Comment Re:AI isn't going anywhere (Score 1) 123
I think you responded to someone else's comment.
I think you responded to someone else's comment.
I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.
It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?
You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.
It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.
Can't do it. I'm refactoring on a large code base. I eventually had to tell it to work on just one task and ignore other concerns it had to prevent it from investigating until it got stuck in a cycle of investigation.
Understood, and yeah single tasking seems like a good workaround given the situation. Or switching to an LLM with a larger context window, if possible/practical. I was able to get about 7X more context window "runway" using the AST approach, but it's a relatively small code base to begin with.
Sounds like you're running up against the context window of whatever LLM you're using. Try converting your code to a minified abstract syntax tree first and pass that to your LLM, and ask it what full text it needs in addition to that. It should stay within the context window much better that way.
It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.
While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.
If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.
A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.
While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.
ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.
But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.
I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.
Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.
In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.
Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.
It doesn't make it *right*, but it does make claiming it is *wrong* inconsistent with their own behavior. This could prevent the US companies from suing the Chinese companies seeking an injunction (due to the "unclean hands" doctrine), and probably blocks them from seeking monetary damages in most US jurisdictions.
And suing may undermine the US companies own intellectual property claims by exposing their shaky foundations. An AI model isn't *expression*, so it can't be copyrighted. Insofar as the service allows the underlying model to be deduced through regular usage, trade secret protections don't apply because that's *reverse engineering*, which trade secrets don't prevent.
This leaves violations of terms of service. But setting aside the dubious enforceability of anti-reverse engineering provisions, the Chinese companies may not even be parties to the ToS agreement if they are obtaining the model data through a network of contractors and shell companies.With only moderate paranoia, they can effectively shield themselves from some kind of US tort claim.
Which leaves them with the model they've created from the US company's model, but which the US company has no IP claim upon. If I download a DeepSeek model that's been (hypothetically speaking) trained on Claude, Anthropic might not like that, but what can they do about it?
It's a strange situation. US investors are spending cumulatively on over half a trillion dollars a year in the hope of owning a breakthrough frontier model that is the end of the economic world as we know it. But the essence of the model might not be intellectual property at all.
I'm going to argue with that: No, the UN is not the "set of governments". That implies some hierarchical authority. You can say the US is a "set of state governments", but not the UN. The UN is also an incomplete set; it excludes Taiwan, for instance, because China had a civil war and the mainland winner threw a tantrum and still won't let the losing remnant join, 80 years later.
The UN can't enforce peace because it is not a cohesive set. If the US were organized like the UN is, individual states could block the US from doing anything.
At best, you can lump the five "founding" nations together, the ones with the security council vetoes, but then you have to explain why Taiwan is not even a member of the organization, let alone the security council with its own veto; and you have to explain why all the USSR's individual SSR remnants are not part of the security council with their own vetoes.
I'd much rather the UN wasted their time doing nonsense like this than trying to tame the boiling oceans. It would be even better if they tried to enforce peace, but that's not important enough for them.
Think of the categories as fixed, and the people moving *through* them. Over 65s are exiting the category at a lower rate.
I think this might be the first time I've seen a Slashdot comment with a non-alphanumeric character that displayed properly. Nicely done, AC!
It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.
The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.
The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.
This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.
There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.
The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.
And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.
Gravity brings me down.