Maybe consciousness just does not exist. Could it be that humans invented it to feel superior to animals, but it does not really exist? I wonder if we will think of the word "consciousness" in the same way we think of the word "aether" in the future.
I was on a call trying to schedule a service at my house. An AI agent was the first one to talk with. It was actually decent. It gave me one slightly wrong answer and I just said "Representative" to talk to a real person. The real person gets on the line and is in such a bad mood and not friendly, I almost wanted to say "AI Agent" to get transferred back to the AI agent.
Tesla does a great job not having buttons. I think the real issue is that other car companies have bad interfaces that make physical buttons necessary. Tesla just has a great UI that does not need physical buttons.
I started with sketchup to make basic floor plans and house shapes. I had a rough idea of the style of the home. I picked "Transitional English Estate" since the build site is out on a farm that sorta looks like the Cotswolds. I used AI in this process to get rough renders and feedback on the floorplan. I then took that basic floorplan and house dimensions to a Draftsman who did a lot of tweaking to get it up to code and fix issues. I got his plans and took it to a Sketchup Pro on Fivver . They made a detailed sketchup model. I then took that model and took screenshots from different perspectives and tweaked the prompt to get renders I liked. These changes were reencorprated into the blueprints. I did the same thing with the interior. Took screenshots from sketchup and put them into AI and tweaked the prompt. https://imgur.com/a/lSIYTYr
I'm building my personal home right now. The AI image models have been a game-changer in designing the look of the house. My architect did an OK job, but the details that Nano Banana added really bring the house up a notch. I just do hundreds of renders from the basic 3D models and I find looks that I like and iterate from there. We are implementing the renders from Nano Banana over our Interior Designers designs. We would not have hired the Interior Designers again after using Nano Banana to do our interiors.
I think part of the issue with architects and designers today is that they use CAD too much. It's easy to design boxes and basic roof lines in CAD. It's harder to put in curves and more craftsman features. Nano Banana's renders have more organic design features IMO.
Our house is looking great and we're very happy how it's going so far with a lot of the thanks to Nano Banana.
As much as bashing capitalism is in vogue. I'd take capitalism running the food system over communism any day. The reverse article could have been written 50 years ago. "Starving communism: How collectivism killed the kitchen"
Movie making is going to become fine-tuning these foundational video models. For example, if you want Brad Pitt in your movie you'll need to use his data to fine-tune his character.
I've been thinking of why the government does not want the public to know about UFOs. My current thought is if the government admitted there was something more powerful than then itself the government's power be questioned and therefore diminished.
I get asked for my gender often in online forms. What is it ultimately used for? Even for my employment why does my employer care what gender I am or my sexual orientation? Personally I think there is an over emphasis on gender and sexual orientation. I don't care about your gender or sexual orientation unless I want to have a sexual relationship with you.
The TDD tradition comes from dynamically typed languages. If you write a Ruby or JavaScript function it's got a good chance of not working the first time you run it. However, with statically typed languages your function has a much better chance of running, if it compiles. IMO TDD only makes sense for dynamically typed languages.
It would be a shame if some hackers combined opencv, a camera, a raspberrypi, drone parts and buck shot shells into something useful to defend against mean helicopters.
I've designed a residential house form the ground up in the US. The current building codes in the US are very strict and high quality. Especially around energy consumption. There are blower door tests to makes sure the house is air-tight. The insulation requirements make it so the furnace rarely comes on even on the coldest days.