This article is essentially a damaging self-fulfilling prophecy camouflaging as analysis. The world is full of turnarounds, and stories where "mistakes" turn out to be happy accidents: "maybe so, maybe not."
Generally speaking, Valve's vision has amazed to impress me time and time again. Not perfect, but super impressive nonetheless.
Even just simple things like pricing the Steam Deck. They are damn good at that, where the baseline is doable and each incremental improvement is worth the amount of money. Before I realize it, I've talked myself into the top of the line even though I initially went there to buy the entry-level version :-D (and I have no regrets btw)
I think you're conflating things. The point is to ban shovelware with low-effort AI assets, not games using AI to generate the game on the fly based on player input like this is doing. I personally think it looks pretty cool if it works as good as in the linked Twitter thread.
It touches one common psychological aspect: Most people don't want to play or see generative content just for the sake of it while the same doesn't hold true for human-crafted art/content. They value carefully human-crafted art over ai-generated ones. Reading the hn comments fellow posters were put off by a blog article today only because it featured images that they perceived as likely ai generated. The images didn't add anything of value to the article. I don't think the reactions would've been that strong if those filler images would have been hand-crafted art. Would you really want to go to a concert by some musician who created his music ai-generatively? I wouldn't no matter how good and no one i know of either. It feels in some weird way disgusting.
I think the position you expressing here is more of a hope than an actual reality. People already love AI art. Sure, when its been a deception people are upset. And the bars are set higher when you're upfront with the use of it. But the experiences it enables are great! I've already seen a dramatic uptick in the graphical quality of many indie games made by one or two man teams. When AI music becomes the norm, artists using it will simply outcompete those that don't, in exactly the same way bad autotune gave way to good autotune gave way to "wow she's a good singer" and now intentionally bad autotune becomes an instrument
Phones and photography are banned in many Berlin clubs - they either lock your phone away at the entrance or put a sticker on the camera. That's why you barely see any footage from inside Berghain anywhere...
"Se non è vero è ben trovato" but this reddit post [1] does a decent enough job of explaining what's happening there (or what cool people think it might be happening in there). Slightly NSFW text post:
It is, and that's what it's intended as. Some shows in the US do it too. e.g. Lane 8's This Never Happened shows in Oakland. But the most recent version of that had a lot of people complaining that there were lots of phone camera usage, so the sticker thing might not work in some venues.
Thing with sticker is that usually you go to the toilet and walls are covered in those stickers people removed from their devices as soon as they got away from the bouncers.
The point is that the sticker would have to be taken off deliberately. If you are caught taking a photo, you can't claim you just forgot about the rules. You broke the rules on purpose and depending on the club they either get very angry with you or kick you out without warning.
The stickers you see on the walls could have accumulated over month. The system usually works fine and you rarely see anyone taking photos. Certainly way less than in clubs without those stickers.
I've been thinking a lot about what constitutes "AI-native". In this "blog", I'm exploring this question by turning the blog post itself into something you can prompt and change as you read it.
The described step function changes are super apt and mostly overlooked by the pure hype crowd (although the step functions enabled by AI should really be what the main hype ought to be about!)
That said, once you get into the step function changes, the GPT-wrapper accusation might quickly become akin to a "AWS-wrapper" one, with traditional moats getting more important than AI-native ones.
We've had internet-enabled businesses without technical moats (but very real other moats, be it UX, social platform effects or a great b2b sales process) for the longest time, and might just see the same thing play out in AI native land
The way the author summarizes his own study in this thread borders on misinformation. You could actually take their findings and write the opposite headline, which would more accurately reflect their actual research results:
"Critics claim that models such as Stable Diffusion act like modern collage tools, recreating copyrighted and sensitive material.
Yet, our new paper shows that this behaviour is exceedingly rare, recreating copies in less than 0,00006% of 175M test cases."
Hoping for a quick sane ruling here. The whole thing is written in a way that clearly isn't interested in the fundamental reality of the technology, and calling it a "collage tool" is just manipulatively wrong.
What exactly are you struggling with? The main challenge with Midjourney is to open up a broader style pallete, while the out of the box vanilla results are usually amazing in v4.
Had not tried Midjourney, probably as I dont usually bother with discord. Just tried it out and while the results are probably better than anything I had before, there are a lot of weird things going on (per my usual experience) that dont seem to appear in examples other peoples use and def not in the topic post; distorted faces, extra body parts, weird 'deformities', proportions etc... Here are both variations and upscales of the same prompt (-> which is probably my issue?). This was without reading the 'tips' or looking through /r/StableDiffusion yet. It still really seems like prompting is an art form and skill that really needs to be learned, or atleast have the skills to touch-up the images.
::a happy family in the middle of a nucular wasteland:: (I just realized I spelt nuclear wrong, does that matter?)
That's... not close to enough in your prompt. I suggest you go browse the v4-showcase channel and look at the prompts other people are using (users will sometimes share). Alternatively go to a site like prompthero.com and look up some examples. At a minimum, you need to use the --v 4 trigger to get it to use the new (better) model. You also generally need to tell it what style you want with some more description.
Fwiw, I've found stable diffusion outputs to be mostly crap in comparison to DALL-E and Midjourney. DALL-E seems to output results closest to what you ask for with low-specificity prompts, and Midjourney tends to give the most "stylistic" results like what you would see on a digital art site.
If you look at civitai then you'll see that the good images often have massive negative prompts that literally say things like "missing fingers:-1" or equivalent.
It's surprising to see that there are liberal proponents of this. You don't have to be a raging libertarian to see the risks of unlocking this much financial reach for governments. We (in the West) may now mostly live under reasonable governments, but there's obviously no guarantee that this won't change (including towards your <current political opponents>), and implementing social credit score systems and other dystopian things would be much easier under CBDC than it currently is?
I never understood this argument. It is not like governments can't tell the banks and payment processor not to accept payments or freeze all funds of certain people. Courts can already order automatic confiscation in cases like bankruptcies and so on.
Friction in a process can be an amazing deterrent and prevents you from abusing power en masse. Whenever there is a cost to doing something, it demands prudence.
I wish this was more widely understood. It's relevant when talking about the danger of ubiquitous/dragnet surveillance; it's relevant to our habits around communication, and consumption of media. Friction is a key determining factor in human behavior.
Because societies function very differently in a dense & community driven country like India vs sparse nuclear nations like the US.
Once you reach a certain level of density, be that most of India or east-coast American cities, you have to rely on public services to facilitate most things in your life. The Govt. already has indirect financial veto power on you. This won't change anything the Govt. is already able to do everything that you claim CBDCs will facilitate.
Note that 90+% of India operates in a permanent survival mindset. All positives associated with libertarianism are much higher on Maslow's pyramid. These people are on the bottom rung, so the rights citizens would have to forfeit as part of CBDCs feel trivial.
Second, India is a low trust society. So, anything that increases tracking, surveillance and transparency is welcome. Trustless systems are welcome. Cash is easy (to launder) and cash is simple (to hide). The elimination of cash adds significant barriers to the most important facilitator of the low trust economy : cash.
Because CBDC are the complete opposite of bitcoin philosophy. Bitcoin is about personal freedom and separating state and money. CBDC is about centralised govt control and monitoring
So if you found out that a top pentagon official was working as a military advisor for the Taliban, that wouldn't ring any alarm bells to you. It's completely normal and there's nothing to worry about.
I don't have a theory (other that both CBDCs and cryptocurrencies are dumb). I'm merely pointing out that the idea that CBDCs are absolute evil while bitcoin is absolutely against evil is rather inconsistent in light of the fact that some of the people behind CBDCs are also involved with bitcoin.
It's not inconsistent when the designs are the opposite.
Bitcoin is permissionless and payments are uncensorable. A tool against govt power and individually empowering.
CBDC have central control and govt control in the name. The Chinese govt will be jumping at the chance to implement CBDC. Bitcoin is only a threat to their control
But I get the impression that most people's minds are already make up about bitcoin and it's be a while until people are open to new ideas
Classic crypto bro retort. The "technical details" of these systems were neither the topic nor had any relevance to these conversation, and at any rate you haven't got any clue whether I'm ignorant about them.
If you had technical knowledge you would given any reply with some substance but you just derived my response as "mental gymnastics" after baiting me into a discussion
And now name calling
You just wanted to get out your superficial preconceptions on the topic after wasting my time
I simply pointed out a fact that is never addressed by bitcoin propagandists, which is the fact that bitcoin core developers are also working on implementations of CBDCs.
What sort of "technical knowledge" is required to make such an observation? None. Therefore trying to discredit what I said on the grounds that I lack technical knowledge is ridiculous. Calling the statement of a fact a "superficial preconception" is equally ridiculous.
It's not surprising. Liberals want the government to take money from people to fund itself. A digital currency allows them to do that much more efficiently.
Negative interest is supposed to be applied on cash and bank reserves (this includes checking accounts). Not on savings accounts.
The entire point of negative interest rates is to get people to stop holding 70% of their balances at the bank in checking accounts. Because checking accounts cannot be used for loans, the bank creates new money which lands on another checking account which repeats endlessly like some sort of out of control recursive function resulting in a perpetual increase in the M1 money supply.
