> So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
But it's those lawful residents and taxpayers paying for it if you make it free anyway. They're just paying through their taxes rather than through fares. So still all taxpayer money, just non-riding taxpayers subsidizing riding taxpayers. Why is that better?
Honestly I give Google credit for realizing that they had something that people were talking about and running with it instead of just calling it gemini-image-large-with-text-pro
They tried calling it gemini-2.5-whatever, but social media obsessed over the name "Nano Banana", which was just its codename that got teased on Twitter for a few weeks prior to launch.
After launch, Google's public branding for the product was "Gemini" until Google just decided to lean in and fully adopt the vastly more popular "Nano Banana" label.
The public named this product, not Google. Google's internal codename went virally popular and outstaged the official name.
Branding matters for distribution. When you install yourself into the public consciousness with a name, you'd better use the name. It's free distribution. You own human wetware market share for free. You're alive in the minds of the public.
Renaming things every human has brand recognition of, eg. HBO -> Max, is stupid. It doesn't matter if the name sucks. ChatGPT as a name sucks. But everyone in the world knows it.
This will forever be Nano Banana unless they deprecate the product.
A lot of negative posts here, but AI to advance science seems like basically the best possible use case. The more ultrawealthy people who want to throw billions at it, the better.
Wasn't OpenAI also for the embetterment of society? Looking at how things went for all high profile AI companies, why should we trust this one? Even if they got a saint to run as CEO they would find a way to screw humanity over.
I buy and operate e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon, and I'm working on handing as much of the operation of the business off to AI as possible. Doing this both for actual time savings for myself and also as my big-picture eval of new AI models + products as they come out.
I also started a Substack to document it - here's a recent post on using Gemini to screen inbound emails with prospective acquisition targets via a Google Apps Script that evaluates the listings in those emails daily: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/screening-inboun....
The one thing I don't see and always wonder about with these sorts of things is how they define "social media". Seems like a tough thing to do - if you cast too broad a definition you'll end up with just about anywhere one can communicate on the internet, including email. If you take the very narrow approach of naming FB, IG, TikTok, etc., you almost certainly miss out on whatever the next platform is that's relevant to kids.
Remember YikYak? IIRC that was worse for kids than most of the big social media sites, but how do you write a law that anticipates the next YikYak without banning everything?
I don't think it really matters if the definition is too narrow as long as you ward off the worst threats. An easier way to classify them would be by size: any social network with over 1000 users should have to regulate their users. So as soon as something starts being relevant from a public safety perspective it'll fall under the law.
This is it - it's really about the semantics of thinking. Dictionary definitions are: "Have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something." and "Direct one's mind toward someone or something; use one's mind actively to form connected ideas."
Which doesn't really help because you can of course say that when you ask an LLM a question of opinion and it responds, it's having an opinion or that it's just predicting the next token and in fact has no opinions because in a lot of cases you could probably get it to produce the opposite opinion.
Same with the second definition - seems to really hinge on the definition of the word mind. Though I'll note the definitions for that are "The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought." and "A person's intellect." Since those specify person, an LLM wouldn't qualify, though of course dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive, so fully possible that meaning gets updated by the fact that people start speaking about LLMs as though they are thinking and have minds.
Ultimately I think it just... doesn't matter at all. What's interesting is what LLMs are capable of doing (crazy, miraculous things) rather than whether we apply a particular linguistic label to their activity.
I tried this out, and the stuff it produces is just simple text overlaid nicely on images you supply. If you have a designer, it'd take 60 seconds to knock one of these out, plus you'd already have a style guide that this app wouldn't follow closely enough to use. This is definitely for small businesses.
This works for the subset of people who have a good story or a real connection to their brand, but that's just not most businesses. I buy and operate e-commerce brands, and I can't do it both because I really don't want to be on camera and because "hey I bought this company that sells leather handle covers for cast iron pans, and I personally don't use them but the cashflow was good" is not so compelling as a message. Sometimes you just need messages that convey the value proposition of the brand. (And FWIW they are nice handle covers, I just prefer to use a kitchen towel to grab my cast iron.)
That said, I think video generation is at the point where someone will probably develop a product that fakes the kinds of videos you're talking about in the near future.
Interesting. Do you feel like the values you're propagating into the world align with your own personal values?
I know personally that if I recognized some kitchen apparatus or product is redundant, and a something I already own such as a rag will do, I couldn't in good conscious perpetuate what I see as needless consumerism just to put another dollar in my wallet.
Basically, if I couldn't get on tiktok and make an earnest video about why what I'm selling is useful and worth existing, and why it personally matters to me, I don't think I could sell that product in good conscience. Even if the customer truly thinks it's a great product, if I recognize the inherent waste and redundancy, I just can't buy into it.
I just always think about the chapter in Fight Club when the narrator's house blows up:
"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
1. Just because I don't use something doesn't mean that I think it shouldn't exist or be sold. People can make their own choices. A product isn't bad or useless or unnecessary because it doesn't align with my preferences. I'm fine with people being able to make their own choices about what they buy. Also, I generally don't think people should have to live a totally ascetic lifestyle. I have three monitors - certainly redundant, but fine. I have art on my walls - could've gone without that. I have a dog who I buy toys and food for - not strictly necessary. These things are all more than fine in my book.
2. There are other reasons to be in business besides deeply caring about the business itself. The biggest benefit to this business is that it doesn't require a lot of day-to-day work, and I can do that work whenever I want. That means I can almost always be there for my kids. That's what matters to me. I would take a job that I don't particularly care about that lets me put them first over one that I'm deeply passionate about that takes them away from me any time.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I do agree that we don't need to extremify asceticism. I certainly own useless crap.
I think I do specifically have a minimalist approach to kitchens inspired by setups such as hundred rabbits' https://100r.co/site/cooking.html plus I also am becoming increasingly concerned with my carbon footprint given the climate-related extinction event we are currently facing, and that probably strikes out personal promotion of any unneeded kitchenware.
I'm curious about the economics of what you do, if you've ever written about it elsewhere.
Please avoid generic tangents on HN. This turned into an awful flamewar, which is what happens when people introduce tangentially-relevant-but-inflammaory topics into a discussion. Please have a read of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
With due respect, there was no intention to start a flame war, and no intention to start a generic tangent. I calmly and directly asked awillen a question meant solely for them, regarding their comment and they responded kindly, and that could have been the end of it.
While I failed to restrain myself from continuing to engage with what in hindsight was obvious bait by two other users, even rereading their comments now, and the comments from multiple other users agreeing that these two users were being needlessly negative and argumentative, it seems clear to me that my comments were not intended to escalate (sans my final, unnecessary comment).
I even edited a comment at one point after I absentmindedly introduced a swipe, and one of the users continued to attempt to escalate by fixating on words I intentionally removed from the conversation. And at the very end, I lost my cool and got fed up.
While I respect the decisions of the moderators on this website, I fully disagree that my original comment which you have detached deserved moderation.
I try my best to observe the guidelines, in fact you can see I mentioned them several times in this thread, as I saw several blatant, wholesale violations of them. In this case, it was an innocent question to a user that was well-received, but became a target for others.
As another user in this thread mentioned, it seems quite relevant to Hacker News for a user to raise questions about the morals and ethics around owning and running digital businesses. I saw the exchange between awillen and I as very healthy, and I appreciated their answer, it meant something to me to encounter such a perspective.
From my personal view, moderating this comment is vindicating to the two individuals who attempted to derail what could have been a very tight, focused conversation between another user and I. The user did not have an email address or I likely would have just reached out to them over email to avoid attracting negativity.
OK, fair enough. Re-reading your initial comment in isolation, without the rest of the subthread to influence the perception of it, I can see how it was more neutral and benign than others perceive it to be.
You were still a player in the flamewar and you could have done more to defuse the situation rather than inflame it, but I can see that it was the others who escalated first.
I've re-attached your comment and the healthy part of the subthread and detached it where it became a flamewar.
Often with these kinds of things it's not even as much about being specifically accurate as it is about presenting yourself in a way that makes the other party believe that have sufficient understanding of the issue at hand and the escalation paths available that you won't just go away if they don't play ball. That is, make yourself credibly as a Dangerous Professional, in patio11 parlance.
I just did this with a pet insurance bill, and ChatGPT was very helpful. They denied based on the pre-existing condition exclusion even where it was obviously not valid (my dog chipped her tooth severely enough to need a root canal, and they denied because years before when she wasn't covered under the policy, she had chipped the same tooth in a minor, completely cosmetic way).
I was sure they were in the wrong and would've written a demand letter even in the pre-AI days, but ChatGPT helped me articulate it in a way that made me sound vastly more competent than the average consumer threatening a lawsuit. It helped make my language as legally formal as possible, and it gave me specific statutes around what comprises a pre-existing condition in CA as well as case law that placed very high standards on insurers seeking to decline coverage by invoking an exclusion (yes I checked, and they were real cases that said what it thought they said).
Gave them fourteen days to reverse the denial before I filed in small claims court, and on day fourteen got a letter informing me that the claim would be paid in full. It's of basically no cost to them to deny even remotely borderline cases, so you have to make them believe that you will use the court system or whatever other escalation paths there are to impose costs, and LLMs are great for that.
But it's those lawful residents and taxpayers paying for it if you make it free anyway. They're just paying through their taxes rather than through fares. So still all taxpayer money, just non-riding taxpayers subsidizing riding taxpayers. Why is that better?