mindcandy

Perfect is the enemy of the great.

Credit card users pay $1+ fees per transaction all the time. They don’t complain only because vendors usually eat the fees on their behalf to obscure the issue.

I have a “2% cash back on everything” card which I know is actually a “we charged your vendor 4% and shared half of that with people like you who clicked the right button” card. I don’t like it. But, that’s the game.

People complain about the impossibility of crypto having fees of pennies with settlement times of minutes while constantly using credit cards that have fees of dollars with a settlement time of days.

To say it was “trained on child porn” is just about the most “well, technically….” thing that can be said about anything.

Several huge commercial and academic projects scraped billions of images off of the Internet and filtered them best they knew how. SD trained on some set of those and later some researchers managed to identify a small number of images classified as CP were still in there.

So, out of the billions of images, was there greater than zero CP images? Yes. Was it intentional/negligent? No. Does it affect the output in any significant way? No. Does it make for internet rage bait and pitchforking? Definitely.

> the evidence shows money isn’t buying results.

There are different kinds of results.

There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets my favored politicians into office” which apparently isn’t working out too well.

There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets politicians to give me favors at the expense of their constituents” which unfortunately works very well.

And, there’s “Money being spent on campaigns gets politicians to favor laws that encourage donatory competition between big donators even if it is at great expense to everyone including their constituents” which is also going just swimmingly.

All of this is because politicians know that if they don’t play the asshole here, their competition will and they’ll end up with a large multiple of their campaign budget. And, that will put them out of office. A small difference like 2x might not work so well, but 10x certainly does.

Am I reading this right?

Revenue: $667m

Total comp of 3 execs: $322m

Income: ($90m)

I might have a suggestion on how they can get out of the red. It's a wild one, I know. But, it just might work!

From what I understand, the US Dollar is backed by: The IRS requires taxes be paid in dollars. It's a federal offense to refuse payment in dollars for purchases under US jurisdiction. The US has negotiated other countries to require payment in dollars for oil and maybe other goods. The world generally has confidence in the dollar as a fairly stable currency that is unlikely to collapse.

What did I miss?

My understanding of what backs Bitcoin is: By mining Bitcoin, you are provably putting yourself into a financial loss and therefore are provably motivated to turn that around into a profit. Buying Bitcoin is also equivalent to mining in this regard. That means around the world, millions of people are motivated to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars to ensure that the system continues to not only keep working, but grow more valuable.

I get that the concept is upsetting. And, I'm not going to tell people to not be upset or not state their will. Ex: DeviantArt has instated an opt-in checkbox for "It's OK to train on my art" and I think that's great.

But, everything I've heard and learned about how AI works leads me to the conclusion that such a move is almost entirely symbolic. Counter to what our egos would like to believe, the vast majority of the training images and the vast majority of the learning value for AI comes from random, crappy photographs of various things. Without a million photos of dogs and trees, the AI can't make a stylized dog distinguishable from a stylized tree. And, it's turning out that, from that base of crappy photographs, it doesn't take many high-aesthetic images to make a high-aesthetic AI.

Very good!

Alternatively, if I created a large body of works that were 90% Lisa Frank and brought it to a large market distribution, making significant revenue, then she could sue me for damaging her market and her brand. Which she has done to others in the past and rightly won. Go Lisa Frank!

But, if I used an AI tool in the process of making an image that came out 10% Lisa Frank, she wouldn't have a strong case against me. Nor does she have a case against the million random teenagers hand-copying her style but not making significant revenue from their copies.

Either way, AI doesn't really factor in here. The results are the results and the markets are the markets regardless of AI or paint brushes.

> there is no mechanism for attribution.

What if there was?

What if I hand-painted an image (without AI) and God himself came down from heaven and explained to the world that my painting was derived 10% from my observations of the collected works of Lisa Frank, 3% from looking at Davinci paintings, and 87% a long tail of various sources. And then I sell my painting for $100.

OK. Now what?

Anecdotally, as a 6’0” moderately-attractive dude in SF: I’ve laughed at the statistically unlikely number of founders/CEOs/upper management who are not only taller than me, but also are not subtle when they use their imposing height in conversation to get everyone else to just go along with whatever BS they are spouting. Bonus giggles if they are part of the hoard with thick hair and a square jaw.

Looks to me more like we were in a very long, very cool period and are suddenly popping out of it and are only accelerating. That’s fine for the planet. But, sucks pretty hard for any life forms that evolved to fit the Earth in the last 10 million years according to that chart.

eschelon said that we are in an ice age and multiple people asked “how can you call this an ice age?” I either didn’t see the linked reference or it wasn’t there when I read eschelon’s comment.

Either way, I’ve seen the Little Ice Age come up enough lately to be extremely irritating. So, I knee-jerked the rebuttal.

Now I think eschelon was actually asking if we are overriding the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation which would normally take millions of years to happen.

Climate change deniers tell each other we are coming out of The Little Ice Age that started in 1200AD. Which is technically correct.

What they don’t tell each other is that “Little” is an understatement and we shot way past the prior “Medieval Warm Period” long ago and are only accelerating.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#/media/File%3...

How can anyone and everyone prove that the tokens were actually properly paid for? Prove there were no secret smokey-room collusion deals. Prove there were no unpaid tokens minted. Prove that international government/criminal organizations didn’t blackmail a few extra tokens into existence.

You aren’t actually wrong. Tether operates the way you describe: Based on proof of Trust Me Bro :P You can build derivative products backed by Tether. But, that’s a shaky foundation on which to build a new world financial system. You’d have to hope to spin up products that earn enough trust on their own to detach their valuation from Tether before Tether collapses.

The catch is: Even with proof of stake, you need to prime the pump with proof of work. Otherwise, you have nothing to stake!

Hopefully we’ve proven enough work already to serve as a foundation and from here on we can scaffold up with staking.

That was Thaler's argument. He had the first prominent case in this debate. AFAIK, the artist implicitly gets copywrite to the work they created then your contract with the artist transfers that copywrite to you.

Thaler tried to argue that he and the AI were in a situation similar to "work for hire" with an artist, but there was no human input to the AI. But, the copyright office holds that non-human entities/events are not granted copyright protection and therefore have no rights to transfer. So, they rejected his claim.

As an expert in Chinese culture after watching a single YouTube video...

"Lying Flat" apparently is making a comeback. But, it is an old idea in China. A big theme is that skill and effort are not rewarded. Connections are. So, young people see most other people meagerly getting by after busting their ass from the moment they could walk and talk. But, they also see children of well-connected Party members living in luxury and excess as spoiled brats since birth.

Another theme is that while it is hard to make good money, isn't hard to live very, very cheap in major Chinese cities if you cut down to bare minimalism. So, a lot of young people are apparently saving up for mini-retirements where they just drop out for a 2-3 years at a time, because why not?

> Since 2016 San Francisco’s homeless budget has ballooned to $672 million from $224 million, yet the number of homeless in shelters has increased by a mere 736. That equates to $609,000 in higher annual spending for each additional person in shelter.

Where's the breakdown of where that $896K goes?

The art documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film) (available on YouTube...) is basically about how the distant separation of employees from the consequences of their decisions naturally leads nice, regular people to behave effectively like psychopaths and not realize it. Highly recommended.

Around the time of the $20K bubble, I asked a convenience store clerk if anyone actually used the Bitcoin ATM they featured. He said there were 2 distinct groups: Rich-looking, post-middle-aged dudes with fancy cars and homeless people.

The homeless used it because the banks refused to service them and sleeping on the street with cash in your socks is dangerous. That made the volatility and fees involved in cycling dollars in and out of a Bitcoin ATM look like great deal relative to their lack of options before.

Evidence points to the specific change we are charging forward into resulting in huge amounts of drought, famine and flooding around the world. This will lead to resource wars and refugee crises at a scale we have not yet dealt with.

Or, if we somehow set the greenhouse gas levels back to where it was not long ago and kept it there, we would Not have tremendous excess amounts of drought, famine, flooding, wars and refugees.

Totally agree. AFAICT, our math curriculum has been set for a hundred years by mathematicians. People who by some quirk of their upbringing were extremely strongly motivated to dig deep into mathematics.

Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them.

This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it.

It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … …

You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life.

The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun.

We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.

Everyone is crying Corporate Greed in here. And, I can understand why. But, here’s another perspective based on listening to David Holz answer all kinds of questions from random users for four hours a week for over a year during Midjourney’s “Office Hours”.

AFAICT, Midjourney has no shareholders and David Holz is the farthest thing from a slick CEO. He’s a big dreamer hippie dork. He made all the money he cares to have from the sale of his previous company and now just wants to work on fun research projects. The goal of Midjourney is to bring creative power to as many people as possible.

Whenever politics or other controversial topics come up, the MJ teams tries to stay out of it. They just want a welcoming space for all sorts of people to collaborate and create. Lots of people complain that they don’t allow porn. But, as a result, a millions of people who are not just horny teenage boys enjoy hanging out on the server sharing and discussing art that is not just pics of sexy women all day every day. Looking at you, unending parade of unfathomly huge boobs on https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23StableDiffusion

David seems to think that since ridiculing politicians in China is taboo, having people ridicule Xi on MJ would make it unwelcoming to people in China. He wants them to feel comfortable collaborating with people all over the world on MJ. So, prompting Xi is blocked. That’s all there is to it.

One of the first proposals for blockchain was a email with a minuscule, verifiable fee to make email spam uneconomical.

Spamming emails is one of the cheapest things you can do with a network connection. Even $1 per 1,000 emails would make spam untenable.

In the real world, do wealthy companies want to be named on this list of 3 or 4 groups spamming NPM? That’s a lot different than being seen buying a banner ad.

I attended Carmel HS some 30ish years ago. It was a great school back then. Though a bit smaller :). One of the privileges of my life was that my family moved from Indianapolis to the outer edge of Carmel specifically so I could attend that HS and junior HS. I haven’t seen it in person for some 20 years.

How does it work so well per dollar spent? I’m no expert. But, a couple theories from the Twitter peanut gallery:

With 5500 student spread over 22 miles, some argue it should have been 3 separate schools to cut down travel time. I recall the bus ride taking over an hour for some of us.

It was built 50 years ago in a wealthy county of a poor state. They have been building up to this level aggressively for decades now. I recall controversy over construction projects back when I was there.

The parents and local businesses are highly engaged with the local government, community and schools. Expectations are very high both academically and athletically.

You have this backwards to the point I thought you were being sarcastic. Cows and pigs require a huge multiplier of agriculture (and water) to feed them in order to produce an equivalent amount of food for humans.

Thanks to subsidies targeting livestock feed, it is cheaper to buy feed shipped from the next state over than it is to grow it yourself. Thus, petroleum based fertilizer, transportation fuel, and dung reservoirs.

Then there’s the whole issue of methane from cow farts being a serious source of greenhouse effects. It would be funny if only it wasn’t.

And, the obesity/diabetes link is also tied to farm subsidies making starchy corn and wheat practically free while leaving actually healthy vegetables to compete against practically free.

The only way out is to ramp farm subsidies down to zero. That would be political suicide because it will increase the price of food. Especially meat. But, the alternative is to continue to slowly eat our way into diabetes and global warming.

In my research into Ethereum, I learned that in the creation of SHA-3, they did a lot of hammering on SHA-256 to see if new weaknesses could be discovered and addressed. The conclusion was that SHA-256 is still solid as far as anyone can tell. The SHA-3 process moved forward anyway so they could have a backup-plan handy in case some problem with SHA-256 pops up out of nowhere.

Don’t think about this in the abstract. You have to make it concrete.

Go make a service. Like a photo-sharing service. A service like that should obviously feature user comments, right?

And, then users start posting millions of blatant racist, misogynistic, pedophilic and false shock propaganda comments. But, if you decide you don’t want to personally spend your own money propagating this repulsive material using your own servers, large men with guns and dogs will drag you into a cage.

That’s what these laws mean. Don’t sugar-coat them.

In the last few steps, going from “Yes, you need trust-less updates” to “<tiny distraction>” to “Meh whatever, just use a regular database!” seems a bit lacking in short-term memory…

How likely is it that this is the result of Russian bots mass-reporting Ukraine supporters for "violations"?