You're assuming your personal experience is universal, which is very far from being the case. To start with, US does not have compulsory military service, the conversation is about countries where everyone (typically all males, except those exempt for medical and other reasons) have to do military service. Certainly the US army and other militaries will have a bunch of ancillary personnel like recruiters, janitors, cooks, hell you could even count subcontractors writing software. These are people employed by the army to do specific jobs it needs. Compulsory military service is typically short (except Eritrea, where it's potentially indefinite, I think in North Korea it can also be extended indefinitely, I'm not sure) so people don't specialise from the start and get at least basic firearms training.

And yes, if you're repairing military machinery it would help you repair civilian machinery later, or you could get a civilian job repairing civilian machinery from the start. But I can't judge, working for the military may well make sense economically or from some other standpoint. The point is, you made a choice to work for the military and I'm glad it worked out for you. But this is about compulsory military service where you by definition do not get that choice.

China doesn't have full central planning like the Soviets did, where you had no private ownership of factories at all and all the decisions like where to build which factory were being made centrally. They have a pretty normal capitalist economy (in some ways even more capitalist then say Europe, less environmental and worker protection regulations) with a very interventionist and powerful government. A bit like economies of Europe after WWII, with a bit more government power.

There are two reasons for a country to have compulsory military service. One, it has an aggressive heavily militarized neighbour (or neighbours) which it fears is likely to invade. Two, that country is the aggressive militarized neighbour others fear will invade them. Possibly a mixture of both. You certainly do not have compulsory military service in order to build any sort of utopia.

In the military you generally learn two things. One, using tools and learning skills designed to kill people and destroy things. Those are not really skills you are going to need in general life and practicing such skills in a civilian setting is, shall we say, discouraged. Two, you learn to unquestioningly obey orders. That is not really a trait associated with any kind of utopian society either.

That comes at a cost of interrupting your education, relationships and generally life for however long military service lasts, again, doing something completely unrelated to what you're going to do for the rest of your life. I know a lot of military vets in US end up working in law enforcement but as I understand many feel that has some bad side effects.

So many people have already been radicalised on social media, and it looks like their heads have been fucked irreversibly. They're now addicted to mindlessly repeating political slogans and hating people their politics (which is now more like a religion) tells them to hate. Even if Facebook, Twitter, maybe Instagram too were to die soon, which I very much doubt, they will just find some other social media, but one that only allows their political viewpoint. It's already been happening for some time (Bluesky, Truth Social, probably some other smaller places I'm not aware of), if Meta and its ilk were to die all it would do would be to accelerate that process. That could be even worse, total echo chambers like that might turn these people into even worse fanatics.

Some young people are apparently starting to recognise that social media and in general being connected 24/7 is doing bad things to them, but undestanding that addiction is bad for you and kicking the habit are very different things.

Yes, makes as much sense as cannabis being a 'gateway drug', or DnD being a gateway to satan worshipping. Same kind of nonsensical logic as someone who practices on a firing range inevitably becoming an assassin or someone who practices martial arts will use those to mug people. Clearly they've never heard of white hat hackers.

The problem is, people in positions of authority in education are often more or less completely computer-illiterate and view IT as black magic, so to them hackers are something akin to witches or sorcerers, rather than just people with particular skills (pretty rudimentary skills at that, we're talking about schoolkids here).

Not the case on Amazon. There, sellers offering free stuff or vouchers or discounts for 5 star reviews are rampant. So for any product or seller you get a ton of reviews like 'I've bought this electric appliance and they sent me the actual thing I've paid for! And when I've plugged it in it didn't blow up in my face! And seems to be sort of working! Brilliant, five stars, would buy again!'. Negative reviews there are better indicators because they mean there's been a genuine fuckup by the seller, whereas 5 star ones mean very little. I guess on Google this kind of corrupt incentivising of reviews is better policed.

I'd say a good indicator is to look not so much at the number of stars but the comments. From the comments it'll be clear if the business genuinely screwed up or the person leaving the review is stupid and didn't understand what they were getting, or even if it's a scam like this one. People who are genuinely pissed off will be more than happy to explain why, but if you're getting something like 'bad place, is a suck' or something obviously AI-generated then those should be ignored. Same with positive reviews.

Another thing would be to look for reviews that aren't 5 stars or 1 star, those may be more likely to be more objective and reasonable

If the goal is to find out whether people will snap under all these stress factors then first, these are highly trained very dedicated people who are fully aware of all the risks, and second, the stressors will be massively different given they know full well that this is a simulation. People may react very differently knowing that equipment failure is simulated and if all else fails they can just walk out of the testing environment as opposed to really being on Mars where the equipment failure may condemn them all to a very unpleasant death.

If we ever want to understand how our own intelligence works and possibly develop actual AI, research like this is the way to do this. It's complicated and if we ever get there, will take a very long time, quite possibly centuries (if advanced industrial civilization doesn't collapse by that point). My understanding is, biological systems are very messy and haphazard in their design, and that's the only way something that came about as a result of random mutations could be. Systems that control intelligence clearly seem to be no exception, even for relatively simple intelligence like that of mice. But that's the only way to get there.

Not really, no. All generative AIs have the same fundamental limitation, and that is they're limited by what's in their training data. So all you can do is keep redoing bits you don't like until they're sort of somewhat close to what you wanted, because you're limited by what AI can produce. If what you want is not in the training data at all, you'll just have to settle for something that looks good enough. You said it yourself, a lengthy micromanagy commission is still a commission, it's still the artist (the AI, or really the people who produced the training data) doing the actual painting. But if you're having fun, what does it matter?

Why? At least you're introducing something you've done yourself into the process. Unless you got the image from somewhere else.

I'm afraid you've misunderstood what I was saying. I absolutely agree that your crayon drawings at age 5 were art. Not art that had any value to anyone other than you or your close family (sorry, I'm assuming you were not a child genius artistic prodigy). But nevertheless, it was art, because you've done it yourself. I could paint something now and it wouldn't look much better than your 5yo crayon drawing, but it would also be art (although not good art).

Being skilled with the tools of your trade will allow you to effectively implement your artistic vision in a way that is compelling. That's how you make good art that others will enjoy. But even very low-skill art is still art, you can still claim authorship of it if you made it yourself, if you're the one that is doing the actual drawing/writing/composing. With generative AI, however, it is the AI that is doing the drawing/writing/whatever, you're merely directing it. Or, like I said, it's actually the people on whose work AI has been trained.

With the pop singer, it's a bit of an edge case. They can't claim authorship of lyrics or music, so it isn't their art. The vocal performance is being produced by autotune rather than them, but they can at least claim a bit of credit since it's their voice being autotuned. Being very charitable, other elements of performance, such as dancing, interaction with fans and what have you can maybe be considered performance and thus sort of art.

Sorry, but just having a general idea of what you want is not art. Which paint to use and the type of brushtrokes is what makes a painting, choice of words and and mood and ideas they convey is a major part of writing a novel, knowing how to place the notes together and which instruments will work best (and how they are to be played) is what makes music. Craft is not just a screwdriver you use to make art, application of craft is art.

When you're writing prompts, you're not creating art, you're just commissioning it. It's like some 16th-century nobleman who pays an artist to paint a portrait of him and his wife sitting in particular ornate chairs, while wearing particular clothes, with his dog lying underneath. He might add more specific instructions, like 'make me look really wise and less fat' or 'make my wife look really hot' but in reality it is the artist painting the portrait, the nobleman merely commisions it.

Or perhaps an example closer to home, you can have a manager who gathers software requirements from clients and then sends them down to the software devs (those used to be called 'product owners' in one place I worked). It can be a nontrivial job requiring some expertise, but still it's not the manager or the clients actually writing the software, it the software developers.

So when you're prompting AI to give you a picture of a girl with big boobs, it's the AI that's actually creating this 'art', not you. And in reality it's not the AI either but all the artists whose work AI has been trained on.

Also,

Huh? Try years, if not decades. To those who are serious about art, even if it's not their actual job it's often a lifelong hobby.

"Horribly unpopular" is a relative term. I myself have never felt compelled to visit either of these sites, but I know they've been around for a long time so there are clearly a lot of people who do enjoy their content so they're obviously popular enough.

What's happening here is nothing to do with free market. It's a foreign government, in this case UK government, trying to levy fines on sites not based in UK because they don't comply with UK censorship laws. The thing is, if one foreign government can do that, so can all othes. Like, for example China, Russia, hell even North Korea in theory (though I'd imagine they wouldn't have much of a chance if taken to a US court), and literally any other government in the world. And you can be sure that more or less anyone is likely to fall foul of laws of some country out there, not just sites you personally dislike.

So a developer writes an open source utility which is apparently very useful judging by the fact that it's used in Node.js and all these projects, and it's completely free. That's great, right? Everybody wins. But, no, he happens to live in a country which US doesn't like very much, and the utility happens to be used by US military, so that means he could do something nefarious. The guy never asked for US military to use his work, it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything military related, being a file search regex as far as I understand. Also this is open source project, so you can actually look at all the source code and see for yourself if there is anything malicious there. Which is exactly what a 'cybersecurity firm' should be doing, instead of doxxing open source developers. Except maybe they don't have anyone who can understand source code.

But the icing on the cake is

So you write some software, once again, for free, someone with no relationship to you takes your work and uses it, at the risk of sounding repetitive, for free, and then starts demanding that you spend your own money to hire more people (who must presumably all not be Russian) to calm their paranoia that you might do something bad in future. Wow, just wow. Although to be fair this nonsense doesn't come from US DoD but from this complete joke of a 'cybersecurity firm'.

If you start demanding that open source developers pass security clearance (potentially for every military in the world), produce extensive documentation to satisfy whatever compliance standards someone demands etc etc then what's going to happen is people will go 'Fuck this, I have better things to do with my free time'. And then no more open source. And we're back to the old days of everyone doing their own shitty homebrew implementation of every bit of low-level functionality. If DoD wants to write their own implementation of Javascript written entirely by totally security-vetted developers they're welcome to pay contractors however many millions that would require to do exactly that. But it looks like they're actually smart enough to understand that open-source code is pretty secure just by virtue of being used in so many places and being looked at by so many different eyes. It's just this so-called 'cybersecurity firm' trying to get some free publicity by pissing in the well. Ingrates like this just really annoy me.

So why tf are most comments about Trump? What on Earth does this have to do with US politics? The transplant didn't even take place in US but in China.

On topic, this is promising, but for a patient, 'the organ was rejected after X days' is just as bad as 'the organ was immediately rejected', the end result is you still die.