harpersealtako

I think pornhub has one they were saying they were making, idk if that is going anywhere.

I wonder if you could make a good RTS with a "command limit", or a delay between issuing a command and the army moving. This could be simulated by a horseback messenger, or the delay of lightspeed communications across large stellar distances. There's probably a reason nobody's made a game like that before though...

It's a bit of a freaky question (you mentioned the same example last week too, I had to double-check if you were the same person) but I think it's actually really important and we should be talking more about things like that. It's entirely feasible with the current technology we have, and we can't just ignore that fact. We're basically one rich eccentric (who can afford the server time) away from a model that can remove the clothing from an image of a person. You can't put that cat back in the bag.

Most AI is currently done by big, "serious" companies that both care about liability and bad press of being associated with that sort of thing, and also have a lot of AI-ethicist-type folks on board who care a lot about what they consider "misuse". Some AI designs try to limit the NSFW training data used in the model (e.g. DALL-E 2), while others try to fine-tune or censor results after the fact (e.g. GPT-3).

Right now the adult-oriented AI applications lag slightly behind the most cutting-edge ones, but actually make up a shockingly big percentage of the consumer base, both current and potential -- adult content is probably one of the biggest actual potential applications for AI, and there are some really fascinating ethical questions around it (e.g. ethics of AI-generated porn vs real life porn, considerations around real people, minors, other illegal content, etc.).

Generally, adult-oriented models are either hobbyist clones/finetunes of existing models, or just existing models that people have figured out ways to get to work with adult inputs. There are plenty of AI model hosting services out there that have no qualms about being used for shady or even illegal purposes, so it's difficult if not impossible to stop it from the server provider side.

We need to be thinking more about what how we want to handle that sort of thing socially/culturally/legally, because it's gonna happen whether we want it to or not.

I think the (humorous) implication is that you would use them as bait for traps. I don't think potatoes would be that effective as raccoon bait (maybe?), but I do know that bear trappers use all sorts of weird stuff, usually food waste of some kind, and it wouldn't surprise me if potatoes would work. I've heard of people using everything from rotten corn to frosted donuts, usually in ridiculous quantities (like an entire 10-gallon drum full). Put it in the middle of the woods, wait for the smell to permeate the entire forest, and then watch the bears come in. Of course the goal is to get the bear to come back the next week, where you'll be waiting in a treestand with a bow or a rifle.

US grocery stores in general seem no less clean than western European grocery stores from my limited experience. I don't know what the parent poster is talking about -- even Walmarts in the bad parts of town seldom seem conspicuously "dirty".

GPT-adjacent text prediction AIs are already mostly used for this to great effect. AI Dungeon was mostly used to generate erotica. Its successors like NovelAI and Sudowrite are also used mostly for this. The "chatbot" label isn't imaginative enough, because people use them for everything from autogenerated personalized fiction to simulated chat logs.

I know this one from the Umineko visual novel series. Detectives in the Umineko universe are dimension-hopping reality auditors who wield the "rules of detective fiction" as rhetorical weapons (and sometimes literal weapons) when jumping into stories to fight against witches who are trying to create unsolvable mysteries to increase peoples' belief in magic. There's one detective who uses Knox's 10 rules, and another who uses Van Dine's 20 rules. It's a really fun, really meta story, one where the main characters are both participants in the story and genre-savvy readers debating who the murderer is using trope knowledge.

I'm not sure whether you actually think this is good or bad but honestly I bet it would actually be a net positive, in a "if everybody's a pornstar, nobody is" kind of way. If you can generate nsfw video from a picture of a face with the press of a button, it will probably cease to be a thing that matters to anybody within a generation or two, in the same way we think about Photoshop today. It might be a bit of an awkward transition though since it definitely offends most modern people's sensibilities.

Lets be real though, it's the anime-style generation models that are going to be the pioneers in this field.

It's only a matter of time before we get a good NSFW image generation algorithm. Text erotica generation is already a not-insignificant part of the public AI world (remember AI dungeon? Most people used it for porn). The question is whether it's going to come out of the established adult industry or not. There are clear benefits (no real humans needed anymore, personalized fetish material forever, etc.), the only issue is whether they're willing to deal with the inevitable bad press (e.g. fake images of real people, taboos like underage content or disturbing imagery). I wouldn't be surprised if any models from the adult industry will basically be heavily gimped from the start to avoid liability.

I think one of many issues with the car windshield observation is we don't have a good baseline. So we notice that in 1990 there were more bugs on our windshields compared to 2020 after a drive through Kansas. But maybe 2020's insect levels are actually a return to normal, preindustrial levels after an anomalous century of high bug populations? We don't have a bug windshield strike stats from 1890.

Honestly it's such a dirty metric with so many compounding variables I'm shocked that anybody is seriously considering it as a meaningful data point beyond the most basic, surface-level understanding of the issue. To be honest the whole thing reeks of the usual hacker-news crowd issue where people want to pretend they know about a topic (e.g. systemic issues in pollinator/agricultural pest population management in high-intensity modern industrial agriculture) but are underestimating the complexity of the issues by a huge magnitude.

I think you're right. A lot of times in modern movies, the plot, setting, and characters exist solely to advance the ideology it is trying to push. Because ideology is a ideal of real life that almost by definition is incomplete, the plot/setting/characters feel inconsistent, and the illusion of internal logic is broken. For example, a character might do or say something that is inconsistent with reality purely in order to push a certain message, and it's really obvious what's happening. It's like if you're watching an action flick and the actor suddenly turns to the camera, smiles, and says "and that's why kids shouldn't do drugs". It pulls you out of the story -- even if you agree with the ideology.

Yes, that's one of the big mindfucks in the nutrition world, which is that arguably the healthiest society on the planet has a diet high in sodium, refined carbs, and fried foods.

I think the backlash to describing Heinlein as "fascist" says more about the average person's understanding of real-life fascism than anything. I get the impression most people just replace the word with "evil" in their head rather than considering it on its merits and understanding what his thoughts on it were. There's often an implicit unstated argument there, like "X author is fascist, fascism is evil, therefore X author is evil, therefore you should not read their books", which seems a little more extreme than is warranted.

On that note, Heinlein wrote all sorts of weird, contrarian themes into his books. Many of them pushed against the prevailing social norms and beliefs of the time, from sexual norms to ethics to race relations. Trying to pin down his actual beliefs is difficult because he would often write one book taking one stance on an issue, and another later with a totally contrary stance. Often when I read Heinlein I find myself strongly disagreeing with what he's putting down, but fascinated with the question or angle being posed/presented.

You can't argue with demographics because, outside of immigration, it is physically impossible to change them in the short term.

Even if e.g. Korea somehow managed to get a fertility rate of 10 tomorrow, it would takes many decades for that generation to begin to contribute to the economy as a class of high-skilled laborers. No matter what Korea does, absent implausible levels of immigration, they are still set for future economic hardship due to their demographics.

An easy counterpoint is that Japan is a very healthy society with the lowest obesity rate in the developed world, and they actually have a mantra that says "eat 30 different foods every day". Japanese people directly attribute their health to the diversity and variety of their diet.

I'm assuming the types of older w/ downtown suburbs you're talking about are more like this, right?:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2054168,-71.5416077,3a,75y,0...

For the record I grew up between two types of places. One was a pretty, forested, newish, wealthy, totally-isolated-from-anything-that's-not-a-home-or-school development very similar to this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7471229,-122.073413,3a,60y,0...

The other was a more remote, rural, mixed-income area a lot like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.4281764,-78.0252446,3a,75y,1...

I found both of those great in their own ways. The former was extremely pleasant and peaceful. Kids would play around outside, neighbors would walk their dogs together, people would frequently have house parties and barbecues and such. Weirdly, it's completely isolated from any commercial development. It's a 10 minute drive to the nearest place you can buy anything. Nobody had much of a problem having a social life as far as I could tell.

The latter was great too, but in a more independent kind of way. Everybody kept to themselves more at home, but they would congregate at church or at the local restaurants all the time. People would shoot guns, drive 4x4s, just do whatever the heck they wanted and nobody gave them shit for it. There was a bigger mix of poorer folks and richer folks, oftentimes along traditional racial boundaries, but they coexisted better than any community I've seen. Rich farmers would shoot an extra deer each year for the poorer families so they could eat meat for dinner even when it was expensive. There was a bit of a "downtown" but it was still like, 20 minutes drive away on a country road so not really accessible without a car obviously. School and sports was a huge center of life there: people all over town would come to the local high school football games.

I'm still not exactly sure which kinds of suburbs, or aspects of suburbs, you find alien.

I get why some people like cities. Especially kids who don't want to be tied down, who want to be able to explore who they are, who want to see and be part of something bigger than their hometown. There's plenty of things to love about cities, from the convenience of the nightlife/food culture, to the "pulse" of the city, the feeling that something is always happening at any time of day, the compassionate social compromises residents adopt to accommodate the diversity of backgrounds of people, etc.

But there's a reason the plurality of Americans choose and prefer to live in suburbs. It's deeper than just "outdated 20th century city planning". It's something specific about American culture, community, etc. that resists specific generalizations.

That just sounds like old people talking to each other, I don't see the problem. That kind of small-talk would be commonplace in any small-town diner. In a quiet neighborhood where nothing happens, literally anything is gossip-worthy. Not every online has to be maximally interesting content, sometimes it's fine if it's just old people talking about the weather.

My impression of nextdoor based on my admittedly very limited usage was that maybe 5% of people (the usual paranoid types) used it as a sort of unofficial neighborhood crime watch, and 95% of everybody else used it to share pictures of local wildlife, organize barbecues, complain about the weather, and share old people memes.

I'm sort of biased though, I find mild gossip to actually make a place feel almost "comfy" and "lived-in". It's like the vibe of a local diner or church meetup, where nothing really happens in the community so anything minor (from a new car a neighbor has parked outside their house, to the loud kids who collect sticks to pretend-fight with and store them in a pile behind the mailbox, to the "crazy" party that the young couple had in their backyard last night with half a dozen friends) is a subject of minor gossip and banter and speculation.

I honestly bet 90% of the bad rep nextdoor get is purely a generational thing because nextdoor is basically just social media for older people and young people just don't really get how old people use social media. Notwithstanding the email/notifications topic here of course.

This is so contrary to my experiences living in suburbs/exurbs most of my life that I'm honestly not exactly sure how we came to such polar opposite beliefs.

The most alienating, dehumanizing, isolated environments I've ever lived in are large and medium cities and apartments, while the most welcoming, strong communities I've been a part of have been suburbs, exurbs and rural areas.

One thing I think about a lot is that in a lot of artistic fields, there's often a niche for "art loved by artists". Poetry that mostly people who write poetry like. Architecture that mostly architects like. Painters that most people dislike but other painters love. And I think this is somewhat of a recent thing as well (recent as in last 100-200 years or so).

For classical music, I have a theory that instead of splitting into two, it split into three. To overly generalize, there's the mainstream classical music everybody loves to listen to, mostly game/movie/tv soundtracks. There's the classical music that fans and critics of classical music loves (the subject of the article, the avante garde, the neoclassical, etc.). And then the classical music that classical musicians like, which is mostly stuff written by the old great composers (my impression is that classical musicians aspire to play famous old pieces more than they get excited over new pieces).

That's one of the big appeals of LVT: in theory it works incrementally. You try e.g. a 5% LVT and you should notice 5% of the effects.

So the "killed gently and instantly" is the main one I think is wrong about these documentaries and the part that is certainly the easiest to construct a false narrative with. Largely IMO the horrors of industrialized animal husbandry are in the everyday life of the animal, e.g. feedlots, rather than slaughterhouses.

An example: there's this classic image you see all the time of the cow strung up by its hindquarters, kicking and flailing as it's moved along the assembly line. The problem is that this narrative is literally fraudulent. That cow is already dead, its brain has been destroyed by a bolt gun, and the reason it's "kicking" is because its 100% dead carcass is being shocked with electricity to induce rigor mortis. It's actually illegal to slaughter a cow any other way in a slaughterhouse.

For me at least the reason I hunt is because I love the personal connection I get to what I eat. Being responsible for my food is incredibly satisfying. Lab grown meat to me seems like the opposite of that.

Admittedly I only skimmed through through it, but it looks like yet another vegan documentary (e.g. Dominion, which I watched all the way through and wasn't convinced at all by) where the worst examples of the worst excesses of industrialized slaughter are taken in the worst possible light and suggested to be broadly representative of the whole. Honestly, anybody with basically any exposure to real-life animal husbandry can find issues in these sorts of documentaries with minimal effort. For myself, I'm a hunter and so I regularly kill and butcher wild animals literally as a hobby -- despite this (or maybe because of it), I'm actually quite open to criticizing the ethics of intensive livestock farms as long as it's not through the lens of "meat is murder".

I wish there was a halfway decent documentary that took a more balanced approach, because if your goal is "better animal welfare" rather than "the abolition of meat eating on moral grounds" then there's actually a lot to criticize and improve on. e.g. I thought "Food Inc" was a lot more even-handed, even though it still fell into some of the usual traps.

This is why I'm not an urbanist even though I support in theory a lot of urbanist policies.

The motte: "There is great demand for dense, walkable, affordable, towns/cities/neighborhoods in the US, and not enough supply to satisfy this demand. A big reason why there is a supply shortage, aside from the relative inelasticity of housing in general, is government restrictions on building/zoning these sorts of developments. There are many coordination failures in attempts to create these sorts of neighborhoods which could be rectified through government action."

The bailey: "Suburbs are a failure of city planning. Car ownership/usage is a net negative on society and should be disincentivized. Government policy should work to eliminate suburbs, replacing them with dense development. Most of those who live in suburbs would surely choose and be happier living in denser developments."

If I lived in one of those houses, would I be able to paint it whatever color I wanted (e.g. pink and yellow stripes)? Or is there some sort of coordination to make sure they all look appealing as a set?

>Is there a standards body for HOAs? Are they regulated?

Each state generally sets its own standards for HOAs. There are legal frameworks, insurance laws, etc. which are fairly similar across the country.

>If they have equivalent legal status to a government or a police department, are there constitutional rights which they cannot violate?

They do not have equivalent legal status to a government or police department. HOAs are limited in their powers by federal, state, and municipal guidelines. Every state has its own laws in this regard. There are also federal laws prohibiting certain bylaws, e.g. the Fair Housing Act prevent HOAs from enforcing racially discriminatory covenants.

>Can two competing HOAs exist in the same geographic area, and home owners are free to setup additional ones if the incumbents don’t meet their needs?

I don't know exactly what you're referring to, but generally speaking, nobody is forced to buy in an HOA neighborhood unless they want to, there are generally a multitude of HOA-managed (and non-HOA-managed) neighborhoods to choose from within a single town/school district/etc. The only exception might be things like specific lakes/small island communities, where the entire geographic feature is managed under a single association (e.g. for lakes they generally pay for the maintenance of the lake itself, stocking fish, removing trash, etc.)

I was similarly skeptical until I read it (ever since the first part appeared on HN) and it convinced me on many points.

That said, I think you're half right? SMTM's environmental contagion hypothesis is an explanation for population-level obesity rates, not individual cases of obesity. Anybody who cares sufficiently about their own obesity can change it through individual efforts. However, on a population level, "just change your habits", or even worse, shaming people who are obese, is a less effective strategy than "figure out what is causing their bodies to signal hunger and store fat in dysfunctional, self-harmful ways that they didn't used to anywhere on earth until the mid-1900s".

I don't think "refined carbs are bad for you" is correct. Consider that many of the healthiest, least obese, longest lived societies on earth (e.g. Japan) have diets heavy in refined carbs (e.g. white rice).

This is absolutely true. Look at text prediction models as an example (e.g. GPT-3). One of the biggest (if not the biggest) applications was story-generation tools like AI Dungeon. Guess what most people actually used AI Dungeon for? Erotica. Guess what happened when OpenAI cracked down on it? A huge portion of the userbase jumped ship and built a replacement (NovelAI) using open-source EleutherAI models that explicitly did support erotica, which ended up being even better than the original ever was. I can tell you that there is very strong interest in nsfw image generation in those communities, as well as multiple hobby projects/experiments attempting to train models on NSFW content (e.g. content-tagged boorus), or bootstrap/finetune existing models to get this sort of thing to work.