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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)IH
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1 yr. ago

  • In the tech industry (likely every industry but I wouldn't know) we could make a 200 level course in college that covers tech that's been over hyped. A few choice hits like:

    • Crypto
    • Blockchain
    • Quantum
    • Cloud
    • WS-I
    • LAMP
    • XML
    • P2P
    • WORA
    • OOP

    Now some of those went on to become useful concepts, but all hardly lived up to the hype of transforming the industry forever. There's just no shortage of people who lack any kind of set of morals that will, without any knowledge in the domain, jump on some train and hype it to get some quick cash before the thing derails in a fit of coming to terms with reality.

    I mean, at least it's been this way since I've been in the industry.

  • I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it's impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

    This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that's just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

    There's a reality to these tools. That reality is they're helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.

  • Tech vendors have also been falling over each other to tell the world how they are including GenAI in their offerings as the leading AI companies attract feverish attention from investors.

    Because you can't hype it up for investors if you call it what it actually is. Fancy auto complete. And don't get me wrong, I love me some of the tools out there. But this stuff is being absolutely way over hyped.

    It's good to go into this stuff with realistic views. Will it do all your work? Absolutely not. But what it will do is do a lot of heavy lifting for you so that you can get more things that require your specific attention done.

    The level of "sky is falling and we're all going to be enslaved by AI" is literal bullshit to sell more stocks and create a bubble that will absolutely pop.

  • Just a reminder that the last of the tax cuts under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 for citizens ends in 2025. The flat 21% rate for businesses tax cut will continue long after that point.

    The Republicans are the ones who passed the TCJA with the whole point being that they would run on this plank hard in 2024. The reason the income tax on people are ending in 2025 was because the House and Senate (both controlled by Republicans at the time) couldn't agree on a unified measure and decided to instead use reconciliation to move the TCJA through. And they're planning exactly this same tactic if they win in November.

    Because they don't want a solution, they want a never ending problem.

  • China is one of the leading producers of solar panels at exceptionally cheap prices. China and the Philippines are currently in a bit of a sour mood with each other. The US could step in with cheap solar panels if they were researching that, but alas, who do you think is going to be providing them with cheap LNG?

    So while the story indicates that solar is at it's cheapest it's ever been. Not for the Philippines. The Philippines is a clear cut example of how the United State's continued resistance to a domestic solar panel production industry is literally hurting their long term prospects. There's a lot of nations out there that want panels and right now, China is the only serious game.

  • Say no to SaaS as much as you can

    I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don't work in that profession.

    With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they're going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won't be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.

  • Ah. No problem. So the notion behind the "big guys are the ones that stand to profit from AI regulation" is that regulation curtails activity in a general sense. However, many of the offices that create regulation defer to industry experts for guidance on regulatory processes, or have former industry experts appointed onto regulatory committees. (good example of the later is Ajit Pai and his removal of net neutrality).

    AI regulation at the Federal level has mostly circled "trusted" AI generation, as you mentioned:

    But what it is doing is making it infinitely easier to spread enormous amounts of completely unidentifiable misinformation, due to being added with indistinguishable text to speech and video generation

    And the talk has been to add checks along the way by the industry itself (much like how the music industry does policing itself or how airline industry has mostly policed itself). So this would leave people like Adobe and Disney to largely dictate what are "trusted" platforms for AI generation. Platforms that they will ensure that via content moderation and software control, that only "trusted" AI makes it out into the wild.

    Regulation can then take the shape of social media being required to enforce regulation on AI posts, source distributors like github being required to enforce distribution prohibitions, and so on.

    This removes the tools for any AI out of the hands of the public and places them all in the hands of Adobe, Disney, Universal, and so on. And thus, if you wanted to use AI you must use one of their tools, which may in turn have within the TOS that you can not use their product to compete with their product. Basically establishing a monopoly.

    This happens a lot in regulatory processes which is why things like the RIAA, the MPAA, Boeing, and so on are so massive and seemingly unbreakable. They aren't enshrined in law, but regulatory processes create a de facto monopoly that becomes difficult to enter because of fear of competition.

    The big guys, being the industry leaders, in a regulatory hearing would be the first to get a crack at writing the rules that the regulatory body would debate on. In addition to the expert phase, regulatory process also includes a public comment, this would allow the public to address concerns about the expert submitted recommendation. But as demonstrated back in the public comment of the debate to remove rules regulating ISPs for net neutrality, the FCC decided that the comments were "fake" and only heard a small "selected" percentage of them.

    side note: in a regulatory hearing, every public comment accepted must be debated and rationale on the conclusion of the argument submitted to the record. This is why Ajit Pai suspended comments on NN because they didn't want to enter justification that can be brought up in a court case to the record.

    The barrier is no longer “you need to be an artist”. It’s “you need to have an internet connection”

    And yeah, that might be worth locking AI out of the hands of the public forever. But it doesn't stop the argument of "AI taking jobs". It just means that small startups will never be able to create jobs with AI. So if the debate is "AI shouldn't take our jobs, let's regulate it", that will only make it worse in the end (sort of how AWS has mostly dominated the Internet services and how everyone started noticing that as not being incredibly ideal around 2019-2021 when Twitter started kicking people off their service and people wanting to build the next Twitter were limited to what Amazon would and would not accept).

    So that's the argument. And there's pros and cons to each. But we have to be pretty careful about which way to go, because once we go a direction, it's pretty difficult to change directions because corporations are incredibly good at adapting. I distinctly remember streaming services being the "breath of fresh air from cable" all the way up till it wasn't. And now with hard media becoming harder to purchase (it's not impossible mind you) we've sort of entrenched streaming. Case in point, I love Pokémon Concierge, it is not available for purchase as a DVD or whatever (at least not a non-bootleg version), so if I ever want to watch it again I need Netflix.

    And do note, I'm not saying we shouldn't have regulation on AI, what I am saying is that there's a lot for consideration with AI regulation. And the public needs to have some unified ideas about it for the regulatory body's public comment section to ensure small businesses that want to use AI can still be allowed. Otherwise the expert phase will dominate and AI will be gone from the public's hands for quite some time. We're just now getting around to reversing the removal of net neutrality that started back in 2017. But companies have used that 2017 to today to form business alliances (Disney + Hulu Verizon deal as an example) that'll be hard to compete with for some time.

  • Man, the edited video is just extending a few frames and letting it go on longer than the actual video. Yeah, Biden goes to sit down first, and is doing a little squat while the person is welcomed to the stage, but the video on Reddit's Conservative subreddit is just cut right at the point he sits down and the last few frames are extended a bit.

    But you know I'm going to give them benefit of the doubt (I know, I'm going to hear it from you all). They saw something on Xitter, ran with it before fact checking, and now they have egg on face. Happens to the best of us sometimes. But in the age of AI, all of us are going to need to be on our toes about things. This is just a simple edit on a video clip, AI going to allow us to straight up do all kinds of crazy shit.

    We're all in this together and there's a ton of NOT AMERICANS that want us at each other's throat. We are either going to help each other get through AI or we're all going to be falling for made up shit.

  • From Cara:

    We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation

    Okay I wanted to talk real quick about this aspect. Lot's of folks want AI to require things only held in copyright. And fine, let's just run with that for sake of brevity. Disney owns everything. If you stick AI to only models which the person holds copyright, only Disney will generate AI for the near future.

    I'm just going to tell you. The biggest players out there are the one who stand to profit the most from regulation of AI. And likely, they'll be the one's tasked by Congress to write drafts of the regulation.

    In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily

    And the thing is, is Photoshop even "human-made art"? I mean that was the debate back in the 90s, when a ton of airbrush artist lost their jobs. And a large amount of Photoshop that was done, was so bad back then we had the whole Ralph Lauren, Filippa Hamilton thing go down.

    So I don't disagree with safe from AI places. But the justification of Cara's existence, is literally every argument that was leveled at Photoshop back in the 90s by airbrush artist who were looking to protect their jobs and failed because they focused way too heavily on being anti-Photoshop that the times changed without them. When they could have started learning Photoshop and kept having a job.

    I think AI presents a unique tool for artist to use to become more creative than they have ever been. But I think that some of them are too caught up in how CEOs will eventually use that tool as justification to fire them. And there's a lot of propensity to blame AI when it's the CEO's writing the pink slips, just like the airbrush artists blamed Photoshop, when it was newspapers, the magazines, and so on that were writing the pink slips.

    I just feel like a lot of people are about to yet again get caught with their pants down on this. And it's easy to diss on AI right now, because it's so early. Just like bad Photoshop back in the 90s led to the funny Snickers ad.

    Like I get that people building models from other people's stuff is bad. No argument there. But, open models, things built from a community of their own images, are things too but that's all based on the community and people who decide to be in a collaborative effort to provide a community model. And I think folks are getting so hung up on being anti-AI, that it's going to hurt their long term prospects, just like the airbrush folks who started picking up Photoshop way too late.

    There's not a stopping Disney and the media companies from using AI, they're going to, and if you enjoy getting a paycheck, having some skill in the thing they use is going to be required. But for regular people to provide a competitor, to fight on equal footing, the everyday person needs access to free tools. Imagine if we had no GIMP, no Kitra, no Inkscape. Imagine if it was just Adobe and nothing else and that was enforced by regulation because only Adobe could be "trusted".

  • I mean this comes from the House led by GOP who have spent so much time in committee that they have past:

    checks notes

    64 laws, most related to renaming post offices.

    As a comparison, the 117th Congress (the last one) which was led by Democrats passed 463 laws including the CHIPS law, the Inflation Reduction law, the Infrastructure bill...

    In fact, the 118th is on track to be the least productive Congress in modern history. And it's not just because of all of the inquires that have gone nowhere the GOP have lead, though that has eaten about 60% of their time on the Hill. The GOP has dealt with massive infighting that prevents even themselves from getting things done.

    "too little too late"

    Man they could have centuries of time on their hands and wouldn't even do basic things like pass a budget. The GOP has demonstrated quite well that they don't have the ability to enact their platform. And mostly because they're too damn busy posing in front of cameras and trying to score sound bites. Like just the other day Comer was talking about how he'd like to arrest Fauci and the thing is, Comer has a degree in Agriculture and mostly majored in those aspects. He doesn't even have the functional knowledge to actually indict anyone, much less the ability to maintain the massive amount of litigation.

    Like he can say that, but the odds of any kind of successful indictment is slim to none. I mean for fucks sake, he sits on the Oversight Committee ex officio, shit he likely doesn't even know what that means.

    A large part of the modern GOP are people who are horrible at their job and have very little understanding of how Government works. MTG just a few weeks ago was talking about some sort of "law" and what it really was, was a regulatory hearing on review of rule making. Not even new rules or regulatory processes, just the usual self audit. Lady doesn't know the different between slip, law, bill, and rule. But she'll be the first one to open her mouth about who is and is not a doctor.

    A lot of them are very poorly educated in how anything works. And they objectively demonstrate that lack of knowledge on a fairly regular basis. And they're pretty unabashed about it too.

    So yeah, that "too little too late" that's some rich bull. You know my Grandfather used to say: "If you are ever worried about professional politicians, just you wait till the amateurs get here." He made that in reference to a Governor of Tennessee Ray Blanton, but fuck if it doesn't apply here.

  • I use Firefox, but at the same time I have Vivaldi installed for PWA, like for mbin right now. Why Firefox removed SSB is beyond me, was like one of the things I used regularly. Being able to pin my Mastodon account to the KDE taskbar and click it to pop it open in it's own window is something I really don't want to do without.