Yeah, their espresso is also roasted to death.

I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks.

Not just that, but even the more middle ground small cars. I’d love to have an EV truck sized the way they were in the 80’s/90’s (which was more or less comparable to a midsize sedan, just taller). The push to bigger and bigger wheelbases to take advantage of loopholes in the efficiency standards really doesn’t need to be reflected in EVs, but it’s what all the major automakers are doing.

Nah, these accusations of racism from a company owned by an Apartheid era South African emerald mine heir are too racist.

Thanks for clarifying. There are a lot of misconceptions about how this technology works, and I think it’s worth making sure that everyone in these thorny conversations has the right information.

I completely agree with your larger point about culture; to the best of my knowledge we haven’t seen any real ability to innovate, because the current models are built to replicate the form and structure of what they’ve seen before. They’re getting extremely good at combining those elements, but they can’t really create anything new without a person involved. There’s a risk of significant stagnation if we leave art to the machines, especially since we’re already seeing issues with new models including the output of existing models in their training data. I don’t know how likely that is; I think it’s much more likely that we see these tools used to replace humans for more mundane, “boring” tasks, not really creative work.

And you’re absolutely right that these are not artificial minds; the language models remind me of a quote from David Langford in his short story Answering Machine: “It’s so very hard to realize something that talks is not intelligent.” But we are getting to the point where the question of “how will we know” isn’t purely theoretical anymore.

Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.

This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they’re eventually “destroyed”; the model doesn’t contain them at all, and it doesn’t need to refer back to them to generate new images.

It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn’t contain any of the original images.

None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren’t getting a cut. That’s bad.

But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you’re going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn’t cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That’s also bad. I’m pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.

The best you’re likely to do in that situation is say it’s ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.

I have a suspicion that all of the layers of “Elon management” at Tesla and SpaceX have given him the idea that he’s a brilliant innovator; he gives them all his outlandish ideas and they get filtered into (normally) reasonable plans, and they guide him down the path they want him to go down while he thinks the good idea is his. And those companies are both doing well, so clearly his style works, at least in his mind.

But then he bought twitter, which didn’t have anyone devoted to protecting the company from him, and it’s all going to shit.

Ahh, so less “hard to believe” and more “unpleasant to believe”, that’s fair.

The only other solution is that the richest person in the world (officially) is this stupid. This is almost harder to believe than a conspiracy to destroy twitter.

Why is that hard to believe? The mega-rich are not notably more intelligent than anyone else, they just started decades ago with inherited wealth and got lucky early.

There’s a very specific type of “free speech” that he’s fighting for.

Your second question answers your first. The more he leaves Tesla alone, the better for them. It’s probably pretty hard to determine how much having his name associated with Tesla is hurting the company vs how much it would help/hurt to get rid of him, but if he’s attached but absent, it’s very much a “devil you know” situation.

Beyond that, it’ll try to summarize a book, but it often can’t do so successfully, although it will act like it has. Give it a try on something that is even a little bit obscure and it can’t really give you good information. I tried with Blindsight, which is not something that’s in the popular culture, but also a Hugo nominee, so not completely obscure. It knew who the characters were, and had a general sense of the tone, but it completely fabricated every major plot point that I asked about. Did the same with A Head Full of Ghosts, which is more well known but still not something everyone has read, and it did the same thing.

One thing I found that’s really fun is to ask it a question and then follow up with something like “Are you sure about that?” It’ll almost always correct itself and make up something else. It’ll go one step further and incorporate details you ask about. Give it a prompt like “Are you sure this character died of natural causes? I thought they were killed by Bob” and it will very frequently say you’re right and make up a story along those lines that’s plausible within the text. It doesn’t work on really popular stuff; you can’t convince it that Optimus Prime saves Luke Skywalker in RotJ, but anything even a little less well known and it’ll tell you details that it’s making up whole cloth with complete confidence.

Yeah, as one of the people giving you “heat”, I think it’s great that you put forward this proposal and took feedback on it, and my goal was a productive discussion, not shaming. Not every idea is good, and very, very few of them are good right from the jump, but you never find good ideas without putting them out there.

You can also put an LSI SAS raid controller card flashed into IT into a PCI slot and use SAS to SATA cables. Can easily find them used on ebay for reasonable prices. And if you really grow your server, you can transition those SAS ports to point to a JBOD array with SAS ports, although that takes you from “cheap” to “cheap when compared to buying new.”

I’m also a fan of Unraid since it makes expanding the array much easier, but you have to pay for it, and it’s designed with the assumption that the only thing you’re doing on the bare metal is storage, and everything else is either containerized or in a VM.

I’m just not seeing a benefit here, I think this is a solution to the wrong problem. Your proposal in theory cuts outbound updates from the big hubs, but in reality they’re only updating a subset of other instances for any given update, and it doesn’t do anything to help with inbound updates. And to do that, you have to solve a pretty tricky problem.

If my instance gets an update from Beehaw, I can validate that they’re allowed to do so, because Beehaw has a TLS certificate that says “Yep, this is actually Beehaw.” If you introduce a hub system, I need some way to determine that the hub system that’s telling me “Beehaw has an update for you” is allowed to send updates on behalf of Beehaw.

If you ensure that all messages are queued until processed, with retries on failure, what’s the point of the hub model? As pointed out elsewhere, the large instances would be acting as hubs already.

That doesn’t do anything to fix the problem. If a server can only handle 5k updates per minute (a completely made up number), it doesn’t matter if those 5k updates come from one server or a thousand. In theory you could cut down on outbound messages a bit if you could tell a “hub server” that post #123456 got another upvote, so please tell instances A, B, C, D, and E. But the total number of messages would increase, so even if the hub instance can handle more updates, it may eventually hit capacity again.

The core of the problem is that if an instance doesn’t process an update (inbound or outbound), it doesn’t ever retry, the instances are just out of sync for that post forever.

Federation isn’t working well, but it’s not working well because the big instances aren’t able to keep up with all of the inbound/outbound messages, and if a message fails, that’s it. Right now there’s no automated way to resync and catch up on missed activity.

So I guess we’ll see if there’s anything interesting in the corp data…

My guess is it’ll get sold, not made generally public.

Isn’t it trivial for bot farms to just spam posts on their home instance? And how does this handle cases where the number of posts is zero?

Yeah, unfortunately there’s not much that can be done there, at least not without adding little motors to the switch so it can match state with whatever it’s controlling. My experience has been that there’s an adjustment period, but eventually it’s not a big deal. Sort of like switching to paddle switches from toggle switches; at first it’s different, and people don’t like different when it comes to things they don’t think about, like light switches. But eventually the new thing becomes normal, and it’s not a problem anymore.

That said, the z-wave toggle switches are garbage, it’s much easier to adjust to paddles.