Look I am definitely... Well, not guilty... Let's say a keen advocate of not having crazy amounts of advertising rammed down my throat.
However I think raw viewership will help with surfacing the video to a larger audience, surely YouTube sees "ad-free" viewership as still a valid barometer of mass appeal and would therefore seek to boost that video in hopes of getting more ad-supported eyeballs on it.
Or I am speaking out of my ass, who knows.
I tend to think there will be a degree of variety, I believe that often in our forests it tends to be the underbrush that tends to be the more varied with gum trees and some acacias being the larger species a lot of the underbrush develops under. That being said I am in no way an expert on forestry and would defer to just about anyone with a passing familiarity of Australian forest biodiversity.
I'd love to see it exceed his expectations, but I think his table in the middle covers the "Wildly Optimistic" contingency well enough that we will struggle to beat it.
I was going to ask how he knew it was Arch, but I feel like that is just setting up the next comment.
Huh, the more you know. It was some time back that I was selling them, a depressingly long time ago now I guess. It's a shame they have bowed to economic circumstances, the article I just read (which was translated so nuance may have been lost) makes it sound like they fell into the pandemic trap of scaling to meet demand during an unforseen boom and then couldn't justify the size and scope of the workforce once that demand rationalised.
My family recently purchased a Bosch front load washing machine (autodose 1 button operation and teenagers is a match made in heaven) and they have 3 series available, 2 are manufactured in China, the other is manufactured in Spain. I had several retailers tell me to steer clear of the Spanish product, it carried a higher price tag than the Chinese lines and had a higher fault and return rate. We have been happy with ours so far but time will tell.
I'm not sure Miele is struggling that much, was a few years ago now but I remember a sales rep telling me the story of the annoyed German executive who "was unhappy" with a division of Miele as they had run out of room and had to "off shore" a factory to keep up with demand. The new factory was in Austria.
I am a huge advocate for them, back when I sold white goods and small appliances they often had really solid products and they maintained their "prestige brand" status by testing their products to an extent I haven't seen many other brands bragging about.
Usually we sold to new customers on word of mouth from existing, and existing customers who wanted to scale up or down as family requirements changed.
Sorry I just see a "In compliance with government regulation to provide you with a full set of search results you need to be logged in" prompt in the near future. If they can drive people to log in, or even better/worse make people who haven't had an account create one, I see some big financial incentives for them to do so. Of course that is going to be offset by the potential cost of any breaches, but I can also see the silver lining on that of raising a bigger barrier to entry for any new competition that wants to get started in Australia, and a bit of supporting legislation that blocks "non-compliant" search engines from being accessed in Australia might actual serve to increase lock in. Maybe I am just being paranoid, but when I see an Industry aligned body co-authoring legislation I start to look for their angle.
Seems like a case of a Industry lobby group getting out ahead of the government to try to push an agenda to me.
Logged in users are worth more than logged out users as far as digital profiling and advertising so let's conceal the juicy stuff behind a log in. Doing it this way makes the government the scapegoat. So I would guess 100% compliance isn't anything too concerning, they just want to juice their numbers to make line go up.
If Google & Microsoft have to degrade our privacy and freedoms to raise their Oceania region profitability by 0.00000001% that's a price they are happy for us to pay.
Exactly what I meant, knowing how loathe people are to do routine maintenance let's be honest, most Dysons operate within their marketing specifications for a few months and after that they are on a downwards trajectory.
Miele is one of the brands I respect, mostly because of the way their products are tested. I remember a video from back in the day that showed a testing rig that essentially threw their test subject down a flight of stairs multiple times. Turns out there is a statistical average number of times a vacuum will fall down a flight of stairs and they test that their vacuums still function after exceeding that average.
Having sold them in a previous life, marketing and hype.
We got a lot of people who would "upgrade" from a Miele vacuum because they wanted to stop buying bags, then see them a few months later buying bags for their Mieles.
Sorry to all the people who like them, but bagless vacuums leak sooner or later and say what you will about upright vacuums, you just can't reach as many spots as a low profile head on a pole.
To be honest the answer is obvious, straight forward and impossible. Society just needs to reject entirely any company that embraces shitty "AI".
I mean it's not as though "AI" is in any way intelligence, it's just utilising large data sets to make it look that way, think about it, you meet a person at a party who is entirely oblivious to social norms, incapable of understanding tone, not able to improvise and adapt to conversation, but is really good at stating and restating and respinning facts that they picked up in previous conversations, is that the smartest one in the room?
In every one of my interactions with AI it has reminded me of talking to my ex's autistic son, he was astounding with the things he could remember and repeat (and would do so with absolute conviction) but would crash out when given too many explicitly contradictory tidbits of information.
So assume that any company that replaces workers with it is happy to embrace slop and ask yourself if that is a company worth your business?
Unfortunately the world is far too influenced by America and has spent too long buying into the narratives that have been used to strip Americans of all the characteristics that they like to believe define them.
So the general public is dumb, reactionary, intolerant and beligerent in far too many places around the world.
The tiniest trace of class solidarity and any company that opted to embrace the shit slop as anything other than a tool to enhance the existing workforce would be shunned and reduced to irrelevancy and the world could move on.
For what it's worth I fully 100% believe that AI is attainable, but when we get there we will see LLMs as equivalent to alchemy and shake our heads about the amount of resources we spent trying to turn virtual lead into digital gold. I also wonder if our descendants will curse our wholesale destruction of the planet following these modern day charlatans down the path of environmental collapse just to explore a dead end that was never going to yield a positive result.
My wife is a big fan of his, as are my kids, I am less diligent a follower. But I can say his content is consistently quite good, and he really seems to live his public persona.