> I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
Being a heavy user seems like it'd create a lot of resentment if you don't actually enjoy doing it.
If you have used a tool for years and years and suddenly it shoves in a bunch of AI, like Duolingo or Google, are you a heavy user who may well dislike the results?
I have to put in some work to not be a heavy user by any reasonable definition.
ChatGPT has been downloaded >1 billion times on the Android PlayStore. AI is incredibly popular.
People have all sorts of concerns about how AI will change society, but that's precisely because it's so useful for so many things. If it were useless or just a fad, there would be no reason to worry.
The startup where I worked had 1 million downloads (which is much less), but how many of those were using it daily vs trying it for 30 minutes and forgetting about it?
Because companies that want to go public need to look profitable or potentially profitable. And before they go public they have to release real, actual, legally demonstrable numbers for their costs and revenue anyway.
When they will actually file to go public, their numbers will be intensely scrutinized. That's all that global headlines will be talking about for weeks on end.
Why would they create forward expectations before it's necessary?
Of course they don't want to create forward expectations in a volatile macro environment, with the public listing being 6 months out.
It's wild to me that someone looking for advice on how to do any kind of stock trading would be looking for a once sentence answer.
I hope it at least has real citations to actual websites like, I dunno, fidelity or some other reasonably competent authority that can explain all the details?
It's an answer that's too short for an expert to find useful, and useless to a layperson unless all they want to do is reply to a post on twitter.
I've never searched for a financial question where I did not want to know all the weird details because why would I search for it unless I was considering doing it? Seems like someone who doesn't care about the answer is going to be more an edge case than I am.
Those looking for a one sentence answer will be the quickest to invest. When people talk about the harms of AI, this is the kind of thing that comes to mind first for me.
Similarly, I put a repeater in an upper story of an apartment building in Boston and am reliably able to talk to people over 10+ hops. Right this second I'm able to talk to someone 99.5 miles away in Vermont.
We had to create different channels for different regions (connecticut, new hampshire, massachusetts, rhode island) just to keep from having hundreds of messages in a single public channel when posts are generally about local things.
Unfortunately it doesn't fix congestion issues completely, repeaters still repeat everything (and can't listen while transmitting) so packets from connecticut still put traffic onto the entire mesh all the way to new hampshire, but at least it's better organized.
It seems like there are some ideas to help with congestion, maybe making channels region specific (repeaters can be programmed to only repeat traffic with a certain region code) but for now it's shocking to me how far I can reach with a 0.125W radio.
But yeah, it's not "reliable", that's what TCP/IP is for =) Definitely a toy network for now, and a single malicious bot on the frequency band would absolutely wreck it. Or a single high power jammer sending out noise at just the wrong frequency. Definitely a fun project for people who would do ham radio if they had any interest in taking a test...
I wouldn't use it for emergencies though, it's theoretically a backup if the cell network and internet go down but the reliability just isn't there and I suspect never will be.
It's so weird right? I keep hearing people say it's open source but like... where's the code then? I've tried to find it. I can find stuff for core components, but they lock features behind a delay-wall in the app. If it was open source that stuff would be gone immediately.
I admit it was a super meta-funny response, because everyone I see that's into meshcore thinks it's open source because of that repository and posts it after a 30 second google search when questioned.
Then you ask them to actually find a source file for the apps and they go quiet. It's wild how much it looks like open source from a casual glance.
Heh, I use MeshCore in Massachusetts and my layperson explanation is that MeshCore is for people who would be HAMs except they don't have the patience to take an exam.
You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun.
I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out.
Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing?
At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case.
So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
I came up with a way to install a repeater 20ft up a mast that's been on top of the building my office is in, but it's been idle since the TV station that used to be in here left. It has decent reachability, but unfortunately it's not at a particularly high point of the city, it has great reacability into the University and can reach my house, but there's a ridge to the south that puts the antenna more like ground level if it was on that ridge.
It gets messy when the other poker players are your mentors and family whom you love and respect, when the money is real, when the amounts to you feel enormous (whether they matter to the investor is a different story), and when losing carries unpredictable emotional and social consequences. And when mentors and family do it you are probably their only bet. It feels like betting other people's money and I totally get how that's a psychological hangup to feel that it is wrong.
I am not being sarcastic or flippant in this, it limits me to not be willing to take advantage of the risk/reward system, but it's somehow deeply tied into my ethics in ways I didn't even really notice until my second startup. And I'm okay with that limitation, but I'll work through it sooner or later and regain my appetite for risk.
Aside from that, many people despise thinking this way about their work. Like me, even though I'm willing to do it. I've met founders who loved negotiation. Like I swear they must have been nightmare children. I hate negotiation, I want people to treat each other fairly and will stick with a good human that does so forever. I suspect those people don't mind ripping off family and friends, much less strangers. It is harsh, and I've seen things, but anecdotes aren't statistics, and that's a huge obvious red flag to me. If the leaders like to do internal negotiation games I just want out. It's just painful to have to deal with being around when you just want to make stuff work.
It's important to talk about ahead of time, and get in writing, but that's also something easily overlooked among family and friends who do not do this kind of thing much. And the downsides need to be honest and clear to avoid mistrust.
Now, after working at two startups and starting three, my third is a consulting company that exclusively does things hourly except in very special circumstances. It's never going to grow fast because it scales as my hours of labor. But I am way more able to pick a price for my labor than decide how to price something that I haven't done yet. I could figure it out, I just kinda don't want to. For now?
This is what I do, I'm a little confused by the issue. If you have a device that outputs HDMI just never connect the TV to your wifi. It's not like you need or want firmware updates if there's no internet connection.
A much more fair retort is that an extra device to output video costs more, though I might argue that if you don't use the TV's built in system the manufacturer is losing ad revenue. So if you only use it as a normal TV you kinda are buying it subsidized by everyone else watching ads on theirs.
Being a heavy user seems like it'd create a lot of resentment if you don't actually enjoy doing it.
If you have used a tool for years and years and suddenly it shoves in a bunch of AI, like Duolingo or Google, are you a heavy user who may well dislike the results?
I have to put in some work to not be a heavy user by any reasonable definition.
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