Nick Johnson

🚨 PRINTER INK COSTS $32,000 A GALLON — AND PEOPLE ARE REALIZING THEY’VE BEEN GETTING RIPPED OFF "This should be illegal." A man at Target picks up a single black ink cartridge. Price? $63. Then he checks how much is actually inside. About half an ounce. Do the math. That puts this stuff at $30,000+ per gallon. More than a used mobile home. For printer ink. And here’s the part that has people pissed: You don’t get a choice. The printer is built to force you into their system. Cheaper ink? Blocked. Refill it yourself? Disabled. Wrong cartridge? Printer won’t even work. So you buy the printer… and then you’re stuck paying whatever they decide to charge. Over. And over. And over again. A locked system where the product is cheap and the refill is where they get you. If something costs more than gold and you’re forced to buy it… how is that not a scam?

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.