riversflow

What a bizarre article. It talks about scientist self experimenters and specifically about psychedelics yet makes no mention of Shulgin?

Huh. Wild. I'm unaware that I have ever even associated with anyone even close to that level of germaphobe.

> you have the extra step of wiping the headset down between users

You wipe it down? Is that normal?

> Readability, reduced visual noise,

Semantically colored text, by definition, reduces visual noise. After doing a bit of googling there are infact a number of studies that show that colored text seems to positively affect both short term free and serial recall.

> Fuel loads are dramatically higher than historically however.

Yup! I live in the Sierras. Everyone in this thread talking about controlled burns needs to say "California has just spent a century pursuing a policy of fire suppression" a few times.

The fuel loads are insane, these fires have been turning into giant firestorms with their own weather systems in a matter of 2 or 3 hours during the summer. I've watched it happen a few times, frightening. I suspect you can't solve this problem with fire because even if you are burning the brush wet there is still enough fuel to dry the forest out and burn it to ash.

I personally think the state should tell insurers that they only have to provide insurance in wildlands if the home/property meets stringent fire safety rules around defensible space. My house isn't even in the coniferous forest (I live in the chaparral) and it has set backs, greenzones, the works. I get so frustrated when I'm watching news coverage of the fires and the house is surrounded in pine duff and has giant pine trees right next to it.

> much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads

Yeah, my dad, a California native, who studied forestry at Davis always says that the solution in millions of goats. Ironically this spring the local Sacramento news reported that there was a shortage of goats to clear brush and that was just for commercial landscaping in the greater metro area. So not only is not feasible because of green hand wringing but also because we just don't have adequate goats.

> Or how about search a pdf on my phone?

Open it in iBooks, which also runs ocr on the pdf, and hit the magnifying glass.

“If I don’t charge you to pass how will my boss pay me?” said the highwayman to the traveler.

> What is clearly a major issue for the majority of users is unauthorized account access and resource theft through the use of easily-phished account credentials protected by nothing more than a character string

Is this a major issue though? I think it’s pretty minor, not being able to share or backup my passwords is a pretty huge issue in my books.

> We can look up the definition of any word at our fingertips.

So what? Being able to understand expressive language and quickly context shift vocabulary is extremely valuable. If you don't have the vocabulary to identify context, being able to look up the definition of words will only get you so far. Additionally, you can't write words if you don't know that they exist.

I'd rather not live in a police state, and I think I speak for many Americans when I say that. Singapore can kind of get away with it because it is so small, but we can see what it looks like when scaled to a large country by looking at Modern China. I'll take some crime and something less than stellar education, as a national average, than have to contend with a government who welds people in their apartments, creates "reeducation camps" for minorities, and disappears business leaders.

My modest proposal is to make drugs OTC for adults. Regulate the supply and most of the problems disappear. The war on drugs has failed, we need to abandon it in the west. People want to get high, not die. Give them the ability to manage their addiction with dignity and safety.

Just too drive home this point a little deeper. I personally know 2 people who died last year from fentanyl poisoning. One of them thought they were taking MDMA, the other thought they were taking Xanax. Both are terrible, needless deaths but the one who was taking Xanax had actually been prescribed Xanax previously for GAD, but was having trouble getting/affording a doctor to prescribe it to them.

> I don't agree with those saying mobile photography/videography has (or will soon) make DSLR/mirrorless irrelevant.

I like to go backpacking. I used to always take my Full Frame Camera and a couple of lenses, after several years of going with the same crew, they finally convinced me that I should just leave the extra pounds behind and use my phone.

I won't do it again. The difference in the image quality, if you actually look at it, and not just scroll it, is night and day, and from my understanding of optics there is no way that it will ever be comparable.

In my personal opinion if you are trying to make photographic art, to really capture beauty, a smartphone camera is incredibly limiting. You can do it, just like you can make art with a disposable camera, however the rendering is too utilitarian and the ability to capture fine details will always be lacking. You can get moments quite well, perhaps even better than a ILC, I find "Live" photos particularly charming, and moments can be very beautiful. But again, my subjective opinion on aesthetics is that to capture things that are already very beautiful in their own right, like a landscape at sunset, a waterfall, or a Stag in the woods require fairly precise equipment–not algorithmic de-noising.

I am extremely sad about DPReview closing, it is an extremely valuable resource for comparing lenses. I will forever hold this against Amazon.

Invoking the free market in a discussion about a market as distorted as higher education is laughable. No, the way to maximize profits is to get government(s) to ensure that you are in a favorable position to earn profits. In this case, demanding that most well paying jobs necessitate tertiary education and providing free credit.

I mean, Instagram has a “not interested” menu item (behind …), with the additional option 'don’t show posts from ${account}' and “this post makes me uncomfortable”.

They also additionally introduced chronologically sorted “following” and “favorites” feeds. I haven’t had a Facebook in a decade, but after hardly using IG for years, I’ve started using it again. These features have honestly improved my opinion of Meta significantly, you can at least utilize it as a tool now.

What are context, culture, emotion? If you want to talk about how people do things in a mechanical sense, starting from before “thought”, no, we have no idea how it happens. You can form a model of how you think someone thinks, but the reality is you have no idea how another’s brain functions, and thing like aphantasia, autism spectrum disorders and internal monologue prove this. Different people can have very different brains.

> ask the hypothetical person with a notebook to provide you with a 4K rendering of the scene over the last 30 days.

You just seemlessly transitioned from a machine learning model to literal recording. These aren’t at all the same. In the context of your example, the person on the bench could have easily been wearing a body cam or recording with their cell phone, in certainly something they are capable of doing, so why would I treat it any different? The camera you mentioned could also be a CCTV feed with no DVR, in which case it couldn’t reproduce anything. The AI/person would be what would allow instant pattern recollection, like, “the person usually leaves in a hurry, but not on the weekends with a few exceptions” or “they usually turn lights on around X in the morning, and Y minutes after sunset”

> norms that restrict behavior for other reasons

What’s a concrete example of a tool that has been banned for other reasons. ML models like SD are tools, we usually let people use tools freely unless they can cause great bodily harm, and often even if they can.

> why would it be the same for an automated process?

It's perfectly acceptable for a human being to drive a a car, but driving one drunk is completely unacceptable. Conversely, there is no rule against creating or consuming art while intoxicated.

So to answer your question, because it is not a matter of life and death. Take your argument and apply it to mass produced goods that were once the realm of only skilled craftsman.

> Is a human sitting on a neighborhood bench in view of your house the same thing as a surveillance camera on a nearby telephone pole?

If a person never leaves and keeps notes, yes, it is exactly the same. I'd call the police for stalking. The issue here is privacy, which is tangential to AI reproducing the styles of known individuals.

> The AI software has only "learned" in the sense that it has operated on the input data such that it can now provide outputs that are of convincingly high quality to make it appear to "know" what it is doing.

Completely disagree with you about the nature of learning here. If a person produces art in the style of an individual, they have no idea the internal machinations of the original artist, they just "appear to 'know' what they are doing".

> no other ad seller has access to search inventory for "download Spotify”

I think that behavior should be broadly illegal on the basis that it’s tantamount to false advertising and extortion.

Google claims to be a search engine; if you search for something very specific and well known like Spotify, providing you a paid advertisement as the top hit is essentially fraud.

Yes. I actually knew and frequently talked with many of the homeless people who lived near me when I lived in downtown SF. The thing is that opiates are naturally cheap, and most of the current cost comes from heavy regulation.

If an addict can be high all day for a quarter the cost of a meal, say $1, and can purchase said from a safe, reputable drug store in their chosen location, rather than trekking across town to a shady area to buy illegal drugs from a outlaw dealer, they’ll do that. If only because they can spend more time begging and less time walking.

You have a very skewed view of addicts if you think they are that deranged. A good illustration of that is clean needle programs that provide orange safety tips for used needles. If these addicts were so completely deranged, those tips would end up in the trash not on the ends of needles in the streets.

I just don’t see what describability, or as jiggawatts calls it, naming, has to do with AC. AC is built upon an indexed set[1]. That way you can just reference the index. It seems extremely contrived to me to argue that being finitely nameable has any bearing on underlying mathematical principle, nothing about any form of infinity is relatable to the physical confines of this universe, of which language is a member, but the concept of infinite is very useful.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice

What does naming have to do with AC though? This seems completely tangential to the axiom. It’s about the nature of sets, not the semantics of how you make the selection and reference it.

AC says: if there is a set of non-empty sets y with length x, I can construct a new set z of length x by taking a member from each set in y.

How does being able to name the constituents z or any member of y matter to the logic of the axiom?

Right, that's why I said a "fair market price", not "heavily regulated and taxed to pay for facilities for junkies and pay for drug education". My understanding is that opiates can be produced dirt cheap.

Also I have absolutely no clue, and I doubt there is really even data on it, but there are a lot of people who are dying from fentanyl who aren't opiate addicts at all. One person I knew who died last year couldn't afford healthcare, bought their anxiety meds online, and died in their room from fentanyl. Another person I knew died from ectasy, and having talked around it's a common story.

> become a victim of fentanyl.

Fentanyl poisoning is >99.9% a result of the war on drugs. If you could purchase any drug OTC at a fair price, virtually no one would be risking their life on dodgy street drugs.

Because they want to make sure that only the good guys get them. They don't want these to get into the hands of the NSO Group, as a nameable example.

I think this misses the bigger problem. Much like the MIC, big tech is a matter of national security. If the USG doesn’t get involved with their own home grown tech companies, nothing is stopping other state powers from doing so.

Freedom of religion came at a time when long-distance communication traveled very slow, in a country with oceans for borders. In a typical (old world) situation religious consolidation makes sense for a state, religion is the only thing that significantly threatens state power besides other states. This was even more true 300 years ago. Today’s tech companies aren’t a challenger to state power; people mostly hate Mark Z. & Jeff B., rather tech is the very fabric that the state is made of.

Agree 100%. I misread the post as "given" rather than "giving" and was answering what I perceived the question to be–are models given copyright images–oops.

> Are image generators giving exact (or very similar) copies of existing works?

um, yes.[1][2] What else would they be trained on?

According to the model card:

[1] https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/main/Stable...

it was trained on this data set(which has hyperlinks to images, so feel free to peruse):

[2] https://huggingface.co/datasets/laion/laion2B-en

Yeah, I read the first study because it seemed crazy.

TFA:

"The group consuming more vegetable oil had a 62% higher rate of death during the seven-year study compared to the group eating less vegetable oil. . .To put that into perspective, of the commonly cited diet and lifestyle risk factors, only severe obesity and heavy smoking are more dangerous"

The study in question, emphasis mine:

n=458 "Eligible patients were men aged 30-59 years admitted . . . for an episode of acute myocardial infarction (86%), or acute coronary insufficiency or angina (14%) . . . The intervention group received instructions to increase their PUFA [PolyUnsaturated Fatty Acid] intake to about 15% of food energy, and to reduce their intake of SFA[Saturated Fatty Acid] and dietary cholesterol to less than 10% of food energy and 300 mg per day, respectively. To achieve these targets. . . Liquid safflower oil was substituted for animal fats, common margarines and shortenings in cooking oils, salad dressings, baked goods, and other products, and was also taken as a supplement. . .Safflower oil is a concentrated source of [Omega]-6 LA and contains no other reported PUFAs Therefore, the intervention oil selectively increased [Omega]-6 LA without a concurrent increase in [Omega]-3 PUFAs."

TFA represents it as a population wide conclusion about all people consuming "more" "vegetable" oils, and then has the audacity to directly compare this misrepresentation to the results of large scale longitudinal and prospective studies, comparing it to a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, etc. Absolutely ridiculous. Like I actually think that's a valuable study to have read, but the Author's article is being sensationalist and dishonest with their representation.

FWIW as someone who reads a fair amount about nutrition to the point I consider it a hobby; I don't find this result on Safflower oil surprising, but the sensationalism in TFA is insane. There is a lot to unpack with that study–are people in that group predisposed to having biological processing or other confounding factors that make high Omega-6:Omega-3 diets particularly unhealthy? Is there something specifically bad about linoleic acid, or perhaps about a fatty acid regimen of specifically and primarily linoleic acid?

I'm just going to throw it out there to spread the word; GFRP Rebar (Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer) is a thing, and you can buy it today at your local hardware store. I really wish I would have known about it on my last project, probably the last time I will buy steel rebar to put in concrete.

I'm not an ME, but my understanding is that it is a comp in terms of structural reinforcement. I'd be really interested to do a deep dive on how these technologies stack up against each other, it seems like a win for construction longevity, it would be pretty cool if the ecological impact of production penciled out as a win too. My understanding is that there are some trade off when being used in large projects.

My cursory research has indicated that this stuff first hit production in the 80's and was used in a bridge in the US in 96. Still haven't figured out why it hasn't taken over.[2] Is it just for a lack of evangelists?

[1]https://www.lowes.com/pd/Owens-Corning/5013333093

[2] https://www.fiberglassrebar.us/gfrp-rebar-from-the-beginning...

Thank you.