dragonwriter

> UBI will cause instant inflation and everyone will be in the same place they started from.

Well, no, even if it causes inflation, everyone won't be in the same place they started from, because (even if you assume no additional progressive tax or other revenue stream is established alongside it) a flat per-capita additional personal income stream doesn't result in the same distribution of income as existed without it. It would narrow the (relative) range of income distribution, making the poor better off and the rich worse off (assuming no overall change in purchasing power.)

Flock has real human officers who direct it and shareholders who profit from it (those groups overlap), it is not an inert object wielded by the State.

This doesn't reduce the responsibility of the state for misdeeds it does or attempts with Flock, but neither does the State’s role absolve Flock’s leadership and owners of the misdeeds they do and profit from, whether or not some or all are at the request of the State.

Its a protection for the person who deploys the model and controls the context against some exploits, on the expectation that that operator will take steps to prevent large scale context manipulation.

It is not a protection for society against the person deploying the model.

> It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover.

Not under that much cover, just the more overt part of it directed at a different demographic than the primary foci of earlier rounds of US racism (though it provided a lot of excuse for actions directed more in line with classic US racism, and set the stage for the renaissance of more classicly directed, out-and-proud racism that has characterized the Trump era.)

If you are going to limit the 5th Party system to the first half of the long 1930s-1990s period of overlapping realignments (which is pretty reasonable), then the 6th Party system should be the second half of that period, and the period from about the end of the Clinton Administration on should be the 7th Party system; you can call now the 6th Party system if you call the entire long realignment period the 5th (which makes some sense, too, though there is a pretty significant difference between the New Deal dominant period and the Civil Rights dominant period of the realignment), but to split it somewhere in the middle but then lump the period after with it makes little sense.

The complaint has some basis but is greatly exaggerated.

When the whole stack comprising the model is used, it occasionally produce erroneous anatomy and require running qitha different seed to get a good result; this is much less common than with Flux 2 Klein. Also, the step distilled version of the model, particularly, isn't great at generating photo-quality skin, despite otherwise being good at producing photographic-seeming outputs. (Even some of that might be exaggerated, because it was what I saw before fixes to the Comfy templates.)

But a lot of people on Reddit (and some here, I would guess—none are explicit about it but that's the only thing I can think if that would make the “worse than Flux 2” comments remotelt understandable) have decided that they don’t like that BFL’s approach to generality in prompt handling for the model was to train it with a particular style of detailed prompt and provide a LLM-based prompt rewriter (they call it the “prompt upsampler”) to process raw user prompts into the style of prompts the model accepts, and despite BFL flat out saying the model should bot be used without either the provided upsampler or some alternative one (e.g., the published system prompt used with a different LLM), and that that will produce poor results, have decided that the correct way to judge the model is by not upsampling prompts, and pretending that the upsampler isn't part of the stack. This makes generations far worse (it especially increases body horror, probably—from trying it and watching latent previews with and without—because it makes prompts more ambiguous making it harder for the diffusion process to resolve where new elements should be drawn or extra drafted elements should be pruned early in the generation process.

The problems being complained about aren't mostly what you'd expect from NSFW avoidance; it does have some of that, too, even though it is not particularly shy (or low quality) about nudity so long as the genitals specifically aren’t visible. It’s not great with women’s nipples/areolae, but it doesn't avoid them. Its clearly undertrained on NSFW material, but it doesn't look particularly moreso than most corporate base models; its usual for community LoRAs and finetunes to close that gap.

Bounding box support is nice, though the way it is aonewhat soft guidance makes it tricky to use reliably for straight t2i (it looks like it may be atronger for tying references tobit) and, while the Comfy workflow has a tool to help draft it, I think there are some wrinkles with upsampler interaction with it that the workflow doesn't account for.

That said, and despite being great and creative as a first pass composition model at high res that I will definitely keep in my t2i toolbox, it is definitely generally underwhelming for straight t2i, especially given that MOSS Image 5B just dropped, which despite its claim that its strength is in text generation and structured layout (a popular focus for recent models), is one of the best all-round base models I’ve seen in breadth of content knowledge, prompting flexibility, output quality in its strongest resolution range (seems to be 1-2MP for general purpose—full-frame “artistic”, not its structured layout text heavy focus—work), creativity, lack of censorship or undertraining, etc.

I can think of an established industry whose major players each have lots of relevant data that they own to use for that purpose and which would have a ready way to profit from use of those models without particularly significant additional legal exposure compared to those in their normal operations.

Oh, and major players from that industry have been publicly reaching out for people with AI image/video generation and training experience on public forums.

Does it though? It arguably illustrates how the economics of building custom specialized small sub-frontier LLMs and building an service around them that can easily be replicated by open tools wrapping either frontier LLMs for equal or better quality or personally-controlled open LLMs for privacy doesn't work, especially in a market where privacy is a selling point.

But I think that it is dubious whether that is a good proxy for “the economics of AI” broadly.

Which I am not saying are good—I just don't think Character.ai has much probative value on the broad question on way or the other.

> Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.

> Especially not when you're getting older

Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.

Why are we replaying the dishonest “think of the retirees” now? It was bullshit in California in 1978 to sell Prop 13, and its even bigger (and more transparent) bullshit now when, especially when it is used to sell the same basic idea.

> But it's pushing her into poverty.

No, its pushing her into a cash flow problem. Its not poverty; she has substantial wealth, but its all in the house.

There are mechanisms, of course, to access that wealth without moving, including ones specifically geared toward income-limited house-rich retirees.

Now, those end up creating a debt that must be resolved before transferring the house, including via estate, so living on the value of the home reduces its utility as a vehicle for generational wealth, but...unless you want to reproduce California’s system which makes it much harder for people to become homeowners while rewarding those who already have, eapecially the wealthiest, making the rich richer and what would be the comfirtable middle class anywhere else in the country poor, that’s the way it works (and your exact scenario was the major sales pitch that was used to sell the California system; its maybe understadable how people without 50 years of California’s example fell for it then, but...)

> Once the subsidization ends and cost becomes significant I will take a serious look around for the best value models and switch off the expensive providers, but that time hasn't come yet.

There's a reason the labs in the US frontier oligopoly are using “safety” to lobby for antitrust exemptions for mutual coordination as well as anticompetitive regulation.

> but creating multiple accounts, even if they're fake, is usually just a TOS violation, or maybe a civil matter, not criminal.

Yes, in and of itself, creating multiple accounts in violation of TOS is probably not a criminal fraud under either state or federal law.

But when you do it as the mechanism to conceal streaming manipulation in violation of the agreement that governs the terms of payment, and thereby to secure large amounts of money from the streaming service under false pretenses (and, given the structure of streaming payments, to deny payment to other song owners which they would have received without the deception) on the other hand is a different story.

Like yeah, flexing your index finger isn’t a crime, either, but if you are holding a gun with that finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at someone's head...

The law very often is focussed more than anything about the purpose and effect of an action, and that you can ignore that and describe the action in terms that aren't criminal without considering purpose and effect really doesn't matter.

Careful, promoting thoughtcrime by malquoting Miniluv based on old documents that have not been rectified by Minitrue with the latest updates to newspeak could land you in a joycamp.

> You just have to verify multiple times to ensure you have averaged out any sampling errors.

This is... logically equivalent to the claim it is offered to contradict.

LLMs are unpredictably complex with potentially sigbificnaly different reaults based on random seed and seemingly insignificant prompt details) in the ideal case and nondeterministic in practice, so someone finding an error with a given LLM is not strong evidence that the result was not checked with an LLM, even with the very same LLM, previously.

> but yeah this is clearly the users fault.

> A technology being flawed does not absolve its users of responsibility.

It may not absolve the users of responsibility that they actually have, but that doesn't change that the entity making and selling the technology is to blame for its flaws, not the user.

Yes, that’s why it is called a “heat pump”. It leverages the temperature change from compression expansion of a refrigerant that cycles in a loop to gather heat from one environment and deliver it to another, so that (within limits of temperature on both ends) it can heat or cool a targeted space, doing the opposite elsewhere—outside (or in the ground, for a geothermal system), when we are talking about the first space as a building, generally.

> It’s up to the users to use tools that enforce security/privacy.

The problem is that, for most potential users to whom personal (not software dev) agents are being marketed, security & privacy for AI agents is a higher load domain to manage than the things they would want to delegate to agents to relieve load, so taking up the required security & privacy management to avoid problems using the agents creates disutility that exceeds the utility of the agent.

Which is why anyone selling them is going to distract from the issue rather than try to inform their customers.

EDIT:

Another problem is that in many cases, BECAUSE of the assumptions about how people use computers, web services, etc., the required tools DO NOT EXIST. Most account based web services DO NOT have ways to create, say, access tokens with a subset of full account permissions that you could give to an agent rather than full control of the account, because that kind of delegation to limited authority actors was never part of the usage model the vendor designed for.

Google (which is diversified more and whose performance is less likely to track AI outcomes closely) aside, the two other members of the AI Big 3 are non-public, so, no, you really can’t.

> The American system is quite clear about their rights being absolute and derived from God

No, the legal system is not; there are non-legal documents which claim both of those things, but being subject to “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” is very much how the US elgal system treats them. There is even, in federal Constitutional case law, an established, gradated system of tests (rational basis test, intermediate scrutiny, and strict scrutiny) depending on which right is at issue and for whom it is being limited as to whether there is sufficient justification.

> Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism.

No, it didn't. It tried to change from state capitalism (the system the Soviet Union had, not the ideology it presented) to private capitalism but ended up veering off into kleptocratic corporatism.

Negative response to low-effort AI-involved work is not what “AI doomerism” means.

A college student who is also very clearly (fron the links beyond the blog) a very active and enthusiastic AI user that thinks common (if correctly identified as less than ideal) UI trends from before vibecoding was common are indicators of “AI slop” and not just design being the done by people who aren’t very good at it (which, to be fair, includes but is not limited to AI slop) is unsurprising and nothing like doomerism.

You can disagree with the factual interpretations ans subjective interpretation in the piece without trying to tie it into a completely unrelated social phenomenon.

> Not sure how old you are but bombings and hijackings of airplanes were just kind of a common fact of life when I was a kid and I was there on 9/11 as well.

The period where hijackings were “common” (an exaggeration even then) ended around the time the first airline security screening requirements were adopted, about 30 years before 9/11 and (and just a little bit before I was born, and I am in my 50s.)

Airline bombings were NEVER common in the US (there are three I can find reference to, the most recent in 1962 and the others in 1933 and 1955.) They have been more of an issue internationally, but obviously US screening rules have done fuck-all about that, and they have continued.

> The extra time & hassle required to get through security (and the fact that only passengers can go through) means that some people drive instead of fly.

I suspect it leads to more people not travelling at all (or much shorter distances) and net saves lives in both the relatively immediate travel sense and even moreso in the broader analysis including net carbon emissions and their effect in climate change.

(It is still a mix of corrupt corporatism and authoritarian conditioning that should be ended for that reason.)

I guess if you abused terminology to scale by risk then, something decaying faster but by a different mechandism could be “less radioactive”, e.g., for external exposure, an alpha emitter with a shorter half-life might be “less (dangerously) radioactive” than a beta emitter (of course, the reverse would be true for internal exposure.)

Can’t really think of any other way to rationalize that combination.

> Now that inflation is high and MMT says "increase taxes / reduce spending", it sounds far more reasonable.

I don’t think the people that were appalled at loose “fiscal”—more specifically targeted—policy from Congress as a substitute for loose “monetary” policy from the Fed (under the MMT model that the real constraint on “fiscal” policy are its monetary effects rather than fiscal balance) would be any happier with tight “fiscal” policy substituting for tight “monetary” policy from the Fed.

I don’t think they would be happy for the “who pays the bill” when tightening is needed to be one members of Congress have to defend to their constituents anymore than they want “where does stimulus go” to be.

They may like selective appeals to constraints to avoid discussing the specific merits of spending proposals they don’t like, and dislike losing the myth of fiscal constraints, but they still don't want to subject the distributional impact of m monetary tightening to real policy debate.

Well, no, its the law that contains the educational parallel to the privacy and rights of record access parts (but not the rest) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.

Aside from the wrong acronym, the privacy and access rights are the central focus of FERPA, but pretty far down the list for HIPAA, despite being what many people think it is centrally about—which is why both “rights” and “privacy” are in the name of FERPA but (despite the joke about the common error in the acronym that “the second P in HIPAA is for Privacy”) neither is in the name of HIPAA.

Sure, it was high resolution (precise), how was accuracy compared to Jev (or existing open source implementations of the same concept, like laya)?

Also, Jev/laya do it in one forward pass, for multiple questions about the same state, rather than multiple passes for one question about that state. Well, for the usual multilingual configuration, two forward passes through different small models for laya, but that's because one is the router which chooses which model should do the real work, but still.

> Have you been to Death Valley, my friend?

Well, no, but I’ve been close and I can imagine some features of the area that might have impacts on cost of construction and ongoing maintenance that are related to why it was empty land even before it was a National Park (and I can think of additional problems with California trying to build solar generation in a national park—different ones under the current federal administration than would be historically normal, but either way it would problematic.)

> But Clay chose Fefferman to represent "the larger math community"?

Surprisingly enough, being chosen by another actor as proxy for some group doesn’t actually resolve the problem that an individual may not always be an accurate proxy for the concerns of the group (and especially for the same descriptive aggregate group a generation after the proxy acts on their behalf.)