Reading the headline I was about to post how ridiculous it is that AI is taking over everything. Then I read that it is being used to give someone the chance to say their own words in their own voice.

This was not motivated out of using AI to replace an actress. It was motivated out of respecting the wishes and dignity of a dying person. It’s there a better use of AI than this?

I did online dating for many years. I used match, eharmony, tinder, pof, okcupid.

I fully understand the ‘soul destroying’ comment. For me it was a lot of work for little return. I started off being selective. Messaging one person at a time so I didn’t end up getting two responses and having to put someone off or turn one of them down. That was naive it turned out as I got very few replies. So I started messaging multiple people at once. I always tried to personalise things but my effort varied with how optimistic I was feeling about online dating.

Ultimately I think I got responses about 10% of the time. From them, 10% turned into a date, from those maybe 50% would get to a second date.

So overall it every hundred messages I’d write , 1 would end up in a date. I went on quite a lot of dates over the years, but I had to devote so much time to getting them it was, soul destroying.

I never thought i was unattractive, but online dating made me question if I really was. I never thought I was an ass, but online dating made me question if I really was. I would sometimes have very long conversations before meeting to find there was no chemistry in person. Sometimes I would like them when we meet and they would ghost me. Sometimes they liked me and I didn’t like them, but I always tried to be honourable and tell them, not ghost them since I didn’t like it happening to me.

I am male in case my experience doesn’t make it obvious. I often spoke to some of the women I got on better with about how online dating was for them and their experience was pretty awful for different reasons. Generally they were bombarded by messages and a good number of them were obscene. Guys trying to hook up rather than date. To manage their inbox was a real challenge and they probably missed out on good matches because of the noise.

My overall impression of the whole thing is that it generally sucks regardless of whether you are the one doing most of the messaging or whether you are receiving messages. I also think it makes it more like shopping than dating, dehumanising people. Do I want the 8K 42 inch TV or the 4K inch TV? Actually, can I even afford it?

All that said in the end it worked for me. Over 6 years since I last logged in and I think it was a bit of an addiction, or perhaps desperation born of loneliness.i also have a daughter now and there were times I thought that was never going to happen.

So for me online dating was years of frustration, difficulty and upset, but in the end I’m glad I did it but it took a long time.

I’m not saying baby monitors are the only reason for improved SUID rates. I’m saying they likely played a role. Despite your sarcasm, you might also be right that lead could have adversely affected unexplained infant mortality. The point I was trying to make was that baby monitors are not useless devices designed to extract money from you as implied by OP, whose comments by the way, were anecdotal.

$400 is excessive though. As is a subscription.

And data on SIDS is freely available. https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm

They’ve also not been fine.

SUID Death rate for infants has decreased even since 1990. Baby monitor likely had a role in that.

FYI not supporting subscription for features a device has in hardware, just saying I’d rather have a monitor that never went off than no monitor and a dead child. There are plenty of alternative devices without subs that cost a lot less to begin with.

Pesky Uber!!! I knew they’d be to blame somehow.

Upper mgmt “We need our employees back in the office.” Lowrt mgmt “Did you see the numbers? Since our employees started working from home, we’ve been smashing targets.” Upper mgmt “Yeah that’s why we need them back. Just imagine how much better the numbers could have been if we were making sure they weren’t slacking off.”

One of the most important things in a tool line this is long term stability. Unity just showed anyone intending to use their engine they are not a stable choice. I wanted to use unity for a recent project and found unreal engine terms more acceptable for my use case before these changes. Now there is no competition.

My gut tells me they are not deleted but rather simply no longer publicly available. Can’t have these pesky AI bots training for free.