MPSimmons

This is an awesome effort. I stared and played with the rotating graphics at the top for a while before reading the rest of the article, trying to figure out why it was so much better than a lot of the efforts I'd seen before, and I kind of figured out what you must be doing, but I'll admit, I wouldn't have ever done it as well or put in as much work as you had - really excellent techniques for determining character!

I am actually really curious how performant this is and whether something like this would be able to contribute beyond just demo displays. It's obviously beautiful and a marvel of work, but it seems like there should be a way to use it for more.

Also, I did find myself wondering about the inevitable Doom engine

Really nice job!

I disliked Adams, but this is a good eulogy.

>For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.

A+, no notes

That's really cool! I've never seen those before.

Has anyone ever set up the parrot equivalent of Chatroulette so parrots can interact with each other remotely?

Damn, I really enjoyed reading this. Great writeup!

All humans get a certain amount of respect, Scott Adams included.

What level of respect do you think dying earns you, above and beyond that? And why would being dead earn you more respect than you had in life?

>He also just passed away, show some respect.

It takes more than dying to earn respect.

Ope! Sorry, I missed it!

> scale and degree matter

I agree, but I don't know where that line is.

So, back in the 90s and 2000s, you could get The Gimp image editor, and you could use the equivalent of Word Art to take a word or phase and make it look cool, with effects like lava or glowing stone, or whatever. The Gimp used ImageMagick to do this, and it legit looked cool at the time.

If you weren't good at The Gimp, which required a lot of knowledge, you could generate a cool website logo by going to a web server that someone built, giving them a word or phrase, and then selecting the pre-built options that did the same thing - you were somewhat limited in customization, but on the backend, it was using ImageMagick just like The Gimp was.

If someone used The Gimp or ImageMagick to make copyrighted material, nobody would blame the authors of The Gimp, right? The software were very nonspecific tools created for broad purposes, that of making images. Just because some bozo used them to create a protected image of Mickey Mouse doesn't mean that the software authors should be held accountable.

But if someone made the equivalent of one of those websites, and the website said, "click here to generate a random picture of Mickey Mouse", then it feels like the person running the website should at least be held partially responsible, right? Here is a thing that was created for the specific purpose of breaking the law upon request. But what is the culpability of the person initiating the request?

Anyway, the scale of AI is staggering, and I agree with you, and I think that common decency dictates that the actions of the product should be limited when possible to fall within the ethics of the organization providing the service, but the responsibility for making this tool do heinous things should be borne by the person giving the order.

>I wouldn't even think twice about banning CSAM outputs.

Same, honestly. And you'll probably catch a whole lot of actual legitimate usage in that net, but it's worth it.

But you'll also miss some. You'll always miss some, even with the best guard rails. But 99% is better than 0%, I agree.

> ... and just expect the user to use it legally?

I don't think it's entirely the responsibility of the builder/supplier/service to ensure this, honestly. I don't think it can be. You can sell hammers, and you can't guarantee that the hammer won't be used to hurt people. You can put spray cans behind cages and require purchasers to be 18 years old, but you can't stop the adult from vandalism. The person has to be held responsible at a certain point.

I am, in general, pretty anti-Elon, so I don't want to be seen as taking _his_ side here, and I am definitely anti-CSAM, so let's shift slightly to derivative IP generation.

Where does the line fall between provider responsibility when providing a tool that can produce protected work, and personal responsibility for causing it to generate that work?

It feels somewhat more clearcut when you say to AI, "Draw me an image of Mickey Mouse", but why is that different than photocopying a picture of Mickey Mouse, and using Photoshop to draw a picture of Mickey Mouse? Photo copiers will block copying a dollar bill in many cases - should they also block photos of Mickey Mouse? Should they have received firmware updates whenever Steamboat Willy fell into public domain, such that they can now be allowed to photocopy that specific instance of Mickey Mouse, but none other?

This is a slippery slope, the idea that a person using the tool should hold the tool responsible for creating "bad" things, rather than the person themselves being held responsible.

Maybe CSAM is so heinous as to be a special case here. I wouldn't argue against it specifically. But I do worry that it shifts the burden of responsibility onto the AI or the model or the service or whatever, rather than the person.

Another thing to think about is whether it would be materially different if the person didn't use Grok, but instead used a model on their own machine. Would the model still be responsible, or would the person be responsible?

Oh, that's good that they added them. I stopped being active in on the sites a long time ago, so I missed that.

The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question about best practices, but you can't ask people to share their experiences or recommendations.

>Lp(a) levels are almost purely genetically determined and so elevated Lp(a) is essentially due to a poor roll of the genetic dice... For simplicity, we will devote little further attention to either of these secondary risk factors”

As someone who rolled poorly on those genetic dice, I would like to complain. But also, disregarding a factor that impacts 20%[1] of the population seems disingenuous.

[1] - https://familyheart.org/family-sharing-tools/high-lpa-family...

As far as I can tell from the narrative, Venezuela was basically serving as a puppet state for China, and if that's true, I would probably give that as the primary reason, but who knows. Maybe it's because Venezuela did poorly in the FIFA World Cup qualifier and this was action dictated by his recent peace prize award.

On a slightly more serious note, the charges against Maduro were actually filed in 2020: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/nicol-s-maduro-moros...

Gonna have to write more speeding tickets to pay for these, I guess

Yeah, this is definitely an n-dimensional modeling space. Left/Right wing are only one axis, and as far as I can tell, not even the most definitive in terms of determining if I agree with someone's perspective. I think that would be the authoritarian / anti-authoritarian. Lots of left wing people are still authoritarians, but between those two, you can get a _decent_ feeling of where someone is with regard to the national politics.

Agreed, I immediately thought of vehicles, but this is cool too.

No, not like there are with Arduino. Arduino is definitely the best I know of for embedded programming, and it has its place there, but I stopped trying to do real work with it.

Yeah, for sure. My more... uhh.. creative toys are definitely not ESPhome, but it's super cool that I can solder on a few wires to a DHT-11 and throw it in a closet with the weakest USB power plug I own, and end up with a great sensor.

I also really appreciate how routine ESPHome has made building sensor networks in my home. Really just incredibly useful software.

Ever since I got involved with Espressif's ESP32/ESP8266 chips, I haven't even thought about arduinos, except to download the UI, but you don't even need to do that with the right VSCode extensions to make your life better.

I do keep meaning to try this though - https://platformio.org/

As a bit of personal advice from a former blogger who had a million+ visitors per year, it's not about anything except your readers and the community you build. AI might have facts on everything, but AI content will not build a community and enrich the people's lives who engage with the site.

When everything else is a computer, be a human.

I don't know to what extent it has directly impacted his quality, but it appears that Derek sold Veritasium to a private equity firm

https://www.electrify.video/post/electrify-completes-majorit...

Warning: I thought the first 10 minutes of Up were the saddest thing I'd ever watch, but then I watched Grave of the Fireflies.

What a ridiculous, intellectually dishonest comment. Why even spend the time?

PowerToys (https://legacyupdate.net/download-center/powertoys) used to be on my "first software to install" list on a new machine. Between Tweak UI and Deskman, you could _almost_ get a minimal X Windows-like UI. Get those set up and add on LiteStep (http://litestep.net/) and you were pretty much good to go, with the exceptions of the kernel, network stack, and CLI toolset, of course.

Awesome charts, thanks! I think it bears out that the multiplier for older hardware isn't as extreme as the newer hardware, right?

Undoubtably the cost would go up, but nobody is building out datacenters full of DDR4, either, so I don't figure it would go up nearly as much as DDR5 is right now.

This reminds me of the recent LaurieWired video presenting a hypothetical of, "what if we stopped making CPUs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk

Spoiler, but the answer is basically that old hardware rules the day because it lasts longer and is more reliable of timespans of decades.

DDR5 32GB is currently going for ~$330 on Amazon

DDR4 32GB is currently going for ~$130 on Amazon

DDR3 32GB is currently going for ~50 on Amazon (4x8GB)

For anyone where cost is a concern, using older hardware seems like a particularly easy choice, especially if a person is comfortable with a Linux environment, since the massive droves of recently retired Windows 10 incompatible hardware works great with your Linux distro of choice.

Growing up in West Virginia, I was in a moderately sized city (40k people) but when traveling to smaller high schools for football games, you'd often find a shared latrine as the bathroom, and everyone who needed to pee would just crowd around a long sink thing and just let 'er rip. No idea what it was like in the ladies'