AI is deeply unpopular with a large and very vocal fraction of the population. It's reflexively just "slop" to them. (And, on Twitter, I keep seeing people praise content, learn it was AI-generated, and immediately pivot to outrage.) As such, it's reputationally risky for brands to use AI-generated resources in any public-facing project, and this situation is unlikely to change any time soon. Marketing managers need to realize this.
It’s easy to be against it now because so much content that people recognise as AI is also just bad. If professionals can start to use it to produce content that is actually good, I think opinions will shift.
There are a lot of AI videos that you can very easily tell are AI, even if they are done well. For example, I just saw a Higgsfield video of a kangaroo fighting in the UFC. You can tell it is AI, mainly because it would be an insane amount of work to create any other way. But I think it is getting close to good enough that a lot of people, even knowing it is AI, wouldn't care. Everyone other than the most ardent anti-AI people are going to be fine with this when we have people creating interesting and engaging media with AI.
I think we will look back at AI "slop" as a temporary point in time where people were creating bad content, and people were defending it as good even when it was not. Instead, as you say, AI video will fall into the background as a tool creators use, just like cameras or CGI. But in my opinion it won't be that people can't tell that AI was used at all. Rather, it will be that they won't care if there is still a creative vision behind it.
At least, that is what I hope compared to the outcome where there are no creators and people just watch Sora videos tailored to them all day.
Okay, you guys are funny, because "it's not x, it's y" (or "it's not just x, it's also y) is probably the most characteristic post-2023 LLM writing quirk.
These days, though, it's not as common as it used to be. Kimi K2, in particular, is a weirdly good and stylistically flexible writer.
Yup. I'm not sure if the person I replied to was going for that, but as soon as I see anything like it I hate to say my mind instantly jumps to AI, along with its grandiosity. I guess it might already be able to write like a normal person by default and I haven't noticed. Haven't heard of Kimi K2
Every major country's demographics are shaky. Japan and S.Korea are already shrinking. The US is propped up by, uh, low-quality immigration, and fertility has nevertheless dropped to record lows. The large countries of Europe are either basket-cases, tinderboxes, or both. Germany and Italy haven't had above-replacement TFR since 1970!
China's not doing great, but having a population reservoir of 1.4B can make up for a lot of deficiencies. If everybody shrinks or becomes utterly dysfunctional, I'd bet that a vast, productive, essentially monoethnic nation weathers the storm better than the rest.
Three or four generations of Kindle Scribes since 2022. Still no new Kindle Oasis. At this rate I think my Oasis is going to be a family heirloom passed down the generations, as Amazon steadfastly refuses to release an ergonomic e-reader with buttons.
Was in the same situation last year and gave up waiting for a new Oasis or Voyage. Bought an Android Reader (Boox Go Color 7) with Buttons. Battery life is comparable to the Oasis, Buttons are OK. The Oasis is much better made. I really enjoy the App Koreader and the support for Bluetooth Remotes. I transfer my Epubs remote via Calibre.
I replaced my Kindle (2nd gen, 2009 vintage) with a Boox Go 7 (non color), can flip pages with the two side buttons, it’s very nice hardware and the software doesn’t get in the way.
Amazon doesn’t care about my super old kindle so I decided to also not care and just moved my collection of purchased books over to the Boox (using Calibre).
I have a(n admittedly fairly old) Boox and I like it in concept, it's great that I can install multiple e-reader apps and read a book in any format with any DRM, but the battery life and performance seem a lot weaker than the early-generation do-one-thing Kindles.
Which sucks, because the battery life and performance were the huge selling point for e-readers not just being shitty tablets.
Mine is not comparable with the Early Kindles but it comes close to the Oasis with the tiny Battery. I have to charge it every 1 - 2 Weeks. Wifi is disabled, Bluetooth turned on. I only use the Koreader App, sometimes Wikipedia.
Powersafe triggers after 24h of inactivity what really rarely happens because I read every evening.
Mine lasts for weeks! I disabled wifi (only on when I need to transfer some books and keep the backlight at a not super high level but am not otherwise careful in how I use the thing or try to preserve battery.
I'm afraid to replace the battery in mine, since it's glued together. It's only a matter of time before it's unusable. The latest Kindle software is already glacially slow on it (waiting multiple seconds for taps to register).
I'd take the exact same form factor and screen but with the latest CPU and a new battery, even if it cost $300.
I appreciate the tip, but I'm afraid my situation is more dire than I had let on.
First, I'm already completely locked-in to the Amazon Kindle ecosystem. (Kindle jail.) I've literally purchased >1200 books via Amazon, and it would be serious labor (the work of months) to get them off the platform or, where possible, to download pirate copies. Amazon makes it extremely difficult.
Second, books tend to be generally more expensive on Kobo/Rakuten. A few bucks here, a few bucks there... Over those ~1200 books, even if the average price difference was $3 (and I think that it was historically larger than that,) I'm down $3600. This is what made it hard to make the switch earlier.
Lastly, there are quite a lot of books that are only available on Amazon. A lot of good old-time science fiction writers are now self-publishers. David Gerrold, for instance:
These books are available on Amazon, but not on Kobo/Rakuten's platform.
So I'm pretty much stuck. I'd be happy to give Amazon more money if they made a reader similar to the 2019 Oasis. As things stand, I regret not pirating from day one.
The examples at the link are mostly from around midcentury. I'm familiar with a more recent example: In 2006-2009, there was one of those on St. Mark's Place -- 8th street between 2nd and 3rd. It was called "Bamn!" and IIRC was open 24/7, so it mostly catered to late-night drinkers and partiers. (It happened to be on one of NYC's few streets that always had lively nightlife, even during the week.) It was cheap, at something like $1 or $2 for a burger, and it was reasonably good.
I've used a bunch, but Namecheap is the easy go-to for me today. Their support is extremely good. In over ten years, we've never had an issue that we couldn't solve over chat in 15 minutes.
WHOIS privacy is actually mandatory and has been for years, it should be free on any registrar, otherwise you’re being scammed.
You have to provide real data when registering your domain name for KYC purposes (if you lie your domain could get suspended) but it won’t be exposed anywhere anymore unless you opt in to make it public.
Almost every European-descended person has ancestry from Kings and peasants alike. Even the very recent Oliver Cromwell has way more than 20k living descendants in the UK. If you have any substantial English ancestry, there is a Plantagenet somewhere in your family tree to a mathematical certainty.
On the continent, and in other aristocratic societies like Dynastic-era China, things are much the same. If Qin Shihuang's progeny weren't all put to the sword, just about every Han Chinese person is descended from Qin Shihuang.
Read about the "identical ancestors point". Past that point, every individual alive is either: (1) ancestor of everyone alive today, or (2) ancestor of no one alive today.
This is a very very far stretch from saying your family was royalty. Though i do guess you are technically correct. Forgive me, your highness. lol
Let me add that you've delineated a technicality with no real consequence to my argument. If anything supporting my argument by suggesting that makes anyone proper royalty.
> If anything supporting my argument by suggesting that makes anyone proper royalty.
This could potentially be a good argument for more democratic systems.
My grandmother was very proud of the fact that we were descendants of King James (one of them, I couldn't tell you which one, probably the one that abdicated!)
What she didn't understand is that something similar was true of almost everyone she knew.
This is true. When you look at actually free markets -- like the gray markets in bodybuilding drugs, "nootropics," peptides, etc. -- you'll find that there's usually a race to the bottom on price, and that everything is easily affordable out of pocket. Quality also tends to be okay, as lab reports are one of the primary ways that customers rank and differentiate between brands.
And these aren't necessarily old pharma hand-me-downs. There are lots of novel and strange drugs (9-MBC, lol) that you can buy for next to nothing.
> There are lots of novel and strange drugs (9-MBC, lol) that you can buy for next to nothing
Indeed, plenty of peptides that aren't really well tested in humans (in some cases, like at all). And some that have tests in foreign countries but are not recognized by the FDA (like Selank and Semax, which are nootropics). And if you want to get ahead of the curve, you can buy things like retatrutide already even though it hasn't quite completed Phase III tests yet so Lilly isn't able to sell it to you. If you hunt a little, you can even buy orforglipron now.
It is quite fascinating to watch. A lot of people are very willing to experiment on themselves. And it seems like GLP1s end up being a gateway drug -- people go to the gray market to get it cheap, and then they cave to temptation and try some of the other stuff they can get the same way.
That's not true, most of the gray markets you have to be careful with the quality of the product. Also, there are regulations on Europe, like with insulin but in USA is much more expensive than in Europe.
An easy, somewhat expensive (if you do not know the trick) entry point that is easily accessible to anyone is nexaph.com. You can pay full retail (quite expensive) or go to their Telegram (listed at the bottom of their page) and wait for a pre-sale, where it'll be a little above half the price on the web page.
Still more expensive than the rest of the random Chinese vendors, but the upshot is that participation rates are very good for Nexaph and so there's a lot of testing done -- especially for GLP1s. For example, the current batch of Tirzepatide 60mg will have a 3- or 4-vial COA done by Nexaph themselves, another 3-vial random sample tested by customers (but then compensated by Nexaph), and at least one and maybe two big group tests with 7+ vials doing a full range of mass/purity/endo/sterility testing.
I've not seen too many other vendors that get such a high participation rate. And even for this company, for non-GLP1 peptides it's still tested pretty well but not to the same extent.
Even at their expensive price point, you could buy a few kits (10 vials ea) and pay $1000 for a full suite of tests and still be into it about $80/vial total, where a vial is ~65mg and lasts most people at least a month. Do the math on that -- compared even to cheap compounded tirz it is a fraction of the cost. There is good reason why a lot of people are taking that route now.
And back to your original question - once you are on the Telegram group, ask around and people will invite you to other Telegram and Discord groups for various vendors.
Or go to glp1forum.com and a lot of the same vendors will have posts there with information on contacting them.
If Crunchyroll is down for 30 minutes it's nbd, because you know they'll be back. If the pirate sites are down for any duration, it can be very stressful, because they can be gone for good.
> The main factor behind this shift appears to be the acquisition of Fontworks by the US-based Monotype in 2023.
When I read the headline, my bet was that the culprit would be US Private Equity, and that there's no way a Japanese or Chinese company would pull such a move. That kind of destructive rent extraction is just not in their normal playbooks.
Yeah, I wasn't entirely correct, but pretty damn close.
Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality.
I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of this statement, look around you.
Too harsh on democracy, literally everything else is much worse. Attested by enormous suffering of tens of billions humans before or now who could only dream of freedoms like you have here, criticizing it openly without mortal fear of repressions on you and your loved ones.
The worst thing out there are those arrogant folks who think they know better than everybody else and go and try to create some sort of (self-centered) utopia, based on flawed expectations who we humans are, ignoring basic human traits we all share like selfishness. The more anybody tries to stick out of grand design and forge their own way (or even god forbid criticize), the harsher they are put down to not spoil the paradise.
I'd take democracy and freedom with corresponding risks and rewards any day over that.
Peak Whig History. You may want to consider whether you're mistaking temporary anomalies for permanent truths. A review of history illustrates that democracy is simply the mechanism by which the merchant class destroys the traditional aristocracy. It is a transitionary phase, not a permanent state. It will inevitably transition to mob rule or oligarchy -- and you can see this all around you! Answer me this: If "democracy" is so great, why is it that every Western political establishment is terrified of direct democracy and plebiscites?
Ancient Greek-style democracy -- where every citizen votes on every important issue -- can now be implemented in the US and any European country, with ease. It's not like we don't have the technology. Why do we need corrupt intermediaries? To simplify things a bit, it is because we're going to get oligarchy or ochlocracy, and the oligarchs want to make sure they're on the winning team, whereas direct democracy is a path to ochlocracy within a mere handful of years.
The Ancients knew all of this, of course.
All that said, a state's form of government has very little (in some cases nothing) to do with that state's ability to benefit from material progress.
It's a real laugh to suggest that our ancestors were "suffering enormously" on account of the fact that they were ruled by a feudal lord who descended from his mountain fortress once a year to collect taxes in the form of a handful or two of grain. Our ancestors had a place, a duty, a strong faith, and a connection to their superiors and inferiors. Large families, festivals and feast days, homes full of music. On balance, they were probably happier than modern man.
Your whole post is literally false with single word - Switzerland.
As for the suffering - I grew up in communism, or socialism, or whatever you want to label it, behind iron curtain. There was some child-like naivety in population, you can personally call it something positive but I do not. The rest - oppression from all angles, erasure of individualism, sometimes outright murder by system. This is reality of alternatives I talk about.
The medieval fairy tale you are getting from maybe some children's book wasn't true anywhere in Europe, that's pretty much guaranteed. Half of kids died before reaching 5, child births were often fatal for mothers so men had often multiple wives out of practicality. Tooth infections, appendix or flu were killing those older left and right, everybody smelled horribly due to simply not washing at all, had fleas and other parasites and infections. Those folks suffered in ways we can't even imagine, lived short lives full of hard work and often died of causes we simply don't experience anymore. Marriage around 14-15 with first child on the way right after was the norm.
> On balance, they were probably happier than modern man.
You don't know that, nobody knows and its not even comparable. Its true that if you are semi-constantly in survival situations and one bad crop will kill everybody you don't have energy to ponder on larger topics. You can easily create it on your own today if you want, nobody is stopping you.
As a lifelong Swiss, I also wanted to post that :)
Direct democracy has been working out pretty darn well for us, for a pretty long time now. The system may seem slow and tedious sometimes, but it's probably mainly responsible for why it seems much less susceptible to the polarisation, demagoguery and authoritarianism we see rising all around us. It's not perfect and a constant work in progress, but I don't know of any other system that has a better track record of ensuring long-term social cohesion and stability.
As for medieval life, I keep remembering an interview with a medical historian. They said that you could imagine it a bit as the reverse of today's mode where most people are usually fine, but occasionally get sick. Back in those days, having some sort of ailment was pretty much the default, and people felt exceedingly lucky to be genuinely healthy for a few weeks.
> Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world.
I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are expected to be less fit on average because -things can go wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a counterweight to this.
Seemed to me that the author was referring to regression to the mean, as another commenter noted.
De novo mutations have a negative effect, to be sure, but it is extremely weak on an individual level. In parents who are extraordinary, the effect of regression to the mean is going to be 20x to 40x stronger than the effect of de novo mutations. For instance, if you have two parents who are both 195cm tall, the regression penalty might be 4cm, whereas the mutation penalty would be somewhere in the millimeters, so a statistically average child would be ~190.9cm. If both parents are statistically average, there'd be no regression penalty and only a vanishingly small mutation penalty.
> That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit ...
You're right that it's a relatively weak effect-- which is a good part of why the effects of variance and selection (incl sexual selection) win out and fitness doesn't decline with each generation.
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