It's a chicken-and-egg problem, 100% created by Wall Street.
Companies used to rely upon loyal employees. They'd invest in them, and those employees would be career-employees. Then Wall Street came along and decided to speculate on short-term company profits. What kills profits? Personnel costs.
So then the companies started trying to play games with their personnel costs to hit their profit expectations, and that means shitting on employees. Suddenly there was no more company loyalty. Why stick with a company that's going to pink-slip you one quarter, then hire 100 new employees the next one?
Now with no company loyalty, investing in employees doesn't make sense, since they're just going to leave and take their new skills to someone else where they can make more money.
There's no fix for this, other than pushing a new corporate structure like a Benefit Corporation which includes employee retention as a goal. Pair that with some good tax breaks, and we're more likely to get back to career employees rather than the current revolving door that exists at most organizations.
Now this robot isn't going to replace any jobs here in the developed world because we either outsourced clothing manufacturing to the developing world decades ago... or bought it back in recent years to be done by robots.......So this robot will only affect developing nations with large manual seamstress operations (I.E. China, Honduras, Bangladesh).
But that should be very, very concerning to them and every country near them. The West has been very profitable by making goods where it's cheapest to make them. That's not going to stop. As you noted, we're bringing manufacturing back, except it's all automated because that's cheaper than the import duties now.
Clothing is one of the last remaining large-scale manual-labor goods that we import into the US, outside of electronics. If we can make clothing here for less than importing, that's going to kill the countries that make clothing now. The US is such a huge market, I can't imagine the disruption if we rapidly stop buying from these countries. Consumers here won't notice, but the developing countries sure will.
That's a pretty stupid argument. Only a very small percent of people do their job because they love it. How many lottery winners go back to work? I know that while I like my job, if I was independently wealthy I'd be gone in a heartbeat.
Given the tips and the hours, there are lots of reasons to love a pizza delivery job if you're a teen who can't work a regular 9-5 shift. Where else can you make double minimum wage after dinner while smoking a lot of weed?
I ask, because you were obviously interested in the product, and you're using Facebook's services which get paid for by advertisements. For them to pay the bills by offering you something you're interested in seems to be a win for everyone.
I am very worried that companies will use my behaviour to tint or change my world view by more precisely manipulating and tailoring my news feeds, search hits, education resources etc in order to achieve political or economic interests.
Then don't let them? Or at least make it really hard for them, to the point that it's not worth their time. I've got an RSS feed, and I pull into it a wide variety of news feeds. I don't let someone curate that list for me. Now the individual news sites do that, but again, they don't do that to target me, because they can't - to them I look like an RSS aggregator. And by spreading my news between a dozen sites, theoretically I should be washing out a lot of the targeting.
Similar with search - I tend to split my browsing up between a couple of different browsers, and I use a different search on each. My assumption is that these competitors don't share data, and don't have a good way to link me across browsers visiting different sites using different search engines even if they do share data.
It doesn't mean it's impossible to try to track and manipulate me, but it's far more difficult than everyone who just gets their news from Facebook and Twitter.
What you and I should both be afraid of, however, is that this will happen to 90%+ of the population, and their voices and choices will drown out ours. That's the really scary thing.
Came here for this, was not disappointed. That was my first thought too. "When I get one of those in another year or two, maybe I should look at Gentoo again..." 7-8 years ago I got tired of compiling Gentoo all of the time. A 36 second kernel compile would definitely pique my interest in Gentoo once again. Gentoo can be blindingly fast, and I'm wondering exactly how fast with a CPU like this. If the kernel compile goes that fast, how about the rest of it?
You could work together and create an open, non-patent encumbered standard for voice assistants, and open-source your jointly developed assistant. Perhaps spin off a well funded open source organization which could continue work on the software.
......or, you could just keep doing your own proprietary stuff, with half-assed integration, that limits competition and benefits nobody but you.
Right? Look, there is no legal right to not get audited by the IRS. Sure, if they audit you every goddamned year you might be able to cry about harassment, but that sort of behavior is rare unless you're ultra-rich and using all the loopholes. If a Liberal group set up an anti-tax, anti-government platform, I'd expect the IRS to pay some extra attention to them too.
If I posted my travel photos to social media it would look like I was one hell of a party animal. The photos I take are during the brief 3-4 hours I get between work being done and bedtime during non-travel days. So it's nighttime shots of a different city every couple of months, generally including a nice restaurant and some drinks. If I took photos of the other 20-21 hrs per day I travel for work, it would look far less glamorous. Yet another generic hotel room, yet more time spent sitting in airports, another crappy hotel conference room, more time sitting in a taxi during rush hour.....
I agree that sane financial planning is preferred. Unfortunately, only a slim minority can actually do this. A lease (plus insurance) shines in one area: You never get a large, unexpected bill. For all the people out there with decent cash-flow and no ability to do financial planning, this works.
I'm in a minority in that I've got a half-dozen savings accounts that get automated monthly deposits to tamp down big bills in the future. (Appliances, Electronics, Car, Pets, etc.) When something dies or needs work, I first check the liquid assets, and see if I can pay from there. If not, I dip into the savings. And if the savings are not there, it's time for a discussion if we really need that, or what we'll sacrifice for it.
Most people can't do this. If there's cash lying around, it gets spent on something. It doesn't mean that they can't exactly afford an expensive phone, it just means they can't budget or plan to save their life. Lots of people are paycheck-to-paycheck pretty successfully, and they only get in trouble when they get a large bill. Leasing helps prevent that. It's not financially wise, but it really does help a lot of people.
While I haven't owned an iPhone ever, Applecare was well worth it for the MBPs I bought. I more than got my money's worth on those. Hell, on my one model, the replacement power cables that frayed next to the magsafe part got replaced free every 6-9 months. Terrible design, but without Applecare, I'd have been on the hook. Enough other times they fixed things for free that I always bought it without hesitation. It might be different for the iPhone, but I always found Applecare to pay for itself, unlike most other insurance schemes.
That's the problem with building a bad reputation. It takes a long time to fix.
And sometimes it doesn't matter if you fix it or not, if you alienated your customers thoroughly enough the first time around. There are a handful of companies that are on my "fuck you forever" list, and I honestly don't care if they have reformed, or if they ever do. I was burned badly enough that there is no compelling reason to ever go near them again. Until their competitors all burn me somewhere close to that much, I'll be using their services and products instead.
The world would be a better place if companies actually had to fear the long-term wrath of customers. I'll do what I can to help make that possible.
And that's what I really, really don't get. Why did someone come to an article on your page? Because they want to read that article. What's your response? Throw up an overlay to mask it, and make them click through a "subscribe today" box. Drop an ad overtop they have to get through. Post distracting ads on the page and in the middle of the article. Drop in auto-playing video that doesn't have to do with the article.
What the fuck? None of those things were why someone went to the article in the first place. Does it not occur to people that maybe doing everything in your power to distract people from what they're looking for might be a wee bit disruptive and annoying?
More and more websites are on my "do not visit" list because of this. But I do wonder how much longer the rest will hold out. Will there be a day that I ragequit the internet? As I get older, it seems more and more likely...
Yeah, even uBlock doesn't handle those well. Newsweek drops that shit in the sidebar when you scroll down, and every time uBlock blocks it, the script detects it's not there and relaunches it. 30k blocking attempts while I read the article....
I'm shocked to be defending videos, but there is one small defense for them: Most people suck at explaining things, and a vanishingly small percent of the population can write technical instructions. However, this appalling lack of communication ability doesn't mean that a much larger percent of the population doesn't know how to do things that others might need to learn.
I've run into a couple of situations where I needed to learn how to do something, take something apart, fix something, where there were no functional written instructions. It seemed as if everyone learning to do it either figured it out on their own, or they learned by watching someone else do it. In those cases, I turned to youtube. And you know what? There was a video of someone doing what I needed to learn how to do. Was it slower and far less efficient than if I had had a technical manual or well-written instructions? Sure. But lacking those, a virtual apprenticeship was the next best thing.
Thinking about the places we go to regularly, I can't imagine any of them data-mine. Why? Because they ask. And if the answer isn't, "That was awesome!", they try to make it right. One did an awesome whitefish cake patty. I found a single pinbone in it. Pointed it out politely, and said that it wasn't a big deal, but I wanted the cooks to know. Comped. Another we had a server who was new and bad. The shift boss that I knew well came over to say hi, and I said that she was not very good. Just wanted her to know. Drinks comped, two free drinks, and that server was gone 2 days later.
As you noted:
Restaurants that serve good food and understand their customers and control costs and are in a sensible location will do fine.
But it's more than that. It's interacting with their customers and building that relationship. It's knowing your regulars, and knowing which ones are looking out for you. Once you know that, just ask them.
One of our favorite places has had some kitchen turn-over lately. One bartender who knows us well said it gently, but clearly. "It's good, but I don't love it. It's like a lot of our food lately. X, Y, and Z are still good, however....." That was a clear, "You know this food, and it's not up to your or our standards. Don't hate me for this." And we got one of the good ones, one of the ones which might be dodgy, and that one was shit. Talked to the owner, they said they understood, and were working to make changes. 3 weeks later, bartender is all smiles, tells us about some amazing shit coming out of the kitchen.
If you're McDoonald's, big data might mean something. If you are a local joint, the personal relationship is going to crush that shit.
When this happened to me, I went with a Dell Precision running Ubuntu. It's got different irritations than my 2012 MBP, but overall I'm pretty happy. About 2x the hardware for the same price plus all the ports was what sold me on it. And Apple dropping magsafe was the icing on the shit cake. I loved my MPBs for a decade or so, but they're ridiculously expensive and crippled now, with most of the things I valued gone.
My current laptop doesn't replace an old MBP, but it handily trumps the new MBPs. Shocking how far the MBP line has fallen.
What kills me further is that we're still dealing with 1990s tech when it comes to interfacing with cable tv boxes. I get a remote with arrow keys and a bunch of buttons that do random things. 700 channels....how, exactly, do I find the one I want? The fastest solution I've found is to pull up TV Guide on my laptop, enter my cable provider, and then scroll through the giant list. It's faster than what my cable provider gives me. And can I hide everything I don't get? Nope. Because somehow, clicking through hundreds of channels I don't get, each one pausing, then throwing up a "buy me now" button is going to make me want to spend another $50 every month?
How is it that we have not been able to get past a remote and the ridiculously terrible set-to-box software yet? To take your analogy further, you bring home all the flavors, and then are required to scoop out the one you want with a spoon taped to a pool noodle with your eyes closed.
I'm running around a 90% success rate kickstarting things. Here are my numbers:
Video Games: 13/15 @~$20 each Books: 8/8 @~$15 each Board/Card Games 7/7 @~$35 each Music Albums: 2/2 @~$75 each CRISPR Gene Editing: 0/1 @$40
So not 100% success there, but really not a ton of wasted money either. I'm happy to have helped a number of these things come into being. I know for a fact that a lot of them would not have existed without myself and a number of others being willing to take a risk.
Success or failure, I also get regular updates by the creators on the progress of the work. For the CRISPR one, it was 2 years of regular updates while a team of researchers tried to make a hybrid organism and ran into roadblock after roadblock. But while I got no product from that, I did get a 2 year window into genetics research, and that was almost worth the money. I was fascinated by the idea, and getting a deep look into how hard it was to accomplish was really cool. In the end the lab spun out an offshoot of the kickstarter product for sale, and even offered it in place of what they failed to make.
I went in deep on the music albums because they were from local bands I was already really good friends with, and they were offering some really fun perks like backer-only t-shirts, private concerts, covers of any song you wanted, etc. One I funded got about 20 of us an intimate pre-release listen through of the album with the band, with song-by-song commentary on the making of the album. If you're really a fan of a band, that sort of experience is just amazing. Then we all got wasted and played arcade games.
Probably 80% of the things I've funded I've known the backer ahead of time. I've been a fan of their work, and I know they have a good vision. An overlapping 20% were science education products that I just wanted to see exist in the world. Evolution books aimed at the 2-5 year old age group, e.g. Those are pretty safe bets - practicing scientists that want to write or produce science education things are generally pretty reliable.
I've definitely passed on a number of kickstarters, because they just didn't seem to have their shit together. If you're willing to be thoughtful and picky, and not a coked up monkey on a tweeting binge, it's definitely possible to pick great things to back. If you just lemming around social media clicking everything everyone else does, you're going to lose a lot of your money backing stupid shit.
Yeah, those are fucking hard! You have to look left, and if nobody is coming, you go. And then if someone is coming you have to...I don't know...not go or something? JESUS THAT'S COMPLICATED!!!
And then once you're in them, it's SCARY AS FUCK! You have to figure out if you're taking the FIRST RIGHT, the SECOND RIGHT, OR THE THIRD RIGHT!!! And if you miss one, I think you die or something. It's not like you can just go around again.
Except for one thing: If one human runs across this one non-standard case, that one human figures out how to navigate it. If another human comes across the same or another similar example, they too need to figure out how to navigate it. With machine learning, we can feed this into every single car, and they will all understand how to navigate it.
I'm really interested in seeing what a million Tesla M3s will be able to do in this realm. It's a massive amount of data collection, and if they can push lessons learned to all the cars, that's going to lead to a rapid increase in capability. Humans are definitely going to be better at navigating unique situations, but with machine learning and networking, the machine learning is not going to run into very many unique situations as time goes on.
What? What about the last crop of ads that made the web unusable? And the one before that? And the Chevy Silverado ad in 1999 which autoplayed in a quiet lab on full volume which scared the shit out of me? That was the first one, and the last one for me. I've blocked them all since.
I don't know about this crop, because I haven't seen any of them. You must be new here if you think this is pretty recent.
The ended up on my permanent blacklist because of that shit. If I can't make it not autoplay, then it gets banned. That simple. I can't fathom how that decision gets made, given how awkward and stupidly annoying it is. Do the people around the board table deciding that they should have autoplay videos actually like that shit?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a chicken-and-egg problem, 100% created by Wall Street.
Companies used to rely upon loyal employees. They'd invest in them, and those employees would be career-employees. Then Wall Street came along and decided to speculate on short-term company profits. What kills profits? Personnel costs.
So then the companies started trying to play games with their personnel costs to hit their profit expectations, and that means shitting on employees. Suddenly there was no more company loyalty. Why stick with a company that's going to pink-slip you one quarter, then hire 100 new employees the next one?
Now with no company loyalty, investing in employees doesn't make sense, since they're just going to leave and take their new skills to someone else where they can make more money.
There's no fix for this, other than pushing a new corporate structure like a Benefit Corporation which includes employee retention as a goal. Pair that with some good tax breaks, and we're more likely to get back to career employees rather than the current revolving door that exists at most organizations.
Now this robot isn't going to replace any jobs here in the developed world because we either outsourced clothing manufacturing to the developing world decades ago... or bought it back in recent years to be done by robots.......So this robot will only affect developing nations with large manual seamstress operations (I.E. China, Honduras, Bangladesh).
But that should be very, very concerning to them and every country near them. The West has been very profitable by making goods where it's cheapest to make them. That's not going to stop. As you noted, we're bringing manufacturing back, except it's all automated because that's cheaper than the import duties now.
Clothing is one of the last remaining large-scale manual-labor goods that we import into the US, outside of electronics. If we can make clothing here for less than importing, that's going to kill the countries that make clothing now. The US is such a huge market, I can't imagine the disruption if we rapidly stop buying from these countries. Consumers here won't notice, but the developing countries sure will.
That's a pretty stupid argument. Only a very small percent of people do their job because they love it. How many lottery winners go back to work? I know that while I like my job, if I was independently wealthy I'd be gone in a heartbeat.
Given the tips and the hours, there are lots of reasons to love a pizza delivery job if you're a teen who can't work a regular 9-5 shift. Where else can you make double minimum wage after dinner while smoking a lot of weed?
Is that a bad thing or a good thing?
I ask, because you were obviously interested in the product, and you're using Facebook's services which get paid for by advertisements. For them to pay the bills by offering you something you're interested in seems to be a win for everyone.
I am very worried that companies will use my behaviour to tint or change my world view by more precisely manipulating and tailoring my news feeds, search hits, education resources etc in order to achieve political or economic interests.
Then don't let them? Or at least make it really hard for them, to the point that it's not worth their time. I've got an RSS feed, and I pull into it a wide variety of news feeds. I don't let someone curate that list for me. Now the individual news sites do that, but again, they don't do that to target me, because they can't - to them I look like an RSS aggregator. And by spreading my news between a dozen sites, theoretically I should be washing out a lot of the targeting.
Similar with search - I tend to split my browsing up between a couple of different browsers, and I use a different search on each. My assumption is that these competitors don't share data, and don't have a good way to link me across browsers visiting different sites using different search engines even if they do share data.
It doesn't mean it's impossible to try to track and manipulate me, but it's far more difficult than everyone who just gets their news from Facebook and Twitter.
What you and I should both be afraid of, however, is that this will happen to 90%+ of the population, and their voices and choices will drown out ours. That's the really scary thing.
Came here for this, was not disappointed. That was my first thought too. "When I get one of those in another year or two, maybe I should look at Gentoo again..." 7-8 years ago I got tired of compiling Gentoo all of the time. A 36 second kernel compile would definitely pique my interest in Gentoo once again. Gentoo can be blindingly fast, and I'm wondering exactly how fast with a CPU like this. If the kernel compile goes that fast, how about the rest of it?
You could work together and create an open, non-patent encumbered standard for voice assistants, and open-source your jointly developed assistant. Perhaps spin off a well funded open source organization which could continue work on the software.
......or, you could just keep doing your own proprietary stuff, with half-assed integration, that limits competition and benefits nobody but you.
Right? Look, there is no legal right to not get audited by the IRS. Sure, if they audit you every goddamned year you might be able to cry about harassment, but that sort of behavior is rare unless you're ultra-rich and using all the loopholes. If a Liberal group set up an anti-tax, anti-government platform, I'd expect the IRS to pay some extra attention to them too.
If I posted my travel photos to social media it would look like I was one hell of a party animal. The photos I take are during the brief 3-4 hours I get between work being done and bedtime during non-travel days. So it's nighttime shots of a different city every couple of months, generally including a nice restaurant and some drinks. If I took photos of the other 20-21 hrs per day I travel for work, it would look far less glamorous. Yet another generic hotel room, yet more time spent sitting in airports, another crappy hotel conference room, more time sitting in a taxi during rush hour.....
I agree that sane financial planning is preferred. Unfortunately, only a slim minority can actually do this. A lease (plus insurance) shines in one area: You never get a large, unexpected bill. For all the people out there with decent cash-flow and no ability to do financial planning, this works.
I'm in a minority in that I've got a half-dozen savings accounts that get automated monthly deposits to tamp down big bills in the future. (Appliances, Electronics, Car, Pets, etc.) When something dies or needs work, I first check the liquid assets, and see if I can pay from there. If not, I dip into the savings. And if the savings are not there, it's time for a discussion if we really need that, or what we'll sacrifice for it.
Most people can't do this. If there's cash lying around, it gets spent on something. It doesn't mean that they can't exactly afford an expensive phone, it just means they can't budget or plan to save their life. Lots of people are paycheck-to-paycheck pretty successfully, and they only get in trouble when they get a large bill. Leasing helps prevent that. It's not financially wise, but it really does help a lot of people.
While I haven't owned an iPhone ever, Applecare was well worth it for the MBPs I bought. I more than got my money's worth on those. Hell, on my one model, the replacement power cables that frayed next to the magsafe part got replaced free every 6-9 months. Terrible design, but without Applecare, I'd have been on the hook. Enough other times they fixed things for free that I always bought it without hesitation. It might be different for the iPhone, but I always found Applecare to pay for itself, unlike most other insurance schemes.
That's the problem with building a bad reputation. It takes a long time to fix.
And sometimes it doesn't matter if you fix it or not, if you alienated your customers thoroughly enough the first time around. There are a handful of companies that are on my "fuck you forever" list, and I honestly don't care if they have reformed, or if they ever do. I was burned badly enough that there is no compelling reason to ever go near them again. Until their competitors all burn me somewhere close to that much, I'll be using their services and products instead.
The world would be a better place if companies actually had to fear the long-term wrath of customers. I'll do what I can to help make that possible.
And that's what I really, really don't get. Why did someone come to an article on your page? Because they want to read that article. What's your response? Throw up an overlay to mask it, and make them click through a "subscribe today" box. Drop an ad overtop they have to get through. Post distracting ads on the page and in the middle of the article. Drop in auto-playing video that doesn't have to do with the article.
What the fuck? None of those things were why someone went to the article in the first place. Does it not occur to people that maybe doing everything in your power to distract people from what they're looking for might be a wee bit disruptive and annoying?
More and more websites are on my "do not visit" list because of this. But I do wonder how much longer the rest will hold out. Will there be a day that I ragequit the internet? As I get older, it seems more and more likely...
Yeah, even uBlock doesn't handle those well. Newsweek drops that shit in the sidebar when you scroll down, and every time uBlock blocks it, the script detects it's not there and relaunches it. 30k blocking attempts while I read the article....
I'm shocked to be defending videos, but there is one small defense for them: Most people suck at explaining things, and a vanishingly small percent of the population can write technical instructions. However, this appalling lack of communication ability doesn't mean that a much larger percent of the population doesn't know how to do things that others might need to learn.
I've run into a couple of situations where I needed to learn how to do something, take something apart, fix something, where there were no functional written instructions. It seemed as if everyone learning to do it either figured it out on their own, or they learned by watching someone else do it. In those cases, I turned to youtube. And you know what? There was a video of someone doing what I needed to learn how to do. Was it slower and far less efficient than if I had had a technical manual or well-written instructions? Sure. But lacking those, a virtual apprenticeship was the next best thing.
Thinking about the places we go to regularly, I can't imagine any of them data-mine. Why? Because they ask. And if the answer isn't, "That was awesome!", they try to make it right. One did an awesome whitefish cake patty. I found a single pinbone in it. Pointed it out politely, and said that it wasn't a big deal, but I wanted the cooks to know. Comped. Another we had a server who was new and bad. The shift boss that I knew well came over to say hi, and I said that she was not very good. Just wanted her to know. Drinks comped, two free drinks, and that server was gone 2 days later.
As you noted:
Restaurants that serve good food and understand their customers and control costs and are in a sensible location will do fine.
But it's more than that. It's interacting with their customers and building that relationship. It's knowing your regulars, and knowing which ones are looking out for you. Once you know that, just ask them.
One of our favorite places has had some kitchen turn-over lately. One bartender who knows us well said it gently, but clearly. "It's good, but I don't love it. It's like a lot of our food lately. X, Y, and Z are still good, however....." That was a clear, "You know this food, and it's not up to your or our standards. Don't hate me for this." And we got one of the good ones, one of the ones which might be dodgy, and that one was shit. Talked to the owner, they said they understood, and were working to make changes. 3 weeks later, bartender is all smiles, tells us about some amazing shit coming out of the kitchen.
If you're McDoonald's, big data might mean something. If you are a local joint, the personal relationship is going to crush that shit.
I...I....am.....Kirk.
No.....I.....I am.....Kirk.
No I......I am....I am Kirk.....
No I....
When this happened to me, I went with a Dell Precision running Ubuntu. It's got different irritations than my 2012 MBP, but overall I'm pretty happy. About 2x the hardware for the same price plus all the ports was what sold me on it. And Apple dropping magsafe was the icing on the shit cake. I loved my MPBs for a decade or so, but they're ridiculously expensive and crippled now, with most of the things I valued gone.
My current laptop doesn't replace an old MBP, but it handily trumps the new MBPs. Shocking how far the MBP line has fallen.
People in New York City have to eat pigeons.
I believe they're called organic free-range squab there. Only high-end restaurants carry them.
What kills me further is that we're still dealing with 1990s tech when it comes to interfacing with cable tv boxes. I get a remote with arrow keys and a bunch of buttons that do random things. 700 channels....how, exactly, do I find the one I want? The fastest solution I've found is to pull up TV Guide on my laptop, enter my cable provider, and then scroll through the giant list. It's faster than what my cable provider gives me. And can I hide everything I don't get? Nope. Because somehow, clicking through hundreds of channels I don't get, each one pausing, then throwing up a "buy me now" button is going to make me want to spend another $50 every month?
How is it that we have not been able to get past a remote and the ridiculously terrible set-to-box software yet? To take your analogy further, you bring home all the flavors, and then are required to scoop out the one you want with a spoon taped to a pool noodle with your eyes closed.
I'm running around a 90% success rate kickstarting things. Here are my numbers:
Video Games: 13/15 @~$20 each
Books: 8/8 @~$15 each
Board/Card Games 7/7 @~$35 each
Music Albums: 2/2 @~$75 each
CRISPR Gene Editing: 0/1 @$40
So not 100% success there, but really not a ton of wasted money either. I'm happy to have helped a number of these things come into being. I know for a fact that a lot of them would not have existed without myself and a number of others being willing to take a risk.
Success or failure, I also get regular updates by the creators on the progress of the work. For the CRISPR one, it was 2 years of regular updates while a team of researchers tried to make a hybrid organism and ran into roadblock after roadblock. But while I got no product from that, I did get a 2 year window into genetics research, and that was almost worth the money. I was fascinated by the idea, and getting a deep look into how hard it was to accomplish was really cool. In the end the lab spun out an offshoot of the kickstarter product for sale, and even offered it in place of what they failed to make.
I went in deep on the music albums because they were from local bands I was already really good friends with, and they were offering some really fun perks like backer-only t-shirts, private concerts, covers of any song you wanted, etc. One I funded got about 20 of us an intimate pre-release listen through of the album with the band, with song-by-song commentary on the making of the album. If you're really a fan of a band, that sort of experience is just amazing. Then we all got wasted and played arcade games.
Probably 80% of the things I've funded I've known the backer ahead of time. I've been a fan of their work, and I know they have a good vision. An overlapping 20% were science education products that I just wanted to see exist in the world. Evolution books aimed at the 2-5 year old age group, e.g. Those are pretty safe bets - practicing scientists that want to write or produce science education things are generally pretty reliable.
I've definitely passed on a number of kickstarters, because they just didn't seem to have their shit together. If you're willing to be thoughtful and picky, and not a coked up monkey on a tweeting binge, it's definitely possible to pick great things to back. If you just lemming around social media clicking everything everyone else does, you're going to lose a lot of your money backing stupid shit.
Yeah, those are fucking hard! You have to look left, and if nobody is coming, you go. And then if someone is coming you have to...I don't know...not go or something? JESUS THAT'S COMPLICATED!!!
And then once you're in them, it's SCARY AS FUCK! You have to figure out if you're taking the FIRST RIGHT, the SECOND RIGHT, OR THE THIRD RIGHT!!! And if you miss one, I think you die or something. It's not like you can just go around again.
Except for one thing: If one human runs across this one non-standard case, that one human figures out how to navigate it. If another human comes across the same or another similar example, they too need to figure out how to navigate it. With machine learning, we can feed this into every single car, and they will all understand how to navigate it.
I'm really interested in seeing what a million Tesla M3s will be able to do in this realm. It's a massive amount of data collection, and if they can push lessons learned to all the cars, that's going to lead to a rapid increase in capability. Humans are definitely going to be better at navigating unique situations, but with machine learning and networking, the machine learning is not going to run into very many unique situations as time goes on.
What? What about the last crop of ads that made the web unusable? And the one before that? And the Chevy Silverado ad in 1999 which autoplayed in a quiet lab on full volume which scared the shit out of me? That was the first one, and the last one for me. I've blocked them all since.
I don't know about this crop, because I haven't seen any of them. You must be new here if you think this is pretty recent.
The ended up on my permanent blacklist because of that shit. If I can't make it not autoplay, then it gets banned. That simple. I can't fathom how that decision gets made, given how awkward and stupidly annoying it is. Do the people around the board table deciding that they should have autoplay videos actually like that shit?