Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • There is a long history of artists "pushing the envelope… by self-deprecating and making “statements” about how ridiculous the market for art is.

    You don’t get to shove Dada, a Campbell’s soup can, canned “artist’s shit”, a black square on a canvas, a pile of trash, a shirt on a coat hanger, a self-shredding copy of a graffiti, and thousands of similar examples, all under the same label as the Louvre, illustrators, writers, etc… then magically have people value all artistic work.

    There has been continuous, serious, self-damage done to the concept of “art”, and now come the consequences: the general public, thinks the value of art is close to $0, and that’s what they’re willing to pay.

    Coincidentally, AI companies allow anyone to get “better than literal shit” art done for $0… so… 🤷




  • “artists don’t deserve a living wage” or “they don’t do real art”

    Blame the “Modern Art” movement, where a black square, or canned literal shit, can be worth millions.

    At some point, people realized that they don’t need real art, just to decorate an office or house space with “artsy looking” stuff, so they went on a chase to the bottom. That used to be random people from third world countries working for peanuts… now it’s LLMs and GenAI working for fractions of peanuts.

    Same thing has been going in all areas. Who needs a slab of real ice (from a mountain) for their fridge, when they can get fake ice much easier, for a fraction of the cost.
















  • There is an experimental distributed open source search engine: https://dawnsearch.org/

    It has a series of issues of its own, though.

    Per-user weighting was out of the reach of hardware 20 years ago… and is still out of the reach of anything other than very large distributed systems. No single machine is currently capable of holding even the index for the ~200 million active websites, much less the ~800 billion webpages in the Wayback Machine. Multiple page attributes… yes, that would be great, but again things escalate quickly. The closest “hope”, would be some sort of LLM on the scale of hundreds of trillions of parameters… and even that might fall short.

    Distributed indexes, with queries getting shared among peers, mean that privacy goes out the window. Homomorphic encryption could potentially help with that, but that requires even more hardware.

    TL;DR: it’s being researched, but it’s hard.


  • The basic algorithm is quite straightforward, it’s the scale and edge cases that make it hard to compete.

    “Ideally”, from a pure data perspective, everybody would have all the data and all the processing power to search through it on their own with whatever algorithm they prefer, like a massive P2P network of per-person datacenters.

    Back to reality, that’s pretty much insanely impossible. So we get a few search engines, with huge entry costs, offering more value the larger they get… which leads to lock-in, trying to game their algorithms, filtering, monetization, and all the other issues.