cerol

It feels like everyone's so desperate to create or predict the next AI unicorn, that no one's paying attention to the fundamentals. Gives me weird dotcom bubble vibes.

I still cannot see how this can fundamentally change the fashion industry. Fashion is not about design, it's about generating desire to buy. You hire models and influencers to showcase your items, so people think they can be just like them, you just have buy the same piece of clothing. AI doesn't change that. You could totally have a niche for AI-generated clothing, but that's it.

Besides, clothes are a physical item. AI can automate the generation of a "blueprint", but it is still heavily constrained by the physical result. It would be mostly hit and miss. Feels more efficient to have designer use their experience to create sketches that would actually look good in real life.

All in all, I am amazed as much as I am skeptical of the entire synthetic art revolution going on. It's been what? A month? It's too soon. Aren't we jumping the gun?

Whatever happened to boring opinions? "Hmm that's amazing, but we'll see what happens, it's too soon". I'm yet to be convinced of how, beyond being an overall better tool, synthetic art will fundamentally change businesses.

For me, that's the big insight.

Not just SD, but any synthetic media. My take? The "upcoming revolution" is not one of a boss firing their artists and making prompts themselves. It's a shift from addictive art" to subtractive art* in commercial environments.

- Mandela effect for famous art pieces: "Monalisa was AI generated" "No it wasn't" "Yes it was".

- Art critics will get the last laugh, as people start giving them truckloads of money to ask whether a piece of art is human or AI generated.

A payment system that is so cheap (free), fast and intuitive that people use it as a messaging system (via transaction description field).

If a tree falls down in a forest, and there is no one there to hear it. Does it make a sound?

If you can generate infinite material, how do you judge quality?

You're extrapolating an idea based on what movies are, fundamentally. But you don't take in consideration what movies are not. Watching a movie is also a social experience. Going to the movie theater, waiting years for a big blockbuster title, watching something with friends. Word of mouth recommendation is a very big thing. If a close friend recommends me something (be it a movie or a book), I'm much more inclined to like it just for the human connection it provides (reading or watching something other people enjoyed is a means of accessing someone else's psyche).

If every time you watch a movie you have the knowledge that there is a movie that is slightly better a prompt away, why bother finishing this one? If you know you probably won't finish the movie you generated, why bother starting one? So what do you do? You end up rewatching The Office.

Sure, if you tell me this will be possible in a couple of years, I won't object. The point is: will you pay for it on a recurring basis? Because if you don't, this will be no more than a very cool tech project.

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I've recently had this idea for a sci-fi book: in a future not so distant, society is divided between tech and non-tech people. Tech people created pretty much everything they said they would create. AGI, smarter-than-human robots, you name it. But, it didn't change society at all. Companies still employ regular humans, people still watch regular made-by-human movies and eat handmade pizzas and drink their human-made lattes in hipster coffeshops. So tech people are naturally very frustrated at non-tech people, because they're not using optmizing their lives and business enough. And then you have this awkward situation where you have all these robots with brains of size of a galaxy lying around, doing nothing. And then some of them start developing depression, for spending too much time idle. And then the tech people have to rush to develop psychiatric robots. And then some robots decide to unionize, and others start writing books about how humans are taking jobs that were supposed to be automated.

Sure, you can make (even though incentives) everyone wear AR glasses (because they're so cool), and they'll censor out undesired things. That's as much a form of control as it is a form of being controlled. Hooking your entire population's vision to the internet means it could possibly be maliciously used by bad actors.

Doesn't make much sense. If a person is a risk, you would want to surveil them more, and not erase them from every camera feed.

I'm no Zen monk, but having studied a bit of Zen-Buddhism and having practiced meditation for close to 10 years in a regular manner, the idea that we might not have freewill doesn't sound all that bad.

I think people are putting way to much emphasis on the concept of an "I" who has or doesn't have freewill. Trying to figure out whether or not we are "free" is like the eye who tries to see itself, or the fire that tries to burn itself. Maybe science is finally catching up to the Buddhist concept of the absence of ego.

For me the biggest implication is that, and this is my own personal lighthouse in these dark and uncertain times, true freedom is not having options or the "freedom" to choose. True freedom is not needing anything to be my real self and to be at peace. Zen is the real self.

How can one prevent a drop of water from ever drying up? By throwing it into the sea.

The ad industry is very profitable, but it seems to hang in the balance. Ads are effective as long as data you use to segment users are accurate. What happens if data becomes corrupted? Something like "This Person Does Not Exist" [0], but for user data. Your user behavior just remarkably similar to your actual behavior, but you can filter out the sensitive parts.

I'd love to see someone come up with a program or little gadget you can solder to the "smart"-things, and actual usage telemetry will train a locally deployed model that generates user behavior data that is indistinguishable from real user data, only it doesn't say anything about you.

[0] https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/

If someone really wants to hurt you, not having AI isn't going to stop them.

Sometimes I have this interesting thought, that someday, when even the oldest people alive will not know or will not remebered how things worked back then. Then someone, or a group of people, will suddenly rediscover, or reinvent (as we always do throughout history) things that today still exist. Maybe someone will come up with "shops where you are served by real people", or paying for content you watch. Or a "shopping mall, but without cameras" ("but who will be watching me?"). Or a vehicle you can drive yourself.

I know it's a silly philosophical thought. But what it points to, for me, is that data harvesting works because it trades privacy for convenience, and even if it's too little, there are ways to opt-out (the trivial case being opting out of convenience). But it's a much too thin line to thread.

People are aware of the massive commercial surveillance. They just don't care. Human society is built upon trust or its lack thereof. When trust can't be established, surveillance arises. It only becomes a moral problem when it is done asymmetrically, and in an unprecedented scale.

When is too much too much? When your TV starts showing ads, even when unplugged from electricity? When you have to watch an ad to start your EV car (unless you purchase the Quick Start+ package for 9.99/mo)? You can take a break from ads today. That, in a way, ensures that you can consume ads for longer. But industry seems to be moving in the direction of eventually leaving you with no way to opt out. Then, the convenience might not be worth it anymore. That means either a market demand for ad-free products, and a subsequent return to pay-for-content business model, or some sort of social turmoil.

Or maybe that's their plan to get us to consume less: just stick everything with insane amounts of obnoxious ads, so we won't buy anything anyway.

I see a lot of people around 35+ remembering how things were better before social media. Things were better because they were kids, or adolescents. It's youth they're nostalgic about.

My father, who is in his 70s, always talks about how his peers always talk about how the 60s were amazing, and how they associate its being great with the things that existed then or didn't exist then. But he always concludes with this: it's not that that we miss. We miss being young.

Social media surely stirred things up, and I personally am for just getting rid of the whole thing anyway. But we have to take the whole "things were better before social media" with a grain of salt.

Sometimes, the burden of responsibility is too much for some people. Fatalism and cynicism are an easier way out.

When people have nothing left to loose, that's where real change happens.

It's still unclear whether or not "automation" will compensate an ageing population, and prevent a demographic collapse. But having a pill that makes people live longer (even if it's 5 to 10 years), wouldn't it be like throwing an entire gas station into the fire?

Even in my university's restaurant, which feeds students on a massive industrial scale, I see food waste. But even in a much bigger scale, the amount was significantly less.

Elimination of food waste is not practical and should not be a goal, you'll just ultimately fail and give up on intermediary goals that might just suffice.

When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever.

In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parents I've seen people ring our door to ask for food. Personally, I NEVER waste any food, if I put something on my plate, I'll eat it unless it's rotten. And that goes for pretty much everyone I know. Every time I went out to eat with my parents, if there were any significant amount of food left, we would always ponder whether or not we would want to it later. If we decided we would not, we would take it anyway and find someone on the street who would.

While in Sweden, I lived with Swedish families and attended to a traditional Swedish high school. So I'd eat lunch at school and dinner with my host families. My first day eating lunch at school I was shocked, to say the least. I mean, yeah, the food was great, it's amazing that there is such a functional high-quality school system there, and so organized too; once you're done eating, you're supposed to take your plate, put any leftovers on a big trash bin, and give your plate to the lady who puts them into a industrial washer. The amount of food kids threw away was just staggering. And it's not a one off thing. It's a behavior, they put more food than they know they'll eat, every single day. It's not like they put a ridiculous amount of food on their plate and throw most of it away. It's like they don't even bother paying attention to how hungry they are, they just put whatever amount of food they feel like putting, and then throw away the rest. That goes even for drinks, they would serve a cup full of milk or water, and throw half of it away.

I know I'm talking about kids and teenagers, but they will grow up to be adults some day. And I saw that of many adults also. On of my duties as an exchange student was to connect both cultures, mine and the country I was being hosted by. I always tried to give people there a glimpse of what of poverty was and how privileged they were, and I always felt I never got the idea through. It felt sometimes they have a cartoonish idea of poverty and what it means to not have the money to pay for really basic things.

I'm not here to call anyone out. I just think there are times when the people are also part of problem, and I wanted to give a personal perspective.

Sadly, it's the perfect scam.

It was a perfect fit for our MVP, since I don't have to code an admin page (which would take as long the project itself), use a paid alternative, or expect the non-technical co-founder to be POSTing JSON data. It's a very clunky design, definitely has some considerable user latency, but it me took no time to build it, it's free, has a nice UX, and it's allowing us to iterate very quickly.