Tell me you've never run a business without telling me you've never run a business. You'd be surprised how hard it can be to answer that question, especially when it comes to taxes and other dues. :o)
As a Swede I am surprisingly drawn to this. At first I read this as a fun joke, an art project if you will. By the end after reading the code and being surprised by how comfortably it reads to me I find myself kind of wanting to use this. In a way it is exactly like brunost, surprisingly good.
I think this probably says more about music in general and the long tail of people who think good enough is just spectacular, than to the brilliance of LLMs. Most music, just like most art, isn’t particularly original. It’s a shocker, I know, but there it is. Doesn’t mean it’s bad, just not particularly original.
Copying something that exists isn’t particularly difficult. It may require immense skill and incredible dexterity in the case of some musical instruments, but it doesn’t really require much more than time, patience and the ability to follow instructions. The blueprint already exists. With LLMs we now have the ability to skip the time and patience parts of the equation, we can produce mediocrity more or less instantly.
I don’t see this as particularly different from what happened at the turn of the last century and beyond, with machines being able to sow faster, carve wood and metals at a higher pace and precision, moving folks and goods between geographical points faster than ever before, etc. etc. It’s not much different from the IKEAs of the world making mediocre copies of brilliant designs, making fortunes selling to the large masses that think good enough is just great. Because honestly man, most of the time it probably is.
I’m not surprised people go to concerts to hear a recording made by an LLM either. People have been going to see DJs sling records for decades. It’s not the music, or the artist, it’s the community. Beyoncé is an amazing singer, but people don’t necessarily come to her shows to see just her, they come to see everyone else. They might say they want to see her, but they already have a thousand times in tickelitock and myfacespacebookgrams. They come to feel connected to something, to experience community.
LLMs are incredibly good at churning out stuff. Good stuff, bad stuff, just a ton of stuff. Nothing original but that’s ok, most things pre-LLMs weren’t either. We just have more of it now, and fewer trees. The creatives that are able to harness these tools will be able to do more with less. (Ostensibly at least, until the VC subsidies… subside.) Because they are creative they might be able to form an original idea and string together enough mediocrity to realize it. They’ll probably get drowned out in a sea of mediocre copies in the end, but that’s just the same as it always was. It’s just faster now.
The platform owners and hardware manufacturers will remain king until the technology can run on my TI calculator, maybe we’ll get there before the VC money runs out. No wonder Nvidia’s been killing it. Creativity and originality will return once this bubble bursts I’m sure, the world has this amazing ability to correct itself, even if violently so at times. Or we all die perhaps. Either way, all we can do I suppose is ride this wave of mediocrity into the sunset. :o)
I saw some of these works in Stockholm and then in Miami, and you 100% captured my thoughts. Cool technique well utilized, but beyond that I'm not sure I felt any particular connection to the art. It just felt bland.
That's ok, not all art affects all people the same and to me that's the wonderful thing about art – it really is ok to have different opinions and taste, no one is wrong. I'll just move on to the next piece and hopefully enjoy that more. :o)
Yeah it's really overblown. I applied for an ETA online last year and it took probably about 15 min from searching for where to do it to the confirmation email dropping in. It was pretty painless, much more so than the ESTA process for travelling to the US&A and even that one isn't particularly difficult.
I don't know the specifics of naming that particular company, but being the majority stakeholder of two companies myself I can tell you that naming companies is just as hard as naming things in programming. Both of my companies are named after myself, one directly so and the other being a portmanteau of my business partner's and my names.
It had very little to do with self aggrandizing and more to do with the tax authorities need a name and time was limited. The names were used mostly as placeholders and then stuck. Branding is hard.
I also worked (and indeed lived) in the City a few years and fell down this rabbit hole for a spell. The more you dig into this the weirder it gets, but it's quite a fun rabbit hole indeed. :o)
Ditto! I was introduced to blender in the late (great!) 90's and had a lot of fun with it for years before I largely gave up on working in 3d graphics and started building a career as a programmer instead.
Sometimes I think of what could've been had I had the perseverance to stick with it, but mostly I'm just very grateful. Ton was a big part of that for sure, but a lot of others as well. WP (or waypay as I used to call him) who designed the Suzanne model (among a lot of other amazing artwork), Bart who was a pillar of the community and went on to found Blender Nation, and many more who really formed that community. Without it I doubt blender would be more than a footnote in the annals of history.
Massive congratulations to Ton for achieving what many (including me!) never thought possible. Huge, huge kudos!
I'm probably just nostalgic, but to me this hardware is a piece of history that's mostly forgotten or overlooked by anyone who wasn't working in IT at the time. That's why I've been trying to get museums to take it, because my hope would be they'd do something educational with the hardware. Alas, selling is indeed probably my only recourse if I don't want these things to end up on the heap (right away.)
I too have an O2 along with some SGI flat panel screens, which was amazing tech in the world of CRT displays of yesteryear.
I've been trying to donate this stuff to local museums for a while but sadly, none seem interested. The O2 still boots without any issues, and at least one of the screens work. Shame to just throw away.
Serendipity perhaps? As an aside, it's one of my favorite words. In my opinion it's a beautiful configuration of letters that's sounds lovely when saying it, and the meaning of it is equally wonderful. As a word, it makes me happy.