Is RAM the new oil, then?
1,675 karma · joined April 28, 2014
If this was designed and implemented as a standard at the browser level, we would get something better in the end, rather than re-implementations on each and every website.
Yes, but it does not solve everything. Because an artist does have (at least in music) a say in how their work is used. That's usually something contractual, sometimes it's supported at the law level (in France, there's the "droit moral" of the author).
Legal streaming could have replaced music pirating. But what Spotify became is a threat to musicians too: all the pro and non-pro musicians I know crave to remove their tracks from Spotify, because Spotify pays nothing. But UX-wise Spotify is the best thing on the market at moment for exposure (broadly, if people don't find you on Spotify, they assume you don't exist). This becomes even a bigger issue since Spotify trains its own GenAI on music and streams generated music (which get paid back to... Spotify, instead of the original artists). Legal streaming still "could" be a win for artists, it just isn't today. You either tour and sell ridiculously well your merch, or you go broke (or you have the funds to sustain a negative balance for the rest of your life).
The thing, back to software, is that things get abstracted, automated, but on top of these, you will still need: people to understand and manage the abstraction (developers), people to understand/manage the translation machine (more developers), and people to understand/manage the basics/foundations (more developers).
The lie that lies into GenAI is this one: we can replace human work (because it makes us reliant and vulnerable on humans) for a cheaper alternative (it's not cheaper, given the externalities, both in the environment and in society).
1. AI CEOs oversell, by a lot. OpenAI CFO admission that they are cooked unless the US government bails them out is a tell.
2. The (almost) purely utilitarian nature of software code is in contrast to the more personally meaningful aim of art in general (although both do converge when we're talking about purpose-fit artwork: design/music for ads/shop centres, for instance). That makes, in my view, most of the difference given the following.
Vibe coding is mostly a very well evolved (albeit not perfect or deterministic) code completion/linting/review tool. Although it does bypass (for the user/coder) a LOT of the intellectual work needed to come to the same result - and by that, I mean/think that it is highly detrimental to the user/coder intellect; and because of this, it becomes highly detrimental to the employer too, especially if it reduces its own workforce.
A software company that extensively uses AI instead of hiring competent (and junior) people is faced with the same fate as a company that just stops hiring: it's going out of business or bought in a few years. Because it outsourced its control over its own process, or the process/product it sells. That's also a reason why considering Engineering or R&D as a cost center only makes sense in the "accounting sense", not in the "common sense", but that's only one example of how MBA's fucked up the world.
It certainly trained on existing open source codebases; whose code reuse is encouraged; although indeed, the license on the code in output is a question; did it train on closed source/proprietary codebases? that's an open question. Does it threaten developer jobs? I am not sure, see above.
"art" GenAI is a whole other beast, operating (and training) on a whole other order of magnitude of quantities of artwork that are very opinionated, original, and for which authors/owners have NOT given their consent to be used neither in training, neither in the output. People promoting GenAI dismiss the objections and practice of those owners showing a poor understanding of the process that is art, and a glaring contempt of the copyright law. Did it train on copyrighted works? Yes. Does it track how? No. Does it compensate people? No.
Does it make comparable quality work in output? No, because it's automated and it completely misses the point.
Does this threaten original artists that put in the work then? Yes, because a lot of people who have money (hence power) but shit taste and no understanding of the art process believe that it does replace real people trained and dedicated to this process and the particular media they work with. And they invest their money where they believe it will further this replacement and give them more money.
But it literally, from start to finish, makes no sense. And that's precisely the point of the process that is art. Through actual, personal and group work, make sense out of something.
A machine, an algorithm does not do so. The art is mangled in the training/labelling process. The prompt is crap, and always will, compared to the specifics and accidentals of the original work used in the training step.
Why not have this negotiation implemented at the browser level?
The majority of your users are not lazy, they have gazillions of other things to think about and to do. Even when they are developers.
Now, that's up to you, as a maker, to decide who your tool is serving, and for what purpose: it's totally fine and valid to target the power user, or your specific use case. Just don't act surprised, or reject the responsibility, that someone else will find a bigger audience with a lesser product, only because it is more affordable, cognitively speaking.
Nonetheless, yes, we're still on the brink of something gloomy. The movie is quite good, and would massively gain from spinoffs showing what happens in realtime in other countries too.
There are people that have a hard time recognizing/feeling/understanding other people as "aware". Even more about animals.
You center cognition/intelligence on humans as if it was the pinacle of it, rather than include the whole lot of other species (that may have totally different, or adjacent cognition models). Why? How so?
> As soon as profit can be made by transfering decision power into an AIs hand
There's an ironic, deadly, Frankensteinesque delusion in this very premise.
Any update I may do to any project dependencies I have on my workstation? Either I bet, pray and hope that there's no malicious code in these.
Either I have an isolated VM for every single separate project.
Either I just unplug the thing, throw it in the bin, and go make something truly lucrative and sustainable in the near future (plumber, electrician, carpenter) that let's me sleep at night.
But then, without this huge financial and tech bubble that's driven by these huge companies:
1/ will those models evolve, or new models appear, for a fraction of the cost of building them today?
2/ will GPU (or their replacement) also cost a fraction of what they cost today, so that they are still integrated in end-user processors, so that those model can run efficiently?
The timetable is the specs. The product is what your customers experience.
The specs (loose or... very specific) is definitely a major product step. But in that it is a mean to deliver the service/experience in the end. Without the implementation details (that do not live in the spec), you get often unsatisfied people everywhere.
Prior to it, yes, there was international phone lines, but those were still expensive enough you might ignore them.
Before then, I'd say around start of the 90's in Europe, you did not represent yourself being in sync with someone, anyone abroad (but perhaps that started to become conceivable for people who could afford frequent international calls or travel).
And that conditioned how you perceived your own time, the time of others, the events here and over there, and the effort you took into communicating long distance, through letters.
Those came from tech, from finance, from speculative finance.
And that it got some temporary success in some specific art business circles is but a confirmation of that.
And that's quite the same phenomenon we see today with generative AI. Interestingly, this time, rather than trying to weaponise copyright for their tech, they weaponise their tech against copyright.
And it's the very same individuals at the top of the money chain, that invested massively in both techs.
There is way too much existing deployed systems depending on alternative open source systems, and a mn incentive to use them to keep using old hardware.
And way too strong a strategic incentive not to depend on US tech alone.
I mean, it's terrific to have an affordable replica, especially for discovery, I'm not debating the price-point advantage (for both acquisition and maintenance), but this is not an on-par replacement.
In an analog (less so in digital, but still somehow) synth, the controls are the instrument itself: they are in a specific place, react in a specific way, and physically part of the device that outputs the sound, and they stay there: you cannot move one without the other. The instrument has its own character. It's still more abstract than a classical instrument like the violin or the piano where the physical action alone is done and felt in real time, of course. It's significantly more incarnated than software + generic (in a good way) controllers.
The good side of this is that after having software replicas or original synthetisers, there's room to build new exciting embodiments/physical instruments.
And something like VCVRack is heaven to learn, experiment and understand what one can do with synthesis, step by step.
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
It sounds a lot like the browsers war, where the winning strategy had been to aggressively push (for free, which was rather uncommon then) one's platform, in the aim of market dominance for later benefits.
So if you have planned meeting in a week, group them (but not all of them on a single day either) and mark that day as unavailable. That usually already reduces a week of work to 4 days.
Then it's usually more on the longer term, but you (well, each dev actually) may benchmark continuously previous estimates against reality, so that they can understand their bias over time.
2/ do delegate approvals with a few basic rules: have a (short) rationale written down for each decision taken without a n+1 request; should be reversible if it's important.
3/ how long are your sprints usually?
Considering multiple invasive animal species, and past and current humans societies fate… the answer seems not very positive.
Then you mistake what could be a rather evasive appeal to authority with an ad hominem.
Perhaps engaging more deeply with the actual methodologies and scholarship within these fields might reveal the rigor you claim is absent.
You're masquerading your assertion as an argument.