Yikes! I hope you find a better place eventually.

That is an absolute nightmare.

Leaving the electronics at home also seems easier to explain in case you’re stopped, compared to trying to explain why you have a phone wrapped in tinfoil in your pocket.

This level of FOMO bullshit hasn’t happened since the Dutch went bonkers over tulips.

Haha, now that’s a great comparison! I mentioned to a co-worker a couple weeks ago that we should get ready to invest in the next bubble coming up after this one pops, probably tulip bulbs (again).

Good points, thanks.

Good article, thanks! That provides better context for how the major AI companies’ finances compare with Uber’s, but I can’t think of a better example to use for a company that operated at massive losses for many years due to being propped up by investors. If you have a better example I could use, I would be glad to do it. Otherwise, if this question comes up again in the context of AI, I’ll be sure to include a link to that article.

Got it, thanks. My memory of how Uber was able to gain a foothold was a little different, but my memory of it was patchy anyway. My recollection was that they essentially said that Uber was not a taxi service. They sold it as just regular people offering to “share” a ride with someone else to an area that they were going to anyway. I have no doubt that heavy political contributions were part of their arsenal in their attack on the taxi industry and regulations, so I agree that this was government corruption. But I also recall that they also had armies of lawyers fighting at every level of government around the world to ram through the idea that this wasn’t a taxi service and shouldn’t be subject to taxi regulations. Maybe my memory is more patchy than I thought, or perhaps both things were true - government corruption and a legal war allowed them flourish.

I completely agree with your conclusion. Just to be clear, I was in no way saying that what Uber did and OpenAI does is OK. They both suck and should never be allowed to operate as they had and have. I don’t know if Uber was government corruption though, at least I had never heard it described as such. What I have heard is that they found loopholes in taxi laws around the world and employed a global army of lawyers exploit those loopholes.

They used to have agreements to make it difficult to do so. I don’t know if that’s still the case but it’s pretty awful. I think OEMs had to pay licenses for every machine shipped regardless if it had a windows license.

Correct.

At least in the tech industry that doesn’t apply if the investors believe that the technology or application is promising enough. Look at Uber’s example. They lost very large amounts of money for many years before turning a profit. They were able to do this because the investors kept sustaining them through their unprofitable years.

The same thing has been happening for years with the AI companies. I heard a while back that OpenAI wouldn’t turn a profit on their services even if they charged end users $100/month.

There was a story linked here in the last few weeks that talked about backlash against a cafe in San Francisco that replaced their menu screen photos inside the cafe with AI-generated ones. They were horrific, made the food look like crap. It was a really incredible decision for a restaurant manager to make.

Where and under what circumstances? Do you have a link for more information? In my US state, I see reproduced license plates (i.e., not the original state-issued metal ones) all the time. Like stickers, e-paper (I think?), etc.

Or several other solutions for different use cases. I always remember this article about alternatives: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/a90e21e3d06e1ad924a1bfdfe3c16902

Which purposeful uses did you have in mind?

That’s wild! I’m sorry that you have to deal with that.

130%??? Are we talking like the stereotypical image of a collapsing country with patients laying in gurneys in the hallway?

In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) facilitates tons of lawsuits against websites that are not accessible: https://www.rjo.com/publications/website-accessibility-lawsuits-continue-to-inundate-california-courts-despite-covid-19/

Typically, in website accessibility lawsuits, a visually impaired Plaintiff will allege that a company’s website is inaccessible and incompatible with screen-reading software such that the individual is denied full and equal access to the company’s website in violation of the ADA and the Unruh Act. In these cases, a Plaintiff will seek statutory damages, injunctive relief, and attorney’s fees both individually and on behalf of a class of persons similarly situated. Plaintiffs have been testing this theory of ADA liability in courts across the country for years, with New York, Florida and California being the most active.

Edit: here’s another good link showing a graph of the number of ADA website accessibility lawsuits from 2016 to 2025: https://www.ecomback.com/annual-2025-ada-website-accessibility-lawsuit-report

Thanks, I fully agree that AI can be controlled in the ways you mentioned. I think most of the discussion around AI not being fully controllable is in the context of if the AI is running as it currently is.

Thanks for the additional info too. I knew nothing about the guy in the link. It was just the first link I found on a quick search about AI not being controllable. I had heard it before, but didn’t remember where, or the exact details.

I have heard in the past that it’s not possible to fully control AI. Like literally, the people developing and running the AI cannot fully control its behavior. I did a quick search to see if I could find more info and found this link on the first page of results: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1032090

I think that we’re going to continue seeing unwanted behavior from AI.

Cool, thank you!

In that case I’ll leave it because it may help someone else. Cool about the Android voice to text. Do you mean you can whisper and it works?