sycamoretrees

Paris - the city itself - is actually surprisingly high density, almost as high as Manhattan if you do not include the two very large 'Bois' (woods) that are technically part of the city.

I think it’s fine to not be into poetry, but at its core the Divine Comedy is a long poem, and I’m not sure what’s left after you remove any and all “poetic” elements. The Wikipedia page I’m sure could give you the basic characteristics of the circles of hell, if that’s all you really want to know. By the way, the book is a chore in many ways, despite the many nuggets of gold you’ll find within it. It’s long, and the number of references is overwhelming. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that it will never be light reading, no matter how you cut it. Why not look at it as more of a personal project or challenge (poetry and all)?

why are we using image generators to represent actual history? If we want accuracy surely we can use actual documents that are not imagined by a bunch of code. If you want to write fanfic or whatever then just adjust the prompt

Haha, thanks for the insightful comic

Oh… my bad. Didn’t know that was a term. Sorry

American born Chinese dumplings.

Why do people go to see movies when they could just watch the trailer on YouTube?

If that’s what the article is about, then I just don’t really see the point. Literally who cares what SBF and his ilk have to think about literature.

If the article is simply an appeal to common sense, or an effort to convince others to educate themselves, maybe there are better ways to get the message across than regurgitating five hundred words on theAtlantic.com. They publish this stuff for their self-conscious “literati” audience to eat up.

I read quite a bit, actually. But I don’t go around making others feel bad for being supposedly intellectually inferior to me.

> is it the vocabulary? Because it’s a grammatically-simple sentence.

Yes, the vocabulary. Throwing a bunch of low-frequency words together doesn’t make a sentence more refined or its content more insightful. It’s just pomp, really.

As someone else mentioned, yes this is an ad hominem attack (although, maybe this is forgivable insofar as I’m calling out hypocrisy and claiming he’s in no place to put down other people - which I believe is the sole purpose of the article. If it’s just to say that reading is good, well, uh, duh. No need for a whole article about the benefits of education.)

Little more than an article for Atlantic readers to pat themselves on the back with. By the way, I get the sense the author isn’t as wise as he imagines himself, either. His catty obsession with Kanye West’s mental break and his seeming Twitter addiction makes me think he himself is certainly “wildly estranged from genuine wisdom or the humility with which erudition tempers facile notions of invincibility” (his words, not mine). (What an incomprehensible sentence - perhaps reading too much has turned him into a walking thesaurus?)

Quite simply, they’re saying that all those things can be done on a laptop if necessary. Duh.

I see. Thanks for the reply. But I wonder if that’s not a bit too optimistic and not concrete enough. Alignment won’t solve the world’s woes, just like “enlightenment” (a word which sounds a lot like alignment and which is similarly undefinable) does not magically rectify the realities of the world. Why should bad actors care about alignment?

Another example is climate change. We have a lot of good ideas which, combined, would stop us from killing millions of people across the world. We have the research - is more “research” really the key?

Is more research really going to offer any true solutions? I’d be genuinely interested in hearing about what research could potentially offer (the development of tools to counter AI disinformation? A deeper understanding of how LLMs work?), but it seems to me that the only “real” solution is ultimately political. The issue is that it would require elements of authoritarianism and censorship.

Good comment.

Not to be nit picky, but I think you might be wrong about the psychologist part. A core principle, perhaps the most important principle of all, in talk therapy is that of transfer between the patient and the therapist. I don’t think it’s possible to achieve that with a machine, to achieve any real transfer without vulnerability.

A lot of talk therapy today is of questionable quality, in that the therapist or analyst is simply soothing the patient without actually confronting real problems. Machine-based therapy would only exacerbate the problem.

For things like CBT, I’m sure a machine could be helpful. But then again, CBT self-help books already exist.

Art, or creativity, is the part of the movie that is not toil.

Art being made purely for the enjoyment of all is purely commercial, and so it is in some ways equivalent to toil: it is something whose sole purpose is to be consumed.

Yes, being “tricked”, in your words, by human creativity is precisely the appeal. If art were simply an equation, it wouldn’t have any meaning to it - it would simply be fact.

I’m sorry, but I think we’re talking about two diametrically opposite conceptions of art here.

Art is about more than just imitation. It’s about the meaning behind the work. I am not talking about Marvel movies, which might as well be totally AI-generated at this point.

I would suggest having some empathy for those affected. It’s not just gatekeeping, it’s people reacting to being told that the meaning they put into what they make doesn’t actually add any value.

In the Human Condition, Hannah Arendt outlines three parts of the Vita Activa. The first is labour, at the bottom of the pyramid. It is by definition consumable and has limited meaning in itself. The second is work, through which we build a world (i.e. something bigger than just the cyclical and physical properties of the ecosystem). The third is action, or politics, which ripples through the world and inspires linear change. Put together, these three parts make up what it is to be a living human. Giving meaning-making away, by replacing it with mere imitation, is tantamount to revoking those qualities which make us human.

This simply doesn’t look like the IKEA style.

The prompt may not be explicit enough about it looking like IKEA.

This looks like something from the 70s. Which makes sense, since Midjourney likely assumes a connection between bomb/fallout shelters and the Cold War.

No, I get it, I’ve heard that argument and I see the logic behind it. It’s a “victimless” crime.

There are two issues I can think of that I would lead one to different conclusions. The first is that of consent - do I consent to my hard work being used without any reference to me and my effort? Would I have made the effort in the first place if there was no recognition? The second is the following example: I quit my job to write an encyclopedia, something which is sure to benefit humanity. I toil day and night in order to one day sell it and get bread on the table. I finally publish it, but the next day another publisher copies it and sells it for cheaper (which they can afford, because they’re not paying me!), gobbling up my publisher’s market share and hence making me penniless, since the publisher has no money to pay me. Do I not deserve justice, considering the encyclopedia has sold a million copies and I am struggling to make a living?

The point is that the world is much too complex to draw a straight line between physical and intellectual property. A lot of us - and the vast majority on HN, I can imagine - work “intellectual” jobs in order to afford “physical” food.

So, if you write a really good (free, since you don’t believe in intellectual property) book and I merely translate it into German, you don’t mind me selling it on Amazon and making money off of it? Ethically this is OK right? Since it’s not physical.

I don’t mean to come off as rude, I just find these “intellectual property doesn’t exist” takes ultimately very shallow and dismissive.

The question is how this is really possible without a dramatic restriction of internet content accessible to citizens, i.e. national firewalls. OpenAI is accountable, but that’s only because they have something to lose. How does one reign in harmful services operating from outside the EU, who either can’t be reached or will not bother paying EU fines?

Hmm, 500 million is a lot but it is only 500 million. Unclear how they can finance what is already there, pay for food and schools, a nuclear weapons program, a relatively giant military with ridiculously long military training, etc, and on top of that build a whole new city out of nothing. At the end of the day China would rather not have NK collapse on itself, and I think it's pretty clear they've been extending a generous helping hand over the last few decades.

Who is funding all of this, at the end of the day? China?

Why would bilingualism be a defense? Try throwing ChatGPT or whatever a line which combines several languages. e.g., If you ask it “¿Quel est the resultado of 四*6.1, in inglese?”, it will probably reply “4 times 6.1 equals 24.4.” I suppose AI doesn’t think in words, but expects bits of information to be related to X meaning, and from there it can predict a reply and translate that information into words we understand. I haven’t tried the above line, but if it’s not possible already there’s nothing really stopping us from making it work soon enough.

Edit: sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. Are you talking more about multilingual people thinking more abstractly, which would make it harder to tie information to any specific words?

Noise, but I’ve gotten so accustomed to them helping me sleep better that even if it’s silent outside I find them comforting to put on.

Reminds me of a story I heard a while back, about a factory town back in the day where the management would adjust the town clock to make it run slower during the work day, and faster overnight, in order to squeeze more labor out of the poor workers. Can't find anything about it on Google, but it's conceivable.

One tip for earplugs -- I didn't know this for the longest time, embarrassingly -- is to roll them between your fingers into compact, narrow cylinders before inserting them into your ear, that way they will expand and fill up your ear canal perfectly. For the longest time I wondered why earplugs didn't work, and why they always fell out (perhaps I am just stupid), and now I use them almost every night.

I don't know, I feel like even a real version of the Beatles singing God Only Knows would disappoint. I just can't picture Paul McCartney signing it.

The fact that this is AI-generated is amazing. To be completely honest, the God Only Knows one almost sounds like a voice actor/impersonator, so it's not completely there just yet. It's exaggerated and it just lacks soul. But New is much better, almost there.

I'm all for it, though I won't comment on this bill in particular, which seems to be lacking.

There are, of course, ways to implement this that don't include sending even more personal data to social media companies. The most obvious way, for starters, would be through a government app or system that simply tells Facebook "This user is over the age of 13" without sending over any more information.

The reality is that we do need to do something about the issue, just like how porn shouldn't be freely available to literal children. It's an inevitable consequence of the internet moving into the very center of our lives.