To answer how it got so big: it didn't start out trying to replace Slack. It just solved an acute pain point for gamers. Skype was becoming increasingly enshittified, and people were floating between TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble, none of which were that great. Discord captured the market because it was completely free and had the audio mechanisms in place to make people with shitty mics and background noise tolerable without forcing everyone to use push-to-talk. That’s really it. By the time non-gaming communities were looking for a Slack alternative, they just defaulted to Discord because 90% of their target audience already had the client running in the background.
The model thought for over 5 minutes to produce this. It's not quite photorealistic (some parts are definitely "off"), but this is definitely a significant leap in complexity.
The model thought for over 5 minutes to produce this. It's not quite photorealistic (some parts are definitely "off"), but this is definitely a significant leap in complexity.
I always enjoyed D’Angelo Barksdale’s interpretation from The Wire:
> D’Angelo: "He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it—all that shit matters. Like at the end of the book, you know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right? You can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are, and what happened before is what really happened.
> And it don’t matter that some fool say he different ’cause the only thing that make him different is that he say it. But it ain’t the truth. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did. And because he wasn't willing to get real with the story, it caught up to him."
> Inmate: "So you're saying he couldn't get over?"
> D’Angelo: "No, I’m saying he was who he was. They found him out. They found him out in the end. And that’s what it is. You can’t get over. You can’t even get out."
The grandfathering clause is the tell. If these drones were an active national security threat, they wouldn't let civilians keep flying them.
This looks like industrial policy masquerading as defense in order to clear the board for domestic manufacturers just as the Pentagon starts handing out contracts to politically connected players.
Case in point: Unusual Machines just secured a massive Army contract for drone motors. Their advisor and major shareholder? Donald Trump Jr. [0]. Banning the import of foreign "critical components" conveniently forces the market into their funnel.
Fair point, but it's hard to ignore the timing. Netanyahu literally just called TikTok "the most important purchase going on right now" and described social media as a "weapon" to secure Israel's influence in the US [1].
When you see a massive donor to the IDF and Israeli causes like Larry Ellison leading the consortium to buy it right after those comments, dismissing it as a conspiracy is ignorant considering they're basically saying the quiet part out loud.
If you’re interested in accurate examples of visual effects of hallucinogens, check out /r/Replications. Some of them are shockingly accurate. Here are some good examples:
How would LLMs ever be able to attend classes at the right time/place, assuming the classes are in-person and not remote? Seems like an odd and irrelevant criticism.