seabombs

There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.

Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.

I take my 18-month old to daycare each morning, before parking my car a few streets away and catching the train into work. It is terrifying to think that one day I might just forget to drop him off.

My partner usually picks him up in the evening. About 6 months ago she was busy so I did it. I picked him up, drove home, parked the car in the garage and walked straight into the house. Something felt wrong, but it was maybe 30 seconds until I realised I'd left him in the car. He was completely fine, but it put the fear of God into me.

Anyway, I'll contribute my poorly thought out technical solution - a thermal camera that monitors the seats for warm bodies, if you lock the car when present it beeps the horn.

Great article.

> Don't underestimate the value to your soul of good work.

This in particular resonated with me.

My concern is not really that AI will take over my job and replace me (if it is genuinely better at my job than I am, I think I would quite happily give it up and find something else to do). My concern is that AI will partially take over my job, doing the parts that I enjoy (creativity, thinking, learning) and leave to me the mundane aspects.

Some of my colleagues will copy/paste several paragraphs of LLM output into ongoing slack discussions. Totally interrupts the flow of ideas. Shits me to tears.

Terrible performance for me too. Firefox, 3600X and 6800XT. Especially as the header morphs when you scroll down.

I don't mind the icons and general aethetic direction, but seriously undermined by the very noticeable, janky performance. Makes it feel cheap.

I installed it a few months ago, I thought it was pretty good! I couldn't find a prebuilt package mirror in or near Australia though so it was painfully slow to install updates, and I didn't stick with it.

You can install/run guix using a nonfree kernel to get around that.

https://wiki.systemcrafters.net/guix/nonguix-installation-gu...

This is a bit tangential but I've noticed lots of comments aping the style of Matt Walsh. Not just on HN either, but probably more here than other places I visit.

Anyway, I guess this would be useful cluster the "Matt Walsh"-y commenters together.

Lol, this reminded me of those engravings we put on spacecraft. Like, if we had to communicate the algorithm to an alien civilization then sure, this might be the best way to do it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

Though there are exceptions (even amongst your examples IMO), of the good-fast-cheap triangle I feel the majority choose fast and cheap.

Totally. It used to be that LoC was widely accepted as a a terrible metric to measure dev productivity by, but when talking about AI code-gen tools it's like it's all that matters.

I'm always curious with the examples in these announcements, how close is the training data to the sample prompts? And how much of the prompt is important or ends up ignored in the result?

The prompt for the figure running through glowing threads seems to contain a lot of detail that doesn't show up in the video.

In the first example (close-up of DJ), the last line about her captivating presence and the power of music I guess should give the video a "vibe" (compared to prescriptively describing the video). I wonder how the result changes if you leave it out?

Cynically I think that it's a leading statement there for the reader rather than the model. Like now that you mention it, her presence _is_ captivating! Wow!

Aw man I miss n-gate... Anyone know why they stopped?

> In a world where some people like to write enterprise software

Come on now...

Bit of an aside, it was fun to notice the Australian references in the comic. Surprises me still to see something Australian on the "regular" internet.

"Formal Comic Sans" was my first thought too!

Avocado toast.

There's been a critical spotlight on Australia's medical industry lately. Like gouging the medicare system or skirting regulations to profiteer off the insane demand for semiglutide weight loss drugs like Ozempic (couple of links below).

If you were a young, idealistic doctor (or an experienced idealistic doctor) I could imagine feeling incredibly disheartened when you see this kind of thing going on around you.

For the regulators I think the challenge they have is how to minimise the damage of the "bad" medical professionals (or weed them out of the system entirely) while not crushing the spirit of the good ones. I certainly don't know the answer.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-08/price-of-pain-doctors...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-01/cowboy-pharmacist-beh...

Also not that it really changes anything but the linked article says it was written in 2024, though Dr Bryant's death was in 2017: https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/i-didnt...

The way the cabbies talk reminds me of a Cormac McCarthy novel.

This is a good companion read about the taxi vehicles of that time too: http://tlc-mag.com/archive_issues/amer_taxi_oct06.html

Maybe this was a big influence on the woolly mammoth example: https://youtu.be/EzzTX3DYMNs?si=WS28fsf5j6SBI1-7&t=15

Also interesting that some of the examples ignore details in the prompts. No clouds or sun in the sky, no depth of field, their hair isn't blowing in the wind.

All the examples feel so familiar, like I have seen them all before buried in the depths of YouTube and long-forgotten BBC documentaries. Which I guess is obvious knowing roughly how the training works.

I guess what I'm wondering is how "new" the videos are, or how closely do they mimic a particular video in the training set? Will we generate compelling and novel works of art with this, or is this just a very round-about way of re-implementing the YouTube search bar?

The author is a doctor, but also an executive at a health-focused VC fund, with several AI companies in it's portfolio. Helpful context to have before reading his article I think.