William Shatner was just on earlier this month, incredible he's still going strong at 95.

With the exclusion of striped patterns, this just sounds like a typical over lit commercial environments, probably overhead fluorescent lights, maybe lights and screens running at different refresh rates. That has nothing to do with home decor of any era or culture.

Also I'm guessing the acoustics are consistently horrible in these environments too. Air quality probably sucks too.

OpenAI & Anthropic are just lying to everyone right now because if they can't raise enough money they are dead. Intelligence is a commodity, the semiconductor supply chain is not.

Just look at Salt Typhoon, every single person should be way more paranoid than they are, including government & agency officials. The attach surface and potential damage - financial and reputation - will only get worse with AI automation and impersonation, and that's for people who are doing nothing interesting and are law abiding citizens.

If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything.

The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.)

I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.

I want to protect my child from X type of content -- one of many jobs of a parent, but I will trust all content to self report to be child inappropriate? "Inappropriate" is entirely subjective and can not be defined as some sort universal bool -- and that's before you get to the point of actively malicious actors like Meta and Tiktok actively exploiting children for their content farms generation and ad impression factories.

If the user owns and controls their computers -- as they should -- then that subjective content filtering layer belongs there, in the owners control. If its a child's, then the parent owns the device, not the child.

One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.

I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.

If someone is a lawyer, accountant, doctor, teacher, surgeon, engineer etc, and is regurgitating answers that were pumped out with with GPT-5-extra-low or whatever mediocre throttled model they are using, they should just be fired and de-credentialed. Right now this is easy.

The real problem is ahead: 99.999% of future content that exists will be made using generative AI. For many people using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or some other non-sequential, engagement weighted feed, 50%+ of the content they consume today is fake. As that stuff spreads in to modern culture it's going to be an endless battle to keep it out of stuff that should not be publishing fake content (e.g. the New York Times or Wall Street Journal; excluding scientific journals who seem to abandoned validation and basic statistics a long time ago.)

Much of the future value and profit margins might just be in valid data?

There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined.

Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal.

These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve?

What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)

Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.