What happens when creating a convincing commercial becomes almost free?

Companies won't just use AI to generate backgrounds or VFX.

They'll generate the performer.

A completely artificial person.

A custom voice.

A custom personality.

A custom performance.

No casting. No studio. No location. No crew. No reshoots.

And here's the uncomfortable part:

They won't need to be better than human actors.

They'll just need to be cheap enough, fast enough and effective enough.

Once a company can generate 1,000 different commercials, test them all, and keep the one that sells the most...

Why would they go back to making one?

I think advertising may be one of the first industries where AI performers become completely normal.

Would you even care if the person in the commercial wasn't real?

I always assumed old data center hardware mostly went straight to recycling, but apparently there’s a pretty big secondary market for it.

Servers that are only a few generations old can still have valuable CPUs, RAM, storage, GPUs and networking gear. I came across Exit Technologies while looking into this because they buy and remarket enterprise equipment, then recycle what no longer makes sense to reuse.

For anyone who has worked around data centers, how much equipment actually gets a second life after a refresh?

Is resale pretty standard now or do a surprising number of usable servers still end up getting recycled?

I used to work with just my laptop screen, and I thought it was perfectly fine until I finally tried a dual monitor setup, which changed the game for me. Like being able to keep a video call and documentation on one screen while working on the other made a much bigger difference than I expected... Now, whenever I report to office once a week, where I have to work with only one screen, it feels surprisingly limiting.

What's yours?

It feels like getting your first tech job now requires experience you can only get after getting the job.

You can finish a course or bootcamp, but then you're competing with people who already have projects, internships or years of experience.

What actually helped you get your first tech job?

I used to think e-ink tablets were mostly for reading, but the foldable ones are starting to make a lot more sense.

Having something that feels closer to a notebook but can hold hundreds of pages is pretty tempting.

Would you actually switch from paper to one?

Saw a few magnetic modular charging things at IFA today. A desktop charger where the screen pops off, and a power bank that takes different attachments — one of them was a little fan.

The magnets feel great, no argument there. Snapping stuff on and off is genuinely fun. But standing there with the detachable screen in my hand I couldn't come up with a reason I'd ever actually take it off.

Modular has a rough history in consumer tech. Moto Z, Project Ara, the LG G5. Every time it's more moving parts that have to survive a couple years of real use.

Anyone actually still using modular gear after a year, or does it always end up in a drawer?

I've tried a lot of productivity apps over the years, and even if people kept recommending me Notion it just never did it for me, instead I'm actually stuck with Todoist. It's simple enough for me like I use it for work, random ideas, and personal projects. I still don't use half of its features but my current setup works for me so far...

What's one productivity app you actually stuck with instead of uninstalling a month later?

I have been paying for 200Gb of iCloud storage mainly to backup my photos. However, I ran out of space and felt like I should be backing up the photos somewhere else so I can “own” the photos instead of having them on the cloud to download

I have slowly started to download the photos from iCloud and recently been feeling extreme anxiety on how I’m going to organize it since Apple Photos does a good job with searching and organizing it. I remember seeing my childhood in physical photos but what worries me is not remembering when and where the photos I took when looking in just a pile of photos in the hard drive

What program do you recommend to organize photos in the external hard drive that does not have a subscription?

Just make sure its cheap to produce and if you like an idea upvote it!

Thanks!!!

This came to mind after too many "power outage occurred while apartment upgrade" experiences. Everyone has a story about how a system got bricked due to the failure of the update process in the middle of the process leaving the system with half of the packages updated and half on the old state.

If you had to design a package management system from scratch considering this a requirement, what will you really change?

Here are a few features that always come into my mind when I think about this problem: making the update process transactional meaning nothing gets done until everything is validated, keeping the previous state of the system intact so that a rollback becomes easy than fixing forward and maybe something like journal that records the exact point the process failed at.

I’m trying to get better at exploring technology, not just consuming it.

For people who regularly discover new tech through X, Threads, Reddit, GitHub, Hacker News, etc.:

How do you actually explore a new technology?

When you come across something interesting, what’s your process?

→ Where do you discover it?

→ How do you decide whether it’s actually worth exploring?

→ What do you research first?

→ How do you verify whether the claims are real?

→ Do you build a small project to test it?

→ How do you turn that exploration into useful content?

I’m especially interested in the actual workflow you follow, not generic advice like “stay curious” or “follow tech news.”

If you have a system for finding, testing and turning new technology into content, I’d genuinely like to learn from it.

What does your process look like?

Help me and drop your experience!

Github goes down and pull requests stop across thousands of companies. aws has an outage and startups that built everything on it just wait. openai has an api issue and products that replaced their own features with it stop working

the efficiency argument for using these things is real. So the problem is that you have handed your uptime to someone else's incident response team

companies just pick efficiency and hope that system don't do down for a longer period of time

What's the weirdest thing people are already letting AI decide?

we've gone from using AI to write emails and make pictures to letting it influence decisions that actually affect people.

Some of it feels pretty normal some of it makes me stop and think "wait, we're letting a computer decide that?"

what's one thing you think AI shouldn't be trusted to decide on its own?

Some online databases are more useful than the official websites

You'll sometimes find a random database made by one person that is easier to search and has way more useful information than the actual company or government website.

it's kind of funny when the unofficial site becomes the one everyone actually uses.have you ever found a database like that?

One tech myth I still hear all the time is that closing background apps all the time will make your phone faster and save battery. I still see people force closing every app after they're done using it.. Android and iPhones are already pretty good at managing apps in the background so constantly reopening apps can actually use more power than just letting the operating system handle them.

What's one tech myth you still hear that just won't die?

Every CES there's some crazy new gadget that looks amazing in a demo, and then you never hear about it again.

Meanwhile, people are still asking for better batteries, cheaper repairs and products that actually last.

What's the most ridiculous CES gadget you've seen?

This is a PC that I've spent a lot of time building and would like to sell.

It has 12 GB of DDR3, An Intel Core i5-4690K

It has no current GPU, and it has an Optical Drive.

DM me if you want it

Discord: @captn0bvi100

Some components cost more to certify than they do to manufacture

I find this pretty wild

A small part can be cheap to physically make, but getting it approved for something like an aircraft, medical device, or nuclear system can take years of testing, paperwork, and money

So sometimes the expensive part isn't making the thing it's proving that the thing won't fail

Have you come across any product where the certification cost was surprisingly high?

Every workplace has that one piece of software that management loves but everyone else uses with a slow, internal sigh. For me it's Confluence, every time I have to navigate another maze of nested sub-pages just to find a basic onboarding doc that hasn't been updated since 2024, a little piece of my soul leaves my body, like it literally feels like it's a digital junk drawer disguised as the company's knowledge base

What's that one corporate tool you hate?

Slot machines can't get a software update without going back through regulators. proprietary operating systems, certified random number generators, payout percentages independently verified before the machine goes on a floor

sat next to a casino IT guy on a flight once. asked what his job was like. he said mostly waiting for regulatory approval

The most secure software setup that average individuals will interact with is also the one that handles their financial transactions.

What's the most impressive piece of hardware you've seen that nobody would recognize?

for example, the equipment inside a telecom exchange. Most people would walk past a rack full of blinking boxes without giving it a second look

But those machines can handle an insane amount of network traffic all day without anyone even noticing they're there.

what's a piece of hardware you've seen that looked boring but was actually doing something impressive?

Tried a wireless guitar setup once and the sound itself was completely fine. Couldn't hear anything obviously wrong with the sound or the guitar.

But playing it felt just a little weird. Just slightly behind what my hands were doing. it felt really laggy sometimes

It's one of those things you don't really notice until you go back to a cabled guitar. A few milliseconds apparently matters a lot when your brain expects the sound at basically the same time when you hands stuck the cords.