pauloday
pauloday on Hacker News
He's not interested in helping anyone but himself. IDK how stopping this stuff helps him exactly, but his actions make a lot more sense if you look at them through that lens. Negative repercussions for the US aren't necessarily negative for him, or they may be outweighed by something positive for him.
Nope, took about an hour but it's flagged now. IMO the people doing the flagging just don't want anyone to think about this stuff at all.
Someone wrote the following comment then deleted it. I spent 30 minutes on my response and wanted to post it anyway. Apologies if the original comment was deleted by a mod, I hope this is OK to post.
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My "test" for video generation turning movie making on its head is when a model can add the missing Tom Bombadil chapters to Peter Jackson's LOTR movies.
Probably 20 - 30 minutes of HD, aesthetically synced, scripted etc with minimal editing after a detailed prompt and source material.
Qualifier - the AI just has to follow the book script, third party tools ok to use for lip syncing and audio :)
I said 5 years away last year.
Feels like it might be more like 1 - 2 years.
What do you think?
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My response:
I think we're getting into diminishing returns territory with this AI stuff. These video/image generators are impressive but they don't "understand" physical reality and probably never will without a breakthrough. You can see this in the demo videos, the best looking ones are glorified still images and the worst are whenever something physical happens, like the lemon being picked up or the guy eating cereal. These examples may get better, but I really doubt they'll ever look like real unaltered camera footage without adding an understanding of how our physical reality works into the model somehow.
For the script generation, Fellowship of the Ring is not a movie script and requires serious interpretation and planning to be converted into one. Especially if you want it to fit into Jackson's films at all. If nothing else the dialog and frequency of songs/poetry are very different. The current text generators aren't really capable of that kind of planning yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a screenwritten treatment of that chapter floating around on the internet somewhere, or at least bits of one. It has certainly ingested The Fellowship of the Rings, and plenty of screenplays plus the books they were based on. So maybe chatgpt can make a convincing script. I asked the free version and got some dialog that seems fine, but absolutely no scene direction at all. I'm willing to believe that was either an issue with my prompting or something that can be fixed in 5 years. So at least the script may be possible.
As for converting it into an actual piece of film, I don't think that's currently possible without a breakthrough on planning. There's a reason these video demos aren't usually very long, it's because they aren't good at scene changes. People's faces change, rooms change shape, etc. Maybe that can be fixed through engineering, but film editing is hard. It's not easy to plan and chain together shots in a way that gives a proper sense of physical reality while conveying everything a scene needs to.
Take a look at Dan Olsen's video analyzing the editing of Suicide Squad[1]. That movie was edited by a trailerhouse and it shows. A big issue is that the scenes and shots don't flow together very well - it's edited like a bunch of separate shots and scenes rather than a coherent whole. As a result it's generally considered one of the worst films big budget ever made. And from my (admittedly limited) understanding/playing around with these generators, they aren't even remotely close to being able to do the type of planning needed to pull that kind of editing off, much less something on the level of Jackson's adaptation. Again I could be wrong but it really seems like another "Attention is All You Need" level breakthrough to get there.
So I'd say no, I don't think we'll get what you describe, at least not at any level of quality, in 1-2 years. 5 years sounds more realistic but I really believe we'd need another huge breakthrough to get there, and those are hard to come by. Assuming one will happen in any given time period seems foolish. But a lot of smart people are working on that, so maybe we'll get it. But I don't think we'll even get there in 10 years with just engineering improvements on the current stuff. Scientific progress isn't linear.
Yours and a lot of other predictions about AI stuff really remind me of how all the futurists in the 50's thought we'd be able to freeze and unfreeze humans in a few short years. They thought that because it's actually really easy to do that with hamsters, but it turns out scaling the process up isn't so easy (Tom Scott has a good video tangentially related to this[2]). I think a lot of people are standing near the top of the steep part of a sigmoid curve and saying "Wow look how far we've come in just 3 years! The next 3 years are going to be insane!" When in reality we just have a long plateau of minor improvements in front of us. But who knows, maybe that next breakthrough is right around the corner.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDclQowcE9I
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y
Personally these and the Wikipedia posts are my favorite posts on here. News is cool, but there's a lot of cool things that don't change very often, and I love seeing those things too.
Also, in response to your "low effort posts do not invite meaningful discussion" from a different comment, I don't see how this is any lower effort than every other link only post (i.e. the vast majority)? And there's over 40 comments on this thread now talking about other scrapers, projects you can do with scrapers, better docs, tangential use cases and how to handle them, etc. Seems like a lot of people have a variety of things to say about this, I don't see how that's not "meaningful discussion".
EDIT: I also disagree with requiring a couple of sentences from the submitter. If they have something to say they can say it, otherwise it's fine if they don't try to influence the discussion - it's more interesting to see where the random commenters take something, then trying to chart a course.
But then people could just get a list of ad hosts and modify their hosts.txt to redirect those addresses to localhost. I think there's other ways to stop this though. It doesn't seem like a huge stretch for ad providers to give hosts all the stuff to host the ad from their server directly, for example.
Pretty sure you can do that with Alexa. There's one in my office, and my co-workers use "computer" as the wake up phrase.
Well, it's easier to lie about things when there's not any hard data available, and they do seem to lie a lot.
It's not that the cards were marked because they were asymmetrical, it was the combination of the asymmetry and Sun manipulating them that caused them to be marked. So other games with those cards are fine as long as none of the players were manipulating the game so that asymmetry gave them an advantage. The player didn't bring the cards, but they did purposefully manipulate them to effectively play a game with marked cards, and that's why the game wasn't legit.
You seem exactly like the type of person that should be here, don't worry :) I don't know what they meant by "unwashed masses", but it kind of seems like there have been a lot of new posters coming here to talk about politics and nothing else. Honestly I think this site started getting mentioned a lot more on Reddit (especially the technology sub), and more people from there started posting here because they felt it was a more civilized place to discuss politics. That's true, but it's also specifically not a politics focused forum (unlike /r/technology) and I think that's messing some people up.
Right, but if you want to retrieve some data through their API, how does it work? Normally you open the connection, ask for the data, then receive it and close the connection, does that change if there's a 5+ hour wait between the ask and the receive? Do you just leave the connection open? Provide them with a webhook to call when it's ready? I don't personally care about the answer but I'm pretty sure that's what they were asking.
If you look around the threads here, dismissive once sentence replies are usually downvoted. You have to actually put "facts and reason" in your comment for us to listen to it.
That's weird because the Xamarin Studio installer definitely has an option to set your own API location.
Sorry about that, I have a bad habit of publishing my fist draft. I agree with what you've written. Like you say I don't think they're trying to avoid arbitrary stylization or selective metaphors, rather providing some arbitrary styles and selective metaphors that make up a consistent design. It's fine if you don't like it, but I haven't seen anyone who likes it pretending it's anything more than that.
Material design is built out of this "material" that mimics some real world things like shadows for user affordance, but is mostly magical. I'm pretty sure the only real world metaphor they're trying to use for the button is a floating panel of some magical material that floats closer to the screen when you tap it.
Personally I use a package manager called Homebrew. It's pretty good, I'd recommend it.
I don't know that it's an "epidemic", but houses are certainly getting bigger in the US[1]. I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else. This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government. I doubt I'd personally agree with many of their stances, but I really can't see how it's "legitimately disgusting".
[1]: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-02/business/chi-a...
I'd guess they just search by name, that's all they consistently have to go off for news stories from a third party.
I think the key word is "personally". That stuff doesn't equal a successful company, but it does look nice on a resume.
And if others could contribute improvements on yours.
I don't think the creator is saying there is a problem, honestly. The language is blunt, but it really seems like a joke more than a statement.
This is hilarious, everyone who's taking it as a call to stop using this template is taking it too seriously imo. It seems more like good natured ribbing - he's right that these Bootstrap sites tend to look very same-y, but as he says at the bottom "this template does look really nice, though". There's nothing wrong with using the same template everyone else uses (everyone probably uses it for a reason, after all), but there's also nothing wrong with pointing out that all these sites tend to look the same because of it.
Seriously, this is clearly a joke and he even says the template is nice at the bottom. There's nothing wrong with using this template, and I don't think the creator of this site would disagree. People seem to be taking the blunt tone as them telling us not to use this template, but it seems more like good-natured ribbing to me.
I think they could do all the stuff that makes it unhackable in hardware, and/or they could make it so updates aren't installed while the phone is locked.
At our company we kept getting emails from them on email addresses that are only used to send data to our service. This was starting to become a problem, so we called them up and asked them to block that domain. They said no. Eventually they said they'd blacklist the email addresses individually. Our response was "OK so we're going to send about 20,000 email addresses for you to blacklist, and probably about 1,000 more every 2 months or so". They blacklisted our domain.
It's a good way to get the right answer but it's not a very good way to get help.
You make a lot of excellent points but I think you might have misinterpreted my comment, because it doesn't seem like we disagree. You mention that evil cannot be defined in precise terms, and that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's not a property of things in reality that can be measured, it's a judgement about things made by people. The judgment may be very rational, but it can't be based wholly on objective reality. For that to be the case, it'd have to be based on a physical law or property rather than a moral principle, and I just don't see how that's possible. Your argument for why Hitler was evil is really solid, not because it's based in objective reality but because it's based the principle that the continued existence of the human race is a good thing. I'd say that's a solid enough principle that it may as well be objective reality. But technically speaking, it's still a subjective judgement that we're making about how things should be, rather than an objective observation of how they are.
This is a really pedantic, subtle and (I think) important distinction. If one sees good and evil as objective truth, they're reliant on the source of that truth for their moral judgement. This explains the jihadists you mention. It's not that they enjoy being murdering maniacs (although I'm sure some do), it's that their source of moral truth tells them that the infidels are evil and must be destroyed (or whatever), so they see what they're doing as a good thing.
It applies to video recordings. Most cctv cameras don't record audio for this reason.
Well if you want to get really pedantic, nothing is inherently anything because all meaning is constructed in our minds. Evil is a word humans use to categorize things, not a description of objective reality.
I would agree that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but since there's no objective 'bad', wether or not they're 'actually bad' is up to the observer. When a person is labeled as 'evil' it's not a description of them as a person but a description of what the describer thinks of them. Hitler wasn't evil because he killed millions of people, he was evil because the general consensus is that doing the stuff he did makes you an evil person.
If one loses sight of this and starts think of evil as objective reality, they're taking their biases and opinions as objective reality, and down that path lies ruin.
Well for one thing there's often stuff on Massdrop that you can't get from Amazon. If the item is on Amazon it's generally about the same price, but I've definitely picked up things from Massrdrop that aren't on Amazon for a much better price than I found anywhere else. But yeah, I see it as a curated list of good products with the occasional deal.