AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying.

People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)

I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.

It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.

> I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.

Confusion and fear are much better for stock prices than clarity

If what they are getting is "not much, plus a side order of hallucination", then connecting the dots is exactly what they DON'T want to do.

Yes! I have a similar reaction.

I often think of Jack Vance’s “Eyes of the Overworld”. They hid the reality of a decaying world behind a fabulous facade.

Interesting read. Given what was covered and tradition notwithstanding, I think “Trump Class” (apart from being an oxymoron) is a perfect designation:

- oversized

- completely lacking in style

- not technically capable for the role it finds itself in!

I believe the designation you are looking for is “all-round fucking stupid”

As you are in Australia you might get somewhere if you lodge a complaint with Consumer Affairs

https://www.accc.gov.au/

And there are also separate bodies for each state.

It’s because their thoughts are Roman while they are always Russian to Finnish things.

Kenya believe it!

Anyway, I’m done here. Abyssinia.

Douglas Crockford addressed this many years ago: write your human readable config with comments and run it through a pre-processor to strip them out before handing the config to a JSON parser. Seems like almost no one picked up on the idea.

That is such a horrible non-solution. It breaks all tooling which isn't aware of your particular preprocessor and adds a compilation step to every configuration.

> write your human readable config with comments

The question then becomes: what format is that?

That avoids one of the benefits of having a text based format; I would use TER and convert to DER (where TER is a text format and DER is a binary format, and which is what I do with some of my programs).

(Text formats do have some benefits, but binary formats have different benefits.)

> Seems like almost no one picked up on the idea.

Seems to me more like almost no one thought the idea was any good.

When I visited Tokyo one of the highlights for me was the sound of Takadanobaba station playing the theme from Astro Boy.

From reading the comments you would think this article was actually about cars.

I love the punchline: the computer eventually worked out that the sofa could never have gotten into that spot in the first place. Adams always brought me joy!

The origin story of the sofa is exactly this: furniture items in the St. John's College got trapped upstairs, and if you assume all other things being equal, they couldn't get there in the first place.

The reason was that the furniture was brought upstairs for the staircase remodeling, and the new staircase made it impossible to move it back.

I skimmed the article hoping for a reference to Adams or Dirk Gently.