[TeMPOraL]

Not your money.

At least this furthers humanity's scientific and technological knowledge, whether it fails or succeeds, unlike most other things people would do with that money, like buy a house to flip it, or buy a car, or sth.

[kenferry]

Yeah, I mean it's true to an extent, I agree. As scientific research though it's not very well thought out. A grant agency would not fund this. There's too much potential for causing harm and it's not clear what benefit or action we derive from the results. They tried this before with a vending machine, it failed, apparently all they concluded was "hm, models got better so maybe we should just try it again". How is that worth anything scientifically?

Re: not my money, true. It's just frustrating even to me to see people do stuff like this, and I'm not struggling to get by. My frustration mostly derives from feeling like I'll get lumped in with techies who have more money than sense. I already deal with enough tech hate in my life.

When people buy a super fancy car they don't (usually) blog about it, and instagram wealth influencers are also frustrating, yes.

[TeMPOraL]

That's a fair objection and I often feel like this, too.

On the research aspect, I see this as something pre-Research, yet still science - in a way, it's science at its core: trying something and seeing what happens. Proper Research usually follows once enough ad hoc attempts are made and they seem to show a pattern that's worth setting up a systematic study to verify.