Damn, you really can’t control your legacy, huh?

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall with the panel required to approve a flatulence study that uses an app called “Chart Your Fart”

They aren’t just hanging out. They were driven to extinction by the early 1900s and repopulated into the wild by zoo breeding programs. It’s a textbook bottleneck genetics scenario and very nearly failed had then not found 1-2 wild horses to increase genetic diversity in the 1960s.

Although their population has been increasing successfully, the biggest reason it is working is because they live in areas of Mongolia that are not heavily populated by humans. For the counter example, watch Montana get rid of its re-introduced wolf population. Humans love animals in so far as they don’t inconvenience us. But our societies will happily get rid of animals that get too close, even though we’ve left wildlife with so few places to go.

I’m curious what would be the better approach if someone wanted to donate land to be used for a park? Give it to a charity? Or somehow find the cash and just build the park yourself and let people visit your land?

Many wasp species are quite gentle. We get a lot of great golden digger wasps on our spotted bee balm and despite looking quite scary, they are quite gentle and avoid human contact.

We have a bird bath and when the water has evaporates, the blue mud dauber wasps will sit on the side and very patiently watch me refill it.

They eat parasites and protect the garden. Truly, the more the merrier.

I think it’s a disturbing function of human group behavior. One human can be smart. Humans en masse seem to groupthink ourselves into self-affirming decisions

We thought the fauna of the plains of Africa were so plentiful they could never go extinct, until we drove a number of them to extinction

We thought the ocean was so vast that the solution to pollution was dilution, until we created garbage islands and watched corals die off

We thought we were too small to affect the global climate, until we started watching anthropogenic climate change.

We just never fucking learn.

You may be right (I hope you are). Do you think government funding would offset this?

I think it will have to consolidate down to a few players - I certainly don’t expect that there is a market for 100 different systems. And I think the personal market is a supplement to the executive suite market, so getting a few people addicted for cheap both brings in a small revenue stream and dumbs a population down enough that they have no choice but to function without it (imagine telling someone in 2001 that they would one day pay $1700 for a cell phone - now it’s just considered the cost of living)

The businesses who overdid it on tokens have a choice to make: hire back workers or switch to a different AI company. Maybe one day they will look at humans (although salary may have to increase due to negative reputation), but I think there are a good number that will just shop around to another AI company for a better deal.

I am no AI fan, but I do not see this going away. I think if you can get enough people addicted, they will pay costs if the costs seem nominal at first.

If someone can’t write well and has an upcoming deadline for an essay or needs to write an important document, they might use a one-time fee. If someone uses it for day-to-day decision making, they will certainly do a subscription if it seems cheap at first. And once you have those people expecting to pay, the price keeps increasing every couple of years.

Example a - Facebook. Rolled out as an entirely free service and enrolled billions of members. Now enough people pay for extras in things as stupid as Candy Crush that they can tack millions onto their revenue for nearly no benefit provider. If enough people pay $1 for something stupid, it pays off

Example b - Prime streaming services. It was a free tack-on to people with Prime memberships. So people bought Fire sticks and use it as a home base. And now they are so cemented into the system and don’t know how to use an alternative so they will pay for 1) extra apps that will show the program they want, which will pay Amazon a fee and 2) pay extra for no ads now that they are addicted

I also have no doubt that advertising can be baked into AI. Just wait until it writes a pathology report and recommends a certain brand name medication, or gives someone a to-do list for hosting a Christmas party with specific brands and desired trends listed.

As for video generation, I think you have a small enough pool that does this anyway, and this will increasingly be consolidated by price towards a handful of powerful individuals who want to sway public influence.

You and I may not pay for it, but have no doubt you can get similar adoption to streaming services and you can get people to pay for anything if it feels cheap enough to be nothing money. I’ve become a cynical old fart and I’ve watched this song and dance too many times.

I had my first one 6 weeks after having a baby. Cervix was still soft and I think they could have baseball pitched that thing in from across the room.

I got my most recent one in last year, 10 years after having my final child, and goddamn now I understand what people were complaining about

His internal monologue; “Just lift the corners of your lips and it will look natural”

Seems like we should add kudzu bugs and giant pandas to North America, and all will be well 😄

Oh god, keep the bamboo and kudzu in their native environments. The ecosystem has been through enough!

RIP to the Endangered Species Act

No chance the US government will forego money for their broligarchs because of environmental laws.

But if you really want to overwhelm someone’s property with an unkillable native plant, I’d have to put Virginia creeper forward as a candidate.

You’re probably right. About 5 years ago I recall seeing a link to an entirely bot-populated sub. The conversations were almost indistinguishable from humans - it was really eerie. After that I had a hard time using Reddit because I had to assume that any comment responding to me might just be a computer program

But is there any reason to expect things will suddenly get better when he does? His allies will fight each other for the throne when he dies and the most unscrupulous will win it

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To follow the true traditional method, you should ask a witch for a forecast, and when she gives one you burn her at the stake for witchcraft.

Actually that’s not bad for a watch…

Yeah I think it was more of a hyperbolic comment to the reporter rather than an official recommendation. He thinks we should eat more greens and less fried stuff, which is in line with pretty much every nutritional guideline out there