Udo

It's not unlikely that all the solar system's planets have been contaminating each other for billions of years. All it takes is a big asteroid impact and some luck, and then some bacteria hitches a ride.

The tough part is of course thriving after the organism arrives. Given Mars' current climate and surface perchlorate levels, I'm not convinced it's likely that something from here takes root over there without some help.

If this turns out true, it would be quite ironic: they can't show you a legally mandated cookie selector intended to increase your privacy because you're running a piece of blocking software that's intended to increase your privacy.

Obviously, there are many people who do enjoy the competition, especially if you're someone who is in the top 10 consistently. But to emphasize it again: arguably, the leaderboard is not as real as you think it is. It's not me who's advocating for taking your achievements from you, it's the state of technological progress that has already done that.

"Awareness" is not a thing, not even in the double slit experiment. The term 'measurement' refers to a specific kind of interaction that bridges quantum systems with classical systems, although I believe a good case could be made that these waveforms never actually fully collapse.

Likewise, if there is anything special about Earth's position in the greater cosmos, it would be a trick of perspective or perception - unless there are any completely disruptive new discoveries about the nature of reality. However, my money would be on the fact that the universe is simply not as uniform as we thought.

It'll be interesting to find out how it ended up so far out there. Maybe those clouds are sometimes more stable than we thought?

The OPis themselves were quite decent devices, Raspbian worked very well on them.

> Once consciousness has been digitized, you can beam it at the speed of light to a receiver.

In principle yes, however, the energy required is still dramatic and bandwidth would probably still be a problem. It seems to me the default option would be to physically send non-aging transhumans, or virtualized/uploaded brains, or people in stasis (or a combination of these) using non-relativistic speeds.

I apologize if this wasn't clear. It's an expression about energy potentials, and as such it's not just useful in a lab, it's an essential piece of information about the substance.

For example in the original context of this comment thread, a person asked whether there was a danger of people exhausting our atmospheric CO2 because they got too greedy with this technology - a question that can in fact not be answered meaningfully without talking about energy deltas. The fact that CO2 cannot be practically processed in a way that releases energy is the only pertinent information when talking about this.

Pretty much the only reason to do this would be because you're specifically interested in generating propane. For example, it could be very useful for ISRU on other planets, or to generate propane "for free" from a solar setup.

If your goal is energy production, you'd just use the output of solar panels directly without this costly step in the middle. If you want to store energy locally, electrolyzing water into H and O would be hugely more cost effective. But propane is a more dense fuel that would be useful for mobile applications such as ships and cars, and can also be used as a raw material in chemical synthesis.

My account at Cedar Lake Ventures does not link back to Pixian, and there doesn't seem to be any way to enter payment information on either site.

So, where and how exactly do I pay?

I wonder if more people have this suspicion or if it's just my imagination?

It depends hugely on the task. ChatGPT is pretty good at generating semi-random NPCs, it's decent at keeping track of situations and items, it's lacking at designing/keeping track of special abilities and skills. When it comes to designing plot lines it's okay-ish as a brainstorming buddy. The moment your setting or adventure deviates from its training data, you can tell immediately. It will not be able to grasp things, will spit out many similar but equally wrong suggestions (even ChatGPT4).

Much like image generating AIs, there are areas where it has at best a tenuous grasp. I think almost everybody who played around with current generation AIs has encountered these limitations. I wonder if they're even solvable without AGI.

Hi, my name is Udo and I specialize in working with custom codebases, I can come in and help you with your typical inhouse code bases. I enjoy working on libraries and other foundational code. You can also hire me for:

  - MVPs, game development, scientific applications
  - performance optimization of existing code
  - rapid prototyping, proofs of concept
  - scientific applications and simulations, code for university/research papers and projects

  Technologies

  - C, C++, PHP, Javascript, C#, Python, others...
  - Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, 
    vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js
  - OpenGL/WebGL/HLSL, Cuda, SIMD optimizations

- Proxmox as the base OS, stock install. Close every port except SSH, 80, 443 (alternatively you may want to go with Wireguard instead of SSH). There is an nginx instance running in front of the containers, it passes data along to them as per config. Otherwise, nothing is reachable from the outside.

- Servers are on Proxmox containers, mostly also Nginx, some Nodejs, some other, you know the drill. The containers are pretty low overhead, so you can implement basically any deployment strategy in that environment. They're also easy to back up and to replicate to other machines.

> keep software up to date? ex: Postgres, OS

I run a periodic "apt update && apt upgrade -y && apt autoremove -y" as a cron job on most containers. Some configurations tend to break occasionally, so I do those specific ones manually or with additional scripts. I have a repo of scripts and snippets that I use everywhere, just little hacks that accumulated over the years because they automate useful things.

> do load balancing? built-in load balancer?

That depends on where your loads are, and what the structural needs of your applications are. If this is about external web requests to a mostly read-heavy application, I highly suggest using a CDN such as Cloudflare rather than rolling your own. That being said, Nginx makes load balancing pretty painless.

> automate backups? ex: databases, storage. Do you use provided backups and snapshots?

Their storage offering is pretty okay, but I would consider restoring a whole-system backup a last resort. Proxmox has built-in support for container snapshots/backups, which gives you more granular control. These snapshots are also easy to rsync periodically to another host. If the physical machine dies, you just start the container on another host from a recent backup. There are HA options for this on Proxmox if you link more than one host into a cluster (which is overkill for most setups).

> maintain security? built-in firewall and DDoS protection?

Close down your ports. No complicated firewall rules, either. Just block anything that isn't directed at one of your 3 necessary ports. With DDoS protection: don't roll your own, use a CDN. Also, install only things you can audit or come from a reasonably safe source. For instance, I would highly discourage running npm installs/updates unsupervised. If you have a production app that needs to work and needs to be reasonably secure, don't automatically pull data from free-for-all package managers - deploy them with reviewed or known-good versions hard locked (or deploy them with dependencies already included).

As a final tip: Hetzner servers come with RAID setups (usually RAID1). Monitor the status of those drives! If one fails, tell them to replace it. They will usually do it within the hour on a running system.

By convention, we're using the term artist only for people. Midjourney is not a person, it's a tool. Just like a Gravatar image is not made by the artist Gravatar, it's made by a generator, using rules and some input. Midjourney's rules come from all the stuff it saw when it was trained, and its input comes from humans entering text prompts. You could argue the same applies to human artists, but that doesn't make them equivalent just because they have some things in common.

So, Midjourney is not an artist. But is a person entering a prompt an artist or not? I would argue that there are people skilled and creative at engineering prompts, or further refining the generated outputs. It's not NOT art. Then again, that has always been a matter of interpretation.

> But a machine can only copy. Or you're saying a machine can be an artist.

That's a very Hollywood interpretation. Obviously a machine can be an artist, because humans are also machines (unless you're arguing for the supernatural).

As I said above, the common convention is that an artist should be a person. We have long ago decided that a person can use tools, including generative algorithms, to make what is considered art. However, nobody is obligated to appreciate any given artwork, so I don't see what's being lost if we just let this development play out.

> So - with as few words as possible, who is the artist of that picture?

(HN won't let me reply to your question below directly, so I'll add it here). In your opinion, does every picture HAVE to be made by an artist? If your answer is "yes", then the artist is the human entering the prompt, although the artistic work may have been quite minimal. If your answer is "no", or "it depends on the result", there may be no artist.

Let's say a camera takes a picture of a public place every few minutes and puts it online. Who's the artist?

It's even more complicated than that. "derivative mimicry" and "meta-qualities" are both subjective value judgements you are making, and you're implicitly asking us to go along with them as given.

Human output is also derivative. AI output also has meta-qualities. The real difference is that one is made by a person, the other is made by a person using a tool.

> To replace this process with an ML implementation devalues humanity

Maybe there will be a time where machines will - without any human action involved at all - generate content, put it online, autonomously interact with other machine-generated content, and there will be a closed system where humans are either not involved or are just passive consumers. In that case, yes, humans have clearly fallen completely by the wayside. Which, depending on the nature of those interacting autonomous systems, may be the start of a whole new civilization. Or just electrons chasing each other in circuits that are endlessly recombining the ghostly echoes of their long forgotten makers.

However, that day is not today. We have made more capable content generators and generative tools, and amazingly, have democratized them to a degree.

I think that's an entirely different discussion to have. I think AI generators are not faster artists, they're generative tools. Given the amount of prompt engineering and output editing, I'd say significant human input and creativity is still involved. Even in cases where no such work is being done by a human, it's just a generator, not a person. We have been making generated artwork for as long as computers exist, it's just that the quality, artistic range, and accessibility have made a jump now.

> Car is just a faster way to let you move from A to B. But laws treat cars and pedestrians vastly different.

I would say the laws treat printing presses differently from computers, but so far we haven't had any laws (that I know of) trying to protect human typesetters from modern DTP software.

> Laws are extremely inconsistant.

True.

Society already reflects my viewpoint. Culture is based on remixing ideas. Most commonly copyright applies to direct reproduction, although there are obviously degrees. Whether copyright deserves to exist as it currently does is another discussion.

> instead your spouting nonsense just to serve your self interest. Hopefully not though!

What about my position is nonsense, and what do you think my self interest is?

Edit: Look, I'm sorry for rubbing you the wrong way, obviously we both have some strong opinions about AI generators, and maybe tool usage in general. I would like to know more about where you're coming from to have a reaction this visceral. The most glaring point of critique against current AI generators I would understand is the fact that multi-billion dollar startups are printing money using the work of other people for free. Is that it maybe? Would you have a reaction that strong if the models were open source?

Somehow we have this notion that we can put an idea (a song, a painting, a text, a meme, you name it) out there and by virtue of copyright people will be obliged to pay for it but will not be able to use it in any way. This is not possible, and advancements in tools such as computers and AI generators make this very obvious. You will NEVER be able to prevent people from mimicking your style, your choices, even your content - you can only prevent them from publishing identical copies and claiming them as their own for a while. I think that's all perfectly fine.

If you don't want your idea to become part of the mountain of content that our civilization is built on: don't publish it. Write it down, store it in your cellar, and have your heirs burn it after you die.

This, and I'd raise the bar even further: if we were to be attacked by any alien civilization, no matter if they have FTL or other Clarke tech or even if they have no special tech at all, we're incredibly f**ed.

It would be trivial to hurl asteroids at us until we're all dead. It would be trivial to engineer deadly pathogens, or to flood our planet with hunter-killer drones, or to roast the Earth with solar mirrors. And those are just the low tech options. We chose not to colonize the solar system, and thus we have no possible way of countering a civilization even if it was on the same developmental level as us.

Maybe we'd be able to mount a counter strike against one alien craft if they're unlucky and don't eradicate us outright. But that's a very big if.

However, I sleep well at night knowing that we have so far not seen anyone else out there, and we definitely have not seen a large space ship entering our system. Assuming they're bound to known physics, we'd definitely pick up their deceleration burn as they approach. If someone wants to eradicate us, a risk-free strategy would probably be to bombard us from outside the solar system.