TechTakes

lotta this is being used for blatantly political speech, really DIY editorial cartoons, e.g. the image we used

its eagerness to give you a school shooting, not so much

Musk is probably unique among Big Tech owners in that he's using his product daily (most people think to the detriment of both Xshitter and his other ventures). He is definitely the person who both directed company resources to be devoted to a GenAI product, and ensured that it doesn't have the "guardrails" his fans and himself decry as "woke".

In other words, no other Big Tech CEO is dumb enough to give the OK to a product that trashes its reputation.

It's using Flux which was developed by Black Forest Labs and is open source. Neither Elon nor twitter had any hand in its creation and simply use it on their site.

Elon musks underpaid some people to release _____

Musk appropriating "grok" from Stranger in a Strange Land is on-brand for him, seeing as he fundamentally misunderstands Banks' Culture series and reduces it to "the one with the cool ship names".

Edited for clarity

A lot of the tech "innovation" is actually VC "innovation" and is meant to dismantle the safety nets of the working class. Literally half of their disruption is "we'll finance you to lose money until you've ruined all competition, and then you can price gouge everyone while your "contractors" don't get a decent salary, a retirement fund or any kind of insurance.

Most of the stuff these days is behind the scenes, like clean energy, innovative water reclamation, etc. it's life changing but we don't really see it every day.

In my opinion we should put cars away in urban areas and go to e-bikes/rickshaws. That would be both transformative and an improvement.

I think there's definitely something to be said for the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit. Most of those big consumer innovations were either the application of novel physics or chemistry (refrigerants, synthetics, plastics, microwaves, etc) combined with automating very labor-intensive but relatively simple tasks (dish washing, laundry, manual screwdriving, etc). The digital age added some very powerful logic to that toolset, but still remains primarily limited to the kinds of activities and processes that can be defined algorithmically. The ingenuity of software developers along with the introduction of new tools and peripheral capabilities (printers, networks, sensors) have shown that the kind of problems that can be defined algorithmically is a much larger set than you would first think, but it's still limited.

Adding on to this, it's worth noting the degree to which defining problems algorithmically requires altering the parameters of that problem. For example, compare shopping at a store with using a vending machine. The vending machine dramatically changes the scope of the activity by limiting the variety of items you can get, only allowing one item per transaction, preventing you from examining the goods before purchasing, and so on. The high-level process is the same; I move from having no soda and some dollars to one soda and less dollars. But the changes that are made to ensure the procedure can be mechanized have some significant social tradeoffs. Each transaction has less friction, but also less potential. These consequences are even more pronounced if your point of comparison is an old-school sofa fountain where "hanging out waiting for the soda jerk and drinking together" is largely the whole point and while that activity requires more from you it also gives more opportunities to interact with and meet people and to see friends outside of work or school. Even if you don't want to spend the time or be social (or even like me get severe social anxiety sometimes!) this still leads to a world where there are more and larger blocks of time that you can't be expected to trade away to your job or other obligations. Your boss is likely to fire you for being late to work, unless that tardiness comes from the ferry you and your coworkers rely on being late. Because it's inevitable friction in a necessary part of working (can't work if you can't get to work) and because it can't be put entirely on the individual (even if you do want to blame the employee for taking the "wrong* boat so you really want to fire the whole team?) the system is basically forced to give you more grace than it otherwise would want to.

This is another way to frame the problems with more recent "innovations" - while social media and the gig economy both arguably empower individual consumers and producers of both cultural output and of services like taxis, they do so in ways that fundamentally change the relationship and individualize the connections between consumers, producers, and the system that they interact through. And because nobody has as direct a connection to the owners and operators of that system, they have more power to increase their profits at the expense of everyone who actually has to use the system to function.

What a surprise, I have that same photo! The one he wanted nobody to ever see anymore. Whoops, guess it's on two servers now

Careful not to cut yourself on that edge Elon.

It's pretty great for DnD. A lot of people have trouble imagining things in full detail from a text or spoken description, so being able to generate images of the scene, characters, objects etc is super fun and adds a lot of richness to the experience.

I'm banking on the primary use case being "getting Elon sued into oblivion by Disney" .

cursory reading seems to indicate this feature is for ~~Elon-pleasuring suckers~~paying users anyway.