halr9000 · HackerTrans

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

halr9000

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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

Gonna play more with it in ComfyUI.

halr9000

4 jaar geledendiscuss

> I had to think twice about this reply

Good :)

> The Economist Magazine, where factual snippets

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

Ok, 100's of counterpoints: https://www.humanprogress.org/datasets/ (but check out the articles also, lots of great stuff on there.)

> starvation, war, and abundant death

Yeah, there's lots of that. Pre-panbdemic all the trends were in the right direction. This too shall pass.

Things aren't that abnormal in my area, and it's getting even better daily.

halr9000

4 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

halr9000

4 jaar geledendiscuss

> 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.

halr9000

7 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

halr9000

7 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

halr9000

7 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

halr9000

7 jaar geledendiscuss

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

halr9000

7 jaar geledendiscuss

> 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.

halr9000

7 jaar geledendiscuss

Most people I know hate taxis. Uber can nearly raise prices to parity with cabs.

halr9000

7 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

halr9000

8 jaar geledendiscuss

It made me sad that the Evernote migration wasn't full fidelity. Been a few months, but I recall it didn't bring over pictures.

halr9000

8 jaar geledendiscuss

> Seems like a weak market to go after, given that people likely to respond to a "cool" financial services brand may be a poorer demographic that maybe doesn't have any prior experience with "legacy" financial services providers.

Yeah but people do grow up. And I don't know about you, but I've got some super long term relationships with some banks. They are in it for the long game.

halr9000

8 jaar geledendiscuss

This is the best way anyways. 50 experiments will lead to a better outcome.

halr9000

8 jaar geledendiscuss

> the cat litter I just purchased is $17.89 at Amazon, $13.49 at Walmart. Last week I bought a chair mat for $21.95 on Ebay - identical item on Amazon was $33.95 (both including free shipping but Amazon came with an additional 8.25% sales tax).

> They can do that because so many people don't price compare anymore before going to Amazon.

"Alexa, reorder cat litter"

So, no, I disagree with your premise here. They can demand a higher price by way of providing a better overall service, end to end, by way of innovation and hard work. Sure, some of it is in fact laziness like you say, when viewed one way. Viewed another, I am willingly paying for that convenience.

Not to be tautological, but in a free market, this works as long as it works. Cheaper alternatives exist, no surprise there. But you need to take into account value, which is more than just price.

"Alexa, set 11 minute pasta timer."

halr9000

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Super polite legal notice tho!

halr9000

8 jaar geledendiscuss

> Now, it's just a giant subsidy for Amazon.

But it's not. This line is reasoning is very outdated.

They have built a massive network of warehouses all over the country, and that's the physical presence that a state sales tax collection clause needs to come into effect. Amazon has been charging people sales tax in many states for a few years now. (I wish I had a number of states, but top jazzy to look it up.)

halr9000

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I liked the aisle, but have a lot of issues with it. This is one of my main ones: IP addresses and information security. Quoting you:

> Storing an IP for a limited time for security reasons is fine. Have rules in place for how this data is used and when it is deleted. Don't keep it longer than nessescary.

How long is necessary? What does limited mean? Does a regulator now get to determine what sort of algorithms I can use to protect my assets? Advanced persistent threats (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat) can exist over a very extended--and arbitrary time period! I'm in the security software industry, and we and our customers need to detect and react to these threats. That requires data which you simply cannot obtain an opt-in for. Sure, you put that in a posted privacy policy, but if you can only keep the data for 30 days, this means actual evidence of a crime might need to be thrown out.

halr9000

9 jaar geledendiscuss

> It's not protecting your interests, it's protecting Google's interests.

But you can always install (or develop) another browser that might do this job better for you.

> If it was protecting your interests, it would be a toggleable setting that defaults to normalized behavior.

The problem with this view is that the vast majority of end users do not want, and in fact will never know about or use a new setting, and so the when doesn't move forward. This is the opt-in problem that Google is talking about. In politics, an analogy is called public choice theory.

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