I personally learn more and create more and generally live a richer social and intellectual life when I have extended periods off work.
I don't think AI directly leads to some kind of post scarcity UBI utopia, but if we did reach a post scarcity UBI utopia, I think life would be much better for many people and not the bleak dystopia the author finds. I don't think needing to go to work is driving most people's social lives; if anything, needing to work all the time is taking away people's social lives and the energy to maintain them.
I think we would need to mandate to send people off for a period of time to fighting wars in muddy jungle swamps and choking and killing each other with bare hands for that society to work. Its already visible today, people in first world countries seem to think lifes too hard burn it all down even though they live better than the rest of the world, and the rest of history. People start imagining oppressions when they don't have real oppressions.
I posted a link to an online game I made in the comments here once, and immediately got all kinds of good and bad traffic.
Some people liked my work, found me on LinkedIn and sent a connection with a positive message. Other people tried every which way to SQL inject or attack the site, posted slurs in every available input, etc.
Someone copied the site and hosted their own version with a couple minor changes. I only found that one because they had left one of the links in, which gave me referring traffic from their copy.
All that from one HN comment, very much pre-AI too, not to mention the standard daily slew of requests probing for what I assume are known vulnerabilities in Wordpress or PHP.
The internet is a floodgate of different actors, many of which are automated, and a link posted somewhere like HN opens the valve especially wide.
Fine tuning is a huge deal. I made some simple games and spent a lot of time on fine tuning little details about the movement trying to nail the right "feeling". The feeling of Mario's movement in Mario 64 is excellent. That feeling immediately makes the game fun even when just jumping around aimlessly.
It's very difficult to get right. Even with the exact same programming logic, tiny tweaks to certain numbers around velocity, acceleration, friction, impulse, etc all can have a huge impact on feel. So even without changing anything besides a single static value here or there you can make the game feel very different. (and then of course you can also add more logic and tweak things endlessly, like adding coyote time, jumping higher when you hold the button, nudging the player slightly into place instead of stopping flat if they are grazing an object... and then other things like sounds and animations can themselves completely change the feel without changing the systems at all)
Feel is also something that is very subjective. Some people might like something that feels very tight and responsive, some people might like something that feels more floaty or forgiving. I tweaked one simple game I made to be a bit quicker and tighter, which caused more casual players to feel it was too hard and quickly stop playing, but more competitive players got highly engaged and played over and over to climb the leaderboard.
I'm always surprised at the opposite. We have such distinct ethnicities. It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
>It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
Here in Belgium my grandma was first to go work 2 municipalities away. Her parents were farmers.
She cried when she came back and swore she would not go back the next day. Such a distant place was traveling to the end of the world to her i guess.
Later they traveled to the south of france by bus and such but they never went beyond a neighbouring country. Still it's a thing her parents could only have dreamed of.
I think people have a bias by which they forget the massive technological advancements of recent years on one hand.
And see the stories of travelers of the distant past on the norm on the other hand rather than things written about because they were so rare and interesting.
Most people stayed put untill you could pinpoint their location based on their genome and it influenced who you can get donor organs from. They repeatedly developed local cultures, languages and dialects in doing so.
>But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Those are not ethnic groups. The Flemish, the Vilamovians, the Germans, the Basques, the irish are examples of ethnic groups.
Idk if it's intentional but there seems to be this progressive shift/push that pushed nation to mean state and now makes it so some start using ethnicity instead of racial categorisation (which is a vague often even more arbitrary thing)
By DNA there is rarely any non-mixed population of ethnic groups. That applies both to maternal(unless interbreeding is a preference) and paternal lineages, as people are quite mixed, but borders of cultures and beliefs(in various myths - including about their ancestry) is what is holding societies together.
By appearance admixture is the one that defines looks and that includes racial look and it is question of mere 3 generations for descendants to look like anyone else around them, as that is where admixture differences are washed out.
USA has a lot of issues in this matter, like with "one blood drop rule" that is still used in definitions of races and also cultural war issue, which is affecting rest of the world in these matters not to mention taboo subject of races.
> It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
It feels like it for you because you are used to man-made definitions of "race". US is for some historical reason a very race-aware culture.
Skin color for example is mostly related to exposure to the sun. When you go south in Northern hemisphere people become darker. But you call them "black" or "brown" for some reason. Or Africa is a giant continent. You call all the different people on it "black". They are just darker because they've adapted to the sun through generations.
US historically has people that have migrated from different continents. I live in a country (Turkey) where everyone is historically "mixed". There are blonde people, dark people, people with small eyes and large eyes. But they are all the same group of people. We're practically blind to superficial differences you call "race" or even ethnicity.
Also "mixed" doesn't mean the average color between black and white. They can have a dominant phenotype.
That’s because you’re holding a particular snapshot of a race in your mind. If you really think about it, a lot of people are intensely mixed. Most African-Americans, a significant portion of white annericans, all Hispanics, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and all of South Asia are racially mixed. That’s probably half the world’s population.
We could argue a long time about what counts as "mixed" or as a "race", but there are definitely genetic clusters[0]. I don't think it's that surprising given fast travel is a relatively recent invention. The clusters will probably become less distinct over time.
The point I’m trying to make is these genetic clusters are from a particular snapshot of time when we decided to classify these. Each of those clusters is already a combination of a smaller number of clusters that would have existed in a previous snapshot. And I’m not talking about a snapshot from prehistoric times more along the scale of a few centuries.
>these genetic clusters are from a particular snapshot of time when we decided to classify these
Not even. No 'races' as commonly understood are defined based on a snapshot of genetic clusters. The concept predates modern genetics or knowledge of DNA. Races are complex social constructions based on appearance, language, ethnicity, etc. etc.
All these are arbitrary. The genetic distance between a European with a high percentage of neanderthal DNA and that of some African populations is probably more comparable than some might expect. And whether we should consider Neanderthals a separate species, is again, probably more debatable than some might expect.
What makes a "race" is basically just total nonsense. Arguably there should be many "races" in Africa given the genetic diversity.
> We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races.
> I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect? Historically travel between the more obvious-by-skin-color-and-features ethnically-different groups has been slow and hard with some exceptions.
So you'd expect to see the lines get erased first among groups that started out closest together, and that seems to match with Europe some and especially the US where the English/Irish/Italian/German/Spanish/etc flavors of "white" all frequently ended up in the same cities. You also see more broader mixes in the US since it's historically been more open for, and attractive to, the sort of immigration that would produce it than the "home" countries for many of those ethnicities.
Even when you have a diverse total population like in the US, you only get a few shots per generation for a person of background A to have kids with one of background B, so it's gonna be really really slow, even before factoring in cultural/political factors that have generally actively discouraged it (or made it illegal in living memory!). Even the mixing of white-European ethnicities was often quite controversial. But as it became more common most Americans lost the ability to even recognize the differences, since they were more subtle than "skin color."
Give it 400 years of affordable air travel and it could look very different in countries with historical or future high levels of in-migration.
I have the original trilogy's original version on VHS still, and just recently watched them. I would say they hold up very well and weren't really in need of any post release changes or updates. The effects look great today compared to some other movies that actually came out later, probably because Star Wars used more practical effects vs some early Sci-Fi CGI that ended up not aging as well.
The changes are mostly just window dressings around the original footage, like extra CGI in transition scenes. They don't really change much of the core movie experience. It does end up causing some funny side effects though. Like when the main characters move from one place to another you'll see a splashy dinosaur like creature or fancy robot, but once they actually arrive in the scene the background falls back to the original with a lot less of that added CGI action.
The gist of it though is I take a prompt, expand it into a json blob specifying structure/palette/positioning of elements/etc, feed that into a diffusion model to output a few choices. Once I lock in a choice I take the pixel output + json blob and use it as input into followup pages. The json helps preserve the brand across multiple pages.
Once I have all the inputs I take their corresponding image+json blobs and feed them into an agent to create a web implementation.
For image models, diffui currently uses gpt-image-2.5, mai-image-2.6, and very, very rarely a post-trained version of flux 2 dev I've made for web design, though that one will be deprecated soon.
On my older android phone I always have problems watching anything with bluetooth headphones adding so much lag that the video gets very desynced with the audio. So I will continue to use wired headphones (now via usb-c adapter since the dedicated port is gone)
My 2016 Toyota Corolla has a 1.5 second audio lag and it’s my only issue with the vehicle. No clean way to update or upgrade just the Bluetooth component either.
It looks really good in the video uploaded, but when I tried it myself it didn't look the same and was hard to tell what was going on. Not sure what the issue is.
Same here. The video looks cool, but what I see is much messier and hard to identify shapes and objects. Tried on latest Brave and Firefox on Arch Linux.
Rhys is the developer of the video version, a person named Miguel wrote the version that was linked with source code. The CONTRACT.md in Miguel's version suggests AI usage, as does commit history (I'm not a zealot about this, but I do note it). I think Rhys's version is more handcrafted, but also much less accessible, being pay-to-play and being delivered in obfuscated WASM.
I loved math, chemistry, and physics, but I hated biology for some similar reasons to the author.
In chemistry or physics I felt like I was actively problem solving, learning about systems and how to manipulate them. By contrast in my biology class I felt like all I did was memorize different names of things.
In college chemistry I enjoyed lab work and I've always loved the outdoors and the natural world, so maybe bio would have been a good fit for me in some ways... but I never took another biology related course after the first one turned me completely off the subject.
In contrast, I loved biology and felt its applications call to me, and it took me like five years after struggling through calculus to go "Oh, that's what that's for."
I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer.
I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.
Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.
Except staying on the edge costs exactly the same as not, when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. The problem is that some can afford to lock their capital in the hardware (via one-time investment) and some do not.
R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.
> ...when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account.
When taking the resale value of used kit on the second-hand market into account, one must also take into account the hassle of selling on the second-hand market.
For me? Personally? That hassle absolutely eliminates any money I would get from any plausible sale price. If I'm getting rid of used kit, it's going to be as donations to people I personally know who will come and pick it up at the agreed upon time.
Yes and I seriously doubt gps insinuation that resale could make up for the price premium of top of the line components when they were consistently beat by the next years significantly cheaper mid range components.
I thought about upgrading my macbook, but I have the M1 Max and it still doesn't feel slow, so I decided it'll probably last another two years. That said, now I feel like this price raise is maybe permanent. If so it will definitely eat into computer makers profits, people will not be upgrading nearly as often.
I ordered a new CPU on sale a while back, right when the memory prices started spiking. I didn't even know RAM was going up in price. Realized the CPU needed a new motherboard and ram so I ordered the motherboard, started looking at ram and realized it would cost almost as much as the Mobo and CPU put together. Cancelled the orders because I wasn't intending a big expensive upgrade.
What I have is still fine, though I do regret cancelling now.
I upgraded a year ago and I bought a bunch of extra RAM because it was "so cheap", why not. Man did I get lucky, I got it right before the price hikes started.
Same, my desktop is a top end full of ram beast that I thought I overpaid for because motherboards had gone up. Bought everything before the surge. Past me was damn lucky. Wish I had bought some stock tho.
I don't think AI directly leads to some kind of post scarcity UBI utopia, but if we did reach a post scarcity UBI utopia, I think life would be much better for many people and not the bleak dystopia the author finds. I don't think needing to go to work is driving most people's social lives; if anything, needing to work all the time is taking away people's social lives and the energy to maintain them.
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