OP do they not have trains, buses, or bikes where you live?

This is a cool use case. Just make sure you retain your own voice! If you read an AI-generated sentence out loud and think “I’d have said it this way instead”, IMO you should absolutely then change it to be that way.

AI has niches but they’re exactly that: Niches. Small duct tape tasks for fudging over “hard problems” where manual code would result in a worse outcome and take far more time. Little esoteric problem spaces, which notably don’t actually require you to use several states worth of electrical power training on a 50PB dataset of anime titties.

An example: I have a name generator in my game that strings together several consonant+vowel phoneme pairs into a name. This means that the names are always pronounceable, but often the spelling looks really unintuitive. Eg Joosiffe, which the player would likely pronounce as Joseph. However, the leap we do in our head between those two spellings is a process of declassifying phonemes and then re-classifying phonemes, and is actually a “hard problem” from a coding perspective due to the unintituive, multifarious complexities of written, spoken, and conceptualized human language. Adding this step to my name generator in code would be a project of it’s own, larger than the game itself, and wouldn’t ever work nearly as well as it needed to. But relatively small (30MB) AI models that do this with something like 99.8% satisfaction already exist. They didn’t require a data center’s worth of resources to train, and since they’re academic projects they have licenses that allow them to be used for free in a game.

You can’t know that with absolute certainty. Sorry, but if you’re using someone elses server for your communications and they’re not end to end encrypted, you should just assume that they can and do read your emails, and act accordingly.

New music is doing fantastic, it’s record companies that are dying. Most artists just self-publish these days.

What’s crazy is that none of the other P2P apps that came after ever had as nice of an interface as Napster. I guess that’s cause Napster compiled Mac and Windows native apps while most other P2P apps were Java jars.

Yeah but it didn’t feel quite that expensive because we all made more money in terms of true value back then, too.

Not quite yet, not all of us.

If they produced an equivalent of That 70s Show today the “very special episode of” would be the one where 9/11 happens.

Vinyls don’t really offer any fidelity over digital, that’s mostly confirmation bias from vinylheads owning nicer sound systems. But they’re a fun and sort of interactive physical medium much in the same way books are, in that way they offer a unique and enhanced musical experience, and that’s why I keep buying them to this day (It’s 1PM on a Saturday and I’ve already played two LPs on mine today, while my gf and I ate breakfast).

For Playstation games you had to get one of the nicer-quality CD-Rs and burn it at a slower speed than usual. Also I remember I got a replacement disk drive cover for my PS2 that allowed you to pull it open with a hook. I’d boot up the console with a legit disc, then use the hook to open the drive without the console knowing and swap in a pirated disc.