Thank God someone said it. I feel like I’m living in an alternative universe that this amazing series never even gets mentioned.

It feels like loving The Americans did back in the day -one of the best things on TV, and nobody seems to have even heard of it.

I dunno. I felt like series 1 was pretty much flawless, 2 was good with some missteps, and 3 had some good moments.

For example:

I’ll watch series 4, but I don’t have high hopes.

I think society has long established that we give inanimate objects and constructs gender. Bart Simpson is a he, despite being a cartoon voiced by a woman. He‘s often written by a woman, too, and the animation team will be mixed (although probably leaning male). Yet he remains a he in popular parlance.

Perhaps more akin to this situation, there’s a long tradition of referring to animated singers by the gender they present as. Gem & the Holograms are referred to as female, as are Josie & the Pussycats. Hatsune Miku - possibly the most direct comparison, being the first and most well-known “virtual singer” - is always a “she”. None of these are real people or based on real people.

The first AI band that I was aware of was The Velvet Sundown, which made the news for doing well on Spotify before people realised that they weren‘t real. They‘re very MOR AOR type stuff, at least from what I‘ve heard.

Okay. Note the quotation marks.

Oh she absolutely did. Just like she did the “i never said Hermione *wasn’t * Black” thing, despite having described her cheeks as “pink” on more than one occasion.

But that’s not what the people i was quoting mean. They’re doing the “straight, white, cis, man is the default, and anything deviating from that needs an explicit in-universe explanation”.

There was a thing that did the rounds a while back which was variations on “what race are you? White or political?”, “what’s your sexuality? Straight or political?”, etc.

it’s basically that. Straight guy? Fine. Gay guy? “But what’s the *reason *he’s gay? How is it relevant to the plot?”

Note the quotation marks

Me neither. That’s why i put it in quotes to make it clear i was aping stupid objections.

„But what‘s the plot reason for them being gay? I don‘t mind gay people being in something, but if there‘s not a reason for it, then it‘s just pandering!“

Why is it denoted by a smiley face, rather than „Ah“?

Yeah, I feel like there‘s a fascinating study into how indoctrination and radicalisation works in there somewhere. He‘s lost everything because he can‘t stop hating on a marginalised group. Cost him not just his career, but also his family, and recently saw him arrested.

It‘s horrible, but also kind of fascinating.

Same kind of thing happened with That 70s Show. There was a British remake which used the same scripts, and it was awful. Really terrible.

It‘s the cast that made the original work. Just a shame that almost all of them turned out to be huge pieces of shit

I don’t think that is a unique position

I think it‘s weirder, TBH. He‘s a breeder and a misogynist. He wants to do the world a favour by spreading his superior genes as widely as possible so that the next generation is blessed with his amazing intelligence. And of course that has to happen via boy-childs, because girl-childs are inferior and only fit for breeding.

And his public transphobia started in earnest when his daughter came out. Because how dare she take a boy-child away from him and replace them with an icky girl?

I don‘t know what‘s going on inside his head. But my belief is that that‘s what it‘s really about.

That, and there‘s a more directly personal element. When his daughter filed to legally change her name she said that he was a neglectful father and that she no longer wanted to be associated with him. It was at this point that his anti-trans rhetoric took off. Bear in mind that he consented to her gender-affirming care when she was too young to not need a parent‘s permission. He claims he was „tricked“ but she says that he understood fully what he was consenting to. Again, I can‘t know the truth, but I have a million reasons to consider Musk a liar and none to consider her one.

I think he genuinely hates trans people, but I think that he wouldn‘t have had he not had a trans daughter who bruised his fragile ego. And I think that his breeding kink, scientific racism, narcissism, and misogyny feed in to it nicely.

Again, I don‘t know what‘s going on inside his head, but I am strongly of the opinion that had his daughter never a) transitioned or b) brused his ego, he would not be anti-trans in the way that he is now. He‘d probably still be anti-trans because that‘s one of the key right-wing lines of attack, but I don‘t think it would be a particularly big issue for him.

I was brought in as a contractor for a week at a private school once here in the UK. The food was okay but on the nicer/posher end of „nothing special“. But what did strike me was that between two periods one of the girls felt peckish so just wandered in to the kitchen and made herself cheese on toast. Nobody treated that like it was anything unusual.

Thank you

They‘re probably okay with the price because the number of private users will dwarf the commercial users.

As for businesses shutting it down - any business which is using it has already bought the hype. They‘re not using it because it‘s actually effective. They‘re much more likely to crack down on workers than they are to ban AI all together.

I do agree that it won‘t work out in the end, not because this particular strategy is stupid, but because the products don‘t work and no strategy could work.

I have 0% of an idea whether this film will be good or not. I have 100% certainty that I will watch it.

This is also why you‘ll see/hear the verb „unalive“ and have people refer to „seggs“.

And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.

So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.

The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.

And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.