CoderKat

That's what I do. I wish them well, but I don't ask them questions.

Wow, you hate Monica so much she doesn't even appear in the list? I'd put Monica above Phoebe, personally. And Ross is by far the worst.

Especially with many audiences. On your own or with a romantic partner it's not nearly as bad, but watching a sex scene with pretty much anyone else feels so awkward, which pulls you out of the scene.

Yeah, over time, I've come to care a lot less for movies. For most things, I'd rather have a TV show so that there's more time to get invested in characters and do world building. Plus more bite sized viewing sessions.

Modern TV has such high production values that movies have lost their biggest competitive edge. Plus showrunners have more options for how to perform the show. No longer do shows need to be bloated with far too many episodes. Public opinion has also changed, so they don't even try to get away with bullshit like clip episodes anymore (mind you, those were mostly for sitcoms in the first place). Streaming has also made shows more accessible than ever.

As a dev, I honestly can't understand that. I probably use regex a dozen times a day. Basic regex is so easy and useful, but describing exactly what you want is so iffy for an AI. The basics of regex are also so easy. It's not like most people are trying to, say, parse an email address with regex. Most usage is basic, like "extract this consistent pattern from this text" or "remove this (simple) parameter from this function". It takes me seconds to come up with a working regex in most cases.

Especially where image generation is concerned, the infancy part can't be understated. It's growing so, so fast. A year ago, people would be dismissing AI art as "you can always tell", it largely couldn't do hands, and text was right out. But current cutting edge models can semi-reliably generate imperceptible works, needing only some fairly trivial manual curation to pick the best output. There's also some models that are now able to do basic text. Just comparing a couple of years worth of progress side by side makes it very clear that it's advancing rapidly and there's no signs yet that it's plateaued.

The big barrier to image generation, though, is profit. The images that it creates are useful, but current understanding is that they can't be copyrighted and there's ongoing legal challenges that make it very murky. I don't think these companies can stay in business from regular people who'll pay for some tokens to generate art. They need to be usable by commercial companies, and the legal issues will scare many of those away, at least for now.

I do think there's some use for AI in its current form (especially AI art as a tool for developing other works, like movies and video games), but I find it bizarre just how much investors value the current form of AI.

As cool as I find AI art, I'm not yet sure about it's commercial viability, given the serious legal issues it's facing. So why do investors, who are supposed to care about commercial viability, value it so much?

And for generative text, I have an even more negative stance. My understanding is that the cost to train and run those AIs is ludicrous. Sure, some companies will use it to make blog spam articles or replace their basic support staff with it, but is that really gonna make it profitable?

And I emphasized "current form" because the current AI is basically just predictive text. It's severely limited and this is extremely evident if you try to ask even basic math problems. It's not capable of actual intelligence, which is what has me very skeptical of it on the long term. Maybe these companies will come up with a new, better form of AI. Or maybe they won't. But it doesn't seem like "just increase the size of the model" is sustainable nor will frankly get closer to strong(ish?) AI.

The problem is that the "assault weapon" wording makes it easier for pro gun to dismiss you. The US has a lot of people obsessed with guns. I'd love if the US could just ban guns entirely, but reality is that we'd have to at least start with reasonable baby steps and cannot give them any easy way to get out. By using the "assault weapon" wording, you're just making it easier for them to dismiss gun legislation cause they'll claim "it's too vague" (even if it's not).

It's unfortunate that wording has to matter so much, especially in colloquial usage, but it's such an uphill battle to get even the slightest gun restrictions in place, so we sadly do need to be perfect. And yeah, it's stupid. It's dumb that the US can be like it is and people will still defend their guns to the death. But we have to account for that if we want to make anything better.

I wonder how much of a discount OP can get when they send their machine back?

Yeah, but if you're rich you can cut in line. Won't anyone think of the rich???

Yeah, I learn so much from code reviews and they've saved me so much time from dumb mistakes I missed. I've also caught no shortage of bugs in other people's code that saved us all a stressful headache. It's just vastly easier to fix a bug before it merges than once it breaks a bunch of people.

Implying we'd ever get off this planet before wiping ourselves out. :/