduce the wealth of the rich folks they actually work for, so until corporate (Wealthy elite) money is purged from politics, it's just going to be more of the same for the foreseeable future.

"Abundance" is a ludicrous pipe-dream.

With the ways our societies are currently structured, any additional productivity / surpluses / GDP that's created via automation, AI, or whatever the "Next big thing" is, will just be gobbled up by the rich to pay for vacation mansions and mega yachts.

Across pretty much every industrializing / industrialized / post-industrialized country on earth income inequality is rising, and at an accelerating pace.

Technology is not going to save the common person, it's only going to be used a a tool to further control and exploit us, and a disproportionate share of whatever value it creates is going to go to the wealthy elites as it already does.

The "Abundance" that gets talked about in techno-utopian contexts will be an "Abundance" reserved only for the rich, and unless we the people can somehow find a way to break the iron-grip of power the wealthy elites have over our societies, we won't get to share in the windfall, we'll just get to watch from the sidelines in our broken down, bankrupt communities as the rich broadcast their "Amazing" consumerist lives 24/7 via social media or whatever.

As a Canadian, my take on the debate between the Canadian vs. US health care systems is that the US system is better for the rich, whereas the Canadian system is better for everyone else.

The US has world leading facilities, doctors and research, but that world-class capability is only really accessible for the top 5%-10% of society.

The next 20% of folks get something that's roughly equivalent, if a little better, to what folks in say Canada, the UK, or other countries with public healthcare get.

The problem is, the bottom 70% of society gets worse care, for more money, and suffers from substantially worse health outcomes, while living under the constant risk of crippling debt or personal bankruptcy due to medical issues.

Personally I'd much rather a system that takes decent care of everyone than a system that takes really good care of the rich whilst everyone else suffers.

Personally I think the phones, social media, dopamine addiction, etc. are all symptoms, not the systemic rot at the root of things here.

Young people today simply realize, either consciously, or subconsciously, that they live in a broken world and are being forced against their will to play a rigged game they cannot win. Distraction and apathy are the only logical reactions to world that exclusively measures a person's value in monetary terms and does not give a single fuck about them beyond whatever "Value" they can create for soulless corporations their self-serving, narcissistic billionaire owners.

Sure they could buckle down, study hard, get into a good college and work 60-80 hours a week for the rest of their lives, but even if they did all that they're still not guaranteed a decent life. They're not guaranteed to own a home, drive a nice car, take an annual vacation, or put away money for retirement. They're not even guaranteed a roof over their heads and meal on the table.

The social contract that underwrites the entire western world has been fundamentally altered, as where once studying hard and doing all the things you're "Supposed to do" as a young person could at least guarantee you a pretty decent life, young people today have no guarantee of a better future whatsoever regardless of how hard they work or how talented they might be.

This is an odd metaphor, but it just popped it my head so I'm going to try it out.

It's like for generations there's been a boat and a dock. The young people while away their days on the dock, swimming and fishing for minnows and the adults take the boat out each day (generation) and return with a fish. Each day (generation) the fish the adults have come back with has gotten bigger and bigger, and so the youngsters would get excited that when it was their turn to go out fishing they might catch an even bigger fish. The last couple days (generations) the adults have come how with fish that were the same size as the day (generation) before or maybe even a little smaller, but the kids didn't think to much of it and were still excited to get out fishing and catch their own fish. This most recent generation the adults came back with the smallest fish yet, and oh, by, the way, the boat has a leak and is sinking and its also on fire.

We're basically wondering why the kids aren't excited to go fishing when we're giving them a sinking boat that's also on fire.

Of course they'd rather splash around in the shallows and fish for minnows when the best alternative we're giving them is a sinking ship.

Kids DO realize those concerns though. It may not be at the same conscious, rational level as an adult, but they absolutely recognize that they are living in a broken world and being forced to play a rigged game.

As with everything else to do with religion, it probably comes down to something to do with exerting power and control over other people, typically for the profit of the people writing down the "laws" in any given religious text.

Chance are the dude who wrote the rules against eating pork was a beef farmer (Or more likely some kind of noble type who owned beef farms, but didn't do any actual labour themselves) and so the whole thing was just a way to force people to do the thing that made some particular dude or group of dudes the most money and that gave them the most power over other peoples lives.

And all of the scam call centers in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, etc. are run by Chinese gangsters with the tacit support of the CCP.

Just like how all the scam call centers across eastern Europe and Russia are run by Russian gangsters with ties to the Kremlin.

North Korea is also a big player in the global scam industry with many thousands of scammers operating out of state run call centers in Pyong Yang.

One thing that doesn't get discussed enough in the rise of internet scams over the past few decades is how much of the global scamming "Industry" is directly or indirectly state-sponsored.

Deepseek or whatever farming tech they may be developing don't amount to a drop in the bucket when it comes to their looming demographic collapse.

China is projected to see its population decline by somewhere near 400 million people over the next 75 years. Given their deep seated xenophobia, and limited and largely unsuccessful efforts to attract and integrate immigrants over the past couple decades, there's also no way they're going to replace even 1/10th of their population loss via immigration.

The predictions of "Collapse" may be somewhat early and perhaps hyperbolic in the short to medium term, but there's just no way they aren't going to face some extremely significant economic challenges when they lose 1/3rd of their workforce and have a population pyramid that looks like an upside down triangle over the next few decades.

Of course anyone other than "Tech" (Corporations) is better at literally anything than "Tech." "Tech" doesn't care about providing utility to it's users, only extracting as much profit from them as possible, which is almost universally in opposition to the interests of users.

People who build things because they care about them and want to maximize the utility they provide actually design systems that allow users to effectively and efficiently access information or complete tasks, "Tech" on the other hand designs systems full of anti-user dark patterns solely intended to force users to view as many ads as possible or buy whatever service "Tech" is selling.

There's also a small Canadian company called Edison Motors that's doing some very interesting work in developing hybrid diesel-electric logging and back-country hauling trucks. They've taken a far saner approach to growth (Ie. not the typical SV hyperscalling model) and are actually building trucks that solve real world problems and I am personally a huge fan of them. They might not have the glitz or funding of your typical "Startup" but they are actually building a sustainable business that has a very good chance thriving for decades to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an6e2Lh9u58

Another factor worth considering is that the cost of fuel is almost certainly going to go up substantially over the next decade due to dwindling oil supplies, ever increasing fuel taxes and possible global supply-shocks, but the cost per KWH of renewable power generation is effectively halving every year or two, so while the cost per KM traveled with an ICE vehicle will most likely range from remaining relatively the same to increasing substantially, the cost per passenger KM traveled of electric vehicles will likely range from staying relatively flat to decreasing substantially.

Personally I'd much rather buy an (electric) vehicle that at least has the potential for operating costs to decline year over year, than an (ICE) vehicle that's almost certainly going to see operating costs increase year over year as fuel prices inevitably go up.

It's by design. Airlines, like most industries these days have decided that it's no longer "Profitable" to serve regular folks, so they are pursuing the "Whale" strategy of re-orienting their entire service offering to exclusively cater to the 20% of their customers that drive 80% of their profits.

The experience of flying first class is better than it's ever been, and all that extra comfort, convenience and luxury has come 100% at the expense of the experience of the unwashed masses flying "Economy" class. First class gets lie flat beds, priority boarding, lobster thermidor and hot towels, while economy seats keep shrinking, boarding times get longer, checked baggage that used to be free costs $100, and a child-sized bag of peanuts costs $5.

The reason airline travel sucks so much these days is because it's supposed to. If you're flying economy class, the airlines literally see you as a burden, rather than a valued customer, and are doing everything in their power to make your experience as awful as possible, while squeezing every last penny out of you in the process.

This is honestly a super delightful article. It has personality and charm, and actually provides some useful information, despite said information having literally no bearing whatsoever on my life.

This just baseless conjecture, and even somewhat conspiracy-theory adjacent, but my best guess is one of the Irving families' companies is somehow involved here.

The Irving's, if you don't know, are one of the richest families in Canada, and effectively own the province of New Brunswick and run it like their own personal fiefdom. They are also heavily connected to both the Federal and Provincial conservative parties (And the Liberals too honestly), so I would assuage a guess that they had something to do with squashing the former investigation as they knew they were somehow culpable and used their cronies in the government to protect them from any potential liability.

Again, this is all just baseless conjecture, but it feels like at least a potentially reasonable explanation here, as it would be far from the first time billionaires used their wealth and political connections to kill an investigation into their own malfeasance.

I really, really, really wanted to like Framework, but for the type of work I do with a laptop (GPU / CPU / RAM intensive video editing) I can literally get a laptop with twice the performance of a Framework laptop for half the price. Not to mention Framework laptops only display option is a (admittedly decent) IPS panel, when miniled and OLED panels are becoming increasingly commonplace on devices that cost less and offer better performance. They have also not come out with a new GPU module since launch, and their current GPU offering is woefully under powered, especially given it's absolutely ludicrous $550 USD price tag and there are seemingly no plans for any more powerful GPU modules in the future. I love the idea of a repairable / upgradeable laptop, but I really can't justify spending twice as much for half the power just for the thus far unrealized promise of future potential.

79% of CEOs either have significant holdings of commercial real estate, or have friends / family who do. None of this "RTO" nonsense has literally anything to do with productivity, creativity or whatever other nonsense CEOs are prattling on about, it has 100% to do with propping up the value of the commercial RE holdings of these CEOs and their cronies. The venn diagram of the people who own commercial real estate and the people opposed to remote work is a circle. These greedy, feckless bastards want you to sit in traffic and suffer not because it's going to make anything actually better, but because it's the only way to protect the value of their investments, and it make me sick.