dbspin

Not spear phishing in organisations... Spear phishing against individual people. Your grandmother, your aged uncle...

Your comment on nuclear waste is so ill considered and poorly informed it's not worth responding to.

I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a couple of years now that real time identity theft voice and video calls are going to be an enormous problem. I don't think anyone realises how much of a problem. I haven't seen a single effective solution proposed to proving digital identity given these new attack vectors. It's akin to nuclear waste in that way - the benefits are obvious, but the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.

If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it.

A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.

The investors.

They're not remotely similar. The consequences for a spill of nuclear waste - either from a storage facility that's been compromised or hit by a strike during a war, or for example the sinking of a delivery ship that's transporting waste - are enormous. Ditto the largely unsolved costs of decommissioning.

Yup, and a duopoly isn't a free market!

> most of my contrarian ideas are correct.

My stripper finds me attractive, my therapist is in love with me, and my genius goes unrecognised because of small men intimidated by ideas they cannot comprehend.

I'm really hoping your comment is satire, but assuming it isn't, genuinely it might be time to get some help. Our capacity for self delusion as humans is enormous, and it's only higher in brighter people - particularly autodidacts who are used to being the smartest person they know.

Beautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical.

Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.

'Europe' is a big place. Here in Ireland good quality beef is readily affordable, and not particularly more expensive than chicken or pork.

That is not what Yedlin's tests show or made an effort to test! His famous first set of comparison tests are about resolution, specifically his opinions about the unimportance of 4K.

I deeply disagree with his conclusion, because he is downgrading a digital image to show it can match the resolution and some of the visual aspects of a 16 print. Which is like putting a filter over a high resolution monitor and then comparing it to SD TV.

But in either case, his work wasn't about whether digital could match the look of any film (it can't).

He has also never released his nuke workflow, although he's more recently productised it to some extent.

Here's his discussion of the footage you linked - https://www.yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/DispPrepDemoFollowup

The only cinema cameras I know of that don't employ some variation of a bayer filter in the colour science are black magic cameras. Their higher end cameras all have an RGBW sensor with a 6*6 grid including a white photo site. This is way beyond my technical level of expertise to understand or explain, but there's some more info below.

https://www.cined.com/ursa-cine-12k-blackmagics-rgbw-sensor-...

Broadly speaking these cameras aren't used on any major features. The market is still pretty much exclusively Sony and Arri.

That's fascinating - presumably a facet of the IMAX process.

The majority of films shot analogue are graded digitally. Because the most popular film stock they use (Kodak Verita 200D, employed for it's 'classic' look, good skin tones and modern niceties like anti static and anti halation) requires a digital stage in development [1].

[1] https://www.kodak.com/content/pdfs/motion/KODAK-VERITA-200D-...

Hilariously out of touch take. In the West AI video is popular almost exclusively amongst boomers (and of course tech company employees). Gen Z absolutely loath it. Filmmaking is yet another future career that's being made impossible for them.

1) Having met Stross, and briefly spoken to him way back when, he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future.

2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.

There are no purely capitalist states on earth. Not one. We all live in mixed economies, where some aspects of market are regulated or even entirely state controlled. e.g.: defense spending, road construction etc etc. Where exactly that money should be spent, and according to what moral framework - these are political and ethical questions. But to handwave and say 'capitalism' is meaningless. Capitalism itself, in it's modern highly financialised form - is entirely reliant on state force, the rule of law, regulation, market protectionism etc to function.

Sure, let me explain it to you.

The end result is not recreatable with digital assets. i.e.: It doesn't matter your budget, we cannot currently simulate the look of the original footage shot on 35 (let alone 70mm, forget about IMAX 80mm) by shooting digitally.

Also what you're referring to as 'garbage', is colour grading and composite work. It's not adulteration, it's an essential create part of the filmmaking work. Whether you're doing it exclusively as part of the development process of the physical film, or digitally in Nuke or Resolve etc.

Your inability to understand why people do things in a domain you're not familiar with is indicative of gaps in your knowledge, not the futility of the process. Lots of information about how and why all this works as it does online.

Every film is colour corrected and graded digitally (in addition to all the special effects and compositing work), and this is in fact one of the cheapest parts of the process. So no, it's not remotely a consideration.

Some directors like the appearance of film... Given that the spectacle is a large part of the reason we go to the cinema, the colour fidelity and (and in the case of IMAX) unique scale and aspect ratio are the point... Not sure why practicality or cost would override that?

As a director who doesn't shoot on film - I still see the appeal, there's a particular quality to skin tones - especially in response to older arc lights and the like - that digital still doesn't quite capture. Ditto motion cadence, halation and grain that are all emulated in digital post to greater or lesser degrees of fidelity.

Way too many people put themselves in the position of proposing reducing the liberty of others, while unconsciously assuming their own liberty won't be significantly curtailed.

I live on an island, and it's literally only now, in my late forties that I'm earning the kind of money that allows me to travel moderately. If you tire of the privilege, feel free not to. For me it's perhaps the one aspect of modernity that unarguably better than the past, the thing we get in return for global homogeneity.

You think people resent the rich now? Imagine how resentment would grow under an enforced localism. Imagine how much bigotry would increase.

Cosmopolitanism is real! People who travel are more tolerant, less supportive of war, and better informed. The world isn't a virtuality to them, it's a set of places they have visited or may visit. Peoples they've known or may yet know.

Came here to say something similar.

I'm someone who suffers from major reluctance to exercise. To be more specific - the first thirty minutes of exercise are hell, always. Doesn't matter how long I've been doing an activity. It feels like the first time. Exhaustion, fatigue whatever.

This basically means stuff like jogging is out, since it takes so long to get over the hump each time my motivation to do it can't be maintained.

Recently (in my late forties), inspired by some friends who go regularly, I've started attending a weight lifting centred gym near my house.

The cardio I do at the beginning and end of each workout is still hell. But the weight lifting itself really is quite freeing, and it's wonderful to see your strength go (gradually up). It's great also to discover my legs are much stronger than I'd have expected (after years of riding a fixie), despite my arms being flimsy noodles.

The phrase the global south elides the fact that those countries are far higher in inequality than the West. Wealthy elites being the only ones able to travel isn't a solution to climate change, it's a recipe for a degree of social control we haven't seen in a century. We can fight climate change, and increase mobility, standard of living and freedom for all. There is an enormous amount of low hanging fruit here - from switching to renewables, to moving militaries off gas and oil, to switching cargo ships to renewable energy. Trapping humanity in their nation of birth shouldn't be the go to first step. The consequences of that degree of social control aren't being allowed for here.

Insane take - this is just ensuring that the only people who get to enjoy travel are the rich. Nothing in our society is improved by taking a privilege that's widely enjoyed and restricting it to the wealthy or very wealthy.

I wonder how far we are from being able to custom spec electronics to locally manufacture low volume dedicated hardware devices at the late 90s Sony level of quality. Is this something that's likely to be possible as 3D printers, cnc machines, AI design tools and microelectronics advance. Or is the combination of materials science and expertise impossible to ever replicate? Basically is a solar punk local fabrication future where you can custom build a CD Walkman, or equivalent technical device - in small run quantities, to high tolerances, making small runs of all the requisite components - even possible. Or do we need to 'wait for' nanobots or replicators for that kind of manufacturing?

They're not free to run, Kimi K3 needs to be run on the cloud, and the quantised versions aren't as capable. Unless you happen to have 3 - 5 TB of VRAM and an 8-node cluster of 8× NVIDIA H100s to run the full fat version. Plus the weights are not yet available to download in any case.

I'm not following the argument.

The robots linked above wouldn't be capable of vacuuming either. My point stands - the world is made for humans, we might remake an aspect of it for new vehicles that provided some radical advantage (as we did with airports or roads, although that would be a much larger undertaking with the level of complexities cities have today). But we're certainly not going to have twenty different labour saving devices roaming our homes, nor are we redesigning homes to facilitate such robots.

So if we do see domestic robots, they'll have to a) perform multi-domain functions, and b) fit into existing domestic spaces.

Long term, any generally useful domestic robot would have to have a pretty deep capacity for autonomy across a range of tasks - whether it's role specific or not. So it follows that it's much more likely we'll introduce humanoid robots (which already exist, starting at 30K), with the capacity for a wide range of subtle movements, and gradually add skills to them over time.

We already have roombas and dishwashers. I can't see us adding dedicated laundry folders, dedicated chef robots etc. There are social considerations in addition to the level of goofery that having numerous different devices to house and charge would involve.

Fair, I think the map is nonsense, but also the idea of 30K castles in Ireland is clearly untrue.

Seems like your map lists pre-historic ring forts, not castles?

I'm not sure what the 'official' definition of a castle is, but I personally wouldn't consider a crannóg or something like Dún Aonghasa a castle. Nor would I consider a stand alone tower house a castle, although they might (along with gate lodges and great houses), sometimes be colloquially referred to as castles.

Surely a castle is a fortified building, specific to the middle ages. Wikipedia agrees - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle

Which would put the number of Anglo-Norman castles in Ireland much lower, probably something around 100.

I think this perspective is now demonstrably false. It was basically the defacto position of most roboticists until a few months back. But we've already seen the cost of humanoid robots fall precipitously (even without the kind of mass production that genuinely useful home and real world intelligence would bring).

Which seems more likely, that cheap humanoids will continue to improve in dexterity, battery life, strength etc. Leveraging the vast investment in research into real world task training. Or - that we'll redesign millions of everyday objects to fit the limitations of current task specific robots?

If you answer the latter, I've got a whole bunch of mid century quirky labour saving inventions in the back room I'd like to sell you.

That makes sense. Viewed as just a store, it isn't the worst.

However - a store is no longer the competition. In terms of promoting independent music and giving the artists both control over distribution and profit, Bandcamp is almost the only game in town. However the complimentary service is streaming and the typical user is on mobile. It's awful for both mobile streaming and browsing. As well as recommendations in general.

If we were still in 2003 and Napster and it's successors were the alternative, bandcamp would be great. But record stores (outside of a few independent marquee stores like Amoeba in hip, high income cities) are now glorified merch stands and music is gatekept on evil services like spotify.

Just loaded up the bandcamp app for the first time in a while and my goodness is it godawful. Worse than I remember. Arcane icons, unclear features, total lack of centring the music I've already bought or the artists I've bought it from. It's a shop and that's not been enough for a very long time.

Lets bear in mind that most folks don't even have an mp3 player client on their phone. The distribution platform must - to stay useful, also be a listening solution. Bandcamp fails at even that.

Just to be clear - I very much want Bandcamp to succeed. Hell if I could roll back all technology to a point in the mid-late 2000s just before the smartphone I would. But in todays climate it has to improve or eventually become irrelevant.

I applaud bandcamp radio's existence, but their player doesn't even have a jog function. It's shocking.

So I've been a bandcamp user since close to the dawn of the service. The issues I commented on above don't relate to their curation emails but the poverty of the interface itself. Bandcamp has been widely and roundly, not to mention accurately criticised for it's technical / UX failures for a long time. It also has no social features whatsoever. Unfortunately a curated email isn't a replacement for proper recommendations based on similar users listening (as lastfm used to to, see above anecdote), content based recommendations, or genuine social recommendations. Not to mention the fact that half the writing staff were fired several years ago, and the quality of their curation fell off a cliff after that point.

The app and site are awful, and even finding stuff you've bought to play or download can be a nightmare if you own a lot of material. To site a specific example - I bought a back catalogue of sound effects records for work reasons. They have many dozens of individual releases - which makes navigating my other purchased records much more difficult.

Bandcamp also only allow you to 'uncover' the download links for tracks or albums one at a time, presumably to save bandwidth costs. I could go on and on.

It's a hypothetically great service that's absolutely crippled by not having been improved for a decade.

Agreed. Last FM is one of the great lost opportunities of web 2.0 (up there with the early location based social networks). The website still exists, and I still use it (despite painfully poor integration into iOS, requiring the third party paid client Marvis to synch). They offer unclear value subscription to access all your data, and at this point, most dedicated music geeks have probably moved to OSS / local solutions integrating musicbrainz datasets.

There is a world in which lastfm is the one of the most popular social networks, tiktok before tiktok (which started as music.ly) if you like. There's another in which it developed into a Tidal like successful boutique streaming platform. Instead it's a half forgotten not really working nonsense.

My favourite lastfm story, is that back when it was somewhat popular (at least indie popular), someone commented on my lastfm profile to say they'd been in Tokyo and been approached by the members of a hyper niche Swedish band (Strip Squad) because one of the members had heard their music being played in a park. The guy playing them had found them because of my lastfm. Lastfm at the time actively suggested connecting with other users who had similar psychographic taste.

I'm all in favour of supporting local music scenes. Just personally I don't enjoy gigs, never have really. Sound is bad, always too loud, vibes are too alcohol based (at least here in Ireland), they're pricey etc. I'd actually love it if there was more of a 'listening cafe' Japanese style venue / scene here. There's a popular bar that poses as one, but it has a terrible, wildly over loud sound system in a box room with a loud open bar next door.