2,744 karma · joined April 19, 2018
https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%...
That, and the state of missing a technology in a period of time is irreplaceable once it's been discovered. Nobody can live in an era without social media anymore, barring a global-scale catastrophic reset. So I believe it's important to consider what technology is not yet totally pervasive, for example by realizing there is still a steering wheel for you to grip in your car.
And in my mind, the sinister feeling stems from the fact that all it takes to irreversibly shift society like that is enough smart people with honest intentions but little foresight of what will happen in a few decades as a result of proliferating all this. The problems that result stop being in anyone's control, "throwing it over the wall" so to speak, and instead become yet another fact of life that could weigh us down (mostly I think of the ubiquity of social media and how it has changed human interaction). And it all stems from just a few engineering type people getting overexcited about cool possibilities they can grasp at, not considering there are billions of people unlike them who may have other ideas.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1307550/Craftopia/
Given Palworld is the new thing I doubt its predecessor will ever exit EA by now. I hope the devs commit the new game to a full release instead of dropping support again after the hype dies down.
A question is, is it possible to advance technology to fulfill the green revolution without changing the value of human creativity due to the creation/advancement of genAI? Or past a certain point, the results of discovering improved health and ecological outcomes will become inextricably linked with discovering new technologies that cause conflict? What actually drives such a process?
I think more people might become interested on why we end up here talking about new possibilities conflicting with stability again and again, similar to how the negative effects of the invention of smartphones are being talked about now.
I think the term "AI" is one of the most loaded and misleading to come up in recent discourse. We don't say that relational databases "pack and ship" data, or web clients "hold a conversation" with each other. But for some reason we can say that LLMs and generative models "get inspired" by the data they ingest. It's all just software.
In my own opinion I don't think the models can copy verbatim except in cases of overfitting, but people like the author of the post have a right to feel that something is very wrong with the current system. It's the same principle of compressing a JPEG of the Mona Lisa to 20% and calling that an original work. I believe the courts don't care that it's just a new set of numbers, but instead want to know where those numbers originated from. It is a color of bits[1] situation.
When software is anthropomorphized, it seems like a lot of criticisms against it are pushed aside. Maybe it is because if you listen to the complaints and stop iterating on something like AI, it's like abandoning your child before their potential is fully realized. You see glimpses of something like yourself within its output and become (parentally?) invested in the software in a way beyond just saying "it's software." I feel as if people are getting attached to this kind of software unlike they would to a database, for example.
A thought experiment I have is whenever the term "AI" appears, mentally replace it with the term "advanced technology." The seeming intent behind many headlines changes with this replacement. "Advanced developments in technology will displace jobs." The AI itself isn't the one coming for people.
I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier.
My feelings about the rise of streaming video are also conflicted. It has given us high-quality longform content on topics that hadn't been covered before, but all those other people's passions and hobbies take up way too much time if you as a consumer become deeply invested in them (not even counting the conspiracy genre and its implications). It's easy to do partially because YouTube facilitates that, but I think in the end people want to consume all this information in the end, for some definition of "want". And dozens of 6-hour streams of the latest game or another will keep being uploaded every day.
And there's this other thing that I keep coming back to. Someone I know was really into this engineer creating fake Apple product boxes that recorded thieves stealing them and being glitterbombed. They found it hilarious, but I was sort of confounded. It was the conversion of a few people's bad choices into entertainment and ad revenue, coated over with the intellectual sheen of detailed makerspace engineering diagrams and wit mixed with a moral high ground. Though what the thieves did was not right, there was something smug and passive aggressive about the entire thing that rubbed me the wrong way. And this was presented as just a humble guy with engineering experience creating his content and getting people interested in STEM. Anyone has the capability to do this sort of thing now, not just a media machine with questionable motives. It's just regular, driven people with questionable motives now.
It makes logical sense. The longer the intro cutscene took, the more people would just exit out before the action could take place, the more money they lost on IAPs. So fast-tracking the player to beating things up within 2-4 minutes is critical. The longer story cutscenes can take over later. There are probably hard metrics to back this up somewhere.
OpenAI has one of the fastest-growing software releases in history. It's kind of insane how after a year this is already starting to alter people's communication styles. Technologists will have to start asking "why do people still insist on doing this", even with all the discussion about incorrect information coming up. Well, because they wanted to, they could, and nobody has told them "no" yet.
I hope the consequences of such a large-scale software rollout are considered next time. If you have to stop and stay "we should educate people about the misuses of this," then some proportion of the population won't be educated or reject being educated outright and do what they want. In my view, the only thing preventing people from throwing around ChatGPT suggestions in inappropriate contexts is... not giving them ChatGPT. To remain naive to the possibilities lest they get excited and unwittingly unleash them on everyone, regardless of true their intentions - as had been the status quo up until a few years ago. Draconian legislation outlawing GPUs or LLMs are more divisive a solution than the general public just not being aware of the possibilities of LLMs.
I know this is unrealistic, however. "Time for people to embrace the tech and move on" has become a thought-terminating cliche. As a programmer, I'm lost as to what to say or do about this.
I've seen accusations and suspicion of HN commentators giving ChatGPT responses. Accusing someone of using ChatGPT here has become something more nuanced than an insult, but still sows discord. If it's coming to this, I think it is worth examining for what purpose we build the things we do.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-launc...
Plus I believe there was an (uncommon?) feature where two players could share a single controller to control each character (two shoulder buttons and an analog stick).
(Even with an Action Replay I remember that game being frustrating as hell.)
But when asked what people do about their innate insight they can only respond "Oh, I can only manage my finances telepathically and none of my friends have time to speak mouth to mouth anymore, their mental energy is always focused on something now."
And when asked about alternatives, "Oh, we can't just make it go away. We were born with it from the start and everyone relies on it to stay connected. And my children are given assignments where they exercise their PSI so they're obligated to use it. Then they spend a lot of time playing mind games after school with their friends. It will probably never go away, and I accept that."
I'm starting to think that successive generations will both live and die by advancing technology. It's a runaway force that no single organization is in control of, and that we cannot study the long-term effects of until everyone relies on it daily.
And just think about how many tech dependencies we don't have yet but are itching to give ourselves. A generation from now this could repeat itself when people generally consider LLMs useful enough to integrate into every fridge and ATM. Who will make that decision? It seems like when a few people make that decision for others, an acceptance loop begins where the tech is normalized over years until we stop asking ourselves how we got here at all. It no longer makes sense to wake up and see that you don't have a smartphone sitting on your nightstand anymore.
The noisy part was this notification steals focus so you can't type into the search bar immediately, you have to hit escape or click out to gain focus again. And the popup kept appearing until I realized you had to specifically press "yes, keep changes" on the notification to get it to stop (usually I canceled out of it reflexively to do actually important things). If you just hit Escape or tried to use the URL bar it would come back next session and steal focus again.
It sounds like something minor but the idea of stealing focus to re-confirm a change you already confirmed is a mild source of headaches, and not necessary in my view. Not to mention, this process would repeat itself for every Firefox installation synced with, since the extension counts as a fresh install each time. In a world where switching browsers is trivial, I think minor annoyances like those are best removed.
If LLMs are eventually regarded by a lot of people as an authoritative source, regardless of whether or not they are, I expect a lot of such cases of "morality laundering" to appear.
Now that I think about it, I don't remember Sync handling syncing extension settings on top of install state.
It was also pretty annoying how all the extension install pages opened in several dozen new tabs whenever sync was set up and I had to sit there letting it do its thing for a minute or two before trying to interact with anything. It didn't seem like the hallmark of a sync system that "just worked", in my opinion.
I lost hope it and other issues would be fixed and moved to Chromium on Android.
At the same time, I'm not sure it's realistic to convince everyone who enjoys AI art that they're not getting the full picture unless they put in the effort to create handmade art. I think if AI art hadn't been invented as of now, all those people would just be doing other things that they believe have a higher return on investment - other unrelated hobbies, for example - instead of anything related to art at all.
I had tried picking up pen, pencil, and ink for a year to try to relax and find enjoyment, but for me it was the opposite result, much like the frustrated guests at the end of the piece, and it never really got better for me even though I could see the slow and steady progress I was making.
It didn't help that much of the time I wanted to draw for real, I found that I had some other programming projects on the backburner I wanted to work on instead. So I did those things and was generally happier about my free time. When AI art came around later that year, I found the process much more enjoyable than the sketching and doodling I had been doing for months.
I accept that because of how my mind works, AI art and the related computer code will be more interesting to me than penciling, and because of this difference in interest I might never become a decent penciller in my lifetime. Is that a bad thing, if I'm not necessarily trying to embark on a profound artistic journey?
I'm imaging hordes of businessmen tired from their daily activities that at most have an hour of free time to make something they like. In the past these people would have silently given up and did something else. Except, now there is a solution to that problem of skill and effort that has been placed in front of us and it's impossible to ignore.
The problem I see is, how do you convince a "kindergartner-at-art" who will turn down a crayon and paper after a few weeks to grab hold of the interest in physical art and not let it go, lest their interest fall back to AI art for an indefinite time? It feels like this allocation of interest has almost become political with the ethics surrounding AI art being hotly discussed - the ones who have the "correct" interests and hobbies are placed on one side of the discussion or another.
This sort of culture could explain why Sony still sells $1000 digital Walkmen and luxury Android devices with a headphone jack.
Also OpenFL was missing some Flash features the project relied on and I had to spend a lot of time on a fork of their repos patching them in.
[1] https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/hxcpp/graphs/contributors
I think some players of games (or watchers of movies, etc.) are more sensitive to that kind of "pain" than others. Sometimes I think they might feel as exhausted as their character after pushing through an entire fighting tournament with their avatar, as they were also kicked around in a sense.
Now imagine in a group of people you share a hand-crafted song but one of your friends who isn't as interested in producing music takes your song as inspiration and creates something that sounds better. Imagine they aren't even trying to do this to intentionally one-up you; they think of it as the same kind of sharing and creation. You may disagree but their definition of self-expression differs, and it's difficult to change people. But this happens consistently and the bar is raised ever higher each time.
How well someone handles this kind of scenario depends on mindset. Is the joy in being better than others, or pursuing the craft and learning things, or sharing in the experience in consumption? People will have different values. But I think the bias in AI is for people to focus on the end result without needing to put in a lot of effort.
It's the entire selling point of these products - taking out the effort in getting a high-quality result. Yet the effort spent on human art isn't wasted effort. The effort doesn't just go towards the finished price, but to the satisfaction of the artist themselves. It stimulates their neurobiology. And in a lot of tutorials for hand-crafted art, the mindset taught is to focus on the process and not the end result. Generative art contradicts that bit of knowledge, and it could cause dissonance.
In Stanisław Lem's story about the electronic bard, the existence of the impeccable poetry-generating robot does not directly deprive the poets of their ability to create their own poems. Instead, after perceiving the generated work to be higher quality than anything they're capable of writing, the poets become depressed and commit suicide.
You could say the poets didn't have the right mindset of how to approach life, but I think it raises a good point. It's the mental state of people who create and how society views these tools that matters. You will always have the ability to put pencil to paper regardless of what big technology does, but will you want to if you think the rest of the world has moved on without you?
I think maybe in modern times the effect will be closer to: artists scale back or give up their craft because the potential audiences vote with their wallets and attention spans for people who rent server farms. It's the despair at seeing the public valuing the end-result over the human element in a broader cultural sense. It's feeling as if a piece of yourself is being lost in an eternal void.
And it's the idea that generative models could become a fundamental part of society. Billboards are generated because those cause the most successful ad campaigns. People hold massive music festivals exclusively made of generative synth lines because they attract the crowds. The taste of your drink is algorithmically modeled with ingredients adjusted for the best product-market fit possible.
What stops these people in their tracks is perceiving the world as one that values the machine over the human, and even if you value the human, you still have to get in line with the machine - everyone else is doing it. Generative models could retrain our value systems.
It's not so much what generative models take away than how they change the public's perception of art itself. It is the depression and mindset changes that come with knowing the poetry-robot will be there for all eternity.
Older forms of thinking become outdated, some which may be considered virtuous or delicately intertwined with the human spirit, and this causes anguish and despair at the state of things, and the ever-improving army of poetry robots that sees no end in sight. Because we haven't put an end state on improving technology, and I think deep down some of us believe there was never meant to be such an end state in the future. We would have to spin terms like degrowth and Luddism into something more palatable to have any chance of creating one.
At the same time, it is hard to imagine someone letting go of implementing an idea because of vague negative future effects that are not real in the present. And there is a lot of money incentivizing betting on lots of new ideas to see what takes off.
So it's like, if we uncover the next transformative technology that we know little about the future effects of, we just have to eat the cost of proliferating it everywhere before countermeasures can be figured out, if they can be created at all?
Sometimes I think the ease of virality in software could be a Great Filter. If not something farfetched like human extinction, then the Great Filter of human isolation, or of lasting intergenerational conflict, or something else that's profound but not totally catastrophic. Not only is new tech too tempting to spontaneously put down, but it's nearly impossible to know when to put it down. I think maybe if information overload and the like was hypothesized about like AI is starting to be today, we would still not be able to leave social media uninvented, because nobody had tried it and witnessed it fail yet. But the Great Filter comes in when maybe you can only witness certain failures once.