jkf
8hr ago
Hollywood didn't invent changing stories.
Surely not -- but at some point it feels like they started doing it themselves -- "The Maltese Falcon" is pretty interchangeable with the book; Cecil B. Demille mostly played it straight in his Biblical epics.
Not sure when this changed -- various mass-market James Clavell/Tom Clancy adaptations into the 90s seemed pretty true to the books, although I'm sure there are counter-examples from this period?
jkf
9hr ago
Furthermore I'm pretty sure it wasn't legal to rape other people's slaves at any point -- I don't think it was that common actually for slaves not to be considered "people"; the sticking point was that they were people who you owned. And what's the point of owning someone if you can't have sex with them?
jkf
9hr ago
I guess some of the problem is, has the Odyssey actually ever been faithfully adapted?
ISTR seeing a TV miniseries version in the 90s that was a pretty direct port -- it's not like the story is super-complex really?
I think the problem is that Hollywood thinks that everything needs to be "improved" -- not sure when this happened, but I think (for instance) the Biblical epics of the 50s/60s didn't do this?
jkf
22hr ago
The doctor will probably give you some antidepressants while you're there getting your speed prescription if you ask him with the right magic words?
jkf
1d ago
Canada essentially did this by mistake with their licensing/registration scheme -- online private sales exploded, because you suddenly had a fairly transparent way of checking that somebody in (say) Newfoundland was who he said he was -- and some sort of recourse if he failed to ship your gun to the Yukon or whatever.
To this day this is an area in which Canada is a lot freer than the US for gun-buyers -- the lack of the whole FFL/interstate commerce thing helps of course, but even if that were repealed I'd think that Americans would find transacting with BamaBoy666 on reddit a bit fraught...
jkf
3d ago
Fast food is really fast. Burgers with avocado and fresh-grilled Hatch chile slices are not something we're going to make every day, or every week, at home, but if I want something 40% as good I could have it any time by swinging by one of many convenient drive-thru lanes. Making it so easy to indulge makes it too easy to over-indulge.
It's a good point but burgers are not the best example -- my burger-making strategy these days is:
- heat pan
- scoop 1/3 lb beef with measuring cup
- slap in pan
- squish with flipper
- flip after 2-3 minutes
- wait a couple more minutes then add cheese
- put on bun with mustard, butter and whatever veggies
If I'm at home it's pretty much the fastest easiest thing I can make, and probably at least half-way between your avocado burger and the fast food one; if I'm not at home obviously stopping at a restaurant is faster, but a burger is probably the easiest, fastest fast food to make for yourself in the universe.
jkf
3d ago
I don't know that AlexNet et al were truly breakthroughs in and of themselves so much as a logical extension of existing NN stuff enabled by the step-change in GPU hardware -- as I recall LeCun was doing similar work in the 1980s, and I myself did a project with a simple one-layer LSTM network in the late 90s in which I had to work at night because the server load involved was bringing down other (so-called) "important workloads" at my department (at a major university) during the day.
None of this was really feasible, even as research, until pretty near 2010 -- the hardware just wasn't there yet.
jkf
5d ago
I think it would be more accurate to say the business entity owns the output.
Well that is what I said -- but to your point, if the person asking you to produce the work is your manager, from a business perspective he does indeed in some way "own" your work. (also owning the consequences if it's bad work, which seems relevant to AI generated text)
jkf
5d ago
What I meant was a normal contractor contract -- and non-famous freelance writers absolutely do sign over copyright to their counterparty.
jkf
5d ago
Ya it was a fun dig -- I love that the Florida hotel scene was arguably developed by a single dude because his wife liked it there!
I already kind of new that trains were great, and I do like riding on them myself -- but it's kind of amazing how great they really were at the time. We've maybe halved the ground-travel time to Florida from New York in the last 100 years -- a hundred years before that it would have been a dangerous journey taking... months, I'm guessing?
jkf
6d ago
Well, it doesn't, anymore than if you asked a work colleague to write that report for you.
If you are a business owner, you unquestionably acquire copyright/ownership of anything written by people in your employ; contractors too under most normal employment contracts.
jkf
7d ago
Seems like one guy (who became filthy rich by involvement with Standard Oil, and who's wife liked the climate in Florida) basically built/acquired/standardized railroads and put up hotels all over the place:
https://flaglermuseum.org/history/florida-east-coast-railway
This all happened right around the turn of the century though -- by the '10s and '20s I'd think you could pretty easily interconnect up the Eastern Seaboard via Jacksonville -- apparently there was freight service to Cuba (!) even, accomplished by loading cars onto a ferry.
By the mid-20s it looks like you could do NY-Miami in about a day and a half:
https://streamlinermemories.info/FL/SAL26OrangeBlossomSpecial.pdf
https://streamlinermemories.info/FL/SAL27OrangeBlossomSpecial.pdf
Which I guess is a bit longer than driving down there now (Google says 19 hours), but considering that you could eat/drink/sleep/get a haircut on the way, not really that bad! (Certainly nicer than being herded around JFK and getting searched/felt up by the help along the way -- after all one is on vacation; what's the hurry?)
jkf
10d ago
OK, but why -- Google is pretty good at marketing and should know better; why are they doing this?
jkf
11d ago
gives me a strange worlds-collide sort of feeling.
Kind of like they could never tear you apart?
jkf
11d ago
The companies are using the free samples as a sales come-on though -- like if the smashburger place were giving out shitty frozen burgers on the street as an ad campaign to get people to come pay for their good burgers, it would be weird, right?
Most normies are experiencing AI through the lens of Google's shitty free one -- which seems particularly shitty if you ask it about normie things. It seems like this should be anti-convincing in terms of driving adoption of the paid product.
jkf
14d ago
Nybbler is correct in this; I was there also -- it was a good job, but kind of how being an accountant is a good job. You had to like it; people weren't really getting into it for the money until the mid-to-late 90s.
jkf
14d ago
That is certainly not the experience of most people 30+ years ago.
I think either the '+' is doing more work than it should there, or you mean something more like 50+ years -- I grew up in the 80s in very-small-town Canada, and frozen burritos were literally available at the corner store. They were terrible ofc, to the extent that a strong case could be made against them even belonging in the category -- but people certainly knew what burritos were.
I can't imagine the Midwest being so very different as not to have its own terrible burrito factory at the time?
I can't swear that the first time I saw soft tacos in the grocery store was before 1990, but I'm pretty sure they were a thing -- maybe they'd be called "wraps" in the 80s, but it was hardly an exotic concept.
jkf
16d ago
Or if @cjet79 wants to compare apples to apples, "throw a steak on the grill, baked potato in the miker -- add some sort of bagged salad since you are super-lazy" is about as easy as it gets and is probably better than the fancy steakhouse -- cost-wise I'm gonna say twenty bucks instead of 50+? Throw in a bottle of wine since we are being fancy and it's $30-35 vs $100+
I think this cost model probably works all the way down the chain -- ground beef at... about a dollar for a quarter pound plus one bun and a piece of cheese is a much better burger than McDonalds peddles for five bucks or so?
She asks an important question: why precisely do people hate data centers so much?
The article seems to be either eliding something important, or treating small-town-folk as serious rubes -- while I'll grant that normies are not likely to be as familiar with the details of AI-doom discourse as the average Mottizen, surely it trickles into their consciousness at least a little bit?
Which is particularly relevant because it's being promulgated by the same people trying to build the data centres -- it's similar to the dust-up with fedgov on "AI safety".
Only instead of:
"Hey we are building this technology that can hack everything and take over the world, you should give us money -- but we need you to leave us in complete control and not regulate us in any way"
it's
"Hey, we are building this technology that will take over not only your job, but the entire world -- also there's a strong chance that it will lead to the extinction of humanity. If you help us out on this, we will happily... pay municipal taxes at a somewhat reduced rate(!?) as negotiated by our slimy lawyers"
Does this seem like a good deal to you?
Speaking out of both sides of one's mouth and then being shocked (shocked I say!) when people catch wind of what you are saying to others and become uncooperative is a strong sign that one is not as smart as one thinks one is -- probably a pretty big bear signal for these companies if you ask me. (doesn't help that both sides of the mouth sound suspiciously like an evil robot)
Small-town bumpkin real-estate developers have been able to mint money by working municipal politicians into approving terrible deals (in terms of, say, servicing costs for new subdivisions) for many years -- you do it with some combination of bribery and 1-1 marketing; not sure which of these Sam et al are failing at, but if they can't figure it out they definitely deserve to lose.
jkf
16d ago
Now I'm curious -- how did you, um -- identify this breakfast bandit? Like a smelly hobo was in front of you loading his bindle full of scrambled eggs? Dominating the toaster while swilling cheap wine?
Enquiring minds want to know!
jkf
21d ago
I am very much not a gun nut, but I would rather have a 5.56mm NATO go through my arm than a musket ball... but I imagine getting hit by one was gruesome.
That's actually one of the matters of dispute. An actual musket would have had similar kinetic energy and carved a much wider wound channel as the 5.56 NATO, which is definitely gruesome, and there's very few human organs that like having a three-quarter-inch (or inch: soft lead deforms) hole drilled through them. Even a lower-round, 'small' flintlock rifle reproduction from that era can be pretty unpleasant to see on a clean hit. But the cavitation effects are much lower and more evenly distributed on an imperfect shot. The 5.56 carves a smaller wound channel (even if it tumbles!), but in ballistic gel you get these massive and really traumatic-looking temporary distortions, caused by the rate of energy release.
Sounds like somebody needs to shoot Grosskreutz's other arm with a musket! (ah... for science, in minecraft -- don't actually shoot this guy again please!)
The Kenosha incident did convince me that close-range 223 makes very nasty wounds though -- there is a significant muzzleloader hunting community one could draw from here -- unfortunately that's not one of my personal hobbies so IDK, but I'd be kind of surprised if a .75 ball didn't mostly just pencil even at close range? (a really big pencil mind you; an inch sounds about right)
jkf
23d ago
I mentioned this in another comment to gattsuru, but here's some light reading for you:
https://rokslide.com/forums/threads/223-for-bear-mountain-goat-deer-elk-and-moose.130488/
Up to almost 700 pages, lots of pictures -- and not limited to the titular species either; some guys are a bit overboard and going after grizzlies and African game too, as I recall.
It's not something I'm planning on doing myself anytime soon, but they do make a compelling case that with heavy-for-calibre bullets the 223 kills pretty much anything pretty damn well!
But who's planting those arguments in their heads?
Datacentres have existed for an awfully long time without anyone caring, now even obscure fora have posters showing up and raising the issue.
I'm not sold, but it kind of makes one think -- I'm increasingly close to being sold on covert China media ops driving the entire political conversation here in Canada, so it's not a crazy idea.
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