All real men spring forth, fully formed, from Zeus’s brow.
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Joined 22 days ago
Cake day: September 6th, 2024
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5·10 days agoWouldn’t that make sense from an evolutionary perspective? Through human history and prehistory, think of all the common tasks people did on a day-to-day basis. I would say the vast majority of them would involve looking at things below eye level. With the exception of picking fruit from trees or hunting birds in flight, most of the tasks we evolved to do involved looking at things below eye level. Most work with crops involves looking at things below the height of your eyes. Tracking prey involves looking at things below the line of the horizon or tracks on the ground. Crafting objects involves working with your hands and looking down at your work. Raising children involves looking down at their shorter stature.
Why wouldn’t our back and neck structure be evolutionarily optimized to look at things a bit below eye level?
1·15 days agoSo…mostly 18-24 year olds?
As a matter of course, one should not even open a link that goes to OpenAI.
It’s best not to become dependent on these piracy engines. These models are hopelessly unprofitable, and they will not be cheap and accessible for very long. They take such colossal resources to train, billions upon billions of dollars. Currently OpenAI is trying to do the classic Silicon Valley bait and switch. They have a product that is more expensive and inefficient than the previous method. If they charge the real price for their product, they know no one will adopt it. So instead they offer their product at an artificially low price initially. They hope that everyone will become dependent, after which they can jack up their prices.
It’s the Uber model. Start by paying drivers more than they would make driving taxis, and by charging riders far less than they would pay for a taxi fare. This is possible through billions of angel investor subsidies. Then once everyone is dependent, slash driver pay and jack up ride prices. This is the only way for Uber to make back the billions they’ve squandered on market capture sub Silicon Valley execute bloat. If we had functioning anti-monopoly law enforcement, the executives of all these companies would be in jail. But for now they’re able to take advantage of practices that would have seen them in chains two generations ago.
Same with OpenAI. They want to get all the copy-editing companies dependent on their piracy engines. They want all the graphic design companies dependent on their image stealing tools. Then, once these companies fire their real human copy editors and graphic designers, OpenAI will start charging the real price for its services. And considering the literal hundreds of billions being poured into these hopelessly inefficient piracy engines, the rate they will have to charge will be enormous. Someone has to ultimately pay for those billions Sam Altman is sponging up. And even if they didn’t have billions of investor dollars to recoup, their ultimate goal is to gain a monopoly position in the copy editing and graphic design market. They will replace a million competing copy editors and graphing designers with a single provider - OpenAI. They’ll control the market. Once all the real human copy editors, graphic artists, and voice actors/readers have been driven from the industry and been forced to move on and take jobs elsewhere, they will be able to charge whatever they please.
Any executive that lets their company become dependent on this technology is a fool. They’re a sucker, falling for a classic bait-and-switch. Hopefully enough of them are smart enough not to be suckered in by the OpenAI con job, and OpenAI can hastily be driven into bankruptcy where it belongs.
I mean, I am literally working on a PhD in wood science.
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Little known fact; heavy timber buildings will often perform better in fire than steel buildings like this.
You can see them on the upper levels. On the bottom level, you can see the shear tabs, mounted on the girders that additional beams will frame into.
Specifically a girder is a beam that other beams frame into. Gravity load typically goes slab->beam->girder->columns->foundation. At least that’s what I teach in my steel design classes.
Partially correct. Those are beams, girders, and columns.
It really depends on how much they’ve invested in building AI chips.
I think they’re going to be bankrupt within 5 years. They have way too much invested in this bubble.
7·21 days agoI’ll be…out here…where there are witnesses!
I don’t buy that. I think it’s fraud. Yeah, the victims of the fraud are not nice people, but the law is supposed to protect all, not just the nice people. This isn’t “gaming the system,” it’s fraud. Uploading the AI-generated songs is fine. The problem was the fake listeners. That’s where the real fraud is.
My city has a modest bus service they contract out to a private company to operate. At the front of the buses, there are scanners that count the number of people that enter the bus. These passenger counts are then baked in to what the company is paid for their services to operate the city’s bus system.
In theory, the contractor company could park a bus somewhere, set up a conga line of people, and just have thousands of phantom passengers board a bus, and then try to bill the city based on these inflated statistics. If they did that, I would absolutely hope they would be charged with fraud.
The law isn’t stupid. There’s a reason laws are enforced by judges, not algorithms. What this person did was little different than hacking a bank account and just stealing money from it. Yes, you could say, “they didn’t do anything wrong, they’re just gaming the system!” You could just as well call guessing someone’s password and stealing their money “gaming the system.” After all, is there anything on the bank’s login page that explicitly tells you not to enter someone else’s account and transfer their money to yours? No judge in a million years would buy that.
This was effectively just a hack. This guy had to create thousands of phantom people to pretend to listen to songs. He was clearly not making any good-faith attempt at making music and was just trying to exploit a weakness in their system design to extract money from them that he didn’t earn. The law thankfully doesn’t work on a standard of “well, they never told me I couldn’t.” Cases like this take into consideration the totality of the circumstances and weigh whether it is fraud or not. And this? This wasn’t some clever technicality a legit artist used to boost their earnings. This was unambiguous fraud.
I really don’t see how this is any different from pretending to be someone else to access their bank info, conning someone out of money by pretending to be a person in need, deep-faking someone’s voice to get their relatives to send money to you, or a hundred other scams involving fake identities. Yes, the victim in this case is a villain themselves, but that doesn’t make it any less a crime.
Meanwhile in Alabama, things are so backwards there they haven’t even figured out shoes yet! It’s not like they prefer sandals or they’re too poor to afford shoes. They all go around barefoot, because the idea of shoes just has never occured to any of them. Most buildings instead have special brush ledges so you can scrape the dirt and blood off your feet before you walk in. Again, they’re just a hopelessly backwards people. So backwards, they haven’t even figured out shoes yet. Their cousins over in Mississippi are a bit further along. MSU currently has a study going where they’re experimenting with wrapping feet in ziplock bags, secured with rubber bands.