2,744 karma · joined April 19, 2018
I feel like it could be the same for a lot of people who can afford the cost. Ability to pay may not always be the issue. Paying the price could become a symbolic indicator of Google finally triumphing over even the most obstinate anti-timewasting user, and mentally it's not a good feeling to give that up that fight after years and years of holding on to the adblocking creed, regardless of the resulting betterment of the service from paying.
At the same time, it doesn't result in a justification for being set in one's ways, only a possible explanation of why people would decide not to use premium. This strategy only works so long as uBlock Origin's team of volunteers holds more patience than Google's salaried employees.
There is a problem that lies above the development of AI or advanced technology. It is the zeitgeist that caused humanity to end up in this situation to begin with, questioning the effects of AI in the future. It's a product of humans surrendering to a neverending primal urge at all costs. Advancing technology is just the means by which the urge is satiated.
I believe the only way we can survive this is if we can suppress that urge for our own self-preservation. But I don't think it's feasible at this stage. We may have to begin questioning the merit of parts of the human condition and society very soon.
Given the choice, I think a lot of people today would love to play God if only the technology was in their hands right this minute. Where does that urge arise from? It deserves to be put in the spotlight.
I think it is interesting that in the case of media that is known to be fictional like video games, we now have to grapple with the novel question of how realistic is too realistic, all because we found out enough ways to make it realistic enough. What was once an implicit and invisible barrier mediated by the lack of advanced technology has become an ethical barrier that relies on persons refusing to use the technology for the harm it causes.
Sometimes I liken the outcome to spicy peppers. I can imagine that at some point the spiciest pepper yet will be engineered such that an average person ingesting one will encounter severe health problems. And yet we can't help but ask the question of "how spicy we can go," so until that limit is reached we keep going. The question of harm that such a pepper could inflict is drowned out by the question of what stones humankind have still left unturned. Somehow we can't stop turning them.
But unlike peppers, the results of these technologies will affect people that aren't interested in the question, and they will still be affected without any say in the matter.
Also, if one's social skills are lacking it's even harder to get treatment, if it's difficult to articulate the problem or why a stranger should care about them. One's social standards for failure could be set so high as a result of their past that only an AI or other parasocial method could be designed to clear them.
In my opinion the only thing preventing this is the lack of technological progress. If the technology exists, someone will attempt to apply it to problems they perceive - brainstorming, throwing things at the wall, looking for untapped markets. Whether out of trying to secure a revenue stream or out of optimism for the future of humanity through the changes they bring, or some mix of multiple motives, it seems the end result is the same - a mix of the good and bad.
The issue I perceive is some of what makes people human is the flaws they carry for their entire lives. However, what gets the attention of biological sensors are qualities that are near perfection. So I guess the disconnect in this case is the founder of this company watching the turmoil of person-to-person relationships and seeing that as a business opportunity. They could frame it as: making up for those flaws could be lucrative, because why would having flaws help someone? Why would confronting people with their flaws help us?
For what it's worth, I think there is a market out there of people who retreat when confronted and don't respond to traditional therapy, and maybe there are others who don't want a human relationship, whether by choice or circumstance. There might always be an interested audience for this sort of thing in the case that the technology allows for it to come true one day. So I'm gradually becoming more concerned about the idea of an up-to-now untested software platform with potential ramifications for millions of people can come out of nowhere and be deployed at the push of a button.
Unfortunately, because the effects of large platforms like these take years to become apparent as in the case of social networking and ADHD-like symptoms, the damage may have to be assessed when the platform is already cemented in place as a perceived inalienable right. Just how smartphones are now ubiquitous and billions of people can't imagine life without them any longer, someday consumers may become very attached to their ownership of AI and its integration into society. It worries me if the results of even non-general AI turn out to be anything like the second-order effects of smartphones and social networking. But I don't think it's within many technologists' playbook to slow down and question what they're doing, since someone else could seize the opportunity and revenue instead.
If anything I'd be curious as to what dedicated users of this service would think about interpersonal human relationships in contrast to AI ones.
I think it's worth it.
I always thought the term "artificial intelligence" had a sort of disabling effect, like there is an intelligence outside of ourselves that serves to drive us in X direction, good or bad. "Technological progress" implies we are the ones driving the changes and the problems they will invariably bring. We sort of grasp this tech will cause profound impacts on society of some vague quality, enough to leave an "ethics" section in every white paper that comes with freely-distributed code and instructions for use, but continue plowing on regardless of what they could possibly be. How sustainable is this? Will there ever come a time when uploading code or even papers to GitHub for anyone to consume become taboo from the stigma and change that's been inflicted on ourselves?
I think the inflection point for those problems creeping into society at a visible everyday level is on a much quicker time scale than AGI. Sometimes I think it's like equipping people with pistols that shoot precision-guided homing bullets - not so much on the scale of a civilization-ending scenario, but it changes the game in its own significant ways. Look at comments accusing others of using ChatGPT to write their responses for them. I think most tech can cause these effects and it's worth questioning what it's meant to accomplish as they're created or used.
At times I wonder if the end stage of any given intelligent civilization is to delegate all parts of its thought process to technology that can be engineered to be superior, with all consequences that entails, because there's no point to being stuck with the tech that is already there forever. The thought that scares me the most is that the revolution might not be directed by governments or angry anarchists, but indirectly, by bored machine learning engineers sitting in their rooms contributing just one more paper or PyTorch implementation towards an inflection point in humankind because it's fun and rewarding to them.
And even if we're supposed to stop advancing this tech to prevent irreversible societal change, would it even be possible if we tried? There's 8 billion of us on Earth and metric tons of GPUs in existence. The question of if progress can ever be halted in a state such as ours for in the name of self-preservation is one I'll probably be keeping in mind for the rest of my lifetime.
I was struggling to put a name to this phenomenon but I recently learned about the term "semantic contagion" as coined by Ian Hacking. There is an article I found interesting that speculates the rise of a rare disorder with the proliferation of the Internet in the 1990s.
I think the idea that an influx of readily available information can confuse people with tempting theories or misinterpretation is more relevant than ever today.
I remember the one time talked about how he could scrape data behind paywalls and about deliberately bypassing anti-scraping techniques on Twitter. I don't think it was a very good PR move.
In the back of my mind I always had this thought that Stability could be some kind of AI accelerationist fund - hype up a shining future, raise enough capital to clear the bar for model training, release their model unencumbered and gather a fervent following of gracious users, and... not have a fully realized plan for what comes after.
But I have a feeling that even if they go under people will still be talking about Stability and their influence on generative art for a long while, at least until another freely available model can oust Stable Diffusion.
https://github.com/devlooped/SponsorLink/issues/9
https://github.com/devlooped/SponsorLink/issues/13
https://github.com/devlooped/SponsorLink/issues/16
And the original blog post.
https://www.cazzulino.com/sponsorlink.html
His opinions make me feel a bit worse that I went for Moq for work-related projects.
I wonder if anyone who wished doom upon X in the past years is finally getting the satisfaction they wanted from watching its steady demise. Personally I don't see anything stopping someone from just making Twitter: The Sequel and starting the whole cycle all over again. There's nothing that outlaws the creation of an internet cesspool.
My guess is someone or a group of people found part of the writing AO3 users upload offensive and wanted to loudly protest. There has been some precedent in AO3 being targeted for "vulgar" content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott_against_Xiao_Zhan_Inci...
It's impossible to know if the author has imposter syndrome or not without some way of measuring his competence. However, I think "imposter" has become a loaded term as a result of the syndrome it's associated with. There are cases describing workplace incompetence, or not being qualified for a job, or being rejected for cheating at interviews, but there is no discussion of imposters in those cases. They're just deemed incompetent or not the right fit and moved on from. Actual imposters who game interviews and do manage to land jobs aren't called imposters either, they're called dishonest, but there's no "dishonesty syndrome."
So I hesitate to reach for explanations of imposter syndrome if I'm not actually qualified for something. It can become used as a crutch to fall back on like a lot of diagnoses, instead of addressing the root causes of qualification. Waking up on that cycle made me realize I have a lot to work on in some areas.
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
Maybe in another 15 years, whichever successor to Reddit is found unsustainable/unreliable (decentralized or not), everyone left with a dire need of niche online subcommunities shrugs their shoulders and moves on once again. I don't see them having another choice. The need for online communities will always be there in my mind, especially since the existence of Reddit has proven that it can be done, and someone will build something else that everyone conditioned on these forums will use eventually.
I hold out hope, but an unlikely outcome is the mainstream somehow attaches itself to a service with a different funding model like Wikipedia or AO3, or these kinds of message boards are treated like public utilities. It will still be a massive burden to administer, but the outcomes could be different. I remember reading how "critical" subreddits were given a pass from the blackouts like /r/Ukraine because the value of their information trumps anything related to Reddit operations. A part of me thinks that Reddit's current playbook takes into account that some parts of its existence have become too important for mods/users to shut down, and that seems different to Digg's situation in 2010. They simply weren't as big as Reddit today. This is uncharted territory.
Regardless, in my mind, a lot of things in life don't last forever, not just Digg or (soon possibly) Reddit. But lots of people rode the wave regardless for 15+ years, and have gained a lot of useful knowledge from Reddit in the meantime.
So people will inevitably flock to other closed platforms like Discord because those platforms are the objectively superior choices, and they're not ideal for various reasons, but in my mind you just have to meet people where they are. And I think a service like Discord could absolutely implode with a few misplaced administrative changes. But at this point I tend to see these things as part of a greater circle of life, and it's (probably) not like they're going to implode almost immediately in quick succession. Just that your time spent there is a part of a particular nexus in a particular point of human history, and it's going to be limited. So, enjoy it while it lasts.
Technological progress is kind of like a boiling frog scenario to me, where the temperature was ratcheted up with the proliferation of LLMs and diffusion models for many more people to take notice. And I don't want to use the two-letter acronym when speaking of technological progress specifically, since at this point it's too loaded a term. (I think some use it as a label for "tech that's progressed too far".)
But I also think this implies that past some threshold it leads to negative outcomes for some actions to be made too easy to accomplish with technological progress. The limiting factor of being stuck in a state of inefficiency prevented them until the moment those barriers were dissolved. Some of those barriers are implicit and invisible and I think will only be appreciated in hindsight when we become an advanced enough society to finally remove them and see what happens.
When the cost of copying public artists' styles was driven to near zero, suddenly thousands more people were taking part in what is deemed by some of those artists to be plagiarism. Only this time it's marketed with terms like "style transfer" and "artist prompt studies" and "democratization" and "hey, now we can create N new images M% faster with these matrix multiplications and these miscellaneous optimizations, and our paper will now discuss these in technical detail..."
Then there's the fact that your backend framework has to define the subset of all frontend features it supports in Python. The moment you hit on a usecase that isn't supported in Python, you have to learn JS anyway and write code in the frontend. Except it's the worst kind of frontend code: hacks around broken or missing frontend features that depend on implementation details specific to the framework that are subject to change at any time.
I feel that these kinds of frameworks are better suited towards researchers or backend devs who really do not want to have to set up an NPM project just to have a simple (and I really mean simple) frontend UI to interact with. But don't dare try to write the next gigantic ML app on top of it or you'll have to deal with the performance and maintenance issues that follow.
I was happy when Atlassian finally sunset Mercurial, forcing those repositories to move to git. I'd rather all major source code hubs standardize on git since it's harder to contribute needing to learn different incompatible workflows.
It sounds like the bottleneck is lack of foresight. Our ancestors were incapable of seeing the end result of ICEs everywhere when they were first used. How is any future civilization supposed to combat this when they aren't handed the correct answer by some forebearer civilization that destroyed itself first? It feels like not only humans but all future intelligent life with access to petroleum would fall into this trap over and over again.
It's as if the only way to avoid the current scenario is to discover all the petroleum and then not touch it for the rest of time. About the only guardrail that could incentivize that behavior in my mind is the blind faith of religion.
There was also the time months ago when the art of a deceased artist (Qinni) was featured prominently on the front cover of an img2img/style transfer paper until the artist's sister requested it was taken down.
Is there anything that incentivizes Nvidia to publish these results? Is it just needing to get papers out in the public for the academic clout? Something tells me that all this accomplishes is setting the standards of everyone who sees the possibilities, that "this will be the future", and a third party without the moral framework of Nvidia will become motivated to develop and openly release their own version at some point.
Some people do, some people don't. There's nothing obligating an anime/SNS art hoarder to think this way, and if all they ever do is consume the end product without giving a thought to how the artist laid down the individual strokes that made the picture or how the artist's circle of friends and life story influenced their style, there's no consequences. The artist and other people with a similar mindset are unable to criticize these consumers because their behavior is invisible. When AI artists started appearing with art featuring blatantly copied styles, they did finally become open to such criticism.
I have a feeling the nature of endless feeds with a practically infinite amount of art to consume has conditioned a lot of consumers to never have think about the human artist. They can just look at the stash in their Pictures folder and think "that's a cute X" divorced from the artistic context that's been integral in earlier art history. The consequences of this are only starting to become apparent right now. But I think if there were nothing like Stable Diffusion then one would be unable to tell apart the people who would be open to copying artists' styles with a hypothetical AI program to-be-invented in the future from people who wouldn't. They'd all just appear to be the same breed of fans. It was the invention of the technology and its spread that revealed those preferences.
Ironically it's been shown that the fans can also be on the side of AI. Some of them will happily download or train a LoRA based on their favorite artist and use it with Stable Diffusion, often to generate images the original artist would never draw (because of limited commission slots/doesn't take commissions at all, lack of experience/interest or explicitly stating they will not take commissions for certain genres).
I don't know, the reasoning seems simpler than any school of thought can offer. Humans are bound to 14-16 waking hours per day. A large portion of those hours are taken up by obligations like work or chores. That leaves a set amount of time to consume media created by other humans. Even if more free time could be had, there will always be a hard biological limit of about 14 waking hours to consume things.
But more and more humans are being born and learning the arts, so combined with instant global communication they will inevitably produce and distribute way more than can be crammed into those hours. Look at a random streamer's Let's Play history for an example. If they play a longer JRPG then they can leave a trail of many hours-long videos per week depending on how long their sessions last. Sometimes that's to the exclusion of every other game in existence. It's a bit sobering if you think about it.
I read a book called The Plenitude by Rich Gold who discusses some of these topics. He doesn't go as far to give a fully workable solution to the problem but one of his suggestions is to challenge creators to limit themselves to 5 "big creations" over their entire life, and focus on honing those creations to the greatest extent. It's an interesting book and I'd recommend it.