Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement
Weird comment as this iteration has spawned the fastest growing products of all time. There’s no comparison possible with bubbles such as NFTs or the Metaverse.
Financially it’s a bubble because those products are grossly unprofitable even by VC standards, but the consumer appeal definitely is there.
It’s been obvious, since early 2025, that they are chasing the next step change but not getting any closer to it. OpenAI is in a catastrophic financial position and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where it gets any better.
Ironically, I think only AGI could get them out of this pickle, but even they are starting to realize it’s not around the corner.
That’s 0% feedback, 100% being a dick.
That’s contrary to my experience, but we may be working on different use cases. Do you have some specific issues in mind?
In my experience if you find yourself engineering prompts specifically for one SOTA model, you’re on the wrong track. The resulting product gets brittle and non deterministic and very difficult to maintain.
There’s absolutely a push for specialized hardware, look up that company called Groq !
Still we must refrain from doing worse than ourselves
It’s one of the rare use cases where it actually makes sense. If you have, say, a scene where a meteor strikes a large city, if you are an indie shop with a tight budget that’s probably happening off-screen or you’ll pour 90% of your budget in that one scene and it will still look like shit. Now you can just have an AI generate it, if the scene is isolated enough and doesn’t have too many continuity details to handle it will look pretty good for a fraction of the cost. It may be the best example of a situation where AI levels the playing field.
And quite surprisingly, this will probably be more environmentally friendly too because CGI is a big fat energy hog.
What’s weird about the mental gymnastics is that a respiratory virus pandemic is the risk factor of the century. It was a probability of 100% that this would end up happening, the only question was when and where.
But people will take the numerous calls to caution that were issued in the decades prior, and use them as proofs that something shady went on. What can you do …
I agree that it is ridiculous to claim that it is impossible and outright dismiss the idea. Nobody can say it doesn’t come from there and proving a negative is impossible. However there are a number of reasons which make the Wuhan thing a lot less suspicious than it seems at first glance.
Wuhan is the 7th largest Chinese city, and is among the most prolific research cities in China, so of course you’d have a lot of virology labs there and that would be the most probable location for coronavirus-related research. Remember that coronaviruses were kind of a hot topic in Asia after the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s.
Respiratory viruses, obviously, thrive in high-density population centers, so it would stand to reason that a 13 million inhabitants agglomeration would be at the center of this kind of thing.
To put this into perspective : if COVID had appeared in France, near some podunk town of 30K inhabitants that just happens to have a coronavirus-related lab - OK that would be super suspicious. But most likely it would have originated near Paris which is the largest population center in the whole region. Well that’s also where the Pasteur Institute is, and the Pasteur Institute being the largest virology research center in the country is the most likely place where you’d find coronavirus research. All of a sudden that would be a lot less shady.
Who cares? It’s tempting but don’t make a world view out of some interaction with randos. You’ll just burn out.
You say true and i say thankee Sai 🌹
It feels like you’re asking in bad faith. You’ve never ever had toxic interactions within leftist spaces ? That sounds amazing i’d love to know your local scene.
In my town there’s this anarchist collective who own a screen press and rent it out dirt cheap to projects they like. The operator of the machine is a judgemental asshole who talks down to everyone. What can you do ? Volunteers are hard to come by especially with his skill set. So while everyone tries to work around him the experience always ends up being somewhat toxic.
Or there’s this queer/feminist group that i sometimes help out with social media shit. Governance is supposed to be collegial but there’s an inherent power structure to the group which biases all decisions. Making a good point is often less important than making it to the right persons at the right moment, and eliciting the right feelings from them. It’s ultimately toxic especially for the younger ones who learn to power-play rather than focus on objectives. But still, the world is a better place with them in it.
Those are just examples from my limited and superficial experience in these matters. At the end of the day, whatever space you operate in, you have to tolerate some toxicity otherwise everything grinds to a stop.
I mean it’s obvious when you involve yourself with local activist groups. Egos, factions, infighting… We’re not immune to toxicity, no human groups are.
Wanna talk about cliffhangers? I got into the dark tower book series in 1995, and devoured the 3 tomes which were published at the time. Without spoiling, let’s just say that #3 ends with all of the main characters in immediate mortal danger. Then there was an author’s note where King basically wrote “don’t hold your breath I have no idea where this story is going and will probably never finish it in my lifetime lmao”.
So there’s that… Then one fateful morning in 98 I got a call from my best friend whose parents had a book store : “hey zos we’ve just put on the shelf a new Stephen King book, isn’t that from the series you keep yapping about?”.
That was probably the peak moment in my bookworm life…
There’s some decent money to be made in null shipping. For one thing, fuel costs are very low.
Not that much actually! There’s not even any bass for the first verse, as it punches in at the first chorus. By the end, the strings appear to come a bit forward in the mix, and there are 2, maybe 3 additional vocal tracks but no additional instruments that I can hear.
We tried to cover it with my band, but it sounded really boring. Upon listening closely to it, I was surprised by how minimalist it actually is. I mean there’s barely anything on the track! Some piano, some strings, and drum and bass of course.
It was a happy surprise to find that it’s one of those songs that are carried by the pure energy of the vocalist, which makes it very tricky to cover unless you go a very lateral route and “re-genre” it.
It’s very rare that the backend language significantly affects performance. In 99% of apps you could have the most optimized backend written directly in machine language, and you’d just shave off milliseconds.
That’s because in web development most of the latency comes from i/o (network requests, database access, file access), not from computation being slow.
I don’t know about the other languages but most widely used JavaScript packages also have corporate backing