Well, while I can never be sure about my own biases, I submit this particular instance is/was not an "illusion". I truely never heard the word dreck used in english before. Why do I know? I am a german native speaker, and I submit that I would have noticed it if I ever heard it earlier, simply because I know its meaning in my native lang and that would have made spotting it rather easy.
I also believe noticing Baader-meinhof in the 90s is rather unsurprising, since RAF was just "a few years" ago. However, "dreck" as someone else noted is documented since the early 20th century. So I dont think me noticing this just recently isn't a bias, rather a true coincidence.
The main judgement here seems to be: not everyone was there to get a refund, therefore, just entering the store is not an opt-in consent to biometric scans.
As a counter-example: Australian clubbing venues use facial recognition and id verification to identify banned individuals and detect fake documentation. This is required on condition of entry (therefore, opt-in), and this information is shared across all partner venues.
Something that you are required to do by every single venue that offers a service in order to participate is not really what I would call opt in. Yes, you can opt out by never going to a nightclub, but that seems different.
You can’t really call something opt-in if opting out means that you are barred from participating in an entire class of activity unrelated to what you opted out of.
As a counter example, the TSA in the US is now starting to use facial scans for ID, but you can opt out by telling the agent. It does not mean that you cannot go flying, it means that they use a human to identify you without the use of computerized facial scans.
I mean, the TSA already scans your passport/id, and knows every other detail about your trip. Is a facial scan really adding much more? Last time I entered the country they used facial recognition and I didn't even need to show my passport. So they obviously already had the data to recognize me from my passport photo. And this was over two years ago.
Do you really not see the difference between having to pay for a service and having to upload biometric data in a centralized database under someone else’s control?
For one, I don’t have to buy a ticket. Many theaters participate in programs where you can get a ticket as a reward for other activities (credit card points, eg). The ticket sale is determined by the theater, and is not part of a government supported scheme to prevent some people from ever seeing a movie in any theater, ever.
Finally, the sale of a ticket is necessary for the operation of many movie theaters. It is intrinsic to the business model. The nightclub could operate the service, and even work with ban lists without the centralized biometric database.
How is this the case? Presumably the scenario where they have live camera feeds and a security guard recognizes a banned person on them and removes them would be fine. Why does replacing the human with an algorithm legally make a difference? Did people consent to being facially recognized by a human security guard?
I think that it's analogous to when my genitals are fondled by a TSA agent because I opt out of body scans. The memory of the feeling of them caressing my shape lives on only in their brain instead of being permanently recorded in a database.
That's not a counter-example to the judgment reasoning you highlight: everyone entering a night club is there to enter a night club, not everyone entering a K-mart is there to get a refund.
Everyone trying to enter K-mart is trying to enter K-mart just like the night club. Everyone going into the night club is not there to drink/meet someone/dance/use the restroom/make a drug deal Just like not everyone going into K-Mart is there to shop/browse/by a snack/get a refund/steal something
nightclubs want lots of customers especially attractive women, and don't want lots of problems. What's the potential for abuse? Detecting your attractiveness or ethnicity in order to turn you away would be abuses, but is that what you are thinking of or alleging? because if it's just facial recognition, they don't have an incentive to misidentify people
This is indiscriminate data collection. Some of the risk comes from the correlation with other sources of data by LEO with overly broad access to fine grained data.
Big Brother is not watching you. Instead, thousands of Little Brothers are patiently watching their little corner of the world, recording license plates, logging phone locations, tracking credit card usage. Big Brother doesn’t need to see you, he just asks them to tell him what he wants to know.
It's not a hard logic path to follow - If AI becomes a digital necessity for modern society to function, Microsoft's relevance shrinks while OpenAI's relevance grows.
Once OpenAI breaks out of the "App" space and into the "OS" and "Device" space, Microsoft may get absorbed into the ouroboros.
OpenAI's dependence on Microsoft currently is purely financial (investment) and contractual (exclusivity, azure hosting).
Is this like saying a gym runs at 40%+ margin because 80% of users don't really use it heavily or forget they even had a subscription? Would be interested to see the breakdown of that number.
That's how nearly every subscription service works, yes. Some fraction has a subscription and doesn't use it, another large chunk only uses a fraction of their usage limits, and a tiny fraction uses the service to it's full potential. Almost no subscription would be profitable if every customer used it to its full potential
TL;DR: their subscriptions have an extra built-in margin closer to 70%, because the entry price, target audience and clever choice of rate limiting period, all keep utilization low.
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In this case I'd imagine it's more of an assumption that almost all such subscriptions will have less than 33% utilization, and excepting few outliers, even the heaviest users won't exceed 60-70% utilization on average.
"33% or less" is, of course, people using a CC subscription only at work. Take an idealized case - using CC only during regular working hours, no overtime: then, even if you use it to the limit all the time, you only use it for 1⁄3 of the day (8h), and 5 days a week - the expected utilization in this scenario is 8/24 × 5/7 = 24%. So you're paying a $200 subscription, but actually getting at most $50 of usage out of it.
Now, throw in a rate limit that refreshes in periods of 5 hours - a value I believe was carefully chosen to achieve this very effect - and the maximum utilization possible (maxing out limit, waiting for refresh, and maxing out again, in under 8 hours wall-clock time), is still 10 hours equivalent, so 10/24 × 5/7 = 30%. If you just plan to use CC to the first limit and then take meetings for the rest of the day, your max utilization drops to 15%.
Of course people do overtime, use same subscription for personal stuff after work and on weekends, or just run a business, etc. -- but they also need to eat and sleep, so interactively, you'd still expect them to stay below 75% (83% if counting in 5-hour blocks) total utilization.
Sharing subscriptions doesn't affect these calculations much - two people maxing out a single subscription is, from the provider side, strictly not greater than two subscriptions with 50% utilization. The math will stop working once a significant fraction of users figure out non-interactive workflows, that run CC 24/7. We'll get there eventually, but we're not there yet. Until then, Anthropic is happy we're all paying $200/month but only getting $50 or less of service out of it.
The studio being firebombed probably does not factor much into it. Kyoani and Kadokawa have beef, but Kadokawa can easily contract it to another studio to do. They just don't want to because of 1.
Also don't forget to watch Disappearance after the 2 seasons.
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