Hoasi

Perfect analogy.

> They are being outcompeted by a megacorp selling bootleg derivatives of their work

and driving the value of their hard work to the ground.

> Incredibly talented people complain when technology lets talentless people make some of the beautiful things that they imagine but never had the talent to make real.

If we are speaking about the democratization of tools, this is not what is happening here.

In effect, prompting Dall-E or Midjourney does not make you a creator.

And herein lies the problem. It doesn't enable the talentless to create something beautiful. It allows anyone to prompt aggregated images, regardless of talent or years dedicated to a craft. These images have no intrinsic value and, on top of that, don't belong to the prompter.

This technology is a collage tool, and it's great, but it doesn't make anyone a creator. If you believe it does, you're in for a rough awakening.

Right now, the best models are only working thanks to bypassing the will of thousands of artists who didn't agree to have their work used for training data. As such, we are not essentially speaking about talent but the democratization of theft.

Again, it's not the technology itself that is the problem. Most artists are pro-technology and don't oppose it. Besides, if you learn how to draw (anybody can learn this skill, come on!), you probably won't be impressed by most Midjourney results.

True. For most, it will be a tool to generate ugly pictures.

I mean, this defeats the point of democratizing art. What's the point of driving the cost of an image to zero and replacing a craft with automated art of that level? Where exactly is the progress here? Are we expected to be impressed by speed or quality? Where is the value? The level of kitsch here is overwhelming. Should we applaud for more kitsch in the world?

"Was einer möchte und nicht kann, wird Kitsch." —Jan Tschichold

> Why do I get a feeling we are going to see an explosion of secular cults that have weird beliefs in AI and worship AGI?

A tendency that would take humanity a few hundred years backward, that's such a shame.

Laziness will prevail when immediacy and cargo cult tribalism are the most potent currency.

> Also, "forever" doesn't happen all at once. Give me immortality, and then check in with me yearly if I still want it. I will let you know once I'm over it.

Immortality as a subscription service—brilliant!

> But nah, the projector device attached to your clothing is cumbersome and all sorts of problems (catching it, dropping it, easy to snatch/steal) will prevent this idea from becoming adopted. And an AI app store? A little too much like 'hardware clickbait' to be taken seriously.

Agreed. If they were aiming for the Minority Report look, it’s a miss.

Bad art causes eye pain. You really can't make that up.

The jury is still out on that. Bandcamp's branding effort is hard to measure.

Even if we didn't read their blog posts or listen to their radio podcasts, there is something beautiful in that effort. And I agree that written critique doesn't do much for music or art, for that matter.

Even though you can't quantify it, I wouldn't dismiss Bandcamp branding effort around music. You can't strip music of everything aside from sounds. Bandcamp's rich illustrations managed to set a musical mood, for example.

Image is important. Controversies, interviews, politics, and even ridiculousness are part of the culture regardless of whether one decides to engage.

Inconclusive.

What if they built right-handed defenders AND left-handed defenders towers?

Good things don't last.

Colour me surprised. How are carbon offset credits different from Catholic Church's indulgences?

Adobe has been famous for this annoying behavior for over a decade. Remove some cool features only to reintroduce them, sometimes years later, as a breakthrough. Annoying, but it didn't prevent them from quietly innovating.

They could send over ChatGPTed newsletters. Marketing bullshit is one thing ChatGPT excels at.

Exactly. It's a time-saver for bureaucratic chores. And that's great. There is no need to strive for excellence when mediocrity is required.

Useless for anything that requires originality, elaborate humor, or finesse.

> said by someone who uses chatgpt extensively, it is good for the structure, to get an idea, but as a code generator it kinda sucks.

Interestingly, the same applies to text-to-image programs. Once you used these for a while, you realize their utility and value are little more than an inspiration or a starter. Even if you wanted to ignore the ethical implications, very little they produce is useable. LLM are amazing. However, their end-product application is overrated.

Bing has about a 3% market share today, just as it did before adding ChatGPT to its search more than six months ago. It has since disabled ChatGPT “out of an abundance of caution” in July, while Bing Chat still uses GPT-4.

We can't all agree on what best means.

It can't be objective since we are humans.

HN guidelines and moderation are doing a decent job of promoting interestingness in general. I don't think upvotes are a reliable indicator, but maybe they are as close to good enough as a system can be.

Depending on timing, you see great topics flying under the radar. Likewise, "poor" posts regularly prove to be quite popular. But then again, this is also subjective.

> but it's embarrassingly easy to train the AI on interesting or not content based on upvote information...

And yet, the best topics and answers do not necessarily correlate with the most upvoted.

> However, I have no explanation for NFTs.

Simple. A multi-level-marketing scheme build on the free money/web3/crypto trend, successfully taking the existing art market speculative practices into the digital realm.

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (The Myth of the Objective) by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman was excellent.

> It makes me think of something Brandon Sanderson wrote that has been bouncing around in my head a lot lately: "Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind. If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.”

While I understand the theory, it doesn’t work in practice most of the time. Labour work doesn’t let you think that much in reality.

Already avoided the news for some years, the Covid era put the nail in that coffin for good.

Long-distance travel by train is a luxury compared to the car. Traveling by train, you can work, eat, read, watch a movie, and socialize.

> I've just been using Jekyll since 2013. For a long time now Github has had first-class support for Jekyll and so I haven't even had to mess with Ruby for many years now, I usually just edit it online in the Github UI. I pay $0 a year for this service so my only cost is DNS.

Jekyll remains one of the most robust solutions for small projects and blogs.

He's a singer-songwriter though not a virtuoso guitarist.

> Also, taking Elon's word at face value for a second... is Twitter really worth scraping for AI training or whatever?

Maybe... if you build a LLM scrapping for the lulz?

Their No Bullshit days are over for good. Thank you, and goodbye, Gandi!

> Whose idea was it to have oil on canvas in black and white, for whatever purpose (flashbacks - whatever)?

Budget, most likely.