AI actors seems like a good thing. Generative AI will allow small groups of creatives to stick to their vision and create truly unique art. The massive staff required for movies today seems like a major cause of the blockbusterfication of hollywood where every movie is trying as hard as possible to play it safe.
It'll be a revolution for indie filmmakers. $0 budget movies with top-notch visuals.
When movies take $100 million each to make, you need execs and investors to make it happen, and they want safe returns. When they cost $0, anybody with an idea can turn it into a film - the kind of stuff studios would never have greenlit.
The "AI is going to destroy creative work" view requires either 1) wild optimism about the future of AI, a belief that it will quickly become orders of magnitude better than anything we can do today, or 2) a lack of understanding and appreciation for good art.
Like yeah you'll probably be able to churn out some hideously mediocre content slop with AI. I'm extremely skeptical that we're anywhere near producing anything good with AI.
One of my all time favorite films is It's such a Beautiful Day, an animated film painstakingly created by a single visionary. If generative AI allows creatives to create similar projects in unique ways, which I believe it will, then I'm all for it.
> a belief that it will quickly become orders of magnitude better than anything we can do today
I don't think this is true, all we need is a belief that generative AI will quickly become a tool that allows small groups or individuals to create projects that are better than they can create today. If my theory that small groups are better able to create artistic statements than large groups is true then the small group + AI will be better than the current massive group paradigm.
obviously AI won't be able to compete with traditional movies for some time, but for amateur film makers who don't have a budget for sets and actors, AI is going to help them make their work better.
i don't know if that is good or bad though. one side effect of AI helping to make movies is that there will be so many more of them. think about all that cheap content on youtube. imagine a bunch of that enhanced with AI. it will still be cheap content, but it will look better, which means we will have a harder time to detect it and dismiss it.
Enlighten us, then, on what you understand art to be. If art in your view is simply defined as something humans make and that computers will never be able to do regardless of how much quality the final product has (or, imagine if I were to blind watch two movies, one human made of excellent quality and an AI one of an even better quality, and I choose the AI one), then honestly we (and likely many of us on this forum) disagree on such a fundamental level that it is not worth elaborating.
It's a poor analogy, but maybe they imagine something like a composer being able to release their classical music without requiring a conductor and orchestra to convert it to sound.
The odd bit to me is how such tools open up a spectrum of possibilities with poorly defined roles or boundaries. When is someone a musician with electronic instruments, versus a DJ, versus a consumer? And what are the equivalents for film synthesis...?
Indeed, imagine if people cried the same way when electronic music or synthesizers were getting started (well, some people did). It is just that now when it is coming for their profession, they are panicking.
The parent comment was most likely referring to the idea that someone else should compel you to give away the replica to an organization, in perpetuity, without compensation or rights. I don't think anybody is against a digital replica used privately where you can be sure you control the data and any derived income.
no, it should be illegal to pay you only a pittance of a lump sum to be able to use your digital version in a movie. for example maybe you should have the right to get paid for every minute that your digital version appears on screen, like actors are paid today.
because this is a negotiation between weak individuals and a very strong movie companies. as the movie companies have shown that they won't hesitate to exploit people working for them, laws are needed to protect the individuals.
you don't get the point. every individual is weak in the face of a large corporation seeking to exploit them. that's why we have laws to protect employees.
People have agency and can decide for themselves if a job offer is worth it
if they desperately need a job then they don't.
the pandemic actually demonstrated that. many more people than before are refusing to work when a job forces them to be in an office. that means previously they accepted that work even though they would have preferred not to. but they didn't have the agency to voice that preference. only the demonstrated evidence that work from home is possible and the collective awareness of that gave them that agency.
likewise, most people are uninformed as to the consequences for signing away the right of a digital version of themselves. at a minimum they are not aware of its value.
that is a power imbalance the film industry seeks to exploit, and that power imbalance must be corrected by giving individuals more protection.
it is similar to copyright. i know the US doesn't recognize this but at least in europe copyright includes the inalienable right for a creator to be associated with their work even if they sold away the right to profit from it financially.
Do the people who pose for stock photos have special laws?
yes, they have the right to control how their image is used.
in a similar manner, at a minimum it must be recognized that an individual should always have the right to use their own digital version as they wish and to control how their digital version is used by others and that selling the rights to someone else must not prevent them from doing so.
where there large likelihood of individuals being exploited, the law must step in to reduce the risk for that exploitation.
that's why we have minimum wage laws. that's why in europe health insurance is mandatory for any job and even available if you don't have one. that's why in many countries you can't dismiss an employee without proper justification, or you can't evict tenants unless they egregiously violate their tenant agreement (and failing to pay rent on time is not such a violation).
there are plenty of examples of how the law protects individuals from being exploited. to suggest that such laws are unnecessary is completely missing the power imbalance that exists here, or worse willfully ignoring it.
"Legal pressure over the damage caused by PFAS has increased. Last month, 3M and DuPont de Nemours Inc (DD.N) were among several companies sued by California's attorney general to recover clean-up costs." This sentence very clearly explains the main problem with late-stage capitalism. It externalizes real costs to humanity unless governments enforce dollar costs for the societal harms of corporate actions. Neither of these companies would've done anything about this issue on their own.
The github repo https://github.com/openaps/openaps includes a description of some of the things the project can do. One of them is "predict - Can make predictions about what should happen next."
All diabetics ever have is a rear facing indicator, fortunately it's not really true that you can't predict the future when it comes to blood glucose. The simple equation is `exercise + carbs + current blood glucose level + insulin on board` along with all the attributes that make your body respond to artificial insulin the way it will. The system doesn't really need to predict the future to be a massive improvement on where diabetics already are thanks to slow moving organizations like the FDA. With appropriately cautious buffers around when to shut the insulin pump off a huge majority of diabetics will rarely see a low blood sugar. The technology is here, we just have to summon up the will to move medicine forward.
The F-35 is receiving so much scrutiny because of the exorbitant cost of the program and the very poor product that program produced for the american taxpayer.
Better fighters have been produced in far less time for far less money. I think it's receiving so much attention on HN because it's an example of poor engineering.
Well, the thing is, nobody really needa a Wonderplane like the F-35. Yes, the Marines need a VTOL plane, but they could be developed cheaper, probably on the base of the old AV/8B. A-10 is still fine for CAS. Maybe ask the Israelis in turn about modernization options for "older" planes. Generally, countries that have to make do with "old" hardware have pretty good Ideas.
E.G. the Olifant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_tank#South_Africa
The Sufa
http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/f-16i/
> Well, the thing is, nobody really needa a Wonderplane like the F-35.
The do-everything F-35 was actually supposed to be a cost management idea, since the exploding cost of new generation fighter programs was so big, we were just going to do one of them, rather than several for different roles. This would, the theory went, be cheaper in total for development, plus the shared parts would make them cheaper in operation, then separate role-specific airframes.
And, radically expensive and problem-prone as F-35 has been, that still might all be true. It might have been far more expensive, both in development and operational costs, to develop separate airframes for the various roles.
Unfortunately the shared parts ratio is far lower than what was planned. It was supposed to be 80% commonality between variants but it's more like 25%.
Furthermore, because they tried to make the aircraft meet contradictory requirements it has resulted in a plane that doesn't do several things as well as even the aircraft it is replacing, much less newer aircraft on the battlefield. All at an astronomical cost.
At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to pay far more for a weapons system that doesn't do anything well.
The do-everything F-35 was actually supposed to be a cost management idea, since the exploding cost of new generation fighter programs was so big, we were just going to do one of them, rather than several for different roles.
...and if you ever bought that, they've also got a bridge they'd like to sell you. The goal is to spend money. This is just their latest innovation in achieving that goal.
They like the name and, more importantly, have spent a substantial amount of money preparing to launch their brand. If they can reach an agreement with GNOME that is acceptable to both parties then why not?
I think this statement should remove any anger or resentment from both sides since at the end of the day they are willing to concede if they can't make everyone happy.
Although all things considered, they probably shouldn't have started developing their brand with this name in the first place.
As a side note if you haven't checked out Opera's Other Browser "Coast". I would really recommend playing around with it. It feels closer to the Web as OS concept than anything else I've seen.
<!--
So this guy we just interviewed at my
current job wrote this little script
to see if a product update for some
company had come out. Every 10 seconds
the script urllib'ed the page, checked
the length of the html - literally
len(html) - against the length it was
last time it checked. He wrote a blog
post about this script. A freaking
blog post. He also described himself
as "something of a child prodigy"
despite, in another post, saying he
couldn't calculate the area of a slice
of pizza because "area of a triangle
with a curved edge is beyond my
Google-less math skills." Seriously
dude? I haven't taken geomtry in 20
years, and pi*r^2/8 seems pretty
freaking obvious.
The script also called a ruby script
to send him a tweet which another
script was probably monitoring to text
his phone so he could screenshot the
text and post to facebook via
instagram.
I think the "millenials" - who should
be referred to as generation byte - get
undeserved flak, as all generations do,
for being younger and prettier and
living in a different world.
But this kid calling himself a prodigy
is a clear indication of way too many
gold stars handed out for adequacy, so
to ensure that no such abominable
script ever does anything besides
bomb somebody's twitter account, this
comment shows up exactly 50% of the
time, and I encourage others to do
the same.
-->
/*
Yeah, there's some shitty code here.
There are some things that shouldn't
be done. I did them. Sometimes, I had
my reasons. Sometimes, I was just being
lazy. But guess what? You're sitting
there reading the source on some guy's
blog. So fuck you.
*/
If that's what made him your favorite, you really need to read his earlier post that really blew up in popularity. It's a great read. http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Guess he didn't know about the last-modified header. Reminds me of a few other instances of modern coders ignoring parts of the http spec, like not acknowledging the use of codes outside of 404 and 200, instead putting the information on the page in a way that has to be parsed for the text
That just seems like poking fun at a job applicant for no reason. Assuming last-modified headers weren't accurate on the website (as one would expect with some poorly crafted sites these days), that will indeed get the job done with a minimum of fuss and effort; assuming this is a one-off script, actually parsing the page would be pointless.
Perhaps posting it to his blog was excessive, but it is a way of getting shared code out there.
