odd_primes
10mo ago
I mean it's definitely not high art, but it's pretty cool that a single amateur animator can crank out five minutes of animated content about a niche internet microcelebrity in a couple days. For comparison South Park apparently costs something like $500k per episode, and The Simpsons is in the millions.
As someone stuck in-office generally 4+ days per week due to operational requirements, I generally try to have a lower intensity "fun" project to work on during slower periods. The "useful" project gets prioritized of course, but I find there's generally something in our queue of work to do that I can use as an excuse to experiment with tech that I'm interested in learning more about. This might be somewhat specific to software engineering though.
It's pretty normal in this field not to do 8+ hours per day of nose to the grindstone coding though, realistically it's tough to have more than 4-6 hours of high-quality focused attention. Especially with the constant distractions of Slack, email, etc.
odd_primes
10mo ago
Having helped coordinate events in the past, the magic words are typically "attending a conference" and reminding people to never mention the word "work". It's a bit of an odd situation though since from the description, it sounds like attendees technically are producing some sort of work product that they may be getting compensated for (eg. If they are posting the blog posts to Substack) and yet it isn't an accredited writing class that would qualify for a J1. It's in a bit of a gray area where you'd probably be fine as long as you framed it properly, but I could easily see the visa officer getting confused since it doesn't fit nicely into one of the usual boxes.
odd_primes
10mo ago
The Will Stancil Show animated partly using Sora is a pretty neat use of AI video that goes above and beyond the standard Instagram slop. What other transformative uses of this technology are you guys seeing? It's a bit disappointing that so far AI video seems to be mostly used for short form video clickbait. Maybe more open weight models will help over time, the high-end offerings right now have a high price tag, lots of content filters, and onerous ToS.
The DA's office still has to review cases and figure out which ones are worth charging, go through the evidence for potentially exclupatory evidence that they are required to disclose, coordinate with law enforcement on building the case in a legally compliant way, etc. They can start putting in hours on a case long before the defense attorney even gets retained.
The plea bargain issue goes both ways I think. If a public defender has a case that they know is a lost cause, they will do their best to convince their client that taking a plea is in their best interest. Every case that the prosecution closes with a plea is also a case that the PD doesn't have to take to trial.
Experts are a fair point though, if that's coming out of the PD budget that is a bit unfair.
odd_primes
10mo ago
They point out that their budget is 60% of that of the District Attorney's Office, which to me signals their complaint is likely justified.
This doesn't necessarily seem like a huge red flag depending on what percentage of defendants retain private counsel, and the inherently asymmetric system where the prosecution bears the burden of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt. It makes sense that it costs more in terms of man-hours to build cases than to poke holes in them.
odd_primes
11mo ago
Yeah LLMs are notoriously weak at anagrams due to how tokenizing works. Here's a fun little demo of how LLAMA's tokenizer breaks up an input sequence: https://belladoreai.github.io/llama-tokenizer-js/example-demo/build/
Hence the famous example of LLMs failing at "how many times does the letter R appear in the word strawberry" until the training data for newer models was contaminated with the answer.
odd_primes
11mo ago
$100k per person per year is totally reasonable. It wipes out the body shop business model, but a highly talented software engineer making $500k in TC at a FAANG will be just fine. This raises the bar for H1-B to the point where it will be used for what it was actually intended for, filling short-term gaps in highly specialized fields where demand vastly exceeds supply.
Historically the good cop, bad cop approach seems to have had success in some contexts. South Africa had Nelson Mandela preaching peace and tolerance, while his wife cheered on the practice of necklacing alleged informants, and her security detail carried out kidnappings, torture, and murders. There was a less extreme dynamic in the civil rights movement, with MLK positioning himself as the reasonable alternative to violent radicals like the Black Panthers. People mostly want peace and stability, so the idea of compromising with moderates can be appealing given the alternative. Of course that depends on the moderates having a palatable message, and support from elites and the media.
Of course this doesn't always work out and sometimes results in violent suppression of the entire movement, including both the moderate and radical elements. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka are likely a good example, with the situation evolving from a political campaign, into an insurgency, and finally a full-blown civil war.
odd_primes
11mo ago
They also applied their style guide to a quote, which seems completely inappropriate. Dinesh D'Souza did not capitalize either word. NYT version:
“The reason for the media silence is racial,” Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing commentator, wrote in an online post on Sunday. “If the killer were white, this would get coverage. Of course if it were a white assailant murdering a Black victim, then it would be front-page headlines everywhere.”
odd_primes
11mo ago
I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all
The assailant is on tape saying "I got that white girl, I got that white girl" as he walks off the train after the attack. Maybe he was mentally ill, maybe he was motivated by racial animus, or maybe it was a bit of both? Perhaps interviews with the assailant will reveal more, but right now Trump and the FBI are really trying to downplay the racial angle and make it about cash-free bail and repeat violent offenders. They got to a federal death penalty charge via transit terrorism, which seems like a bit of a stretch.
From a broader perspective, this incident has highlighted some awkward realities of inter-ethnic crime rates that have largely been banished from mainstream discourse. Twitter is no longer a representative sample of mainstream opinion... but it's the now the incubation chamber for right-wing messaging, and the Overton window there has significantly shifted in the last few days. The video is really powerful, I would put it above the George Floyd footage in terms of emotional impact. Or course it won't have the same amplification, given how national media coverage appears to be grudging at best. The NYT article on the topic is absolutely ridiculous - they try to equate honest reporting on a serious crime to fabricated reports of crimes leading to a riot in the 1800s:
In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.
odd_primes
11mo ago
Honestly the easiest way to get started is to go on CivitAI, find something similar to what you want, and then start playing with the knobs and dials from there. Many images have attached metadata including ComfyUI workflows. This gives you at least a known-good configuration to fall back on when something goes wrong.
The /g/ board on 4chan also has a long running Local Diffusion General which has a bunch of guides and resources for getting started.
One thing to note though is that ComfyUI is a bit of a security nightmare. Custom nodes are basically just python scripts downloaded and run from the internet with little to no security screening by the maintainers. If you're experimenting with this on a computer with sensitive information, I'd recommend not installing random custom nodes with two stars on GitHub.
odd_primes
11mo ago
It is a fair criticism, for whatever reason the census bureau decided to include social science and psychology in STEM. They do have a very nice visualization though, by clicking on the major it shows the percentage of employees who end up working in STEM jobs, and highlights their placement in different job groups. For computer science and math, it's 51.1%. Engineering is 51.5%. For physical science majors, it's only 27.6%. Those are pretty grim numbers that aren't explained just by management being excluded from the stats.
odd_primes
11mo ago
Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.
This is a false premise on a number of levels. Productivity is the value generated per worker. Production is the total amount of goods and services created. Production is a function of a number of different inputs - labor, capital, land, etc. If a company needs to increase production in an environment with a constrained labor market, it can do that by increasing productivity. In other words, investing capital into technology, automation, and other labor-saving improvements. Production can also be increased by offshoring low-value components of the supply chain to other countries, like mineral extraction, textile manufacturing, etc. Of course as we have seen this needs to be done judiciously to avoid building our own competition in unfriendly countries.
Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.
If your new venture is creating more value than whatever these people are already doing, do the capitalist thing and poach them. That's the free market at work - businesses with higher margins can afford to attract labor from companies or industries that are generating less value. That's part of how productivity increases, generating more value per worker by having workers move to higher value positions.
As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through.
The vast majority of employees are "on the market". Just offer them more money. It's that simple. People hop jobs all the time, especially in hot industries like tech. Even if they aren't officially looking, it's easy to put the word out that you're hiring and have your staff refer people into your hiring pipeline. What's more common is that companies have unrealistic expectations - they want 90th percentile employees at 50th percentile pay and mediocre benefits.
Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it.
This is a bullshit false dichotomy. How about just incentivizing the 72% of STEM grads who don't work in a STEM job to actually work in STEM, if we have such a skills shortage?
odd_primes
1yr ago
Apparently the most recent controversy was sparked by an Australian Christian feminist organization called Collective Shout. They are the anti-porn and anti-prostitution type of feminists though, so left-wing media coverage generally just describes them as "conservative" or "Christian".
They take a 20% cut, and don't accept cash or crypto. That makes it a pretty unappealing option for money launderers. If the money is coming from stolen credit cards, platforms are quick to track down which creators have an abnormal chargeback rate and ban them.
Fundamentally OnlyFans is no different than Patreon, Gumroad, the Kindle store, etc. There are plenty of storefronts online where an individual can charge money for access to content. They all tend to follow pretty similar best practices for preventing fraud and money laundering.
The video depicted a man, who is not white, confronting the woman for calling a Black child a racial slur. Though the original video was taken down, Michael McWhorter, known online as TizzyEnt, reposted the video on Wednesday, April 30, to his more than 9.5 million followers across TikTok , Instagram , X and YouTube.
In her campaign, Hendrix claims the child stole from her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at the Soldiers Field Park playground.
“I called the kid out for what he was,” Hendrix wrote.
For context, this happened right after Karmelo Anthony, a black teenager, stabbed a white high-school student to death at a track meet and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via fundraising sites. Hendrix also started a fundraiser to cover relocation expenses, and it went viral in the aftermath of the Anthony incident. From the sentiment I saw on social media, it seemed like mostly spite donations and people supporting her refusal to cave to the cancellation mob. There was a concerted effort to get her fundraiser above the Karmelo Anthony total, and it ended up raising something like $800k.
And just as it seemed like her 15 minutes of fame were up, she was just charged with three counts of disorderly conduct, apparently for simply using the n-word.
Here are a few riffs on the video that have crossed my feed (all should be viewable without logging in): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzUEppFW0AA_Ucc?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzSGAjkakAAp7VP?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://x.com/bitcloud/status/1960179071511585038/photo/1 https://x.com/RealDixonUranus/status/1960232042341244985/photo/1
I do think these new capabilities benefit the right more than the left in the current environment. You correctly point out that these are asymmetric weapons, but that needs to be interpreted in the context of an information "battlefield" that is heavily tilted against the right. There are comparatively very few right-wing institutions that staff full-time paid journalists, political cartoonists, and commentators to pump out high production value propaganda in response to the news cycle. Technology that allows anons on Twitter to turn their idea into reality with a few prompts and a bit of tweaking in photoshop is a democratizing force that helps level the playing field. Twitter is an incredible incubator for these ideas and messages as well, now that they have dialed back the censorship. The most effective messages rise to the top, while the low-effort slop (mostly) languishes at the bottom of the replies section.
odd_primes
1yr ago
Kids love digging holes. Whether that counts as actual landscaping, however...
As for an actual constructive suggestion, a treehouse or some other type of outdoors semi-permanent structure that would be impractical to install at a rental.
odd_primes
1yr ago
Apparently they had a deal with Hasbro for a minimum of $225 million in royalty fees for the three new movies. Lucasfilm would get 20% of the wholesale price in royalties, which would kick in once the minimum threshold was crossed. For comparison their deal with Hasbro for the prequels had a minimum royalty fee of over $500 million, which seems to indicate that they expected lower merch sales.
https://www.jeditemplearchives.com/2018-09-16-the-cost-of-hasbros-star-wars-license/
odd_primes
1yr ago
It seems like they are still pretty deep in the hole. They paid $4 billion in 2012 dollars, and the movie profits are nowhere close to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/14/disneys-star-wars-box-office-profits-fail-to-cover-cost-of-lucasfilm/
Note those numbers also don't include marketing costs, which are often $100 million plus for a blockbuster.
Disney+ lost $11 billion, the theme parks have been a bit of a mess apparently, so I don't see how merch could come anywhere close to filling in the gap.
odd_primes
1yr ago
Personally I mostly use LLMs as a semi-intelligent rubber ducky, or for generating low-complexity boilerplate code that I don't want to write. It can be useful to bounce ideas off a LLM instead of interrupting one of my coworkers.
It is very annoying to get a lengthy email that is clearly AI generated. Generally they are very low information density and just waste the recipients' time.
The one useful application I have found for that kind of text generation is for dealing with risk and compliance people. For some reason they love reams of bullshit paperwork, and LLMs are very good at giving them nice sounding fluff. It's amazing to be able to throw in a list of bullet points and have it expand that out into something they find sufficient.
Nah, I just don't appreciate his rhetorical approach here. It comes across as disingenuous. He's trying to pull the "wise man above the fray descends from his ivory tower to bestow wisdom upon the masses" when in reality he has been down here flinging shit along with the rest of us.
In terms of the actual issue, his funding was not specifically cut, and Tao making this all about him comes across as somewhat egotistical. UCLA's funding was cut for what appear to be fairly legitimate reasons. For example, they are still racially discriminating in college admissions, in flagrant violation of the recent SCOTUS decision. This comment goes into more detail: https://www.themotte.org/post/2732/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/357296?context=8#context
odd_primes
1yr ago
TracingWoodgrains has a thread on the topic here: https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1957878299146993821
Terence Tao, signing an open letter in 2020: "We are enraged at the everyday operations of a white supremacist society. ... Complicity with these systems of oppression is deeply rooted in the origins of this country."
He also wrote a blog in 2016 entitled "It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America". He might want to put forth the image of a politically neutral mathematician now that his funding is at risk, but that does not reflect his previous behavior.
One of the key figures behind O9A, 764, Atomwaffen, and other offshoots is a FBI informant who runs an extremist literature publishing company. You have to wonder how many people he radicalized over the years, and what percentage of them the FBI managed to apprehend before they committed a serious crime.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/the-satanist-neo-nazi-plot-to-murder-u-s-soldiers-1352629/
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dangerous-exploits-of-an-extremist-fbi-informant/
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