I haven't really kept up with what Midjourney has been doing the past year or two. While I liked the stylistic aspects of Midjourney, being able to use image examples to maintain stylistic consistency and character consistency is SO useful for creating any meaningful output. Have they done anything in that respect?
That is, it's nice to make a pretty stand-alone image, but without tools to maintain consistency and place them in context you can't make a project that is more than just one image, or one video, or a scattered and disconnected sequence of pieces.
This is a cultural flaw that predates image generation. Even PG has made statements on HN in the past equating “rendering skill” with the quality of art works. It’s a stand-in for the much more difficult task of understanding the work and value of culture making within the context of the society producing it.
Suppose the deck for Midjourney hit Paul Graham's desk, and the CEO was just an average Y Combinator CEO - so no previous success story. He would have never invested in Midjourney at seed stage (meaning before launch / before there were users) even if he were given the opportunity.
Better to read that particular story in the context of, "It would be very difficult to make a seed fund that is an index of all avant garde culture making because [whatever]."
That's because it's a two-way street, a multi-modal model that is highly proficient at real-life image generation is also highly proficient at interpreting real-life image input, which is something sorely needed for robotics.
Our LCD TV is almost 2 decades old. If we upgrade, I can guarantee we won't be connecting it to the Internet. Also none of our smart appliances are connected to the Internet.
You won’t get a choice; they will come with a 5G connection that doesn’t ask you, doesn’t notify you, doesn’t cost you, and has no user-visible toggle. Like cars do these days. And a mesh-networking fallback so if you’re in a city and your neighbour also has one of the similar brand it will connect through their internet instead.
I am actually surprised at how well our second TV (Samsung) still looks [0] after 17 years. We inherited from my sister who bought it for some ridiculous amount of cash for the time. It’s heavy and runs hot, but doesn’t look any worse than cheap TVs of the same size today.
It very likely depends on what you are playing on it and what size it is.
Even most cheap TVs now a days are 4k even if the panel is low end.
There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k which is usually quite noticeable if the TV is large but if it is a smaller size I can see how it would be less obvious.
> There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k
I cannot tell the difference at normal viewing distances. Up close, sure.
This is how they get you to buy the 4K version, in the store you are standing 2 feet from the screen and you can see the pixels at 1080. Sitting at a normal viewing distance and 1080 looks great.
Actually large LCDs (>65") were pretty uncommon in 2010 but if you ever watched a 1080p DLP television I would be surprised if you didn't notice when looking at them side by side.
There is also of course the issue where people have bad internet (so netflix or whatever destroys the bit-rate, or they have the cheaper 1080p only plan... is that still a thing?) or old cable boxes plugged into 4k televisions.
There is a lot that people can do to inadvertently destroy their image quality without knowing which is not great.
Problem is I am not looking at TVs side by side. I'm watching a movie or a show, and the enjoyment I get at the correct viewing distance is unlikely to be significantly more on a 50" or smaller TV.
I bought the top of the line TV from Samsung in 2011. The 'smart' functionality services went offline after a year or two, which means all 'smart' functions no longer work and I am now happily using it as a dumb TV.
Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
> Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
Except that on newer tvs all the nagging will still be there, all the ads will be "frozen" in time (mine has ads for stuff from 2023, the last time I connected it for some firmware update that _GASPS_ actually fixed some things) and some features may depend on internet connectivity. The manufacturer may care to release a final update and solve these issues, but you know they are much more likely to fraudulently just disable features that worked offline as a last middle finger.
Repeat with me, SaaS is fraud. Proprietary digital platforms are fraud.
I think you underestimate how shameless the vendors can be. I imagine in a couple of years the TVs will refuse to function unless periodically connected to the Internet to get updated ads and an updated firmware so that you can't jailbreak them...
I'd like to hear more how that could work. If I get a new TV and never configure it for access from Day 1, how would it connect to the Internet or some unknown service with I guess Internet access as a proxy? On its own?
I don't think we are at that level yet. A car is a minimum 20k$ object and a SIM card is a fraction of that cost, and car vendors try to sell premium functions with subscriptions. But for a 300$ TV, is a SIM with a data plan still a good investment?
They maybe have an rhlf phase, but I mean there is also just the shape of the distribution of images on the internet and, since this is from alibaba, their part of the internet/social media (Weibo) to consider
With today's remote social validation for women and all time low value of men due to lower death rates and the disconnect from where food and shelter come from, lonely men make up a huge portion of the population.
I'm still not following. Ads for a pickup truck are probably more likely to feature towing a boat than ads for a hatchback even if they're both capable of towing boats. Because buyers of the former are more likely to use the vehicle for that purpose.
If a disproportionate share of users are using image generation for generating attractive women, why is it out of place to put commensurate focus on that use case in demos and other promotional material?
I mean things that take hard physical labor are typically self limiting...
I do nerdy computer things and I actually build things too, for example I busted up the limestone in my backyard in put in a patio and raised garden. Working 16 hours a day coding/or otherwise computering isn't that hard even if your brain is melted at the end of the day. 8 - 10 of physically hard labor and your body starts taking damage if you keep it up too long.
And really building houses is a terrible example! In the US we've been chronically behind on building millions of units of houses. People complain the processes are terribly slow and there is tons of downtime.
We've yet to establish such a system, so I'm not holding out much hope (and anyone who has been through a handful of tech interview loops ought to realise this)
We can?
I'm pretty sure companies have spent billions trying to achieve this and failed. The best they can do is maybe sort of sometime hire people that are good enough
This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve?
A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.
