michaelbrave

in a lot of ways that is understandable when so much of the news is bad news, if all the highlights of the day point toward the world going to hell even reading a normal newsfeed can feel like doomscrolling.

Yesterday I started working through How to design programs, and set up a chat with Gemini 2.5 asking it to be my tutor as I go through it and to help answer my questions if I don't understand a part of the book. It has been knowledgeable, helpful and capable of breaking down complex things that I couldn't understand into understandable things. Fantastic all around.

I imagine it would be easy for them to do similar to the TV guides of yesteryear(the company that owned it used it primarily for self promotion with just enough competitor promotion to fly under the radar and still seem useful), where it gives good recommendations sure, but 60-70% of those recommendations are the paid ones or the ones you own for you custom LLM.

I choose to put the emphasis on 'is'

I primarily use excalidraw via a plugin for obsidian, I wonder what amount of effort it would take to get it running on that.

that becomes more difficult though since older games are in essence collectors items and would be stolen or not returned. It's like if most of the books in the library were out of print books that were highly collectable, a recipe for disaster.

Not saying they made the wrong call here or anything, but there is clearly a gap here between old games being made available and legal options to access them, libraries tried to own a physical copy and distribute a digital copy, which was an attempt at a fair compromise, but if that isn't allowed either then I guess piracy is the only options now.

the AI image generation and 3D printing community had a similar kind of feel from 2021-2023, both are slowing down now though and becoming more mainstream everyday and needing less tinkering everyday. Which is great but disapointing at the same time.

I personally don't much care for the format, if I save an image and it ends up WebP then I have to convert it before I can edit or use it in any meaningful way since it's not supported in anything other than web browsers. It's just giving me extra steps to have to do.

I have a pet theory that burnout and depression are mostly the same thing, just triggered by different things.

as a reaction to the current court being stacked, not as an overall it should be done kind of thing.

it doesn't seem downloadable to run locally, a shame.

I usually imagine extradition being used for people who are dangerous, for someone who at worse encouraged a lot of copyright violations by making software feels like an abuse of power to me.

You know what else might be cool is a "see related" feature, whenever a paper references another, create a link between them and create an almost recomendation engine based on that. Ideally, you could then look at a kind of discoverability family tree of how the paper's evolved.

This is likely hard to implement and only wishful thinking, but I think it would be neat.

that's a chicken and egg problem. People change jobs frequently mostly due to two reasons: 1. higher pay 2. to get away from bad management or a bad work environment (same thing really)

If it's the kind of place that doesn't help train new skills, that falls under "bad management". Employees could collectively try to be the better person first in fixing this, but most modern history would show that most employers if given an inch will take a mile, and will generally pay the least amount possible, expect one-sided loyalty, and overall get away with everything they can until either regulation or market forces force them to change.

it was a bubble, bubbles pop eventually

the tech is technically there using 2-5 different AI solutions, it mostly lacks an interface that automatically takes one step to the next

I've heard rumors of people that don't know how to code using LLMs to make blender addons in python, so this has already started I think.

I'm still sad about 42 in Fremont closing, but if you live near one, it was quite worthwhile.

When I was a kid I had a classic playstation (PS1) it had multiple kinds of video outputs, one of which was S-video, which was a lot sharper than composite, problem was sharper wasn't better, it made pixel games have sharp edged pixels and the blur and scanlines that blended were missing, it also made the motions of 3D things just look clunky and disconnected. In almost every way possible the higher resolution output made it look worse.

So yeah, making a movie sharper could very likely make it worse.

Right now I have a 3090TI so it's not worth it for me to upgrade to a 4090, but I do run into Vram constraints a lot, especially with merging stable diffusion models, especially as the models get larger (XL-Cascade-etc). As I move toward running multiple LLMs at a time I run into similar problems.

I would gladly buy a card that ran a touch slower but had massive Vram, especially if it was affordable, but I guess that puts me into that camp of enthusiasts you mentioned.

the more interesting use cases I've seen have been real time video filters and uses with music based generation for live performances, which is why the speed matters more than the accuracy.

For example it could take an old video game say morrowind and it could in real time patch the graphics onto the video screen. Or people could look at a video of themselves and it would update the style similar to a snapchat filter.

if you have long term fans that really love what you make I think making most of your money with merch is an area worth exploring. Most bands make their money that way, it's what made Star Wars rich, it's where most of the pokemon money comes from too. I don't think a game has to make money just from the game itself.

Millennials are 30's-40's now, they got skipped too.

Brand erosion takes time, so "force awakens" was seen by nearly every star wars fan, giving it a try. But if they were disappointed they were less likely to see it's sequel "the last jedi" which numbers show that I believe. If trust was further shaken by the quality of "the last jedi" then the numbers for it's sequel "the rise of skywalker" would reflect that. If trust was further shaken by the TV offerings like "Mandelorian" or "Book of Boba Fett" or "obi-wan kenobi" show, then those would also progressively have less and less viewership and less and less subscribers to streaming services like Disney+.

A business can do something that makes a ton of money and still tarnishes their brand and their relationship with their fans. So those fans thinking its a flop, even if it was a financial success isn't quite wrong.

the lego one was well received I think.

I would guess likely, it just remind me of microsofts chatbot on twitter that would learn from interactions so some 4chan people decided to turn racist, and they did like within a day or so.

honestly we are basically there already. I could take anyone's face and use stable diffusion (maybe combined with roop) to generate a naked body in about a min. Most of those steps could be simplified with a task specific UI where you just give it a face and it gives you porn.

As for legality, it's hard to say, I want to say it would bump into trademark laws of a person's identity use, but those laws are similar to libel laws that are hard to prove I think.

not all are auto labelled, some are hand labelled, some are initially labelled with something like clip/blip/booru and then corrected a bit by hand. The newest thing though is using llm's with image support like GPT4 to label the images, which kind of does a much better job most of the time.

Your understanding of the attack was the same as mine, it injects just the right kinds of pixels to throw off the auto-labellers to misdirect what they are directing causing the tags to get shuffled around.

Also on reddit today some of the Stable Diffusion users are already starting to train using Nightshade so they can implement it as a negative model, which might or might not work, will have to see.

Brand names carry weight for several years before the damage becomes apparent.

Often their cost cutting measures seem positive at first as it creates a profit uptick, but it's usually at the cost of the brand, so 3-5 years later things take a turn (once the consumer has figured out the brand can't be trusted anymore). By that point it's hard to put the blame on the appropriate person or identify the appropriate reason for a less profitable year.

Maybe something of a compromise then, first time making it creates a 20 year copyright, any additional years have to be applied for with a fee that increases the more years it's kept.