I would like to see that topic covered in more detail. I can't see how something that essentially figures out what the next word should be can create something new, without actually understanding the real world.
You don't, at least for me, I have 5700 followers and most posts (with art) only see 200-500 impressions, whereas a year ago I was getting 3000 on average. The Following tab is clearly (at least for me) not in timeline order, so most of my followers never even know I posted anything. Since I post art most of my followers are artists, so you would think they would see them. Impressions (which are Twitter putting tweets in a timeline so that people scroll by them) are not under the control of the poster. Likes per impression for me are up, so interaction is higher which is supposed to increase how often tweets are shown, but only timely retweets seem to help any.
I am trying to figure out how the algorithm decides on what to show in the Following tab, but the code is way too big to analyze without being able to run it and look at logging/metrics/stats.
A year ago my account with 5700 followers got an average of 3000 impressions per post (art). Today it's only 200-500. It mentions their fanout system was replaced by something new, not sure when or if thats in the drop, but my impression count dropped around April-May last year. Clearly something decided my posts should not shown to my followers very often.
It's not worth $20B, that's just his ego talking. I can see it being worth $4B. It has no long term path to any kind of high growth multiple. Twitter was always an amazingly useful concept but not a big money making business idea. At best it could become like a steady ultility company.
I was at the train terminal in Paderborn (visiting Germany) and did not see the sign that "suggested" paying to use the restroom—but the attendant did not miss that I didn't pay and almost assaulted me. When your German is rather limited it's sort of difficult to understand when someone is screaming at you...
Early in my generative art, I spent a lot of time packing various small shapes together, it was a fun process to figure out how to maximize the coverage without leaving large gaps. For example, a piece with almost every shape I was using: https://digcon.art/details.html?key=river-in-the-woods
Most banks do not have most of their capital tied up for ten years; SVB had to sell their treasuries before the ten years at a loss. The only thing tying other banks who don't do that to SVB is random fear of a bank run.
Maybe that's new, when I was a HIPAA architect for a health related company, I rarely saw anyone being sued or even investigated (mid 2000s). Given how many violations I saw there (and complained about) nothing ever changed because they felt no one would do anything to them.
Contract from OTA (at least did when I worked) does not allow the chain/brand to undercut the OTA, in exchange for traffic. Given its mostly a duopoly (Expedia/Priceline), I guess they feel they have to give in or get cut out of business.
My experience is from when I worked at the now defunct (but still a brand) OTA. Likely the two remaining OTA systems have evolved to stay relevant. Hotel chains will then evolve again themselves, it's like a war.
People rarely realize that making a hotel booking at an OTA (mostly reduced to Expedia Brands and Priceline Brands these days) is a combination of their systems that then call the hotel systems to make the actual booking (or sometimes just a fax or email if the hotel has no IT). So information that Booking collects is mostly sent to the hotel system; there isn't any other way. Booking could add something to their side which is passed only to the customer (such as an ID of some kind) to ensure anything coming from them is legit since a leak of a hotel system would not have that. That would not help emails purporting to come from the hotel however and is likely doubtful to help much. I doubt most hotel brands would accept an email relay, they are already discounting the price to provide the OTA profit margin so not getting the actual email would be a sticking point.
Having worked at an OTA (before Expedia got us) I refuse to book at anything other than a legit hotel system. OTA's are fine for price discovery but you often get a better deal (and better service) from the hotel/brand directly. The front desk knows you booked via an OTA instead of the hotel directly.
I had a Lisa on my desk back in early 1984 (along with an IBM PC/XT, an Apple III and an Apple II of some kind). It was an amazing device that clearly showed the direction of computing in the future. It was also way overpriced and underpowered (a 5 MhZ 68000 is not exactly fast), but while I didn't get a chance to write anything for it as it was just an eval unit, reading the documentation was mind bogglingly different than anything I had ever seen. Of course it was the Mac that actually lead to the future (and then Windows 3 that took over years later), but the Lisa pointed the direction.
To be honest, I expect Elon and Twitter will be discontinued at some point, without any good feelings and thanks on the part of any of their customers, unlike the app developers Twitter just killed.
What is needed is to do Twitter again, in some way that is more open and supportive of client apps, but still has the immediacy and global search that Twitter has. Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement. Twitter was always a terrible business, but an incredibly useful idea. The idea needs to exist.
Oddly enough my first project as a programmer in 1981 was writing a recursive descent parser in Fortran 78 (for Jovial language). Since I had no degree in CS, I previously had zero clue what a parser even was. Fun way to start 4 decades of programming.
AI is reflective of whatever you trained it on. So are people. But you can't build the perfect AI that reflects 100% of everyone's desires; no matter what you feed it some percentage of people will find it irritating or terrible. In the long run I see no solution to trying to make a perfect AI that satisfies everyone unless you eliminate or unify every individual's desires, which of course no one wants either. Maybe the best you can do is make multiple AI's with different training material and guardrails, then have them argue with each other.
I experienced a takeoff abort in New Orleans in a 737 when some birds (I think that's what the pilot said afterwards) clogged up the pitot tubes (in the 1980s) and either the plane aborted the takeoff or the pilot did. It was a max effort whatever it was, scared the shit out of everyone.
The problem happens over time when both properties begin to fail after changes are made to the system by people unfamiliar with the system, and make worse when sudden failures are addressed by the same people, which creates a feedback loop of failures. Eventually the system becomes unusable. Generally companies don't lay off huge swatches of people randomly, so this kind of bit rot is fairly rare.
My last employer one day had virtually every system fail in the world at the same time due to a hidden dependency on some routing in a single data center; it took 8 hours to restart all the systems since that had not happened before. It was a fun slack to follow. There was a lot of institutional knowledge that was able to get everything working again. Imagine this kind of issue with people having no idea how things work...
I was briefly suicidal about 20 years ago, took anti-depressants for a couple of years, never needed them since. I can't say if they "worked" in a biochemical sense — perhaps the only affect was placebo — but they did keep me sane until my life circumstances improved. The brain is a very complex organ we still only vaguely understand, so "fixing" it is still very much a primitive response.
Burnout can affect your ability to work on complex things, a lack of time away from programming, high stress positions and long hours, boring repetitive work. Overcoming all or some of those things takes a lot of energy away from your ability to focus.
It's not age, I was more capable when I retired in 2021 than I was in the 1980s because I found ways to give my brain enough time away (sometimes getting laid off forces you!) and also switching to completely unrelated programming jobs to provide a new perspective. I never completely burned out by giving my brain something new to focus on.
Until our government creates a law that makes the credit bureaus have to pay every time their security fails, nothing will happen. They don't have to care and probably laugh at all of us. But politicians are cheap to buy off and nothing changes. I am sure all 3 of them have huge legal teams anxious to slap you silly if you try to sue them.
Historically speaking, prohibiting depictions of Muhammad are a recent concept in Sunni Islam, especially the Saudi driven Wahhabism which is extremely conservative. Over history art as always been a huge part of Islamic life. This painting has been revered for centuries. The only reason this time it caused the school to go berserk is a single student complained, leading to overreaction in fear. Details: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/08/an-art...
As an artist my favorite definition of art has always been "An expression by an artist in a medium". You can't separate art from the artist without it being artifice. AI can simulate art but not the artist who created it. Sadly we may soon live in a world where art, music, literature—in fact all creative arts—wind up just as machine generated simulations of creativity.
The only thing I can see that the Studio can't do is access hardware directly. My M1 Ultra is beyond anything I could need performance wise (I mostly do complex generative art, but I only need all 20 cores only occasionally). I imagine a few people might need more than I have but it's probably not a large number.