If you only do the easy part, then yes that’s infinitely replaceable. Being a pretty face is exactly that, and AI can do that all day long.
Being actually entertaining and engaging, though, is a different story, and AI is struggling to pick that up. And of course teams of corporate marketers continually fail at this.
But yes, the “job” of “being attractive on the internet” can now be outsourced to machines.
Is it “don’t use them and just keep track of your stuff”? Because that seems like the most right answer here.
That’s what I’m saying - there’s absolutely nothing about nonprofit status that demands a company not act like a total asshole. Have a look at all the really bad ones like the Komen Foundation or Red Cross if you want an example.
Best bet, barring adding more legal mechanisms to the law, is a private for-profit with careful leadership. Yeah, it can change, but companies that put values first can and often do confer those same values to future leadership. Versus, of course, publicly traded companies where rampant growth at all costs is the only legal requirement.
Most nonprofits don’t do a lot with the general public. They have the community they serve (which is getting something for nothing and therefore “customer service” is not a thing) and the community that funds them (where, of course, service is king). How the company treats you on the outside very much depends on which side of that equation you’re on.
This is necessary behavior for nonprofits, at least in the US, because of the demand for charitable giving. It’s ultimately a decent structure for a charity, but a pretty awful way to run a product or service business, since the incentives are all on the opposite side of “good product/service”. Private for-profits with strong, conscientious leadership do much better - I encourage you to read up on Patagonia and Gore-Tex as examples.
The idea that non-profits aren’t profiting-seeking is the biggest misunderstanding in the world. I work for a large one, and it’s absolutely the same rampant penny-squeezing 30%-unsustainable-growth-seeking monstrosity as anything in the Valley. The pittance that gets thrown to “charitable causes” is just another tax dodge in an otherwise profit-demanding venture. Swap “shareholders” with “the endowment” and there’s no difference at all.
Much better to be a for-profit company with a charter demanding where profits in excess of modest growth targets are spent internally.
They need to make some money - infrastructure isn’t free, employees need paid, etc. they should be self sustaining.
They don’t need to be 2009-Google profitable though. That pipe dream needs to end. 3-5% YoY growth is plenty.
My 80 year old dad has been using a XUbuntu for years and never even noticed. The only reason he knows he’s using Linux at all is because he saw a news story about Windows tracking and asked about it. He was quite happy not to be affected.
Unfortunately DoD is right. PFAS are terrible things, but they’re used everywhere (including consumer goods at an astonishing rate) because they’re really effective. Once there are good alternatives, yes let’s ban them forever, but until then we’d all notice their absence in our goods in a big bad way.
Oh, sorry. American cars are require to ship with a feature that shuts the engine off at stop lights, and restarts it when you take your foot off the brake. It’s done to supposedly help the environment, which it doesn’t do in the least and is also incredibly irritating.
So car hackers reconfigure their cars to disable that feature.
Cars are computers. All those fancy features run on software. Software can be patched to get rid of unpleasant functionality.
It’s not always easy, but it’s doable, and the more of these stupid features they add, the more people spend time working on undoing them.
Why would a union help at all? Organized workers won’t change the financial and legal obligations at the top. It won’t drive the focus away from quarterly earnings. Unions protect the workers, they don’t drive company culture.
There is no saving Google. The only way out of the hole they’re in is to have the integrity not to fall in in the first place.
Can’t wait to patch that out, should be as fun as that dumbshit auto-shutoff they have now.
An overreaction by members of the board that wanted to keep AI development slow and “safe”. Sudden news that there was a major advancement toward AGI (which they believe will destroy humanity, there’s a seriously a whole cult around this in AI research circles right now) that they hadn’t been told about sent them off the deep end. Those board members thought they could fire Altman and throw the brakes on, not anticipating that 700 employees would side against them and potentially migrate to Microsoft where the “AI ethics” would have no influence at all.
They shot their shot and lost massively, for themselves and their fellow believers. That attitude toward AI is now being labeled a business liability in the minds of every decision maker in the whole AI world.
Same, I view the whole internet through uBlock and a pihole, so my value as an “impression” is virtually zero.
I’m not against for-profit websites making some money (and I run my own website, which generates a whopping $0), but Google has jumped the shark with their sketchy malware bullshit, and I’m starting to root for that organization to die.
These shenanigans have me rapidly transitioning from “I don’t want to see your annoying ads” to “I don’t want you to make any money at all”.
Well that puts the “Ethical Altruism” board members’ willingness to risk it all on such a wild dice roll in more context.
It’s probably lost their entire movement any influence on the future of AI research, but them’s the breaks.
It’s been awhile and I haven’t tried to latest hardware, but I’m sure it’s still doable. The process wasn’t terrible, just a few extra steps to add compatibility for some of the devices.
I mostly just used the guidance here:
I put Ubuntu on a handful of Surface Pros a couple years ago for work, and while the process wasn’t horrible, I was wishing for something with more native support the whole time. Nice to see I wasn’t the only one.
So much this. I started using it during Covid, and it’s been so great that I prefer Sams over any other shopping experience.