• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Interesting point. I don’t really know what would be fair.

    On the one hand you are right, if someone puts in a lot of time and effort to create a book. And it becomes a hit and gets a movie deal, I do believe they should be rewarded for that.

    On the other hand, out of the tens of thousands of books written each year how many get turned into a movie? 1 or 2 maybe on average? And how much of the book is in the movie? I’ve both read Mickey7 and seen Mickey17. And while they both have some things in common, they are basically completely different stories. Should we really compromise the rules for everyone because of this very rare exception?

    And I also feel like movies are caught in a slump the past years, with very few original stories being made. All remakes, reboots and super hero crap. If more stories were available for free use, how much would that influence new story creation? Very hard to say really.

    As with all art, nothing is made in a vacuum. Everything builds on each other, everything is influenced by other things. I can’t help but thing about what the community did with 3D printing once the patents expired. Having stuff available to use can only be a good thing right?

    But I don’t really know, you make a very good point. In a world where all kinds of art gets devalued all the time, I feel like we should celebrate artists and the art they make. I like to fuck around with creating my own art in my free time and have made stuff for friend and family. Even sold series of hundreds of units in the past. But it’s not my day job and I consider myself an absolute amateur. Maybe if UBI was a thing, it would be the thing I put most of my time into.

    I hate our world revolves around money and capitalism. It leads to difficult situations like this one, where copyright holds us back and mostly benefits large mega corps. But on the other hand, we must support artists for everything they do.






  • Well maybe one person is a little bit more impressed by some pretty pictures than another person. I really don’t see what that has to do with a company like Microsoft putting their money into this? They don’t make songs or movie trailers.

    To me I’m stunned but that’s just me, on top of this we’re only in year like 5 of AI going mainstream, where will it be in 10 years? 20 years?

    This is a common trap a lot of people fall into. See what improvements have been made the last couple of years, who knows where it will end up right? Unfortunately, reality doesn’t work like that. Improvements made in the past don’t guarantee improvements will continue in the future. There are ceilings that can be run into and are hard to break. There can even be hard limits that are impossible to break. There might be good reasons to not further develop promising technologies from the past into the future. There is no such thing as infinite growth.

    Edit:

    Just checked out that song, man that song is shit…

    “My job vanished without lift.” What does that even mean? That’s not even English.

    And that’s just one of the dozens of issues I’ve seen in 30 secs. You are kidding yourself if you think this is the future, that’s one shit future bro.


  • What’s your point?

    Sure that’s the point of venture capital, throwing some money at the wall and see what sticks. You’d expect to have most of them fail, but the one good one makes up for it.

    However in this case it isn’t people throwing some money at startups. It’s large companies like Microsoft throwing trillions into this new tech. And not just the one company looking for a little niche to fill, all of them are all in, flooding the market with random shit.

    Uber and Spotify are maybe not the best examples to use, although they are examples of people throwing away money in hopes of some sort of payoff (even though they both made a small profit recently, but nowhere near digging themselves out of the hole). They are however problematic in the way they operate. Uber’s whole deal is exploiting workers, turning employees into contractors just to exploit them. And also skirting regulations around taxis for the most part. They have been found to be illegal in a lot of civilised countries and had to change the way they do business there, limit their services or not operate in those countries at all. Spotify is music and the music industry is a whole thing I won’t get into.

    The current AI bubble isn’t comparable to venture capital investing in some startups. It’s more comparable to the dotcom bubble, where the industry is perceived to move in a certain direction. Either companies invest heavily and get with the times, or they die. And smart investors put their money in anything with the new tech, since that’s where the money is going to be made. Back then the new tech was the internet, now the new tech is AI. We found out the hard way, it was total BS. The internet wasn’t the infinite money glitch people thought it was and we all paid the price.

    However the scale of that bubble was small as compared to this new AI bubble. And the internet was absolutely a trans-formative technology, changing the way we work and live forever. It’s too early to say if this LLM based “AI” technology will do the same, but I doubt it. The amount of BS thrown around these days is too high. As someone with a somewhat good grasp of how LLMs actually work on a fundamental level, the promised made aren’t backed up by facts. And the amount of money being put into this aren’t near any even optimistic payoff in the future.

    If you want to throw in a simple, over simplified example: This AI boom is more like people throwing money at Theranos than anything else.







  • There is another factor in this which often gets overlooked. A LOT of the money invested right now is for the Nvidia chips and products based around them. As many gamers are painfully aware, these chips devalue very quickly. With the progress of technology moving so fast, what was once a top of the line unit gets outclassed by mid tier hardware within a couple of years. After 5 years it’s usefulness is severely diminished and after 10 years it is hardly worth the energy to run them.

    This means the window for return on investment is a lot shorter than usual in tech. For example when creating a software service, there would be an upfront investment for buying the startup that created the software. Then some scaling investment in infrastructure and such. But after that it turns into a steady state where the input of money is a lot lower than revenue from the customer base that was grown. This allows to get returns on investment for many years after that initial investment and growth phase.

    With this Ai shit it works a bit different. If you want to train and run the latest models in order to remain competitive in the market, you would need to continually buy the latest hardware from Nvidia. As soon as you start running on older hardware, your product would be left behind and with all the competition out there users would be lost very quickly. It’s very hard to see how the trillions of dollars invested now are ever going to be recovered within the span of five years. Especially in a time where so much companies are dumping their products for very low prices and sometimes even for free.

    This bubble has to burst and it is going to be bad. For the people who were around when the dotcom bubble burst, this is going to be much worse than that ever was.


  • I would think all the incidents with fracking have shown rock not to be as impermeable as one would expect or want. Doing this and not causing huge issues seems very hard to me. And also very situational, which is a big problem pumped hydro has.

    Pumped hydro works really well and is just about as efficient as we can realistically do, but you need to have the right circumstances. Like a biggish elevation difference, a place to store enough water at the top and bottom for it to be worth while and a connection in between to pump through and take out the energy in the other direction. Plus close enough to a place that needs the power not to be killed by transport losses.

    This thing seems to require the perfect conditions as well, which may prove even harder to find compared to places for pumped hydro.


  • An LLM cannot be anything other than a bullshit machine. It just guesses at what the next word would likely be. And because it’s trained on source data that contains truths as well as non truths, by chance sometimes what comes out is true. But it doesn’t “know” what is true and what isn’t.

    No matter what they try to do, this won’t change. And is one of the main reasons the LLM path will never lead to AGI, although parts of what makes up an LLM could possibly be used inside something that gets to the AGI level.