More A.I. and Semi-Moto-Related Items

Semi-Pointless Questions, Cockamamie Theories, Etc.

Study this online ad for Verizon. Does it look like it was four models in a studio with props, posing before a photographer, or is it a typical A.I. generation? Hard to tell for sure, and there’s no way I’ll ever know, which makes the question a semi-pointless waste of time. Mine, anyway, and yours too, if you decide to read further. It’s irrelevant to all our lives. This well-known applied popular wisdom: “It is better to remain silent, at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.” is not being applied. Yup.

Some things about the image I don’t like, regardless of whether it was human-generated or A.I.-generated. Not listed in any order of importance:

• The room space is unlike any normal suburban ‘rec-room’ room space. The oversized plant and white wall with nothing on it both say ‘photo studio’ or A.I.
• The clothing is overly similar, and uniform -- jeans, T-shirts, and button-downs unrealistically similar and sterile.
• Three of the four people have near-identical facial expressions, body postures, and positioning. No sports-watching (on a TV) group sits this similarly or expresses this uniformly.
• The hairstyles are also too similar. Atypically overly sterile.
• Who holds a football like that while watching a game on TV? Nobody. And why are the ball’s laces pointed so perfectly toward the viewer?
• A TV remote would not be placed on a table that way.
• No beverage glasses or containers.
• Is the bowl of potato chips tipping off the edge of the table?
• Why is the bowl of cheese puffs so much smaller than the potato chip bowl?
• What is the deal with the popcorn kernels scattered all over the place (?) and (also…) there’s no popcorn bowl?
• The pizza slices are angled and positioned overlapping and in a way that looks like some kind of unnatural display, not how pizza on a coffee table would actually be positioned to be shared.

Conclusion/Projection: The ad agency used by Verizon made this with A.I., but the individual or individuals at the ad agency are either not super skilled as A.I. users, or are trying to save money for their agency by spending less time developing and refining this image. Does Verizon use the lowest cost ad agency they think they can get away with? This image looks like it was made by a ‘C’ student in Jr. High School. The props, people, and entire arrangement are too sterile to be real.

But wait!  There’s more!  Follow this text thread from last night, between my cousin Andrew and me:

Cousin Andrew: https://www.gob.earth/

Very cool startup earplugs grown from mushrooms, zero plastic

Very cool!  Thanks for sharing.  

I’ve now read some of their website and have questions, starting with: 1.) Have you personally tried these? 2.) Do you personally know any of the people behind them? 3.) How long in hours are they springy and resilient in-and-out of one’s ear many times?  4.) How are they in wet situations, I.E., do they break down if your ear canal is wet? and finally, 5.)  See this excerpt from the website about the NRR (noise reduction rating) …these have an NRR number of 20DB and the best expandable earplugs made of plastic foam are in the 31-33DB range.  This company does a bunch of calculations to explain how the 31-33DB foam plastic ones don’t give you that number in real-world use. (see below) If it takes a page of math to justify their 20DB rating, and because the foam ones we are selling are 31-33 DB rated, this might be a hard sell to motorcyclists.  On the other hand, if one falls out and you lose it on the ground, it will decompose more quickly than a foam plastic one. So that is something. I’m just trying to figure out how we’d try to sell them...

Cousin Andrew: I don’t know anything. I just heard the founder on a podcast, and she has a vision for the whole single-use market, and that’s her first product. They designed a single-use but they probably will work a few times. Send them an email. I’m sure they’ll send you a few.

Thanks. If they are single-use, they’d be a hard sell against the foam ones, at least to ICE-powered motorcyclists. Just a guess. But they still are very cool.

Cousin Andrew:  You’ve got a great point, I think they’re big market is concerts. They sell them at all the big concerts, and she said they’ve also got them in the kit. You get what you said in business class or first class that comes with the seat, and I guess a lot of the people who fly that way are learning about them and they’re trying to decide on other markets.

When I ride with earplugs -- all-day highway-speed trips mostly -- I use the plastic foam ones.  I’ll use them repeatedly until they get gross-looking. Then I’ll wash them with hand pump soap in a gas station or roadside restaurant sink, and keep using them. At stops, I’ll jam them in a narrow space on the bike while I eat lunch or fill the gas tank. Some riders use the foam ones connected to each other with a thin cord, which makes them harder to accidentally lose. You are right, the best market for these is for music events, and possibly for air travelers.  

Cousin Andrew: Yeah, you’re right. It’s not for hydrocarbon-burning dirt-bags like your crowd. 😈

Lol

My wife uses earplugs frequently. She’s tried many kinds and has a favorite. At some point, that company stopped making her favorite, and she emailed a complaint message to them. And I think others must have done this also because the company reintroduced them six months later. She buys them by the ‘100-pack’ or something. She has extraordinarily sensitive hearing.  

It is a little funny that the crowd this organic earplug business targets is the same crowd that loves wireless earbud speakers most strongly, and those things are one of the most environmentally impactful little things ever. I have one ‘dead’ Apple pair, and after they died, I looked up how to replace the batteries, and it’s not simple or easy. Pretty much impossible for people like you and me. In addition to that pair, I have two other pairs of Apple earbuds, one paired with the TV in our living room and the other paired with my notebook computer and iPhone. When those die, and eventually they will, they cannot be recycled.

Cousin Andrew: Yeah, that’s the whole world now

You would think that since hearing aids have recyclable and replaceable tiny batteries, Apple would figure out how to add that feature to their wireless earbuds. What the F, Apple?(Channeling John Stewart or ‘Last Week Tonight’…)

Recyclable, replaceable, and rechargeable should be required by law (all three) when it comes to batteries.

I use a bunch of little Apple Air Tags, maybe ten or twelve of them. Some of my motorcycles have two. One with the speaker removed the other, as it came from Apple. My theory is, if a bad guy takes the bike and then triggers the ‘find my’ function using a hacker technology, and the unmodified Air Tag ‘chirps’, they can easily find and remove it. And they probably will then not look for an even more deeply hidden one with no speaker. Battery replacement is easy on these devices, and I’ve done it a bunch of times. I like that they send a ‘battery getting weak’ message to my phone.

I don’t like the whole consumer electronic industry’s approach to little batteries in many products. For example, Garmin GPS’s all use a little ‘button’ sized battery internally to keep the clock that the devices need running. This battery wears out in 15-20 years, and it’s inside the GPS, soldered to a circuit board. The batteries that power the screen are consumer replaceable, but not this little battery that runs the clock. And when it does eventually die, the GPS will not find its satellites without a very lengthy full reboot startup. But as long as the little non-serviceable clock battery is good, you turn on a GPS and it finds its satellites in less than a minute. The only way to make an old GPS easily usable is to disassemble the device and solder in a replacement battery, and few consumers can do this themselves, even though there are nice YouTube videos showing how. Fortunately, there are a few places one can send old GPSs to have this done for $50-$70. Then the GPS is good for another 10-20 years.

Last winter I did this with two old GPS, one just over twenty years old and the other just less than twenty years old. The place I found was an electronics repair service in Mankato. A one-person business. He did a nice job.

Why not spend $500+ on the latest new GPS with a faster processor and better maps? 1.) $500 (or more) is a bunch of money for most people, and 2.) twenty-year-old map databases are 98% good enough for what I use these devices for, which mainly is when I’m somewhere remote with no cell service. I’m still surprised at how weak cell service coverage is in lots of places. I have this great nav app on my phone, but there are places I go with no (or spotty) cell service.

Ok, I think I’m about done now...
🤣

Cousin Andrew: That’s all very interesting and I think you make a good point about all that stuff and sadly most of these companies don’t think those products have a life after 15 years and probably they don’t really get used that much by most people after that long because the new stuff is so much cooler but a lot of old farts don’t care I guess. I have a couple of Apple AirTags too, and they are handy, but putting two on a bike seems very excessive, although I like your theory, and I think that makes perfect sense. What is the chance of one of your bikes being worth such an effort by a relatively professional thief?

Very funny. The marketable value of my bikes is quite low, but the inconvenience cost of duplicating them would be quite high. I’ve always done a bunch of little things to make each bike fit my requirements for it better. Not hot-rodding them for better performance, or customizing them for better appearance, but revising and re-engineering small things that help me use the bike more easily or be more comfortable and safer. If you want examples, here’s a link to a video I made a few years ago about the bike I’ve been riding for local transportation for the past thirty years. I’ve done similar things to modify four bikes. If one were stolen, it would be a lot of work to recreate it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXB8Fxpb3j0&t=2s
🤷

The above text thread led to a troubling discovery that is described below in an email to a few co-workers. Like the Aerostich print catalogs, all Aerostich email offers and the Aerostich webstore are produced internally:

And here’s proof. 12 of the top 15 link-thumbnails in this screenshot are totally made up of totally misleading A.I. nonsense, having less than zero to do with any existing XR650L Honda:

Now that I’ve thought about it overnight, I’d like to make a guess how all of these ridiculous A.I.-generated XR650L videos got onto YouTube in the first place. Who would be most likely to create them, and why? Young people who have been using A.I. heavily for some time now – they’re looking for ways to make some easy money, and simply because they are young doesn’t mean they are dumb. Clickbait works. A.I. is free and easy to use. And so is posting this kind of A.I.-generated nonsense on FB, YouTube, and all social media platforms.

 - Mr. Subjective, 9-15-25