_manifold

Personally I've found that "well curated" sometimes becomes a double-edged sword in Costco's case. Mainstream brands can be expected to be available perennially; however, smaller/niche items and brands will often get cycled out or replaced by something else which may or may not be comparable.

Many times I've found products at Costco that I enjoy, only for them to suddenly stop carrying them a week or a month later.

Several years ago there was a craft beer joint in my area that had a gimmicky "stock market" system for their pricing - the more a certain beer was purchased, the higher its price became, and the less popular brews slowly dropped in price to stimulate demand. Ultimately, they dropped this system for being "too irritating" and moved to a standard static pricing model.

It sounds like the Wendy's thing is based more on time of day and historical analysis of sales, so we will have to see how it plays out. But I think and the end of the day people will become more annoyed when their favored menu item is more expensive simply because they arrived at the restaurant sooner than they expected, or whatever other criteria Wendy's starts basing their pricing on. Having price tracking on their app does seem like the next logical step, but ultimately an annoying gamification (and vaguely dystopian) in my opinion.

Perhaps their customer base feels different and they've done their research on that - I'm not in that group so I'm more of a bystander here.

Indeed, it seems like their whole plan to address profitability issues is just "get bigger", but all that's done is create a bloated, immobile monster that's completely lost touch with thee customer base that got them to where they are.

At ~7000 employees, Unity has roughly double the employees that Epic has - where is all the labor going? To me it's pretty clear that Unity is more interested in being a commercial product/platform whereas Epic is leaning into the engine/technology side and developing their own games. Theoretically both angles can be valid, but I think Unity has completely misunderstood why most of their customers chose then in the first place.

> The one good thing I see out of the coming AI cambrian explosion is that it'll hit the bracket of top 10% to 1% earners the hardest, while those above and bellow are safer.

What are you basing this on? Perhaps I'm missing your exact meaning of "AI cambrian explosion" but right now I think it's arguable that artists and writers are the most threatened by this wave of generative AI - neither of which are usually considered top paying positions.

While it will inevitable be larger in the future, Godot's current executable size is so small something like this could actually work.

At the very least I would want something like Unity Hub which can manage both projects and engine/editor version installations. Being locked into whatever version of Godot Epic Store considers to be "current" sounds like a nightmare.

I think it's definitely more useful, especially long term, in a more controlled system where the government agency that is handling the actual CSAM is simply submitting hashes of the content the company (Microsoft, Apple, or whoever else) to add to their database with which they can use to flag/review suspicious content.

However, the system described in the article is open to the public, and simultaneously privacy/anonymity oriented. I see this as a double-edged sword. While it does protect the identity of legitimate users, that also opens it up to nefarious actors flooding the system with images/videos taken from legitimate content creators on OnlyFans other sites, potentially getting those creators' content flagged/removed. Even if this simply triggers a manual review, you could feasibly spam the system with so many that it grinds to a halt.

Yes, I did some more research on this as well. Apparently perceptual hashing is also susceptible to some pretty simple attacks:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.06628.pdf

>To use Take It Down, anyone—minors, parents, concerned parties, or adults concerned about their own underage images being posted online—can anonymously access the platform on NCMEC’s site. Take It Down will then generate a hash that represents images or videos reported by users as sexualizing minors, including images with nudity, partial nudity, or sexualized poses. From there, any online platform that has partnered with the initiative will automatically block uploads or remove content matching that hash.

This sounds impressive if you don't know how file hashing works. If a malicious actor wants to get around this, all they would have to do is change a single pixel and/or re-export as a different format.

If I understand correctly, Samaritans have the same ethnic roots as Jews. The differences were more religious and ideological than racial. So with that in mind, saying the term "good Samaritan" is specifically racist doesn't really hold water. Xenophobic, maybe. The lines kind of blur when you're talking about groups that are divided by some odd combination of ethnicity, religion, and nationality.

Regardless, if you look at the actual context, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is arguably meant as a message against racism and preconceived notions about people from other ethnic groups or countries.

The thing that bugs me about "influencers" is that it seems in a lot of cases the content is formulated as a host for ads and monetization, rather than the creator focusing on creating worthwhile content first with advertising as a secondary concern (in a lot of cases non-endemically.)

Obviously, what is considered "worthwhile" is entirely subjective - people wouldn't be following, say, Kylie Jenner on social media if they didn't see some sort of value in it. Also I'm pretty sure a lot of people just don't care about being advertised to, or even enjoy it, if it's in a niche that they follow.

To me, it feels more insidious, especially when the line blurs between what is and ad and what is not. I hate being marketed to in such a way that it is so interleaved with the "actual" content - it starts making me question the validity of the content. By example, I used to browse Pinterest every now and again (mostly as a time waster) - it was interesting to search certain keywords and save things that looked interesting or sparked my curiosity. There were ads spaced every several tiles, but in general they seemed more or less separated from user-submitted content. Now, there are ads seemingly every third or fourth tile, and many "normal" tiles are ads as well, submitted by corporate accounts. I've pretty much stopped using it entirely.

I didn't know there was an industry for that, I guess I should have figured. I might look into that for my own purposes. Although for what it's worth when I said "large format paintings" in my mind I was thinking very large paintings - like Picassos's Guernica - larger than something the average person would have hanging in their home. To the point that the cost of producing it and transporting it is large enough that a buyer is more likely to take personal interest in the artist and much less likely to knowingly purchase something AI-generated or otherwise automatically produced.

I think we're kidding ourselves to think that some nebulous concept of "the artist's journey" somehow informs the end result in a way that is self-evident in human-produced digital art. Just as with electric signals in the "brain in a vat" thought experiment, with digital art it's pixels. If an algorithm can produce a set of pixels that is just as subjectively good as a human artist, then nobody will be able to tell - and most likely the average person just won't care.

On the other hand, I would say that traditional mediums (especially large format paintings) are relatively safe from AI generation/automation - for now.

>But to answer your question if we would have been stuck with 1992 technology the internet would have evolved differently, and mainframes would play a much bigger role, to the point that your desktop computer would be just a thin client, running the latest amazing software accelerated by mainframe computers. You would submit jobs from your computer, the mainframe would calculate it and get back to you.

We're kind of getting back to this in a roundabout way, with more and more programs and services being run as web applications in a browser, or otherwise being inseparably tied into cloud technology/storage (looking at you, Adobe.)

With the advent of AI tools that require significant GPU hardware to run there may actually be a legitimate basis for it, but in general it just seems an excuse for companies to have their own tightly-controlled ecosystem which can be continually monetized and exploited.

This is pretty spot-on.

At the risk of sounding like a hipster, or gatekeeper, I think the biggest tipping point was around the time that smartphones became commonplace in the mid-late 00s. The internet and web was already gaining momentum, but smartphones put it in everyone's pocket. It also turns out that most (read: non-tech) people don't want to have to piece together their own set of tools, they want a set of matching Fisher-Price tools handed to them on a platter - hence the popularity of the iPhone and iOS ecosystem which Apple controls with an iron grip. They would rather have a magic black box that does what they want without having to think about how it works or what is going on behind the scenes. I'd say everybody is guilty to some extent, but generally I feel it's this mentality that is largely responsible for the frog-letting-the-water-boil situation we have gotten into with things like data privacy/user tracking/etc. There was a time when "don't post personal information" and "don't believe everything you read on the internet" was a mantra, but now that the internet and web are mainstream, such advice has been ignored. Yet, people wonder why things have gotten the way they are and why bad actors are taking advantage of the situation.

This dichotomy of player opinions seems to be present any time I see a discussion about Stadia or cloud gaming. I haven't tried it myself so I don't have a truly informed opinion, but just based on technical factors I'm extremely skeptical.

However there does seem to be legitimate portion of the audience that either can't tell or simply doesn't care about frame lag/latency issues. I would guess that group is relatively small though. Also as PC and console hardware continues to improve and 4k+/144hz+ gaming becomes more commonplace, cloud gaming is just going to be left in the dust.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, I think the antithesis to your argument is that where synthesizers "failed", modern sampling technology has crept in, especially in scoring. It's less common in the feature film industry, but a significant portion of TV and game scores are produced entirely with virtual instruments, or at least have a very heavy sampling component (e.g. recorded solo instrument against a synthetic backing track). Most people can't tell, or don't care - as will most likely be the case with AI-generated or AI-assisted content as it moves forward into various domains.

All advertising is a bait-and-switch. How is this any different?

Also if it was, it was most likely due to her breaking NDA.

She's welcome to complain about it social media but overall this just doesn't seem newsworthy.

Technically, but by that standard everyone who's ever purchased marijuana at a state-legal dispensary is risking prison time as well.

It's also one of those situations where the practical reality of being caught for something like this is basically nil. Especially when the intent is neither to sell, distribute, nor use them yourself.

The direct technical explanation for the fidelity gap here, as has been stated elsewhere in the comments here, is that Meta's metaverse VR tech runs off of a smartphone chip. Performance is thus very limited. Further compounding this limitation is the fact that since it is VR, the application has to render the world twice every frame - so rendering capability is ostensibly cut in half. The result is bland, low-detail, flat-looking (and in this case jittery and glitchy) graphics.

I think this gap could easily have a hand in preventing the Facebook metaverse from reaching mainstream appeal. We've had gorgeous graphics in games and virtual worlds for quite a long time now - just look at what Crysis achieved fifteen years ago. To the average consumer who doesn't care about the technical limitations and issues behind the product, this is like rewinding the clock twenty years.

As far as why Zuckerberg is so hyped on it - your guess is as good as mine. Just seems like a really misguided attempt at creating a new platform/ecosystem that they control entirely and can monetize.

I'm not sure where Bloomberg is getting that number and I would debate even its ballpark accuracy - especially when Valve is a privately held company and notoriously tight-lipped about things like gross revenue and profits.

>If America was so racist, the single most successful ethnic minority wouldn't be Nigerians.

Do you have a source for this? Not for debate, I'm genuinely wondering where the information comes from. From time to time I've heard things about people from Nigeria being hardworking - haven't looked into it very deep though.

Wow, this is kind of going all-in on phone verification, with what I would argue is a potentially classist end result.

Also a landline doesn't work for verification? How does that make sense?

I feel like a "technology first, game second" approach is a trap. Perhaps I'm wrong and there are examples of it working out but in general it seems building a game to justify hardware is a losing proposition.

In response to your specific idea - I think something like that could be an interesting approach, but the difference between what the cloud GPU cluster can do vs an enthusiast-level video card would have to be massive - in a way that is both apparent and relevant to the average player. Obviously there would be an noticeable difference in the quality of rendering and overall simulation, but unless it's competently intertwined with the design of the game, I don't think a lot of players are going to care - outside of the "whoa, cool" aspect which is fleeting.

Also Amazon[0], who found out that hiring a bunch of veteran developers, putting them in the same room together and showering them with money does not equal a successful game.

Are there any examples of an established company "breaking in" to the game industry and creating a significantly successful product? If so I would like to hear about it.

I feel like a lot of game companies that regularly release successful games have a difficult-to-quantify mix of experience and team cohesion. To the outsider executive it might seem like you can build this from scratch with the right budget, but I think it's a lot more complicated than that.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...

>Epic spent ludicrous amounts (I assume) of money on exclusivity deals and giving players freebies. But their store itself sucks.

It's baffling to me that they took this angle. Hardware exclusivity I think in general is regarded as a negative (aside from weird tribalism/fanboyism among the more hardcore crowd) - but seeing that and thinking you can do the same thing with a software platform is just ludicrous.

Yes, you can buy exclusivity deals and force users onto your platform - but only for those games. It's trivial for players to bounce back and forth between different platforms when it's just software - you can't trap them just because they had to use it for one game they wanted. I'd be more forgiving if they were using exclusivity as a marketing tool alongside an actual attempt at a competitive platform - but as you've outlined and from what I've seen for myself, the experience is hot garbage.

I'm guessing for most users, the Epic store is just a glorified launcher for a bunch of games they got for free, and one or two exclusive games they couldn't get elsewhere.

The key difference is that Unity was a commercial venture from the start and Godot is a FOSS project.

That's not to say FOSS development doesn't have its own challenges and potential issues, but I don't think it's fair to say they are resigned to follow in Unity's footsteps simply because they are now receiving funding.

By example, Blender is receiving a not-insignificant amount of funding from a variety of sources and they are doing better than ever.

Throwing in my support for Krita.

I suppose it just depends on what you need in an image editor but in my opinion GIMP has been dead in the water for well over a decade at this point.

Krita on the other hand has a pretty rich feature set and seems to be more actively developed - I just wish it were more performant and a bit less quirky, interface-wise. I still use it on a regular basis though.

There's a few landmark lawsuits I'm patiently waiting for now that these tools have become widely available and can be used by anyone for purposes that are not not necessarily academic:

a) Artist/copyright holder suing LAION, OpenAI, StabilityAI, or other scientific/academic entity for the unlicensed inclusion of their original work in a publicly-distributed model/data set.

b) Artist/copyright holder suing someone for the use of an AI-generated image that is almost identical to their original work, and/or for using their name in the prompt that generated the image.

c) Artist/copyright holder suing someone for unlicensed use of their original work, while the defendant claims the work was created using AI and therefore is in public domain.

Anybody else have similar predictions?

I still don't understand what the value of specifying a license for generated images is - at least in terms of enforceability. How could anyone reliably, conclusively determine that an image was generated using a locally-run tool?

I suppose in the case of DALL-E they probably save a copy of every generated image and can use some sort of reverse image search and find if/when the image was created.

With StableDiffusion or any other local tool I don't see how that would be possible. The best I think one could do is come up with a secondary tool that can pinpoint the position in latent space a generated image came from (if that's even possible, I have a limited understanding of how exactly these systems work.) But then, if (heaven forbid) someone applied any sort of cropping or post-processing to the image, an approach like that easily gets blown out of the water.