Wow, I thought you were exaggerating / being the usual AI hater, so I opened the page expecting a some product screenshots with a few too many em dashes or something like that, fully intending to tell you to calm down. But dammmn it's bad! You weren't exaggerating at all!
Perhaps not, but that was my feeling on watching the Norwegian version, although to be fair, I was bothered enough that I only watched the first half.
Defending my opinion, though, I felt that both had tall somewhat socially awkward men dressed in oddly formal manners giving monologues to the camera. Scenewise, I thought slamming the drawer was a direct echo of slamming the shutters. And kicking the rock in the street echoed throwing the bottles in the street. And so forth.
Interesting that you don't think it's a knockoff. Given the theme, I found it ironic that it was itself an inferior copy. It ruined it for me.
The Norwegian Consumer Council's entire yearly budget is about 100M NOK, or about $9.5M USD at the current exchange rate. They most assuredly did not spend >$1M USD on a short video clip.
When people write a statement and then tack on a question mark they force people to guess what they mean. Is it a typo? Is it an observation and the question mark is supposed to somehow signal disapproval? Or is it an actual question, with a little grammar error that's not uncommon for non-native English speakers?
Maybe this is just me being weird but I simply don't understand why people think a question mark means ", and that's stupid for obvious reasons that I can't be bothered to spell out and therefore I disapprove".
Admittedly my reply was even worse so yeah, pot, kettle.
I don't understand why you were downvoted, it's a fair question given the context. I don't think I'm autistic, or if I am, it's only slightly. Clearly in this here case my reactions resemble those of someone with autism, and in hindsight I recognize that. So I'll take your question as constructive feedback and try to be less dismissive in the future.
In all cultures, there is an expectation that you have to provide a name for yourself that is intelligible to the culture you're interacting with, both in written language and in speech. If your name is Albert and you are going to interact with many Japanese speakers, you'll have to call yourself アルバート in writing and pronounce your name as something like "Ah roo bay toe" to fit in. If you have a name whose pronunciation depends heavily on tones, such as a Mandarin or Vietnamese name, and you are going to interact with speakers of a non-tonal language, you'll have to come up with a version that you're happy with even if pronounced in the default neutral tone that those people will naturally use. If your name is 高山, you'll have to spell it as Takayama.
Similarly, if you're going to create an identifier for yourself that is supposed to be usable in an international context, you'll have to use the lowest common denominator that is acceptable in that context - and that happens to be a-zA-Z0-9. Why the Latin alphabet and numerals and not, say, Arabic, you might ask? Because Chinese and Indian and Arabic speakers are far more likely to be familiar with the Latin alphabet than with each other's writing systems.
The article has examples about people naming themselves "Аdministrator". That's not about machine-readable identifiers, it's about display names. This entire subthread is either people missing that and thinking they're talking about login usernames and the likes, in which case I don't disagree, or people actually believing it's OK to limit people's screen names to a-zA-Z0-9 in which case I say, that's deeply imperialistic and a super shit thing to do.
It depends on the intention. If this is about a unified international community, like a group of contributors to a Open Source Project, or like HN, then there is no reason to allow general unicode identifiers.
If the project is instead a more general solution intended for many independent communities that may well be country-specific, then yes, it should allow general Unicode display names. It should probably still help restrict this per community, so that a Chinese community doesn't get confusables with Japanese-only characters (though Han unification probably happens to protect from that), or a Cyrillic community doesn't get confusables with Latin characters.
I think restricting the allowed characters should apply to usernames and other unique identifiers that can lead to confusion (admin vs аdmin with a Cyrillic "а"). So if I write my name as "José", I should be able to make an account called "Jose" and still enter "José" in the name field, if such a field exists in the first place. Although I'm not even sure about this.
If you're saying that "José" should be accepted as an username, shouldn't "Борис" or "김" or "金" also be valid?
It makes sense to restrict the alphabet for things like usernames that should be unique, should be easy to read for security reasons and should be correctly handled by various types of backend software.
I'm not from the US and my name isn't ASCII, but I wouldn't mind spelling it with the English alphabet, even in a name field.
I also don't understand how English has 26 letters, but letters like "é" in "José" or "ï" in "naïve" appear as normal letters. And if I write "Jose" instead, it would read as offensive. In my language that uses Cyrillic, the letters of the alphabet are all the letters we use, period. It would just be wrong to borrow a letter from another alphabet, even if it's the same script, just because someone's name includes it in their language. I have a friend from a neighboring country that changed one of his Cyrillic letters when he came to my country. I would do the same if I went to his country and they didn't have a letter we have.
For logins, we're already used to the fact that they're expected to be in Latin. Having them in the native alphabet is more trouble than it's worth (one system supports it, another breaks etc., easier to remember one, in Latin, across systems) I'd be irritated though if I couldn't use my native alphabet in the user profile for the first name/last name
>Please provide your name exactly as it is in your government documents.
>This is extremely important. Failure to comply will lead to termination of your service with no refund, criminal prosecution, our CEO calling you in tears and a hitman being informed about your last known location
Heh, I had this exact thing when getting certified at Microsoft (remotely). They required me to enter my name exactly as it appears on my government ID (not a single Latin character), but their registration site... simply blocked any characters outside of Latin. I had to obtain an international travel passport to get the "official" transliteration of my name
I've gotten a visa to a country that doesn't use Latin characters. My name got transliterated. At the bottom of the visa there's the machine-readable field that uses ASCII characters, and my name lost a character (a OU became just U).
It's also fun when the official transliteration rules suddenly change: a visa/passport issued in one year has a different name in Latin than a passport issued in another year. I was once two separate people :)
I really want this to be true, but the founder launching AGI 9 months ago doesn't help their credibility a lot. And drip-marketing test results seems like a super weird thing to do, whether it's real or it's not.
Don't forget that a lot of scams aren't initially on purpose. Eg Theranos by all accounts very gradually morphed from a mild "fake it till you make it" scheme (mild by Silicon Valley standards at least) into a full-blown scam over years of growth and funding, the lies needing to be deeper and deeper over time to cover up the earlier ones.
I guess all I'm trying to say is the fact that it's a bad strategy for a scam, doesn't really mean it's not a scam.
Those Verge motorcycles appear to actually exist and work though, so that's a data point in favour of this being real.
Yes, I want this too good to be true battery to be real and that's why I'm looking into such things but this claim is false.
He apparently launched "Artificially Superintelligence", which appears to be a marketing term for some architecture this company was working on. The "AGI" term seems to come from people who are going after this CEO.
I wasn't able to come up with people who claim that they were actually scammed, i.e. paid for a product that wasn't delivered or made an investment into something that doesn't exist.
This appears to be a much cleaner slate than the titans of AI. I'm inclined to believe that those alleged scams are not scams by SV standard.
> I wasn't able to come up with people who claim that they were actually scammed, i.e. paid for a product that wasn't delivered or made an investment into something that doesn't exist.
I'm gonna ask the other way around. Name one successful product by the CEO that has reached mass production and you can get it right now.
See my other comment [1]. There's dozen of failed products. That one AppGyver product is from 15 years ago. Since then, he hasn't created any other product. The motorcycle however is real. The battery may also be. The issue with Solid State Batteries is that it's almost impossible to scale them.
The guy changes the industry he's in as often to match what's currently popular.
Failed startup isn’t a scam, to be a scam it needs to be presented in a way that is designed to collect money but that money be used for something else.
Otherwise YC would have been scam center, very few of YC companies don’t fail.
That’s ridiculous, neither making your first product nor failing is scamming.
In this particular case you can buy motorbikes and sport cars made using electric motors from the same company that makes this battery. So at least 1 real product that I know of.
You cannot buy them. Have you visited their website? The way this works, you pay a non-refundable fee. And if this motorcycle turns out to be real, then you get to pay the rest amount (or cancel and lose some money). Because they manufactured a few units doesn't mean it's scalable (or profitable).
The motorbikes are not new, there are people who bought them and are using them. Switching to the new battery is new but those bikes with motors from this company exist. I think you need to do your research before arguing further.
If your research is YouTube then I'm sorry to disappoint you but those people are affiliated with Verge (or Donut). I don't think there's a single video where someone gives a review and they paid using all their own money, is there? Have you done your research before you started arguing the CEO is legit?
I’m pretty sure if I keep pushing you enough eventually you’ll will make your life about going after me accusing me of who knows what. This means that your opinions should not to be taken seriously as your motivations are unclear.
Yea sure Immich taking zero responsibility for possibly causing damages in hundreds of dollars and not warning their uses is fair, yeah, let them go. Maybe actually read the issues before judging? (oh noes, he blame them so he must be bad!)
I don’t care about immich etc, you just gave me the impression of someone who loves going after people. Your primary participation here appears to be for claiming that people committing scams, so I guess it’s your hobby. Maybe I am wrong but I also don’t see why we should argue as those scam claims are your opinions.
> I don’t care about immich etc, you just gave me the impression of someone who loves going after people
Man I don't want anything else but success for everybody. Once someone fs up, there's nothing bad in improving. Dismissing people because they are pointing bad things out doesn't help (referring to Immich).
> Your primary participation here appears to be fir claiming that are people committing scams
If their website makes fun of their "scam mark" (idonutbelieve.com), then maybe it's not just me? Maybe all other people from YT, Reddit, X are reasonably skeptical? If the battery turns out to actually be real, that's great! (I actually mean it.)
Having said all that, despite our disagreements, have a nice day. Maybe we just set off on a wrong foot and the future will be brighter.
I don't think you're going to see investors crashing out on the internet that they got scammed. The ASI video by the CEO shows exactly that he has no idea what's happening. Seems like an investor pitch scam. I wish that the battery was true tho. It's always amazing to see progress in the world.
I never said that. If I did, prove me by quoting me.
This aside, all I said is that you don't get to hear that on the internet, because such stuff is unpopular and doesn't usually bring attention. And if they signed an NDA, the lawsuit may be not public.
All links were obtained from the CEO's LinkedIn page. The last one is definitely a scam. They ask for your money and promise that their magical algorithm will give you profit.
The first one has fake "featured in", Privacy Policy does not exist and almost all those websites were using Wordpress (perhaps made by the same guy?).
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