Vantablack obviously. What planet are you from anyway traveler? I haven't sampled an organism quite like this before.
idk I think being
is completely appropriate.Playing devil's avocado though, it is scary and intimidating to post art and other creative work online, especially if you've never shared anything like that before. Sometimes I've felt quite vulnerable and anxious about whether something I've made will be appreciated, ignored or straight up laughed at.
I've heard all over the place that there's a growing cohort of young people who deeply believe "I can't do that/I don't know how" about anything new and unfamiliar (learned helplessness.) There's also the recognised problem of people judging their own worth on what they perceive about other people online.
I wonder if factors like these have conditioned a lot of people to avoid failure and fear of humiliation to the point where they effectively "can't" learn how to express themselves creatively.
After burning myself out at work I've struggled with so many things that don't seem rational and which I know from experience I should be able to do. It is frequently upsetting and frustrating and confusing. Rarely a conscious resistance, subjectively it feels like brain damage.
From that perspective I can accept the possibility that a lot of people experience a deeply ingrained avoidant reaction to creating and sharing things that leave them open to criticism or rejection. For those people, I suspect generative content creation is a rational and appealing alternative.
Posting generative content is a lot safer by comparison. The generative model provides a layer of plausible deniability and ego shielding, similar to people can build an impulsive habit of expressing themselves through ironic detachment. Rather than taking direct responsibility or ownership and being vulnerable, there's a disconnect between the poster/creator's self identity / sense of worth and the product they are presenting to be judged and consumed. If the generative content they post is well received then they get to enjoy that positive reception and if the content is rejected it's nothing to take personally because the chatbot made it.
I'm just speculating of course. Even if my intuition about this is accurate it's still an unhealthy solution which masks the issue and, if the studies I've skimmed are accurate, will also accelerate skill deterioration. It also seems to lead to users misidentifying what they're doing as work, or as artistic creation.
I guess it takes some of the smug out of my sails if I try to imagine the likely social factors that make posting AI slop more appealing than learning to create and express themselves.
I was reading about this yesterday.
TLDR yes there are ETFs for Chinese companies.
Chinese companies use a structure called Variable Interest Entities (VIEs) to list on foreign exchanges. The government in China regulates foreign ownership of Chinese business in a bunch of sectors and are considered (at least by the US) to be significantly owned or controlled by the Chinese government. I don't think this use of VIEs necessarily implies government ownership, its more about the fact these companies have other entities invested and influencing decision making in ways that might otherwise make them inappropriate for listing on the market - unlike regular publicly listed companies, there are one or more additional interested parties other than a board of directors and shareholders. I think. I'm not an economist.
Rather than selling shares (of ownership) they offer contracts which promise a share of generated profit. They're considered risky compared to stocks and bonds because, as you pointed out, the government can do anything with the company, the VIE structure makes the underlying company's operations opaque and you don't necessarily get transparency about who else might have a controlling interest in the company.
So yea you can buy VIE shares directly or an index fund can buy them and then you can buy the ETF.
I searched for "chinese vie etf" and found a bunch listed on US and other exchanges.
I wonder what would happen to them if China decided to completely ban VIEs, since they are fairly controversial apparently.
My species is unfamiliar with this concept of "price" wat do to get nose job?
And probably overestimating how useful generative models are. A lot of what is being sold (and bought) is not fit for purpose and will not deliver the promised gains in efficiency and surplus value.
A stunning amount of discourse around generative models is essentially fiction. AI companies are actively spinning the biggest and most exciting story possible to entrench the idea that this tech is super powerful.
The same AI companies employ or fund the NGOs of the loudest voices warning about the dangers of AI, but again those dangers are a fiction built within the boundaries of the AI boosting narrative.
The hustle bros are just happy to be included and are riding the hype train hoping it represents similar opportunity to scalp profit as crypto currency did and (while the illusion lasted) NFT were expected to.
The media do human interest pieces warning about harmful impacts of LLMs. Given their non existent domain knowledge they miss probable compounding factors that lead to these harmful outcomes and in lieu of those complexities once again these serve to amplify the significance of generative tech.
Government bureaucrats and politicians are no more knowledgeable and just as prone to buying slickly packaged bullshit. The AI companies are (or were) themselves encouraging regulation of their brand new industry. They use the apocalyptic warnings pushed by their AI-is-dangerous pet critics to argue that if the existing companies in the space aren't gifted a legally enforced cartel, then it poses a national security risk on the scale of untracked nuclear weapon production.
When that gambit failed the same manufactured sense of urgency (and the coincidental slump in US productivity) helped sell LLM research and development as a new arms race, securing massive capital investment that enabled the circular deals that instantly inflated the value of these companies to the "too big to fail" scale.
I declare it all bullshit. I've seen self deluded CEOs survive for years selling promises and vapor. This is startup grifting writ large.
None of this is intended to be copium, wealth is already being transferred from public to private hands and regardless of the specific series of events and their conclusion, capitalist leeches will find ways to exert more power and control over the rest of us.
And as capital starts to lose interest in LLMs, it looks like quantum computing is lining up to be the next speculative hype bubble. We've seen this before, we'll see it again, this isn't new. The emperor has no clothes.
Agreed. So far this tech hasn't found a purpose which generates more value than it consumes, but the US economy is basically floating on a bubble of fake money generated through circular dealing between a handful of companies.
It is highly likely that there will be "a correction" and as always when markets crash or economies go into recession, wealth and power get transferred to the usual suspects.
If I understand correctly, we should expect this.
Capitalism doesn't work in reality in the long run and inevitably the contradictions inherent to it become evident and observable as things like circular trade predicated on the promise of record breaking future profits becoming more valuable than everything else, companies consolidating into monopolies and vertical monopolies, entire industries losing the demand side to their supply as money leaves the citizens hands and stops circulating, etc.
So even if the bubble somehow doesn't burst, or manages to deflate gracefully, the whole state of affairs is a symptom of a sick system that approaches failure again and again in new and exciting ways. Again, with each crisis that is endured, wealth is consolidated in the hands of the capitalists.
I figure either the thing you're worried about happens or we abandon capitalism and the cult of the unregulated free market. Or both, one after the other.
I'm very anxious too, but more about the short to medium term implications on quality of life, consolidation of power, etc.
It seems to me that the major competing interests in the capitalist power struggle (finance, tech, governments) are acting as though they are terrified and desperate to clamp down on people, their ability to share ideas freely and the space to offer and consider serious critiques of what we have and ideas of what we could have instead.
Eventually capitalism ends, regardless. We want that, I think, mostly.
Barely related, if at all, but also, trying to narrow in on a desirable result by refining the prompt over multiple turns is like playing a slot machine, just spinning the thingie with unpredictable reward timing / unreliable success.
It's just being a gacha consumer while soothing yourself with the story that you're Doing Art.
But doing art isn't like that unless maybe you're CIA darling Jackson Pollock.
You hear that Beanis? That alien wants my weiner.
Open weights models are not open source.
Open source models are like this: https://github.com/huggingface/smollm with pre-training and training data provided, training methods described in reproducible detail and of course weights for people to play with without needing to re-do the work unnecessarily.
Also
me when China keeps leapfrogging US tech at the one thing the Americans are focused on and they don't even need to fuck up their entire economy to do it.Except the part of directing that is analogous to is more about organising other people - artists, creative technicians etc, so as to facilitate their collaboration towards a cohesive coherent goal.
When someone dictates a series of prompts they are more like a blend of client and consumer. It's possible that the output will then be on-sold or incorporated into a larger inherently creative project, but the catgirl picture is not creative output and the person who prompted it did not create it.
Its okay the badcomments are more than making up for it.
i loved that dog but for her sake i do wonder if she would have been better off had someone with money came along and taken her
I don't think this is a healthy way to think about your dog's misfortune. There's no way "having the resources to pay for possible future cancer treatment" is a reasonable prerequisite for taking on responsibility for a dog. You minimised her suffering and that is sufficient. You rescued her and you didn't let selfish irrationality stop you from making a hard choice that she needed you to make.
You were the one who stepped up for her, twice. Not some hypothetical person with more resources.
I'm sorry for your loss. It's gut wrenching.
Most libs think the anglosphere joined ww2 to stop the holocaust.
That's the neat trick-
How wide do you think it go?
please laugh
The humanities are devalued because capitalism does not concern itself with humans. Arts and humanities work can empower people on a level that actually threatens the smooth and efficient operation of capitalist enterprise. Meanwhile STEM education has been transformed into expensive vocational training.
Masterful monkeywrenching.