dbspin

Great, please state your expertise in these matters.

The issue here is you have a large number of people in the hacker news 'community' who are domain experts with insufficient humility. While it's great to be informed, essential in fact to engage with a useful conversation about public policy - it's ludicrous to get ideological about areas of scientific knowledge in which one is a layman. If the consensus is, based on UNEP, IPCC etc, that we're going to see the deaths of at least hundreds of millions, the loss of major sea fronting cities and a likely systems collapse of our civilisation... Then mannered critiques of policy outcomes read like defences of appeasement in 1939. Buffoonery masquerading as serious engagement with reality.

This isn't like stealing from a business. These are individuals most private conversations, potentially including their bank accounts etc. Poverty is no defence - and yes, I've spent a great deal of my life barely scraping by. You'll find poor people are significantly less tolerant of theft, especially from individuals, than rich. Whether that evidences the theft inherent in most forms of wealth generation I'll leave up to the reader.

Hackerspaces still exist - and seem to be booming again since the tech layoffs. Dropped by Noisebridge while I was visiting SF and as the kids say, the vibes were immaculate.

Nope, they'd build something custom if such an effect was required. It would be done on wires with the wires removed in post... Just like Fury Road. The results would be more predictable, the liability would be contained in existing insurance configurations and moreover directors trust their practical effects team.

Literally the exact thing the CEO of my old Berlin based startup said before our team was laid off / replaced with AI.

Never gonna happen. It's trivial to do this with CGI, there'd be no advantage, and a whole heck of a lot of liability doing it practically.

Because it works... The level of counterfeit currency is readily measurable. Currency can be withdrawn and replaced. Individual stolen notes can be tracked. Counterfeiting of the dollar and the euro today is a relatively minor problem

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr2502... https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/banknote https://www.cranecurrency.com/news-insights/85-decline-in-us...

> In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.

This is prohibited, not in an ideal world, but in essentially every Western democracy except the United States. I appreciate the political difficulty of implimenting this (or indeed any useful structural) change in the contemporary American political climate / level of dysfunction. But outlawing corruption is not some utopian dream.

To quote Fran Lebowtiz "A great audience is more important for the creation of great art than great artists are"... We've lost a great, ironic, self aware informed commentariat because a literate, emotionally stable audience for long form content has shrunk. Which means the work isn't there (or at least isn't distributed beyond a few substacks), to perpetuate and expand that audience.

I see the same effect all the time in fiction. Innovative challenging books don't get published (or even picked up by agents), because the publishing industry is run by the kind of people who are frightened and offended by such books. Which means the audience for those books become only those lucky enough to be exposed to older, denser, more innovative fiction - which invariably shrinks.

> Severely competitive and hopeless environments will do a hell of a job on human compassion.

True.

> Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature.

Concentration camps and famines are not the 'state of nature'. A closer analogue would be tribal societies in the Amazon basin, Eastern Africa and the like. Constant hunger and scarcity are not the norm for well adapted human cultures, nor have the been for most of recorded history.

The Aztecs lacked horses and attack dogs. The Spanish by contrast had perfected combat with both. Both proved decisive over and over again. You're correct in asserting that guns weren't decisive - although initially he noise and visual display of firearms were a significant factor in confusing and frightening the Aztecs (especially the common people and subjugated indigenous groups).

There's no mystery here. The Aztecs ruled brutally over dozens of other indigenous groups, they practised slavery and human sacrifice. When the Spanish showed impressive military equipment and the implication (when reinforcements arrived, albeit in small numbers) that they represented a powerful external military force, ancestral opponents who'd been subjugated by the Aztec empire were quick to throw in their lot.

> an industry body that exists to protect the IP of artists for the mutual benefit of artists and publishers.

This is the most unintentionally hilarious misunderstanding of what the RIAA does, and the power relationship between artists and publishers I've read in years. In practice the RIAA exists to maintain the copyright monopoly of a few major labels. Rent seeking from the non-artist owned catalogues of the enormous majority of musicians who never 'recoup' their initial record deal.

> While it's seductive to carve the world up into goodies and baddies, it doesn't make it true.

It's far more seductive (since it's the default) to assume class relations don't exist, and wealth distribution is meritocratic. There may not be 'goodies and baddies', but there absolutely are rentiers and workers, billionaires and plebs.

All the major labels are public companies. Which means it's the very same people - the investment class, who claim ownership and extract wealth from say Warner and Open AI (should it make any money - obviously the whole house of cards could come down first).

Does ones world view get upgraded to oil paint if one acknowledges that it's the same class of people - and in many cases literally the same people, PE firms and family offices - profiting from 2000s era record industry profits and on the hook for / in line to profit from Open AI, Anthropic and the rest if they IPO?

The practical isn't being given due consideration here. We spend the enormous majority of our time in the built environment. Every single aspect of our homes and cities (from the size of doorways to the level of countertops) are designed around median human size and form. It's ludicrous to suggest these will change to accommodate the need of personal service robots - which already face a host of barriers to adoption, from privacy to cost to reliability etc. If there ever are to be general purpose domestic robots, they will absolutely be 'humaniform' to use Azimov's terminology. Sure a large hotel or hospital or facility can adapt itself to the shape and needs of more specialised machines, but we're not doing that in our homes. Nor are we likely to return to a jetson's vision of dozens of separate functionally distinct machines in the home. We've been doing precisely the opposite for decades - moving more distinct functions to combined devices as housing gets smaller and more expensive.

Death Stranding 1 at least was a fairly large commercial success. 5 million copies sold, critical darling, and a hugely original put at doing something new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Stranding#Reception

This may be the case - although none of us have access to the real figures.

It's also impossible to judge success relative to marketing budget, how well the game was pushed by Sony etc.

Clearly a critical success and an objectively good game however.

Having lived in Berlin, FLINTA only apartments are a significant minority (up to half) of spaces seeking housemates through publicaly available groups on platforms like Facebook (as opposed to websites like WG-Gesucht). So there's quite a significant material impact. Living in Ireland currently, more and more arts workshops, funding opportunities, arts mixers and the like are FLINTA only or FLINTA preferred (terminology can differ). Ditto club nights, but that's whatever. This is a real and growing issue if you're not a member of the approved groups, but have to function in those environments.

The fact that you can't perceive the equivalence is instructive. Group A generalises individual issues with members of Group B and forms an ideology of blame and exclusion. But Group B was evil all along, cry Group A. Group B have become deranged cry Group A. And so it goes.

I should have also mentioned DaVinci also heavily uses CUDA on Windows, and metal on Mac. I'm assuming the functions implemented in these frameworks do have fallbacks on Vulkan or similar, but I doubt they're as optimised. I know there are some issues with Resolve on Linux for example. Any halfway decent Nvidia card with enough VRAM should work fine - i.e.: a 30 series card is grand. But I'd be skeptical integrated graphics would have the horsepower for denoising or a host of other build in effects. Rendering would likely be slow also. Although this is the least important element of the process on modern hardware.

Which of his ideas didn't stick? Pretty sure the guy hasn't had a failure in recent memory.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls596355504/

It's almost as if people can have a variety of opinions, and support institutions and states they don't agree with in every dimension. 'The left' is a wildly broad church, comparing 'the new yorker' with say 'the socialist workers party' adds more heat than light. Similarly 'Europe' is a very big and populous place, as is the subset of it that's in the EU. Most EU citizens very much oppose attacks on encryption, the digital millennium copyright act etc. Those are pieces of legislation pushed by the European Commission - a body that is not democratically elected.

Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.

Resolve is extremely RAM hungry. For 4K video I wouldn't want to be editing with less than 12GB of VRAM. I'm guessing that excludes most integrated graphics.

Source - I work as a professional editor (amongst other things). Please commenters, do not come at me with your five minute low bit rate projects that required only a LUT and some contrast and 'worked fine' in DaVinci on a potato.

The irony being that a lot of older practical VFX artists aren't able to tell when CGI is terrible. They're often so enamored with what the tech enables, that they're the last to see how quickly it becomes shoddy. Not sure what the equivalent of the hedonic treadmill is for CG, but it ages very rapidly, versus the best practical effects which maintain a charming physicality - even when they're no longer convincing.

They're enormously risk averse, and realised the infrastructure (and perhaps more important external dependency cost of building out their own training data centres). Now that the utility of the technology is clearer, and OpenAI amongst others have proven it's not only Nvidia and Google that can build a stack capable of training frontier models - I think we may find that the beast waketh from slumber.

The thing that doesn't get written about is that precisely the same situation occurs for women. Decentering men is equivalent to MGTOW. The torrent of misandrist content on social media utterly dwarfs the amount of 'red pill' / manosphere or similar content. It's mainstream in a way outright misogynistic content hasn't been for decades. Worse still, it's almost impossible to have this discussion without the immediate repost of 'but actually men are terrible', or some other such nonsense.

There's a very old fashioned 'battle of the sexes' being pushed by algorithmic content, and it's having visible toxic effects on the capacity of people to socialise, form relationships, engage in social reproduction and function normally in society. There's a vast torrent of such poison aimed at both men and women. Pretending it's only occurring to men, or that only men are being radicalised, is refusing to engage with the problem.

The comments section of literally every mainstream video on instagram reels, tiktok and the like that in any way touches on gender, masculinity, femininity etc - isn't dominated by misogynistic comments and hasn't been for years. But rather thousands of 'not all men, but always a man', 'yaas goddess', 'men aren't lonely enough', and countless other shibboleths.

The normalisation of FLINTA only spaces (and accommodation) and the like offline has brought these dynamics into the real world in ways that further isolate and dehumanise.

This was true right when Weimar Germany fell to the Nazis also. There's a degree of inertia to politics. We're also talking about a region of Germany that has been economically depressed for decades, with an unemployment rate twice the national average.

Sadly we're all internet people, and have been for about 15 years. If you mean people on Hacker News... Then yes, obviously they're by and large better informed about the reality of surveillance, government and corporate, than most. Nothing theoretical about any of it. Unless we fail to remember the content of Snowdon's leaks.

I find your comment bewildering. It seems so focused on the perceived effect of an issue that it leaves no room for the actual material effect of the issue.

Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.

The media discourse is interesting, but only sociologically. The fact that these devices are actually spying is significantly more pertinent.

> PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too.

Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.

> PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to.

This is factually incorrect. You're confusing the shadows in the cave for reality.

> I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes.

I think it's important that someone point out this isn't a 'PR problem'. It's a practical resistance to commodified surveillance. All these domestic robotics companies train on video of users homes, many sell such data, each and every one are a vector for state domestic state surveillance. Not to mention criminal hackers, stalkers and others with an interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing. Short of having non-internet connected, locally processing domestic robots - something unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future - they are a privacy nightmare. Bad as google home, alexa and such devices are for privacy - a walking, controllable, camera and set of mechanical arms running loose in a home is infinitely worse.