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There’s this music video made with OpenAI’s Sora model, which is pretty cool but I think also showcases its limitations. It looks quite realistic, but for anything longer than a few seconds, the tech is mostly only good for a stylized fever dream / infinite zoom aesthetic.

It’s a better concept than the movie described in this post though, which seems to just be trying to pass off the use of chatgpt instead of writers for the script as some clever critique on the use of AI. You know, by unironically doing what they’re critiquing.

For actual coherent long-form AI-generated video, I think something fundamentally needs to change about the approach to training.

I’m pretty sure these are just an echo of the same concerns people put forward when URLs first started being included in signage, due to general privacy/security concerns with the internet. Somehow we got through it!

My whole point is that the perfectly good extant solutions are equally flawed. QR codes don’t create a situation where e.g mimicing a website is easier. It is already easy. It is not any more difficult to mimic a website with a fake domain name purposefully named in plaintext in a way to deceive.

Literally the only difference is you are looking at letters, which you are confident in your ability to parse, with a code which you are not. A URL being short and easy to type doesn’t make it less likely to be malicious.

The key thing to remember is that yours, my, everyone’s assessment of perceived risk is very incomplete. Your specific comfort with plaintext is itself a potential attack vector. So an approach to privacy/security where you simply avoid all possible circumstances with any perceived risk attached to them is a shitty approach. Engaging with an acceptable risk level is the only way to teach yourself vigilance.

People recently started seeing QR codes everywhere and feel confronted by this new reality, that’s natural. But the truth is that this is fear of QR codes is irrational where it is not reconciled with the perceived risk of generally using the internet and following links. There might be a difference in the physical characteristics of the link format, but in terms of computer security the difference doesn’t matter.

Just because some commenters here remember seeing a CVE in 2016, or read about QRgen one time, doesn’t mean QR code protocol is inherently vulnerable. It is in fact quite ridiculous to suggest that would be the case and all the manufacturers would continue to support it.

So we shouldn’t use smartphone features if they could potentially have exploits? With this logic you shouldn’t have a phone.

I think you’ll find there isn’t an Android or iPhone on the market today vulnerable to SQL injection or XSS etc via scanning a QR code. You’re talking about device vulnerabilities that get patched and it’s equally possible to encounter these exploits with plaintext URLs

If you’re using these links as restaurant menus as opposed to ordering platforms (this is how I use them, and how this post & other commenters seem to be presenting the concept) that’s kind of limited to a risk of straight up being phished in a situation where you don’t really have any reason to hand over your information.

In a pub/bar setting it’s helpful to know what’s available at the bar before I’m standing at it, especially if I’m buying a round. That is to say it generally lowers the bar to menu availability, not raise it. Because before the pub/bar would simply have no table menu and you’d figure out what you wanted by asking or looking at the taps

1995, I was 4. Can’t remember specs, but it ran win95. I had some preschool games like The Playroom and Math/Reading Blaster, which were pretty sweet. And Rugrats adventure game, which started my affinity for point-and-clicks. Aside from that I would just think of cool animals or other shit I wanted to know about and looked it up on Encarta. The fun lasted until shortly after we got the internet in 99, I had to build a new PC to get more frames in flash games on the Nickelodeon website and with bonzibuddy

Mod tools are the obvious answer, but it’s a platform in development. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to trade off the pain of migration/adaptation to another growing platform also in development because one part of it is supposedly a bit further along right now. The vagueness and incongruence between the action and reasoning suggests they aren’t genuinely offering their true reasoning. It also seems like they’re trying to say that federation was never appealing to them, which seems ridiculous to me. Rather they will cast it to the wind now, following immature decisions they made about federation that didn’t turn out very well.

Right, we have to just murder those kids so they can’t be used as bombs. It’s like you’re seeing the matrix dude, amazing stuff

Yeah we’re deprioritising the platform you use, because it’s niche. We have analytics, and they say your use case doesn’t matter. Just accept it and keep paying us, like all those other times

It is ridiculously overpriced and stepped on a hundred times. According to statistics bureau numbers though, use has more tripled over the last year alone

There isn’t really much peer reviewed evidence suggesting vaping is significantly harmful in a tobacco harm reduction context, though. It’s all supportive of vaping, that’s why it’s been embraced by many medical organisations across much of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The amount of tobacco harm prevention vaping is doing in places like Kuwait right now, where up to 50% of males smoke, is fucking incredible. Australia’s blindness on this issue is a farce. They, like most western governments, are addicted to tobacco tax. It’s 4% of our overall tax income. That’s a proportion of all taxation in our economy, including all the land, property, goods, services taxes. An entire 4% of it comes just from perpetuating tobacco sales. Financially conservative governments aren’t giving that away for free. Internally they’re like “we’ll worry about addressing the leading cause of preventable death when we get voted in for another term, otherwise it won’t work out for us politically”. That’s why we have a nation of Labor state premiers that almost unilaterally support sensible ecig regulation, yet the federal health minister from the same political party has this curious unexplained blindspot on the issue and just parrots big pharma talking points about nicotine, while nicorette isn’t even kept behind the counter.

I think its use in the field was pretty limited. It was something a scientist at the company I work for was telling me about. They were curious given all the shit chat about a lack of longterm evidence. They wondered what is the actual earliest record of this sort of concept? They ended up finding out about experiments done with this device in some kind of wartime medical journal they showed me. We were pretty tickled by the journal article mentioning propylene glycol was the substance these old researchers were atomising. I tried finding it again to link something, but I haven’t been able to find it yet.

Same concept also developed and used in WW2 as an anti-chemical weapon device. Basically a grenade that bursts into a cloud of PG, trapping airborne chemical particulates and pulling them down to the ground.

I mean, look at their handle. It’s not like this is the handle for Famezen, they’ve clearly already had their account removed before. Report function needs someone to use it for it to be able to work, right? On balance, Youtube’s business model goes to assigning value to the action of viewing a video. Subsequently devaluing that metric by collaborating to sell it for a few pennies doesn’t sound like a great plan.

Amyl & the sniffers is my fav

Disposable nicotine vapes, or any other kind of nicotine vape, have been banned federally for import other than via a special access scheme for the last few decades since nicotine was included on the poisons standard.

Just want to clarify that the actual change here is limited to banning 0mg disposables. Since Mark Butler’s health department has decided to continue the trend of totally failing to act on sensible ecig regulation, an entirely expected and totally avoidable de facto standard shipping method of stealth packing nicotine products amongst 0mg has resulted. The China suppliers know that we have zero capacity to detect nicotine at the border and that every word that comes out of Butler’s mouth on the topic is bullshit. They can just flout the law and get away with it. There’s literally no system set up to hold them to account. Border Force aren’t doing GC-MS analysis on your Amazon packages. The only reason the headline says ‘to be banned from January 2024’ is because the government don’t want you to realise they are currently banned, and in fact always have been.

Sounds like he reckons that just keeping an eye out for anything that looks like a disposable shipment will do the trick now? Aw yeah, tell me more about how you don’t understand the scale of freight logisticsin Australia. Is it going to invalidate the existing prescriptions for those products via special access scheme? I’ve had a nicco script for 2 years and haven’t had a single parcel checked.

To wit: if you read this article and didn’t come out of it thinking “shit I’ve gotta hop on AliExpress and get on this for a quick buck”, it’s because you got bullshitted. It’s gonna be creeping up to dethrone cocaine as the hottest Aus consumer commodity 2024. Cheers Mark

Then why is there no sufficient demand for there to be a place in the market for RNT cigarettes currently, if people are willing to smoke separate from the universally accepted purpose of a cigarette as a nicotine delivery device? We aren’t talking about the difference between blues and reds - we’re talking about the difference between an effective nicotine delivery system and an ineffective one. Specifically in a market where effective smokeless nicotine delivery systems are available (and as accessible as cigarettes). If one just stops to think about how things would actually function in that sort of environment, your argument falls apart for me.

I can’t show you long-term data on the health impact of using RNT cigarettes when they aren’t available in the wild. But sure, here’s a review on shorter-term RCT’s & cohort studies.

A review of the evidence on cigarettes with reduced addictiveness potential - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8785120/

As mentioned, nicotine reinforcement and dependence is a key underlying cause of chronic cigarette use. They have a function, whether or not smokers are cognizant of it. When the nicotine is reduced, the cigarette no longer performs this function - no reinforcement, high chance for cessation.

It suggests this benefit extends to important subpopulations whom have disproportionately high smoking rates. In NZ there is a whole ethnic group that could be described this way: tāngata whenua, Māori people.

The review also mentioned the potential for adverse effects, including fostering a black market, or product manipulation. These issues are also presented by outright prohibition. Indeed the RNT strategy itself is intended as a mitigation against these problems, and the review shows they are far from a perfect solution. But taking the same behavioural science approach, it is entirely expected that people would seek alternative black market supply when the decision about availability is made for them.

Even if you consider other positions like the civil liberties argument, what do they want the freedom to do? It sounds like they want the freedom to participate in the act of smoking, more than specifically wanting the freedom to use cigarettes to effectively ingest nicotine. It is understood even among this crowd that nicotine is associated with addiction, which no one desires. At least, RNT’s would sort of reduce their position to “I’m fighting for the freedom to have chronic health problems”. Anyway, they’d still be free to grow their own tobacco legally for personal use, as far as I’m aware.

I’m still not sure if you meant that you think people would be caused to smoke more generally, or just a few. Either way, I wasn’t being facetious when I asked what the reasons were. I can’t imagine what basis you have for it. Like, the fact we don’t cultivate tomato plants for smoking and regulate them as an 18+ product and have a bunch of complicated strategies to address the harm it causes isn’t because there’s no nicotine in the tomato plant, or because the plant leaves are especially caustic and unpleasant to smoke, or anything like that. It’s because the nicotine concentration and bioavailability isn’t high enough to make that an effective delivery device. That’s why tomato smoking never proliferated in Mayan culture and eventually spread throughout the world following colonisation of the Americas, and that’s the same reason why people won’t continue to smoke cigarettes when they are rendered ineffective.

It even seems like what you want: prohibition, but in a more roundabout way. How is that possibly worse than the roundabout way they’re cost prohibitive via excessive taxation?

Sure, in a perfect world we could just ban them, so why have a roundabout? Because the roundabout has specific potential to have a direct impact toward beneficial longterm health outcomes and the elimination of tobacco harm over time, which a more direct approach does not.

The perfect solution would be to go back and somehow stop tobacco use from ever proliferating, but in lieu of that, it’s here, it’s entrenched in every country and culture and things like “outright prohibition” and “complete elimination” are simply unrealistic. On balance, the doubts about RNT’s are unreasonable because of the stakes involved. Statistically several NZers have died prematurely of tobacco-related illness since our conversation began. We need realistic solutions that don’t exist in a vacuum. RNT’s were one prong of a multi-pronged approach which together constituted our generation’s best shot. The UK, Australia, will have been looking at NZ as a test market for RNT’s and other cessation strategies as they have for many other unproven/disruptive technologies, see these decisions made by the Nats, and use it as additional justification to succumb to tobacco industry whims there as well.

It reinforces the effect of the nicotine. That’s literally why tobacco companies were adding acetone to cigarettes back when they were publicly denying it was even addictive.

What are those reasons? It sounds like you’re trying to say that tobacco as a cultivated plant for smoking propagating across the world over the past few centuries is because it was trendy.

Without getting into my personal involvement and anecdotes, ‘introduce RNT products and hope for the best’ is far from an accurate characterisation of NZ Labour’s Smokefree 2025 Action Plan.