I don't know anything about this company and what it may or may not have done, but to be clear, the link just says that when you star their github repo, they add your email address to their marketing list.
I think that sucks, but it's certainly not what I thought of when I read your one-liner (which implies that they harvest and abuse your actual recorded data).
> AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance
I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.
He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.
Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.
But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.
My apologies, internet stranger, for thinking I had different goals than the ones you so cleverly picked up on in my one paragraph comment. Clearly you were more correct about my goals than I was.
It's not meant as a perfect analogy for global warming, but rather an illustration of how a constant state isn't necessary for something to be said to be "changing", which was OP's claim.
It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.
I agree with some aspects, and think the author perhaps misunderstood some others.
> If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?
Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".
Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.
Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.
Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
I'll respond to the content, because I think there are some genuine questions amongst the condescension and jumping to conclusions.
> telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship
Does AI today reliably respond with "the truth"? There are countless documented incidents of even full-grown, extremely well-educated adults (e.g. lawyers) believing well-phased hallucinations. Kids, and particularly small kids who haven't yet had much education about critical thinking and what to believe, have no chance. Conversational AI today isn't an uncensured search engine into a set of well-reasoned facts, it's an algorithm constructing a response based on what it's learned people on the internet want to hear, with no real concept of what's right or wrong, or a foundational set of knowledge about the world to contrast with and validate against.
> what exactly is the fear
Being fed reliable-sounding misinformation is one. Another is being used for emotional support (which kids do even with non-talking stuffed animals), when the AI has no real concept of how to emotionally support a kid and could just as easily do the opposite. I guess overall, the concern is having a kid spend a large amount of time talking to "someone" who sounds very convincing, has no real sense of morality or truth, and can potentially distort their world view in negative ways.
And yea, there's also exposing kids to subjects they're in no way equipped to handle yet, or encouraging them to do something that would result in harm to themselves or to others. Kids are very suggestible, and it takes a long while for them to develop a real understanding of the consequences of their actions.
This. The idea is super cool in theory! But given how these sort of things work today, having a toy that can have an independent conversation with a kid and that, despite the best intentions of the prompt writer, isn't guaranteed to stay within its "sandbox", is terrifying enough to probably not be worth the risk.
IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.
"The cost of treating illnesses has gone up due to X" rather than "more people are getting sicker due to X".
Makes it more of a detached conversation about pricing than about how something is hurting actual people, who perhaps have value beyond a purely economical one.
In Massachusetts, Kia has disabled Kia Connect for all vehicles purchased over the past few years. Any data collected by cars must be made accessible to third-party shops, and Kia opted to disable any data collection (and thus disable Connect entirely) rather than allow that to happen. It doesn't matter where you actually live — as long as you bought in MA, the car's VIN is locked out and no one can do anything about it. You're typically told this at the very end of the sales process, after everything is signed, and it's framed as "oh, by the way, MA has a terrible right-to-repair law that has forced Kia to disable Connect, you should write your state senator."
It's... interesting to see just how easy it is to access this functionality if the VIN check is bypassed.
I don't know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don't notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power.
But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she'd have no idea what the term "continuity" means in this context. She notices that it's easier to snap better pictures in more conditions than it was a few years back (and that pictures she receives are better looking on average, too). She uses 1Password with FaceID, which I set up for her, because it's so easy to just look at your phone to unlock that there's very little in the way of enabling and using that, and she doesn't need to write down passwords anymore.
I think some of the magic of the Apple ecosystem is that you don't have to know about these things in order to use them. Someone shows you how to do something (Apple could certainly improve on the organic discoverability of many of these features! Some are impossible to find without looking), and then it often just works. And these things do keep getting closer to that ideal over time, with each generation. When I first started using continuity — long before my mother did — it definitely did not work all the time, and I persisted because I'm a techie early adopter. Eventually, though, it reached a state where once folks learn about it, they can just use it.
I'm also not sure about the 3-4 year number, at least from personal experience, fwiw. We pass down phones in my family, and it easily takes 5-6 generations for them to reach the end of that chain and be in use for a year or two before they're switched out for the next model. Battery has never been the reason someone in that chain switched phones.
> "Ground-Breaking" New Magnet Free of Rare Earth Metals Developed Using Machine Learning
Would've been a more accurate, but less click-baity title, that didn't imply the existence of an artificially intelligent entity developing something by itself. Human researchers used machine learning to comb through many possibilities and find one that fit the bill — which is still interesting and cool.
My first thought after seeing the end of the video was "why is this video flipped?" until I realized that it was only the train that was "upside down".
I do think this modified scenario makes the solution much clearer. At the same time, I also think that it feels like a significantly-enough different scenario from the original that saying the two scenarios have the same probability then becomes the non-intuitive part. The act of revealing what's behind the second door seems like it should change the probability from 1/3 (one door) vs. 2/3 (one of two doors) to 1/2 (one door of the remaining unopened two) vs. 1/2 (one door of the remaining unopened two, since one was "eliminated").
It's amazing how even seeing the probabilities written out, or running simulations, doesn't really make it easier to truly understand the result.
I think the reason it's so hard to understand is that we try to break the problem down into more digestible problems, and in this case, if you only consider the last stage of the game, it certainly seems like it should be 50:50 odds.
In other words, at the final round, you are presented with two doors. Ignore the fact that you already chose one, and assume you were starting at this point: you enter the game, see two doors, and need to pick the one you think hides a car. So intuitively, your odds of choosing which of two doors has the car are 1/2.
It's hard to really understand why it matters that the previous rounds occurred at all — why it matters how you narrowed the selection to these two doors. I don't think the 1000 door version makes that easier to understand, because the same thing is true there — if you come into a game, see two doors, and are asked to choose between them, it's very hard to understand why it matters whether in a previous round there were 2, 3, 10, or 1000 doors — there are only two now, when you make your choice.
The biggest drawback for me is that AVP only works if you're watching things alone. You can easily watch an iPad with your SO, with your kid, with your friends — and AVP may be a better experience, but only for you alone.
It may be amazing on a plane, but even then only when you're traveling by yourself.
I think that sucks, but it's certainly not what I thought of when I read your one-liner (which implies that they harvest and abuse your actual recorded data).