- empath75You can also make guesses from font/typeface kerning if it's not from a typewriter.
- The files of a high profile and long running investigation are going to be full of false leads, hoaxes and other bullshit. The reason they don’t just always release the files after closing cases is that there genuinely are going to he innocent people caught in the crossfire who have privacy rights.
This case is so important and such a clusterfuck that the files need to be opened anyway.
- Everyone who signed that letter was either a dupe or a fraud.
- People in the US now have to use VPN’s to get access to domestic news from a foreign country. I think it’s fair to say that the wheels have come off democracy and things are badly broken.
- They didn't.
They didn't like go out on Dec 21st, and look where the sun was and mark it. They didn't even have calendars like that. They watched the sun every day, and waited until it stopped being lower in the sky at it's highest point in the day (or whatever other sign of the solstice they wanted to use), and marked that angle and built whatever viewport they wanted (a door, tunnel, etc).
Then they could just go wherever they built the thing that pointed at that point in the sky, and go, oh, okay, the solstice is soon, or just happened, or whatever and plan accordingly.
It actually wasn't really accurate to the day, anyway. There are a few days on either side of the solstice where the effect is basically the same for the viewer.
Something to keep in mind is that this isn't only useful for determining the exact date of the winter solstice, which they may not have even cared that much about. You can see roughly where you are in the year on either side of the solstice by looking at how far out of alignment the sun is on a given day. So it could be useful throughout the fall and even well into the winter for gauging the passing of time. People didn't need to plan day by day or even week by week, but they did need to do things in roughly the right part of the year.
People act like this is some unexplainable advanced technology, and anybody can just do this with a stick and some rocks.
- I think the videos are done live, but she plans them out, she isn't just winging it.
- This is such conspiracy theory bullshit. The point was that China controlled an algorithm and platform that was capable of manipulating the views of millions of Americans on _any_ topic. Maybe some people cared about Israel especially, but that wasn't the overall reason for trying to get TikTok in the US out of Chinese control.
You can, of course, make the argument that Facebook, Twitter, etc are also similar threats to other countries and _that is why they aren't allowed in China_.
I agree that this resolution is a worst-case-scenario outcome, though.
- Well, part of an LLM's fine tuning is telling it what it is, and modern LLMs have enough learned concepts that it can produce a reasonably accurate description of what it is and how it works. Whether it knows or understands or whatever is sort of orthogonal to whether it can answer in a way consistent with it knowing or understanding what it is, and current models do that.
I suspect that absent a trained in fictional context in which to operate ("You are a helpful chatbot"), it would answer in a way consistent with what a random person in 1914 would say if you asked them what they are.
- He was focused on creating a very particular feeling of epiphany as an artistic statement, and I think he succeeded at that. Is the game not especially fun? Is it perhaps overlong? Probably? But I can think of very few, if any, games that provided the very particular feeling that The Witness provided in those moments that I felt it -- the feeling of the world opening up with new possibilities and interpretations.
- > How do you prevent introducing a bias that then becomes what we "know" about how statues were painted? By introducing modern aesthetic sensibilities and present them as plausible, we then reinforce that this is how statues were painted back then, and we don't know.
This is just an argument against doing reconstructions at all. Which I am also okay with. It's not a defense of the existing reconstructions because they have the same problem. You don't want to assume additional layers. The existing reconstructions are assuming there were no additional layers. Neither are valid assumptions, but they are both possible. So present multiple possible alternatives without stating that any of them are accurate reconstructions, only that they are constructions which are consistent with the available evidence.
Surely, if one wanted to produce a "reconstruction" of the Venus deMilo, it would have arms. Even if you don't know what the arms would have looked like. And that you would not reconstruct the arms as just straight lines projecting from the stump and would make some attempt to make them realistic and aesthetically pleasing, even if the end result almost certainly does not look much like what the original arms would have looked like, exactly, it would be more like it in spirit than either the statue with stumps or with some sort of vaguely armed shaped cylindrical attachments.
- > The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
You can be fairly sure that no reproduction would literally resemble the reality, _including the existing reconconstructions_, but you can certainly produce a range of possible reconstructions which would have produced the same evidentiary record, and which would be at least inspired by what we know about contemporary taste that we can derive from surviving paintings and the textual record.
- It's the same problem with trying to reconstruct dinosaurs, with probably the same solution in terms of public communication -- producing a _range_ of possible reconstructions based on the available evidence.
That said -- I think we actually do have more indirect evidence than what the reconstructions used -- in fact 3 separate lines of evidence A) paintings of statues B) contemporary descriptions of statues and C) contemporary paintings in general. All of which suggest that the coloring would have been more subtle and realistic.
I think if we had contemporary paintings of dinosaurs with feathers and contemporary accounts in writing that dinosaurs had feathers, but no feathers in the fossil record, you would still be fairly justified in saying that dinosaurs probably had feathers.
- Even a middling warhammer miniatures painter would have done a better job of painting these statues than the reconstructions.
- I couldn't get this to work with the default model because it's overloaded, but I tried flash-lite, which at least gave me a response, but it only presents an actual UI 1/3rd of the time that I tried the suggested questions in the demo, and otherwise it attempts to ask me a question which doesn't present a ui at all or even do anything in the app -- i had to look at the logs to see what it was trying to do.
- > OpenAI and ChatGPT have been pioneering but they're absolutely going to be commoditized.
I am not sure that it is very interesting that LLM apis are a commodity. It's not even a situation where it is _going_ to be a commodity, it already is. But so is compute and file storage, and AWS, Google and Microsoft etc have all built quite successful businesses on top of selling it at scale. I don't see why LLM api's won't be wildly profitable for the big providers for quite a long time, once the build out situation has stabilized. Especially since it is quite difficult for small companies to run their own LLMs without setting money on fire.
In any case, OpenAI is building products on top of those LLMs, and chatgpt is quite sticky because of your conversation history, etc.
- reposting what i said in the other thread:
> There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for. And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
- There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for.
And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
- > The author doesn't talk at all about the hardware aspect of this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace.
I am not sure why that is interesting. Nobody thinks of these chips as long term assets that they are investing in. Cloud providers have always amortized their computers over ~5 years. It would be very surprising if AI companies were doing much different -- maybe even a shorter time line.
- Because wind, solar and battery tech have given us most of the benefits of fusion power and it actually works today.
- I also think the collapse of the byzantine empire and the rise of the mongols would have lead to direct trade between the mongols and italians anyway.