And yet if you flip the paradigm entirely, you pretty much get coding bootcamps, which certainly don't have a great track record either. The answer is probably some more ideal balance between theory and practice, like Waterloo's CS program.
1,494 karma · joined April 14, 2015
People like you can only see copyright infringement when it's blatantly staring you in the face, like Studio Ghibli style AI images. Why is it obvious in that case? Because we have a large enough preexisting sample of Studio Ghibli style frames from anime to make it obvious.
But move closer to zero-shot generation, which anyone with a modicum of knowledge on this subject understands was the directional impetus for generative AI development, and the monkey brain short circuits and suddenly creatives who want to protect their art can go fuck themselves, because money.
You may not find common cause with multi-millionaire artists trying to protect their work now, but you certainly will in hindsight if the only fiscally-sustainable engines of creativity left to us in the future are slop-vomiting AI models.
Persecuting people for their beliefs by exploiting loopholes (e.g. blast on social media, bully their employer, etc) is also pretty dystopian, don't you think?
And it's not like the persecutors ever give you the full story. For example, the reporting on Meta ending DEI didn't want you to know their rather logical view of the situation (discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristics is wrong). What fraction of people actually believe in giving a boost to certain candidates purely on the basis of race? Certainly not enough for the persecutors to allow that argument to be broadcast widely.
It's worth asking why.
> NATO nations have cut back on troops and military hardware since the Cold War. But Europe has cut far deeper than the US. Defense budgets have become a pot that could be raided to fund more pressing priorities, such as treating and caring for aging populations. As a result, much of Europe’s military has become, in the view of some US defense experts, a “Potemkin army” that is ill-prepared to wage and win a prolonged war.
Labor compensation is determined primarily by substitutability. A $200K engineer creating "$1M worth of value" is not automatically deserving of a higher wage unless there is no one else willing to do that engineer's job for $200K.
I'm extremely anti-union principally because they drive up costs to consumers while yielding a product or service of at best comparable (but usually degraded) quality. Some easy examples are UAW destroying Detroit automakers or the recent dockworkers strike involving uneducated laborers demanding compensation ludicrously in excess of what even most people with master's degrees make, all to drastically under-perform equivalent workers from almost anywhere else in the world. To top it off, those same dockworkers zealously guard access to those highly lucrative jobs with some very questionable tactics.
When you drive by a highway construction project that doesn't progress for years or, worse, a horde of workers, most of whom appear to be doing absolutely nothing, there's a good chance that's union fuckery. When you go to almost any hotel in NYC and are treated with borderline disdain by highly incompetent staff while paying $500+ a night, that's union fuckery. When you wonder why you can't get cheap sufficiently high quality EVs like those from China, that's union fuckery. I could go on.
Unions are not comprised of saints. They're doing the same thing as the companies they despise: getting theirs while fucking over everyone else.
It's a combination of people thinking it violates the 'no free lunch' axiom of the universe and also deriving significant personal status and satisfaction from exerting discipline in eating and exercising religiously.
The 'no free lunch' axiom is a curious thing and seems derivative of western Puritanism and similar philosophies. It violates many people's intuitions that very good things might be obtained with relative ease, and also devalues said things. Some of these are the same people who cannot comprehend (or even accept) a post-singularity world without work. The peculiar morality that produces that belief overlaps rather substantially with the one that rejects the possibility of an easy solution to the problem of obesity.
Further, some of these people have the (perhaps unconscious) belief that they are morally superior to others who are less dedicated to health and fitness, and in particular to the obese.
If obesity can be resolved so fluidly and categorically, then at least two painful things happen for them: (1) their excessive effort towards weight control seems foolish and inefficient (i.e. devalued, as noted above) and (2) they lose a great deal of personal status. The latter is a consequence of the reasonably established notion that a significant proportion of many peoples' happiness is contingent on their relative frames of reference (i.e. not their position in an absolute sense). Again, this is often unconscious. These are not "bad" people, but rather merely victims of human instinct.
There are ample used phone markets selling iPhones and top-of-the-line Android devices (e.g. Back Market). No one needs to be on the latest and greatest. I still use an iPhone 13 and I have friends on phones as old as iPhone 11. None of us are part of the "American lower class". Smartphones are a highly mature technology and the improvements being made year on year are now vanishingly incremental, at best.
Further, there is no shortage of financing models available to American consumers. If anything, Buy Now Pay Later might be *too* available as an option.
It's really amusing how the unitary executive oscillates in fashionability according to which political tribe is currently in power. Congress is responsible for appropriations. Full stop. Whenever this has been bypassed via some loophole, by Bush, by Trump, by Biden, etc, it has been at its core unconstitutional. And it is in our collective interest that it remains that way.
Are you assuming users would still feel this way if they were made thoroughly aware that Apple's intermediation increases the prices of app services by up to 43%?
Are you unaware of Pakistan?