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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.

    I don’t want to judge AI “art” in general - there’s so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn’t really stand out.

    What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It’s possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It’s a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It’s throwing dice until one likes the result.

    The one thing I give this “artist” credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make “great art”. Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.

    But a court already decided you can’t copyright AI art, because it’s trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.



  • I was only talking about the doctors that I know personally. I wasn’t making a point about all doctors. I’m pretty sure they’re not that representative. I’m not sure why I brought it up, as it doesn’t have any statistical weight. I was just trying to give a perspective from the other side. Not all doctors are like that monolithic group of uncaring assholes that OP puts them in. Even if they might appear that way. It’s simply the external constraints that make it necessary for them to act that way. Most doctors don’t choose their profession, because they want to make tons of money and can be mean to desperate people. They’re idealistic and their dream turns into a nightmare - because of unhinged capitalism. With lots of other jobs - bullshit jobs - it’s easy to quit. But as a doctor quitting would mean throwing many years of very hard work around the clock away AND have an immense negative impact upon the patients most desperate for help (and also leaving your colleges (friends?) with even more work). If I’m stopping to be an Uber driver because it doesn’t make me unhappy nobody would get hurt. The societal impact of that would be: “who gives a shit?”

    So they are much less likely to quit and have a strong incentive to keep living in that hell. They might not appear to be the nicest people.




  • I feel slightly angry with you punching on the people working in healthcare that actually provide the care.

    Nurses, but also doctors are working nonstop to keep the patients and also the system running as good as possible within the constraints that they’re given. They cannot afford the time to try and change the broader political environment in which they have to operate. Doing so would cost lives. I’m not American, but German and I know a few doctors personally. They’re pretty decent and even very left leaning people. The shit, human misery caused by a broken system, privatization/monetization of healthcare they have to deal with necessitates a certain dark humor, fatalism or cynicism to just stay sane enough to continue doing it. We as a society have failed to address this problem - the conditions that we put on them - and their only option is to develop a defense mechanism. You may not like it, but this defense mechanism against all this shit is better than the alternative - them all giving up and quitting. At least short time. Maybe the only way to fix it would be a mass walk-off/strike that actually causes a lot of deaths for us (society) to actually wake up and fix it. Unfortunately the majority only has to experience health care in exceptional circumstances. Otherwise it’s pretty invisible to us. We only know about the overworked nurse or the uninterested uncaring doctor. We don’t know the rest of the story - all the other patients they have to deal with at the same time. The bad news that they have to bring and the angry responses they get a thousandfold from unlucky patients, the treatment they have to deny because of asshole CEOs of insurance firms and the politicians who enable them (that we as a society don’t remove with some pitchforks). We only see the end product of a person that has been molded by this broken system and we get angry at them. But they are not the problem. Doctors don’t start their job wanting to be this cynic version of them. That’s just the shit they have to deal, because we as a society don’t help them that makes them so.

    And yes they get tons of money and all that (the doctors), but I’m not convinced that they get to enjoy it that much.




  • exocortextoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldEarbuds
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    1 month ago

    There are still phones that have it. Sometimes even pretty good ones. It’s just that they are not advertised so heavily. I recently learned about HTC U23 or 24 or something. Now I feel dumb because I never bothered to check because I always thought all good phones don’t offer headphone jacks anymore.



  • exocortextoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldAny ideas?
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    1 month ago

    It depends.

    It’s the reason I stopped making so much fun of people that recreate the “MAMIL” trope - “Middle Aged Men In Lycra”. Meaning men who start their midlife crisis buying an expensive bicycle with neon-colored bicycle clothes and bicycle glasses and all the other stuff.

    Why don’t they just start riding their bicycle they already got? They can use their sunglasses and normal sport shorts. What’s the problem?

    I think people (well, mostly men I guess) in this situation (midlife crisis) often have have started working early on and at some point suddenly start thinking “is that it?”. They feel trapped maybe in a job that isn’t really interesting (anymore) and they feel like they can see the end already. They wonder if they want to keep doing exactly what they’re doing for the rest of their life. They don’t know how to get out of it exactly and how do you change after so many years in autopilot?

    But I some cases or age-ranges people want to make a change and get out of their usual habits. A real phase shift. People think they want to work out more regularly. Or really start a new hobby. Buying a bunch of expensive stuff can increase the need to go through with this phase shift - at least in the minds of the people buying it.

    As an adult picking up a new hobby often means that other things in their life have to make room. It’s usually not that adults in their (let’s say) mid 30s until early 50s have problems filling their day. So whatever new hobby or task they want to do has to push away other habits and stay there until these new habits can take root.

    So starting with some expensive shit can be something I can understand - if one has the money.

    If I would start making music again, I’d probably start by buying an expensive synth like the super-6 from UDO (that I always wanted to buy) instead of a bunch of bleep-bloop-machines that need a lot of initial time for understanding them and then only fulfill one specific function in my music.



  • exocortextomemes@lemmy.worldSwift? more like Supersonic
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    1 month ago

    True.

    I’m very much opposed to and sad about an international pop star and apparent progressive taking a private jet all the time.

    But there’s two things at play that should be differentiated.

    1. The role model aspect. She has millions of fans that look up to her. She could lead by example and use different means of transportation.
    2. She’s obviously a unique figure. She’s not replaceable or generic in the position she’s at. Her “position” cannot be replaced by someone else as would be possible with the Starbucks CEO. She’s not “some CEO” taking a Jet to work and thereby normalizing this as a habit for CEOs". Right now there are few if any other celebrities with her status l, so she stands for herself.

    The precedent of Starbucks CEO commuting by jet is much more of a blueprint that might be applied to other CEOs. Or already is. I don’t even know his name FFS. So he’s making a precedent that a lot of other people could readily adapt.

    I don’t want to excuse anything. I just think that it would be more beneficial to attack CEOs for taking private jets. There’s a lot more of them. They areuch more susceptible to the pressure if the companies is seen as a polluter than Taylor Swift might be. She’s much more independent than any CEO. She doesn’t have to worry if the board of directors or the shareholders are going to replace her if her if her habits are becoming a PR problem. So our energy might be more productively applied elsewhere.

    I’m still sad about a seemingly progressive and apparently Intelligent pop star like her flying that much.






  • It cannot “analyze” it. It’s fundamentally not how LLM’s work. The LLM has a finite set of “tokens”: words and word-pieces like “dog”, “house”, but also like “berry” and “straw” or “rasp”. When it reads the input it splits the words into the recognized tokens. It’s like a lookup table. The input becomes “token15, token20043, token1923, token984, token1234, …” and so on. The LLM “thinks” of these tokens as coordinates in a very high dimensional space. But it cannot go back and examine the actual contents (letters) in each token. It has to get the information about the number or “r” from somewhere else. So it has likely ingested some texts where the number of "r"s in strawberry is discussed. But it can never actually “test” it.

    A completely new architecture or paradigm is needed to make these LLM’s capable of reading letter by letter and keep some kind of count-memory.



  • We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

    So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.

    Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.

    This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

    It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

    Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.