- > likely would have otherwise been put toward stock buybacks
Stock buybacks from who? When stock gets bought the money doesn't disappear into thin air; the same cash is now in someone else's hands. Those people would then want to invest it in something and then we're back to square one.
You assert that if not for AI, wealth wouldn't have been spent on materials, land, trades, ect. But I don't think you have any reason to think this. Money is just an abstraction. People would have necessarily done something with their land, labor, and skills. It isn't like there isn't unmet demand for things like houses or train tunnels or new-fangled types of aircraft or countless other things. Instead it's being spent on GPUs.
- Bad audio and bad foley doesn't get mentioned enough. I think it's why people are watching things with subtitles: the actors are on a blue stage that is completely silent having a quiet conversation and then the war happening around them gets added later. In noisy environments people slow down and enunciate and directors aren't helping actors know what to do.
Ideas on how to fix it:
• actors should wear tiny headphones behind their ears (or wherever is not visible) to make noise that approximates the environment they will be shown in. They'll have to act over it.
• Foley artists should not be given video of the final scene to foley. They should be given only one single continuous very wide shot. This will solve the problem where foley artists keep doing ludicrous things like adding the sound of a pin dropping and hitting the ground (since it's shown on screen) in the context of a space ship that is in the process of exploding.
- Yes
Even multiple exposures of one frame of film is, as far as I can tell, still generally considered one photograph.
- That doesn't make any sense. Did you mean double exposures?
- It does devalue the image indeed. He didn't cut out the jumper and paste it onto the sun but he did take images of the sun and paste them onto the jumper, using the jumper as a mask. Which seems to me like a distinction without a difference.
If his images were real they would have shown the powered paraglider too. The images are a composite of photos that he took of the sun and a frame from the video that he took of the jumper.
Is it pretty? Certainly! It's art! But it's 'photography' the same way the 'So Yummy' YouTube channel is cooking.[1]
- So.. it's a composite and .. "transiting" isn't quite accurate either. hmmm :-(
- So.. the owner made a mistake getting expensive menus printed and then corrected his mistake?
Even if he didn't have to adjust prices due to inflation, surely restaurants adjust the items on their menus frequently. I have been to a restaurant that printed new menus daily because it changed daily. It's like 10 sheets of paper or cardstock. It's not that expensive.
- You're better off guesstimating yourself than trusting contractors. The contractors are incentivized to severely oversize any AC units they install or else people leave bad reviews on their pages/listings when the installed unit can't keep up the one day every two years that the temperature gets abnormally hot.
I did this myself and insisted on a unit half the capacity that the contractors wanted. Several flat-out refused. But it works perfectly! Approximately one day ever two years it can't keep up. Which means that all the other time it doesn't short-cycle. Perfect.
- > In what world is that true?
It's true in this one. Companies will design drones that comply with the very detailed regulations and go no further the same way car companies don't put seatbelts, airbags, or auto-brake devices into cars unless forced. The drone regulations are nearly done. Any further changes may take an act of congress.
- The systemic problem is that they didn't spend the engineer-week on it. It's only an engineer week. That pays for itself after avoiding a single drone crash to say nothing of avoiding a second lawsuit.
- The discover and fix phase is over. In August 2025, the FAA announced Part 108 which codifies the rules. Up until now, companies have been operating under waivers. The comment period for Part 108 ends on October 6th. After that the rules may be changed slightly and then will be finalized.
https://www.regulations.gov/document/FAA-2025-1908-0023
You can select a few comments at random and quickly find a pattern: people are concerned that the drones everywhere except in the densest of areas do not have to see where they are going. If they hit a manned aircraft it's the manned aircraft's fault and the drone operator has no legal liability. Does that sound like something FAA employees wrote themselves? How much motivation will be there to "iteratively refine" when they have no legal liability and even admitting that a possible improvement exists would create legal liability?
- If a drone crashes, obviously no other drones should fly there until a human determines what went wrong and presses the 'resume' button. The fact that that system did not exist is a systemic problem.
- Video games weren't as widespread, personalized, or diverse than they are now. That people who played video games in 2010 said that those were better is immaterial. This graph goes up through 2022: https://i.redd.it/tnrs4wl1ibkb1.png
Same with smartphones. Smartphone apps existed but weren't as personalized and didn't serve nearly as diverse of content as they do now. It's night and day. Surely I don't need to pull up a graph of smartphone usage per day.
- May I ask how religious (or woowoo) your partner is?
The number of people who care about having an objectively true understanding of as much of reality as possible is disappointingly small and I suspect that these photo trends are just making that fact more obvious.
- You'll see the big deal when you realize that you don't trust absolutely any photos or videos of current events unless the photos are provided by a news source that you trust. You'll see the big deal when you take a picture of something real and show it to a friend who isn't interested because they don't think the thing in the photo actually exists.
- Your fallible memory is a feature other people expect. So much so that recording a call without consent is a crime in some states.
If you do start recording or transcribing your calls, be sure to disclose this every time you start talking to someone. Otherwise it's a trust violation.
- The Dancing Baby gif, which was abnormally large, and went viral via email in 1996, is around 220 KB. At this speed, it would load in 3.5 seconds. And being 4 seconds long, it could stream.
- I don't think the issue is that they are naive or lack social skills, I think they just choose against it, and then lie about the motivation for their choice. It's all over this thread: "No time and no money!" But you know it's false. I think they know it's a lie too they just don't want to admit to themselves and others that they like TikTok more than people. Being a lame couch potato is socially acceptable if and only if you connect it to the big class-based social cause. They relished in the COVID lockdowns for similar reasons.
It's not naivete; it's dishonesty.
For example: "Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders" is obviously false: the shareholders (via the company) did have cash and now they don't. The cash is distributed to the market. The quoted statement is precisely backwards.
> A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled
That doesn't mean anything.
> more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc)
And do they sit on it? No, of course not. They invest it in things. Real actual things.
> buybacks
Already discussed
> M&A
If they use cash to pay for a merger, then the former owners now have cash that they will reinvest.
> balance sheets
Money on a balance sheet is actually money sitting in J.P. Morgan or whoever. Via fractional reserve lending, J.P. Morgan lends that money to businesses and home owners and real actual houses (or whatever) get built with it.
The counterfactual for AI spending really is other real actual hard spending.