Every act of kindness is a rebellion against a cruel, indifferent world.
😡🤬📲🚘 I just learned that my car’s mobile app stopped working because some trial period that I didn’t know I was on ended.
Now if I want to do basic things, like start the heat or AC remotely, lock or unlock doors, or check state of charge, I have to pay a monthly fee. Of course, there are tiers, like Basic and Plus and so on. The most basic one, for connected safety services (!!) features costs $8 CAD/month! But if you want convenience stuff, you need to pay $18-30 CAD/month (I’m not sure what the pricing is like in the US, but I’m guessing it’s in a similar range after FX conversion).
The bastards even use dark patterns, because if I go in the useless app and click around to see what the options are, all I see are the paid tiers. But after doing a bit of research, there’s apparently a “Lite” tier where I could have some basic features for a couple more years, but I think it’s only in the U.S., not Canada. ☹️
Apparently most car makers are this customer hostile except for Tesla, Rivian and, surprisingly, Ford. Good for them. I hope the market puts pressure on the others to make basic app functionality part of, y’know, the actual product that people pay tens of thousands of dollars for!
🍷🍇 AI sommeliers?
Thinking Machines thought up a clever test for their new model:
We even tested Inkling 2 Small against some of our researchers in a wine tasting event. It outperformed them using vision alone, correctly identifying three wines from a single picture in 19 out of 20 trials.
🤯
That’s some near-magic stuff.
It makes me wonder what AI will be able to tell about people just by looking at them in a few years. Probabilistically guess thoughts from micro-expressions? Detect various diseases just by looking at someone face and gait?
I’ve been meaning to write about super-persuasion. It’s still in my drafts, so more on that later.But imagine how good an AI could be at convincing someone if they can read them almost perfectly in real-time and adjust what they’re saying for whatever has the highest likelihood of being convincing?
Like a supercharged version of the reality distortion field that the most charismatic salespeople seem to have. 🤔
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🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴
The AI Boom Meets Its Political Bottleneck 🗳️⚡️
If you’ve been around for a while in markets, you’ve seen cycles happen over and over again. Some are more extreme than others, some have violent moves that rip your face off or make you think you’re a genius for a while. But sentiment is like a pendulum, and optimism and pessimism feed on themselves until some hinge moment makes them change direction.
Most of the time, changes in sentiment primarily affect stock prices, not things on the ground. But when an industry depends on raising enormous amounts of equity and debt capital to finance capex, stock prices can affect what actually gets built. 🏗️
