Social media is like if someone took all the problems of usenet and amplified them to the point of unusability...

Writing music (or any other creative endeavor) is not just about mimicking learned patterns, but about experimenting until you create something actually new. Models are recombining patterns using deep learning, which can give the appearance of novelty without actually being genuine creations, unless there's adequate guidance and shaping by a human. The problem is that there is a way that real inspiration and innovation *feel* which becomes delocalized when the cognitive labor is mostly offloaded to a model and thus hard to recognize, especially if you don't actually have experience doing the creative act yourself. So people who don't know how to write music will make slop, and even experienced artists could end up with stuff that is mostly slop if they're not paying very careful attention.

Plus the social value of creativity is based on recognition of the effort involved in creating novel things; many people appreciate art because it reflects human experience and human effort, which can get muddled or lost with generative AI.

I have been writing music and studying computing since childhood and studying some machine learning since I was a teen, three decades ago. I don't think all generative AI is useless or offensive (though the resource overconsumption with the LLMs-in-everything fad is a serious problem, and I do believe there is a type of expected-usage violation / consent problem with many AI vendor training sets and products). The disagreements about deep learning and generative AI (exaggerated by a bubble-driven profit motive, unfortunately) will take work to solve because new social contract concepts will have to gradually be explored and tested over the coming years by billions of humans until a general consensus is reached on what fair use now means and how intellectual "property" ethics are navigated.

I think people are asserting a lot of things which amount to gazing into a crystal ball around these topics, but there are at least two things which I feel pretty sure of based on my experience: the human creative process is much more complicated than LLM/GAN training+prompting, and actual human creativity has value which a machine is unlikely to replicate effectively at least anytime soon â" though simulacra of creativity pass enough of a capitalist sniff test to make money, detracting from the livelihoods of artists already dealing with the nightmarish economic calculus of trying to make creative things while paying the bills in the contemporary era.

Of course, litigative copyright scalping companies don't add any value to society either and are effectively just another type of nuisance; Round Hill looks to be a hedge fund manager's project to make money off others' labor without actually facilitating human creativity. Cue the infamous "I believe everyone involved in this story should die" Norm Macdonald line... (which is much more applicable here than the original transphobic "joke"!)

RF control drones are nowhere near dead. Even DJI Mavics are still used daily for recon missions, nothing beats their combination of price to video quality.

This is a love tap, fists will be thrown later. One thing can and should be done, we need to start adding aerosols into the atmosphere, the higher the better. Adding Na compounds to jet fuels would introduce just enough aerosols in order to start reflecting a tiny amount more of solar radiation than what makes it to the surface of the planet. 1-2% reflection is all we need to start reducing the temperatures. Of-course we will have to keep doing it until we figure out a more permanent solution.

This problem needs to be solved by references, ask AI, people, is this program safe before installing.

Google is now adding more rules to make sideloading more difficult while Apple never provided a way to sideload an app in the first place. People need to be able to build and load their own apps without permission from the OS manufacturer, a phone is a computer with specialized hardware, we do have ability to build and run apps on our own hardware.

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

Flock is not a single police officer standing on a street corner. Flock is a network of continuous data collection from every perspective on every road and intersection. Flock is not a camera, it is an AI system that follows you precisely everywhere, it is a data dump without a court order. There is expectation that a police officer will NOT follow you everywhere without a court order just because he is paid from taxes and has nothing better to do, this is stalking.

You should answer this question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Wrong, it's a slight of hand. This is not about individual cameras, this is about the network that uses all cameras together to follow you no matter what you do, no matter where you go, people shouldn't have a government that follows their every step by using AI and networked devices. If this was about individual cameras you would have a point, it is not, it is unreasonable to allow a government to exist that creates a panopticon of this scale, citizens shouldn't feel like they are inside a prison and the warden is watching.

Hi, I came across this thread and it's something which has raised a lot of concerns for me since Google's announcement. There's a discussion of how it hurts the open-source ecosystem at https://www.reddit.com/r/selfh... and Google's announcement is at https://android-developers.goo...

I like the idea of writing free, open source utilities for others to use. Users having to jump through even more hoops to sideload, or me having to pay money and reveal my identity to Google, get in the way of this --- especially if one of the things I've thought about is e.g. writing a tool to help LGBTQ+ people find locations where they can be reasonably safe in the current US geopolitical climate. That is exactly the sort of utility where the DoJ would make claims I'm some sort of subversive "antifa threat" and demand Google release my identity to them for harassment. Plus, the time where that utility would be most useful -- if someone suddenly has to go someplace unfamiliar on short notice (e.g. getting a call that a relative who lives a few hundred miles away in MAGA territory is getting emergency surgery), having to wait 24 hours to sideload the app if you don't have sideloading currently unlocked, just to find out which rest stops are safe to stop at or not on your drive, would be incredibly unfortunate!

I'm not saying improving app security is a bad thing, and at least Google didn't pull a "We Own Everything And There Is No Way Out Of Our Grip" like they could have, but the options they provide are not nearly good enough. It seems like they only thought about (1) average uninformed users who install things randomly, (2) big commercial developers [who still can get compromised and end up pushing malware, or might even include malware intentionally: just look at LG's McAfee situation, the infamous Sony BMG CD rootkits, etc etc], (3) independent developers who have identity documents Google is willing to recognize [what about the identity document fiascos going on right now with Ukrainian towns Russia is occupying? what about areas occupied in the Middle East by various regimes? what about the way cops confiscate homeless peoples' belongings including ID cards, but you need an ID card to get your belongings back?] plus extra cash [and $25 USD is a lot in some impoverished places, limiting the ability of people in such places to help themselves by becoming app developers], (4) students and hobbyists who only need to share their app with a small group of testers [limiting your ability to test scalability!], and (5) power users who are patient. If you don't fit into the scenarios they planned for, you might be out of luck. And I recognize that the vast majority of legitimate use cases do fall into those above categories, but there are legitimate use cases which don't. They could have at least had a series of open community fora to get feedback on other use cases and plan additional options, but they did not.

It's great that they thought about a few different use cases, at least. But that's not nearly enough!

Could I find an ally to register as the "developer" and publish such an app? Sure, but is that how it *should* be? I would now be dependent on someone else to manage the Play Store listing, which limits my ability to build. Could I spread the word to people who might need such an app that they should unlock sideloading indefinitely just in case? Sure, but maybe that creates new risks for them (and -- what if the option to unlock sideloading indefinitely gets taken away at some future point? Google gets to dictate all the changes here, and users have little recourse if they disagree with the specifics of the implementation)

I just want the guaranteed ability to say "hey, what about XYZ situation, which I or a friend have personal experience with? can you provide a way to handle that?" but I don't. There's no form to fill out to request some sort of special accommodation for an unusual situation, and there probably should be. When you have billions of users, planning for the needs of 99.99% of them still hangs hundreds of thousands of users out to dry. I know trying to accommodate more edge cases isn't as profitable, and having a large enough support team to hear people out when they have an unusual need requires a ton of extra staffing, but smartphone usage has become a critical utility rather than a luxury in much of the world. Google has an immense amount of power over numerous aspects of the lives of all sorts of different people, and if they want to continue to make money from that situation, they need to be prepared to deal with the complexities of it all.

in an unregulated market (what consumers need), new businesses are able to create new competition if there is money to be saved for consumers.

Yep. Open weights is closer to having precompiled binaries only (though you can do a little bit more with open weights). All training data with labeling, plus a detailed build log including any special fine-tuning logs, is needed, especially to help show how the final weights were arrived at (since there can be randomness involved). Unless someone else can both replicate your final output plus make their own changes to it, it's not fully open source.

We're entering the exciting age of AI-powered cybersecurity attacks. I imagine it won't be too long before something like a malware worm which polymorphs to evade detection and adapts itself as new CVEs get published, able to utilize tuned edge models, shows up. Wireless IoT could mean we end up with physical "e-quarantine" zones, wherein devices keep attacking anything in radio range...

in the free market businesses form and compete for consumer money with other businesses, it is the competition that is pro consumer. Unions, like any other political formation, exists to protect special interests, preventing businesses from competing to the best of their ability and pushing prices up - anti consumer.