worth checking out. ideogram has the best creation of english text out there. Nightcafe (https://creator.nightcafe.studio/) sturck a deal with them recently and added support for the ideogram model in their tool also, if you want to try that, which I also highly recommend for general SD online image creation services.
In case you missed it, the authors were pretty smart to include that folded section in the middle, "Prompt for prompt-enhancement". I slapped that into gpt (https://chatgpt.com/share/2e53403e-4bd7-4138-ac34-55378e2ed3...) and made a few prompts. Ran those on their online demo. Initial impressions:
- prompt adherence is really good
- it's somewhere between SD15 and SDXL at creating pictures of text
- aesthetic quality is good, but leaves some to be desired
> In the 1930s America there was mass unemployment
Sure, but these are temporary disruptions. Now it's true that the pace of change feels immensely faster than ever before, and I believe that's an observable fact. But we adapt. The incentives to do so are, sometimes, life or death. When faced with that kind of situation, some small % will sink into depression, perhaps never to climb out. I'm sure that some online magazine (which surely used to be known for its print version, but is no longer...) will write an extremely long piece full of anecdotes about the plight of the artist whose livelihood was destroyed by the evil AI.
But I assert that it will always be a tiny percentage of the whole, because the vast majority of people like to eat food and live in houses. Many of them will look at these new tools and make amazing new things. Many will go do other things. That's life, man.
I had to think twice about this reply .. I believe that from a psychological, character development point of view, what you say is reasonable.. adjust to change and apply new skills in new ways.
However, there are different "lenses" through which one might examine large topics, and one lense might be that of personal challenge, adjustment and endeavor; but another lense is closer to The Economist Magazine, where factual snippets of market behavior, participants and results are traded every day, every week, every year. Any college educated person ought to be able to say, there have been real, serious and long-standing economic changes where thousands and millions of capable, good-enough people, had serious, years-long hard times up to and including starvation, war, and abundant death. Those without personal experience of that, or a close relative or similar imprinting, may not really consider this real. I had to learn it from books myself based on where I grew up. Others reading these words, know it very well.
Hand-craft preservation is a thing, I have heard.. so there is certainly a broad spectrum between "no more blacksmiths downtown" to "I send my print jobs via phone for pickup near the metro at an automated kiosk". It is said that nobody has a right to a job. However, The Economist Magazine exists for a reason, and things are not normal where I live.. Welcome to the New Not-Normal, as Jerry Brown said..
Arguably, that's basically directly saying that nobody has a right to life.
You either ensure the basic resources necessary to live are free, or you want everyone to get a job. The alternative is saying - "some people die from lack of work, get over it".
I have nothing special for or against the mag, but I will point out that economists are famously known for disagreeing on huge things once you get beyond the law of supply and demand. Not every discipline of study has whole alternative schools of thought the way they do. Economists are closer to philosophists than most philosophists.
I really love economics! But I have no illusions at all that they serve up one and only one version of the truth like physicists. :D
> real, serious and long-standing economic changes
"founded in 1977 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Industries."
some of these people have funded climate denial on behalf of the Oil and Gas Industry Lobby.. they have the largest wealth in history to defend, at the cost of Climate Change.
You are aware that disruption has been the human condition for 1000's of years, yes?
Why do you posit that life expectancy will continue to fall? Not sure it's rational to expect an extended reversal of the trends which have been on the increase prior to the past 2 years. Look at the charts and the analyses.
Precarious work? You may need to explain that one.
> You are aware that disruption has been the human condition for 1000's of years, yes?
So what? Slavery and The Plague and Cancer was part of the human condition too.
And its wrong - technological disruption only appreared recently. For ten thousand years my ancestors lived nomadic lives on the eurasian plains, their lives were disrupted when a gun and a steam engine were invented few hundred years ago.
And now we don't die anymore because of simple infection or other preventable diseases. Many if not all of the things that keep us fed, warm and healthy today are only because we endured technological disruption.
So which is it, 'human condition includes disruption, there is nothing wrong with human conditions and therefore there is nothing wrong with disruption
or
'human condition sucks and the only way to fix it is with disruption'?
Are you just making it up as you go along? Do you feel the need to justify disruption at any cost?
There is no need to be angry. No, I'm not making it up as I go, I'm saying that the human condition in the long term significantly benefits from technological disruption, even if that's not always true in the short-term. I'm not justifying anything either, I'm just telling you what happened.
Now, we cannot suppress technological disruption either, we can regulate and channel it, but you won't be getting your pastoral society back in which everything stays as is for a few thousand years . I think that's good, you Kay think that's bad, but it just is.
I am not angry, and I am not even saying you are wrong.
I am just pointing out that the post by halr9000 and your post both try to put disruption on the pedestal, but the arguments are mutually exclusive, and in fact they profess opposite values.
I got a confused, through both posts were made by the same person, hence 'making it up as you go along', sorry about that.
Your life or death scenario is an edge case with its own special complexities which should not be lumped in with discussions of the vastly voluntary choices we can make. Healthcare is heavily regulated as we all know. This raises the barrier to entry to new competitors, and leads to a less dynamic market where the status quo can last a long long time. So you end up with only 1 or a very small number of medical devices (with the associated software) for a given situation.
I would expect that the greater debate on privacy will, over time, hopefully lead to some changes in how we are able to control the data generated by our bodies. Until that happens, I’m going to take the thing that saves my wife’s life with the potential for some shadiness or simple distaste at what may happen to her data, or, I might look at it as her voluntary consent which was fully given with her and my knowledge well ahead of time — helps to save others lives, and some loss of control of that data is actually quite noble.
As you might guess, I started at the abstract, but ended up at the concrete, and my wife really does have such a device, similar to your example. And I also work in big data analytics industry, and get involved in these sorts of discussions pretty often.
Okay, let's try a concrete example: Gmail. Let us agree that the point of Gmail is to read people's email so it can send targeted adds. That automating the process (since human employees don't directly read that email) makes the thing more efficient, and thus worse, as well as easier to misuse.
Let us agree that I can indeed avoid having a Gmail account. Can I realistically avoid sending email to a Gmail user?
Nope.
There are just too many users. Maybe I can avoid sending mail to <anything>@gmail.com (though not responding to one will invariably be perceived as incredibly rude), but I cannot avoid having Gmail users send email to me. I cannot realistically notice ahead of time that john.doe@example.com is actually using a Gmail server under the hood, and not send the email. I cannot prevent Gmail users from talking about me.
I can reduce my exposure, but there are limits to what I can reasonably do. Your usage of Gmail is hurting my privacy. Okay, not yours, but definitely half of my friend's. I can't realistically ask them to either stop using Gmail, or stop interacting with me, now can I?
Let us agree that individual choices and individual actions don't work.
That automating the process (since human employees don't directly read that email) makes the thing more efficient, and thus worse, as well as easier to misuse.
While I agree with your larger point, I don't agree with this subjective value judgement and am not sure why it's necessary to lump it in with the rest of your (valid) points. Why do I want to see ads for things I'm not interested in? How is that in any way "better?"
What I definitely don't want is unauthorized humans reading my email. (Even so, I have to assume that is exactly what will happen whenever I type or dictate anything into a computer. I've operated on that basis since before GMail, Google, or even the civilian Internet existed.)
I live in the EU, and as such am pretty much nameless for any Google employee. It's not like they would disrupt my personal life. Automated reading however, scales. The damage to any individual is lowered, but it is also multiplied by the number of users. Reliably so.
And now they have a mighty powerful pattern matching machine, they can easily ask more than where I could possibly spend money. They could ask for my political affiliations, or my sexual orientation, my social network (who knows, I may be related to the second or third degree to some nefarious terrorist?).
That last one is very worrying. Especially since recently, my country (France) is being eerily harsh with political opponents. I've just read a story about a journalist (whose income happens to come from YouTube & donations), who is being judged for… gang theft (the pun also works in French), risking up to 75.000€ in fines and 5 years of imprisonment, just because he covered the unhooking of a 8€ portrait of our current president in a Town Office (which usually have president's portraits, but this is not mandatory). Unhooking, they reportedly did not even take the portrait.
So yeah, I'm more and more worried about giving our governments the means to apply their increasing insanity. Sure, having an individual reading my private email is unacceptable, but that risk is getting smaller and smaller, in comparison, to the mass surveillance that automation enables.
Your life or death scenario is an edge case with its own special complexities which should not be lumped in with discussions of the vastly voluntary choices we can make.
Karen's and my 2019 FOSDEM keynote (and accompanying podcasts) discuss her struggles with the medical device industry and how those struggles relate to the larger set of choices related to technology that we make. This isn't an issue that lends itself well to short-form discussion. The issues are quite complex:
Well, the “right” workaround is an opt-in system. But that would drastically reduce the number of qualified ad prospects, reducing their wholesale value, killing the online ad business, drying up the websites themselves who exist for this revenue (some/many of which are trash, but not nearly all).
I don’t think we can have it both ways, or at least it is very difficult and we don’t have a great compromise solution.
I know that I'm not interested in "compromising" with the ad-tech industry. They've been spending too much time and money attacking my defenses against their terrible practices for me to treat them as anything but an attacker.
Not that I support the ad-tech industry, but those consumers probably are interested in having their favorite websites being kept alive. Which implies that they might indeed be interested in "compromising" with ad-tech industry.
it isn't about giving ad-tech any chance of anything, it is about websites that are liked and used by people (most of whom have either no means or no desire to support those websites with money directly) being able to sustain themselves in order to exist.
If only there were other models for ad sales, say ones that were successfully used for decades prior to the advent of the internet and ubiquitous surveillance, that could be used instead of said ubiquitous surveillance...
But no. The internet enabled vast, invasive user tracking, therefore vast, invasive user tracking is the only conceivable way to sell advertising.
That's pretty much a false dichotomy: a site must either support itself via ads, or cease to exist.
There are other ways to get money to support your work, and if those ways are too painful right now, that's just an opportunity for disruption. Even better, it's an opportunity to prove that disruption doesn't have to be exploitative.
There are entire markets that cannot be accessed by publishers unless they subsidize content with ads. That is not a false dichotomy, that is a market requirement.
Not every website is the WSJ or Bloomberg, which cater to markets that are willing to pay for content.
Not saying that it has to be ads only. If there comes a disruptive alternative revenue model that allows all those websites to self-support themselves, I will be one of the first people to jump the ship and advocate for the ban of ads in favor of that new model.
To be honest, that doesn't matter to me. I think that websites who inflict the ad-slingers on their readers are showing great disrespect to and disregard for their readers.
> but those consumers probably are interested in having their favorite websites being kept alive.
I'm one of "those consumers" and I'm actively looking for sustainable ways to pay content producers.
Here's what I do currently:
- subscribe to two newspapers in addition to the mandatory payments to the national news broadcaster.
- donate to the Guardian
- buy on Blendle
If there was a way to pay for single pay-walled stories I would probably use it a few times a week in addition to my current subscriptions.
I'm not interested in any more subscriptions (unless they are all inclusive like Spotify so I can cancel my current subscriptions, and even then I'm not sure since I actually want to support those two papers and think I do so better through direct payments than through revenue sharing through a huge international tech company. )
More generally, if enough people (including the author) think the content has merit, they will choose to support it (by which I mean “collectively supply all the resources it needs to continue”).
The cost of running a basic website to publish text is modest. Tools like [dat][] and [scuttlebutt][] make it completely free (once you have a computer and any internet connection) to distribute content to people who actually want it.
On the other hand, if you want to make a living out of producing content (rather than wanting to publish the content purely for its merit), that is harder — the content has to be that much more valuable to enough people.
As long as individuals can publish stuff, and others can see it and choose whether to support it financially (all without 3rd parties mediating/filtering), then I'm content. Our distributed tools make that possible; we just need to make them easier and more ubiquitous.
While of course this problem exists, SO didn’t create them, but maybe enabled them at most. What created them was a big cycle starting with the internet leading to digital transformation and new business creation, which led to demand for new programmers, which led to college enrollment demand, and parents pushing their kids into a lucrative field. Lots of variables of course, but some (or many) of those recent college grads only passed due to rote memorization despite their inability to grasp basic concepts like abstraction.
So what if SO helped someone to get to the resume phase who perhaps shouldn’t be there? There’s only one way for them to figure that out, and it’s experience. Give them some constructive criticism and move on.
What I do has worked great for >10 years:
- Direct deposit paycheck into checking account 1(the main account)
- automatically transfer spending money to checking account 2 (I call it the Petty Cash account)
- auto transfer $x for the large recurring or known but infrequent bills into savings account 3 (I call it the Escrow account)
- Only issue bill payments from the main account
- Only walk around with debit card for petty cash account. I also use this for online purchases, Amazon etc
- As needed, transfer from escrow to main to pay off something big, like property tax or car insurance.
Play with the transfer amounts to suit your budget. This helps you not have to think about spending money, or if you have enough to pay rent that month.
Back to the furniture example from grandparent comment, I simply ensure that main has enough in it each month to cover the monthly expenses. HTH
> And that’s what the internet has become. Full of gossip, junk content, paid posts, con articles, click bait links, sock-puppetry, spam, regurgitated spam, free e-books, self aggrandizement, fake followers, fake news, - all designed to achieve one thing - con the Search Engine - and you.
Most of this is junk, but TBH the free e-books don't bother me one bit. I even like a few of the peddlers who deploy this tactc, if the content is any good.
Hailing cabs by phone (and later on, using the non-Uber hailing services that interact directly with cabs) never worked as well for me as Uber. Takes too long for them to get there, and the incentive for them to abandon your request and pick up a fare they find on the way is too strong.
Taxis only make sense in the very small perecent of the US where you can walk outside and hail one coming down the street.
Reminds me of a story I saw (I think on reddit) where someone had booked a cab for a 5am trip to the airport, and after it didn't show up after 30 minutes they just called an uber. They hadn't taken a cab since.
I know it can be an issue on the driver side in terms of job security, but poor customer service and behaviour is weeded out much better on ridesharing apps due to how their rating and tracking systems work.
In Germany, we have two types: Funkmietwagen (kinda "callable cabs") which can't pick up someone without being called and proper taxis which both get dispatched but can also wait at taxi ranks to pick people up (or pick someone up on their way somewhere when empty).
Neither of those would abandon someone they've been dispatched to and dispatcher estimations are usually pretty accurate.
> Takes too long for them to get there, and the incentive for them to abandon your request and pick up a fare they find on the way is too strong.
The few times I've reserved a taxi for someone the estimation was accurate and the driver very friendly. Same for the company I work for, no real issues with taxis. Company wise it's often easier to just take public transport though (quickest to/from airport).
When it comes to airports, I prefer taxis. I once got a Lyft driver at the airport who did not have enough room for all our luggage. Taxis generally will, and even if they don't, there is no charge for "canceling".
I recently arrived at an airport intending to take a Lyft/Uber out of the vicinity. Tried for 10 to 15 minutes to get a ride on either platform and it would just time out. Eventually opted for a taxi, which were immediately and readily available. Surprisingly it was also 30% cheaper in the end including tip than the quoted price on Uber at the time with surge pricing without tip.
The same thing happened on my most recent arrival back home. I am probably going to simply return to taxis at my home airport for now on.
>Most people I know hate taxis. Uber can nearly raise prices to parity with cabs.
If they are willing to let their ridership fall to just above cab ridership numbers? sure.
That's the biggest problem with the market; demand is elastic. Uber's major competitor for my transportation dollars isn't lyft; it's me going out and buying a honda and driving myself. If they charged taxi prices, I'd buy a honda, and I'd use the rideshare less than 5% of the time I use it now.
In the US, correct.
In most of Western Europe a taxi is normally a very different experience from Uber X - a nice car, nice driver, great navigation and safe trip. Yes, you're paying extra, but the comfort is also very different, especially when going from airports.
I live in the UK. Can't say I agree with you. Especially because I have a mobility impairment. The Uber drivers are always more willing to help, (I'd imagine thanks to the rating system), stop exactly where needed etc.
In London - I'd say cabs are better. In Liverpool and Manchester, I'd say on par with Uber.
Didn't have experience with Assist and Access Uber cars, so you have a better view on that.
And as much as people used to hate taxis, the tide is turning to people hating Uber/Lyft more...mainly due to trying to kill passengers, pedestrians, bicyclists at a greater rate since the drivers aren't professionals and rarely know the city they're driving in.
I'm not even going to send an angry tweet. I'm going to keep ordering. If a driver takes the job, at the price Instacart wants to pay, it's on the driver, of course. And this works until it doesn't! Once people quit driving for IC, THIS is the market price signal which will cause the system to reconfigure. If IC can't get drivers, they must pay more!
I have zero illusions that enough people understand the free market to be patient and allow for this to happen. We need to teach more economics in grade school.
The proof of the sketchiness is that if you call the DoorDash support line, their phone reps are carefully trained with exact wording to be as misleading as possible about this. If you bring up the way payments depend on tips, they will carefully reiterate the talking points.
You can learn a lot from how companies feel about their practices by looking at how they train the customer support personnel with talking points to avoid admitting certain of them.
I can't help but feel every time someone says "people don't understand the free market" its people who can't understand anything past the most simplistic explanation.
I'm going to leave you with a quote from Adam Smith who most would say founded the field of Economics.
> The interest of the dealers ... in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public... [They] have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public ... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate ... It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.
As a consumer, are you surprised that your tip is being used this way? I'd operate under the assumption that someone was being paid some sort of fair compensation, and my tip was an addition to whatever comp they earned.
Also, it's not clear to me, are the drivers told their comp for the job before accepting? Did this person know they would earn $0.80/hr?
