DavesWorld's recent activity
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Comment on Some observations about some of the conversations here in ~tildes
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Comment on GPT-4o in ~tech
DavesWorld (edited )Link ParentWay back, when CGI was still new, there was this whole segment of "movie lovers" who were vehemently opposed to it. Now, by new CGI, I mean Spielberg dinosaurs new. I eventually decided the...- Exemplary
Way back, when CGI was still new, there was this whole segment of "movie lovers" who were vehemently opposed to it. Now, by new CGI, I mean Spielberg dinosaurs new.
I eventually decided the anti-CGI folks were basically in favor of randomness. They called it “organic.” They wanted the “organic nature” of how the light would only be just right for that brief window of time where the Earth and Sun were aligned just so. Never mind that the whole film crew (from director on down) would race to set up a shot to take advantage of that “organic” moment while praying for good weather; that was still better apparently. To have to roll the dice to get what you want on film. To have to sometimes give up and try again the next day, after the universe rotated back into that "organic" position they liked so much.
It turns out, CGI's main advantage was it gave directors more control over the frame. Allowing the director to decide just what she wants the light to be, to use this take even though there was some issue in the background (which they can erase with CGI and thus save for use), and so on. Sure CGI lets empty-headed directors say crap like “big explosion, right here” or “three eyed alien waving its arms while running after the car” or whatever, but it also enables all those things Youtubers desperate for content will mine from DVD behind-the-scenes discs and throw up as a revelation. Stuff where you see “oh, Wolf of Wall Street had CGI in basically every frame we were given.
Control is a big thing mature creative AI technology will give creators. CGI gave that control only by sitting dozens upon dozens of humans in front of bank after bank of computers to twiddle and coax it out of the aether. AI is going to open up control in a way that changes everything about storytelling presentation.
The tech is continuing to mature. At some point, you’ll be able to shape an AI voice the way a director can shape a human actor’s performance. “More passion, more fire, let’s go again.” Having a conversation with the (human) actor, while hoping they understand you and do what you ask, only to find what you thought was clear was different from what they took from it, and you all have to keep trying until you get there. Versus tapping in some commands and letting run again to see how that works.
There’s a semi-famous story from Wrath of Kahn. Nicholas Meyer was the director, and he wanted William Shatner to stop doing Shatner-Kirk stuff with the performance. He wanted some acting, not the Shatner shtick. But he felt having that conversation with Shatner wouldn’t work, would backfire. And then he noticed that if Shatner got bored or tired with the scene, the shtick wore off and some actual acting came out.
So Meyer had to “wear” Shatner down.
Take after take after take, Meyer knowing full well they were all bullshit wasted takes. Whole cast and crew, everyone on the film set, just spinning through the motions while Meyer had to play this little unspoken game with Shatner to eventually get the performance he wanted.
Meyer also talked about Ricardo Montalban too, who he was even more intimidated by since Meyer was a very new director and Montalban had a huge filmography of acting credits. Meyer was afraid to try to direct Montalban, and when he decided he had no choice but to try and broach the subject, go into how exactly he wanted Montalban to perform, he was happily surprised to find Montalban was a creative professional quite willing to work with the director to find a performance Meyer wanted.
Not every Montalban is going to be kind and generous and approachable. How many "big stars" are above taking any comments from anyone, least of all a director? Ego is a thing, and ego fucks shit up all the time.
So much of storytelling when you move past writing is collaborative. And that’s fine. Not only is nothing wrong with it, but it can even produce magic when the right people get together and collaborate on a project. However, just because multiple folks are involved doesn’t automatically make it better than a solo project; cinema is rife with tales of meddling that screwed stories up quite badly.
Kind of how “organic” by not using CGI to just dictate whatever elements you decided were important isn’t automatically better. What matters is what ends up on screen. Sometimes organic gives a better result, sometimes control does.
Many of the key “storytelling skills” once you get past writing don’t actually involve storytelling. They involve people manipulation. Charm, charisma. Being able to interact with folks. Being able to give orders when you’re in charge and have them followed, rather than dismissed as the cast and crew ignore you because they hate you or think you’re (insert any number of things people think about each other) and so on.
James Cameron famously went over to England to shoot Aliens and had a hell of a time dealing with the English crew. They didn’t know who this American kid was. Cameron was young at the time, and Terminator hadn’t hit England yet, so as far as they were concerned he was a clueless nobody. Worse, a filthy American. -Edit- Even though he's Canadian, people forget since he lives and works in America.
Never mind that he was the director, they just weren’t very interested in working with him. So they were difficult and there were problems and delays and all that simply because they weren’t willing to work collaboratively out of personal reasons. He finally had to enlist others to help him convince the local cast and crew he did know what he was doing and cooperate with him.
Cameron isn’t a fuzzy-feelings people person it turns out. That part’s quite famous too. Loads of people who’ve worked with Cameron have decided he’s not a people person. But you can’t argue he’s a bad storyteller or bad filmmaker; the man’s proven he’s a cinematic genius.
But what shows up in any story about him and his body of work? “Cast and crew from his projects say he’s difficult to work with.” Just because he’s not fuzzy-feelie with people, he’s “difficult.” And further, only the fact that he is that good at filmmaking and storytelling allows him to overcome this difficulty. This handicap. Which, again, is nothing more than not being charming.
If you took everything Cameron is except the people part, and dropped him into a Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise type, people would fall all over themselves at every opportunity to herald his boundless genius. “Wow, he knows so much about film and story and how to create an amazing, breathtaking piece of cinema. He’s so easy to talk to, so wonderful on set, it just lets everything flow so well.”
That’d be the story, the line. Because he’d be charming, the only difference. He’d have that people skill thingy, instead of “only” being a cinematic genius.
One of the things a mature creative AI is going to do is remove things like that from the equation. Or, at least, from some of the equations. Some projects, some of them student or newcomer projects while others might be big time major projects, are going to come about because someone similar to Cameron won’t have to successfully pass skill checks to charm cast and crew.
That charmless director will be able to directly order his AI actors, his AI voices, his AI everything, while creating. He could do all of it on a live set with real humans, but he’d have to pass those skill checks he can’t. Because people always place supreme importance on people skills, and will hold it against you hard if you don’t have them.
How many amazing storytellers have we missed out on simply because they didn’t give good meeting, didn’t have the ability to charm and dazzle in person while sitting down with a financier or actor or crew lead? How many people were just ordinary people who didn’t have the knack of manipulating others successfully who were told off and made to get out of the whole process simply over that lack and no other? How many newcomers were scared away by veterans determined to lord it over the Johnny-come-latelys?
How many stories have we missed due to people hating on people who aren't good with people? Reference Neil Gaiman's Library of Dream as a hint.
So much is going to change with mature creative AI technology. You can coax and beg and plead and try to figure out the secret sauce in how to convince an actor, a camera operator, anyone in the project, to listen to you … or you can push buttons and get the exact performance you want, you need, to complete a project and be able to show it to others.
Right now that sounds silly because the tech isn’t mature so of course you have to have humans involved. Only a human can give a human performance.
Now.
What about next year? Next decade? At some point, the tech will mature and first with the voice, and then later with the visuals tied to the voice, you’ll have AI actors audiences are perfectly content with. Who they’ll respond to, react to.
Does that mean we don’t need human actors? No. It’s just another option, another tool in the box. We use CGI stunt people right now for stunts that are too dangerous to do live, for example. Student directors, low budget directors, socially inept directors, time pressed directors, and more, will all have a lot of use for a cinematic toolbox that lets them shape their ideas into a finished forms.
Another possibility; lots of modern audiences feel the visual is permanently tied to the character. Meaning, whichever actor was cast is who should always own that role. Actors age, actors retire, actors die. It didn't used to be a thing that you couldn't replace an actor when they moved on for whatever reason, but these days social media melts down just because a key actor dies and "it's disrespectful to replace them."
The show must go on isn't a modern sentiment apparently. So what if we endrun around it. Human actor "wearing" an AI generated mask on screen. Sure we cast a cast, but we didn't cast their likenesses, we cast their performance. We, the project, own the likeness because the project creates it. James Bond could always look like Bond, for example; and extend that example just as far across however many other franchises or characters as tickles your fancy. Sure actors would come and go, and you'd still have "well I like the Craig Bond better" and all that, but at least Bond would still look like Bond which seems to be pretty important to a lot of folks.
Plus it would let actors focus on being actors, and let productions focus on great actors. Instead of beauty. When you create the likeness for all the same cost in time and effort as you'd spend on hair and makeup, you can cast whoever the hell you feel is best. Irrespective of what they look like. That popular complaint about looks and beauty outweighing talent would be nipped right in the bud, and it'd be lovely because it's quite tiresome to put up with in my opinion.
Bottom line, anyone who puts in the time and considerably effort to learn storytelling can probably get to a point where they can write a story. Or a script. But right now, that’s where the fun stops. You have to be a people person of some form to be able to take it further. Even selling it off to someone who is a people person who’ll take the story to the next form requires people skills.
Back in the day, CGI was this scary thing that was ruining movies. AI, from images to voices to even text, is the new CGI; it’s scary and not understood and it’s “ruining everything.” But it’s going to open up the cinematic palette in new ways. Same as how CGI opened up the filmmaking palette in new ways.
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Comment on How did people correct for inaccurate time pieces in the past? in ~humanities.history
DavesWorld LinkBefore accurate timekeeping devices were invented, life didn't revolve around accurate timekeeping. Your boss, your friends, people in general, didn't say "be here at 10am" or whatever. They'd say...- Exemplary
Before accurate timekeeping devices were invented, life didn't revolve around accurate timekeeping. Your boss, your friends, people in general, didn't say "be here at 10am" or whatever. They'd say "after breakfast" or "at dawn" or "before dusk" or whatever.
That was enough, because you lived in a community and no one had accurate time. You all were used to rising and retiring in coordination with the sun, using it to delineate "time" for your purposes.
IIRC, it started to matter with widespread travel. First navigation at sea; accurate time is needed to do calculations regarding your longitudinal position.
The British government offered prize money to anyone who could offer a method to accurately determine longitude at sea, because navigation is kind of important to successful sea travel. Especially when navigational mistakes can add weeks or months to an already lengthy voyage where your stocks of needed water and food and nutrients are running out. They offered those prizes because sailors (and admirals, whom they actually cared about) were dying in shipwrecks and lost-at-sea incidents.
Then railroads decided they wanted it, since they had schedules. Communities often had "local" time, but that's crap when you have (insert some large number) of localities you travel between regularly, such as trains do. Noon (defined then, and now even though we ignore it, as the moment the sun is at its highest point above the Earth) was different in different places because the planet is round and rotating. Time zones came about as part of that solution.
So in many American communities, the first local timekeeping was often the railroad station, or at least due to it. From there, it's not tough to see how the townsfolk (often around the Big Clock) started to refer to it.
Then timekeeping continued to get miniaturized and began showing up in watches of all shapes and sizes. Suddenly well-to-do folk had them, like town bankers and shopkeepers. The technology advanced, becoming smaller and cheaper and more efficient, and a watch of some sort stopped being a luxury item and slowly became a thing someone could reasonably own. The way they'd own a pocket knife or horse or pistol, they could own a watch.
Eventually, more people had access to "time" than didn't, and time started to become a thing that society referenced. When no one has a watch, it's stupid to try to say "be here at 10." But when most people do have a watch, suddenly it's realistic to demand work (or whatever) starts at 10.
By the time mass communications came along, timekeeping had been established. Society accepted it, and just assumed time was this ordinary thing. After all, basically everyone had access to time in some form or another. Even if they had to turn their heads and look at the Big Clock in town.
Until these days, where basically no one stops to consider just how damned complicated it is to get time. How hard it once was, how much technology and ingenuity has just kind of invisibly gone into timekeeping. GPS relies on time; atomic clocks make it possible to use time signals to accurately calculate position down to a very precise measurement.
All so your boss can be an asshole by looking meaningfully at his watch when you walk in ten past nine.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-chronicle-of-timekeeping-2006-02/
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Comment on A British nurse was found guilty of killing seven babies. Did she do it? in ~health
DavesWorld LinkThe whole thing is a witch hunt. Textbook witchhunt. Some doctor decided, completely without any medical evidence whatsoever, that "she did it, she had to have done it, she's the one." Again, no...The whole thing is a witch hunt. Textbook witchhunt.
Some doctor decided, completely without any medical evidence whatsoever, that "she did it, she had to have done it, she's the one." Again, no evidence. No bruising, no witnesses who saw her do anything (or not do something that she should have been doing), no findings in her belongings or house, no injuries to her or the infants, nothing. No evidence.
Just a huge string of people that all track back to that one asshole doctor who decided "it has to be her." A doctor who ran around the hospital, and then later the case, repeating "it had to be her."
Somehow, this jackass gaslit not just his department, not just his hospital, not just his regional medical area's roster, but a police department, and the assigned courts.
No evidence.
I don't care how many kids died. I really don't. It's not that I'm unsympathetic, it's just that you need evidence to convict someone. Period. It's not complicated.
If you're convinced she's the one, even if you have no evidence, then you can have her reassigned. I might even agree to stand idly by as you conduct some sort of political campaign to run her out of medicine. After all, she can get another job, find another way to live her life. Yes it would suck to be innocent and railroaded out of your career, but it's just a job.
Not life in prison.
One jackass decided it has to be her, and has succeeded in destroying her life. With no evidence.
I wonder why I have such a hard time putting any faith in government or authority? What could it be? Hmm.... Oh, I know. Power corrupts. But absolute power is kinda neat, so long as you're the one with it.
One jackass went looking for power, and it turned out he had enough to destroy someone and even get applauded for doing it.
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Comment on Fitness recommendations to gradually increase mobility while recovering from chronic illness in ~health
DavesWorld LinkThis feels like an issue a doctor, preferably your doctor, should be listened to on. But, assuming any medical conditions are covered and controlled by proper treatment that don't present some...- Exemplary
This feels like an issue a doctor, preferably your doctor, should be listened to on.
But, assuming any medical conditions are covered and controlled by proper treatment that don't present some sort of medical obstacle to your activity levels, just start getting more active.
Take it slow. It's going to be a climb. Right now, getting up and walking to the mailbox might leave you needing to catch your breath. Okay, just accept it. The human body, again absent medical obstacles, is adaptable. This week, the goal is to walk to the mailbox. And you don't set a schedule for when any sort of "next" occurs. You just work on mailbox walking.
When mailbox walking ain't no thing, maybe you walk to the corner. Or you walk to and from the mailbox a few times. Just start building your activity level. Eventually you're taking a daily walk of the generally recommended length (usually about 30mins) and if your only goal is general activity for health, congrats you're there at that point.
The key thing in this is to not set schedules. People love to hold out for perfect, or to hammer themselves over not being perfect instantly. They'll go "but I can't even make the mailbox, and I've been trying for two weeks." So? Why is that an issue? If you're being medically treated, and the doctor hasn't said "oh, and don't go being active", then you're just out of shape.
It happens. It's not a sin, you're not a bad person, you're not anything except someone whose body has adapted to not being used. Adapting it to usage takes time. Some people will take longer, or shorter, than others to do that. Because people are different. It has nothing to do with anything else. Focus inwardly. As long as you're being self honest, and genuinely trying to work on your activity levels, you'll get somewhere. It's inevitable due to how the human body adapts.
Again, as I opened with, doctor. If you have/had medical issues that pushed you into inactivity, and the doctor has treated them successfully, then you just start adjusting your activity upward. If you're crippled physically in some way (could be hormone levels, could be a missing foot, whatever) it's disingenuous to protest "but I can't walk, I can't do things" because those issues would constitute a medical obstacle which the doctor should have primary control over as you deal with everything.
But once the doctor has fixed anything fixable, and said there's no medical reason to not be more active, and you decide you want to be more active, you just do it. Day in, day out. So many people want some magic solution that involves less work, less effort. That's easier.
Sadly, magic only exists in story. The rest of us have to put out. I could have a body like The Rock. Except I'd have to (putting aside the steroids) closely monitor my diet and put in three to five hours a day in the gym, and those hours couldn't be me standing around pretending to lift. I'd have to actually get my ass under bars and planted in machines pressing and puffing and lifting. I'd have to put in the work.
Dwayne Johnson has, even if he's cheated with steroids. Even the steroids didn't magically give him that body. They helped, but he still clocked the hours to get there. He wants it, and put in the time, and got there. It's no different for anyone else, even if their goal is just to be able to walk without panting. You set yourself the goal, and you decide you're going to honor your own wishes and not put yourself in a position where you're lying to yourself about what you want.
Do you want to be more active? Great! Now all you have to do is something, every day. Maybe it's making it to the mailbox, and maybe at some day in the future it'll be you heading out to a local park each and every morning to walk for half an hour. It's your call, and it's as easy as being honest to yourself about it.
Anyone who isn't a doctor telling you that it's impossible is probably wrong, and very possibly an asshole. If the doctor says no, listen. But if the doctor says "you're cleared for activity", then you just start. Every day, something.
Then your body does what it does and recovers and adapts just a little bit, so the next day is maybe just a little bit easier. And again, and again, and after many days you're strolling through the park like it ain't no thing. Maybe it happens after a month, maybe it happens after a year. No time frame. The point is the activity, not the goal.
I feel strongly on this issue because my father has spent decades pretending he can't do shit. And being angry about it. He doesn't seem to grasp the concept of "a little each day." He had a tree fall in his yard, and had them chip it in place to avoid paying a haulage fee, and then called me up upset over "how impossible" it was to get rid of this huge mountain of wood chips.
And I mean huge. It was basically as big as a two car garage. Taller than the roof of a car. I told him to just move some every day, but he couldn't see how that would accomplish anything. So I had to spend over a week putting in an hour, forty-five minutes, that sort of thing, with a shovel and wheelbarrow.
Yeah, the first two days, it didn't look like a lot had happened unless you remembered how big the pile was. By the third day, I'd carved out a very obvious gap where chips had been taken away. After I finished spreading them all around the property (they went everywhere, seriously; if it was ground and not in use for something else, it probably got chips), he was glad they were gone, but didn't learn a Godamn thing because he still looks at any sort of project around the house as impossible if he can't do it start-to-finish within a very finite amount of time.
Meanwhile he can't bend over, shuffles when he walks, and despite the best efforts of his doctors doesn't really have any sort of healthy mobility. He gets around, but not easily. And actually doing stuff, no. And it's not because he's old, he's been like this for a long time, well before he got old.
So just chip away at your activity levels. Today mailbox, on some tomorrow to be determined after we're there, it'll be daily walks in the park. Between here and there are a lot of little steps, and they all happen one after the other, spread out day by day. It's no more complicated than that.
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Comment on Seattle’s law mandating higher pay for food delivery workers is a case study in backfire economics in ~finance
DavesWorld Link ParentAn excellent point. The economics of capitalism holds "the market" will find the best solutions. If people being paid a living wage means the "solution" isn't feasible anymore, then was it a...Personally I find that some of the food delivery services had started out so low and with various introductory offers that it misrepresents the real cost of that service and it's not generally economical for most people to actually be using very often. There are certainly some people who can take advantage of it and the economics of it work due to their different circumstances, but for the average it's literally paying someone to drive around for you.
An excellent point. The economics of capitalism holds "the market" will find the best solutions. If people being paid a living wage means the "solution" isn't feasible anymore, then was it a solution in the first place? Or was it exploitation? Except most capitalists don't give a fuck if it's exploitive, they just want the money they make from people too desperate or uninformed to be able to say no to the job.
What would competition for a food delivery job look like? After all, there's a couple different services now aren't there? All gunning for that same market; the market of people who want food delivered affordably. And as far as I know, all the services are basically just competing on price, except they can't do much of that anymore since employees are wising up and venture capitalists want some return on the investment.
What the fuck happened to the other things they could compete on? That they're so upset they "can't compete" anymore if they're not allowed to lowball employees? And if they're lowballing staff, they're probably looking for ways to lowball the restaurants too. Which I believe they pretty much are, when they charge "service fees" that don't get split with or passed on to the restaurant which provides the food.
What would actual food delivery competition look like? For a while, until they got in huge trouble for it over being unsafe, Domino's Pizza was "30 minutes or less, guaranteed." It was their entire marketing scheme. Then they landed in the news when their delivery drivers started getting into accidents, and the media ran with it, and eventually Domino's was like "nope, we're done, no more of that" and the 30 minute thing went away.
But there are ways to speed up delivery without breaking the law or being unsafe. If they could find ways to take time out of the order and prep time? Like, if it takes an average of four minutes for the order to flow from the service to the restaurant, and they could cut that down to 30 seconds, that'd be quicker. If it's usually three to four minutes between the time a driver reaches the restaurant and is then back in the car with the food leaving, finding ways to pull time out of that would be quicker.
Stuff like that. But, stuff like that would require actual work. The services would have to actually get involved in their business, in what they're doing. As opposed to just having hired a web UI team and a marketing crew, like they do now while they rake in venture capital and steal tips from drivers, where they're doing basically nothing to innovate.
I mean, one of my favorite books is Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. It opens with a pizza delivery driver. And you can see Stephenson actually sat down and spent some level of effort plotting out how it would work. Because in the book, which was written back around the time when Domino's was still 30 minutes or less, the Mafia ran the pizza place Hiro (the opening character) worked for, and there's this whole setup about how the head of the Mafia is going to be incredibly upset if his drivers fuck up and don't get the pizza there on time. Not ordinary upset, but Mafia upset.
So the cars are all special Costa Nostra pizza delivery cars, with upgraded performance and traffic scan and special tires and so on. The restaurants have a delivery driver dedicated pull-up, and the car and restaurant both have connections for auto-loading of pizza into the cars, electronic handshaking between the order system and the car and the car's navigation.
The book was written in nineteen ninety fucking two. Before smartphones had even been dreamed up. Before dot com had really been dreamed up. And he'd figured out how you might could go about competing in delivery. Via investment, in both equipment and employees.
What do today's smartphone enabled delivery services do? Well, they take orders and email them to restaurants, and give the driver mapping to find the restaurant and customer. But that's it, except it turns out what they want to charge for that (somewhere in the area of a minimum of $25 above and beyond the base cost of the food itself) isn't agreeable to consumers.
Where are the supposed efficiencies capitalism promises will always surface when competitors compete?
Oh, that's right. They just pay hard-core wealthy playground think tanks to write articles sulking at the very few local areas they didn't manage to get the government drinking the Kool-aid enough to just let them use up employees like dishrags. Whining about how it's not fair, how local government 'ruined' a market with meddling.
It's like Billy Ray Valentine wisely opined once upon a time. "You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people." That might also be the best way to maybe get them thinking about change.
Now we just need a plan to make more rich people poor. Well, one can dream.
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Comment on California says restaurants must bake all of their add-on fees into menu prices in ~finance
DavesWorld Link ParentAmerica is the country that didn't purchase a third-of-a-pound burger because somewhere around half the consumers thought it was smaller than the quarter pounder. I wish I was making that up....America is the country that didn't purchase a third-of-a-pound burger because somewhere around half the consumers thought it was smaller than the quarter pounder.
I wish I was making that up.
Whenever you hear about something, and think "but surely people can't be, wouldn't be, that stupid" just remind yourself yes. Yes they can. And yes they are. And, definitely, yes they will. You'll never go broke betting on the stupidity of humans.
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Comment on How the US is destroying young people’s future | Scott Galloway in ~life
DavesWorld LinkScott is entirely correct. However, and he covers this, most of the issues he highlights are unlikely to change because the people benefiting from how things have become, how they are now, don't...Scott is entirely correct. However, and he covers this, most of the issues he highlights are unlikely to change because the people benefiting from how things have become, how they are now, don't want them to change. And those same people have the power, financial and political and social, to prevent the change. To keep things beneficial to themselves.
There are a lot of ways to break that logjam, and some of them get quite disruptive. Even violent. Which would be unfortunate, but I'm firmly of the belief that when you push someone too far they will snap. And when they do, some of them lash out, will decide they have nothing left to lose. When you're down to rock bottom, sometimes you roll the dice. After all, what can you lose when there's nothing left to take?
The way around all those unfortunate, unhappy outcomes for our society, for the hundreds of millions of us, is for the squished and taken-advantage-of people to change the game. To change the rules. Doing that without violence and dangerous disruption requires people to get politically active.
Now, if the people currently in charge resist the politics and change the rules further to keep a suddenly politically active youth sector from having any impact, then we just end back up at those disruptive, violent solutions. But they might not cheat that far, so maybe it's worth the shot to try? How do we try?
I'm not a fan of social media. It's used for so much horribleness and pain. But it can be harnessed for good.
People, especially young people, spend so much time online. So much time glued to their phones. They scroll and scroll and doomscroll. They post pics and comments and fire shares back and forth, they tweet and retweet, all of that. Right now, it's almost entirely about frivolous bullshit. Movies, people they're laughing at, favorite songs, what their lunch looks like, the latest scandals, on and on.
Change the narrative. Make voting the thing young people scream and shame about online. Because we know it works. People shame each other over fashions and pronouns and all this shit that doesn't affect the root cause of why things are so fucked up and so bad for so many. The George Floyd protests saw protestors using social media live on the ground as they protested, maneuvering to avoid or delay interactions with cop formations, to find each other and grow their numbers, and so on.
Do that with voting. Start shaming each other for not voting. For not registering. For not bothering to exercise the franchise. I'm not saying give up on all the bullshit that's apparently so fun, where you laugh and shame each other for wearing the wrong shoes or going to the wrong parties or whatever. But add voting and politics into that.
And I don't mean issues. That's bullshit unless you vote. It's easy to bitch about issues, you just do it from your phone. You mostly just preach to the choir, because you're talking to your people who will agree with and validate you for the most part. Everyone circle jerks about "yeah, shit sucks and it's bad and we should do something. ... ... So, who's going to John's party on Friday?"
Flip the script. Did John register to vote? Why hasn't Sally posted her "I voted" picture with her in line along with the other one with her outside the polling station wearing her "I voted" sticker? Why is Steve posting from his surf board when it's Tuesday and time to vote? What the fuck is Steve thinking, what's wrong with him? What's wrong with Sally?
Make voting the thing the non-voting generations shame each other about. That's what'll have a shot at fixing things without revolution or civil war. That's what can alter the equation, change the algorithm of the nation.
Scott covers specific issues, in the linked video (and has many others, he's an intelligent guy who knows his subjects and can seemingly discuss them at the drop of a hat). You look on Youtube and he's all over it once you're in his circle. None of the issues he points out are going to change when rich people and corporations don't want them to. Unless they're pushed to, forced to.
I'm not a fan of politicians, but the civilized solution to that is to get better politicians into the mix. Young people love to bitch about how old and out of touch so many "leaders" are. I agree. But then the kids, which in this context pretty much means anyone under 40, don't vote.
So why would "old and out of touch leaders" give a fuck what you think if you and your cohort, you and your friends, you and your siblings, you and all the people you spend time with online and off, why would they care two shits about your complaints when all you do is bitch about them on Twitter and TikTok and whatever else?
Old people vote. That's just the bottom line. They've benefited from the changes Scott highlights because they voted over the years. They show up and make it clear they want certain things, will react favorably to certain things. Since they vote, their concerns will get some level of engagement. Why would a politician wanting votes care about what non-voting people want?
Oh look, they don't.
We have several decades of evidence that they don't. What will make them change their tune? What will make them stop listening quite so hard to the money being waved at them by the wealthy and incorporated?
Voting.
Or, we can just all wait for the collapse and plan to find rifles when the discontent spills out into that kind of action. Voting would be easier. It's one day, sometimes two days, a year. It's not a big deal ... unless you don't do it. Unless you and most people in your bracket don't do it.
Then it's a huge deal, and you see what power there is that might help you is still being seized by others who use it for their own benefit.
Don't just start voting. Start shaming and shunning for not voting. If you can browbeat people over not using the right pronouns and all that, you can do it because they ignore voting and laugh it off. Shame them. Use the power of the social network for your benefit. Rally people to vote.
And you can do it from your phone. Without getting off the couch. Except for that one day each year where you do need to get up and go to the polls. One day that can make a difference, and spend the other three hundred and sixty-four badgering everyone into remembering why that day matters and what they'll be doing on it.
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Comment on ProtonMail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain in ~tech
DavesWorld Link ParentI really disagree. Power is abused. You hand power over to someone, like a government, sure the guy or department right now says something like "it's only for this purpose, just that, and come on...I really disagree. Power is abused. You hand power over to someone, like a government, sure the guy or department right now says something like "it's only for this purpose, just that, and come on it's a really good purpose."
Then that guy leaves. Or someone changes his mind. Or gets installed above him and overrules him. Or her. And so on. And other people go "well, we already have this power, so why aren't we using it?" So they do.
Years ago, way back before electronic anything had even started to become the shitshow it is now, New York installed electronic tracking into the bridge crossings and toll roads and all that. They did it only for billing purposes, so people could pay in an orderly fashion without having to stop at the booth. Have you paid your tolls? Then you can travel. Haven't and you're in the lanes or through the no-stop crossings? We send you fines.
Sounds reasonable. And even is.
Then the NYPD showed up with a request they'd been handed by a prosecutor. "We have a murder suspect, and we need to check his alibi." There was an initial pushback to handing over the information. Privacy. "But it's murder!" was the push-pushback. "Do you want murderers to go free?"
It's tough to argue against that, especially since everyone starts piping up with "yeah, fuck murderers."
So the toll authorities lost the fight, and handed the information over.
And within a year or two, the NYPD just routinely checked everyone they were investigating against toll records. Like, it was standard. The same as they pull phone records and so on. Get accused of something, and your movements are free game.
Keep in mind, this was before everyone began carrying around a locator device in their pocket. The phone knows where you are within a few feet, all the time. Or, at least, it knows where it is. And you're usually carrying the phone. If the phone's moving and being used, it's gonna take a genius lawyer (even if it's true) to manage to convince anyone that you weren't the one carrying your phone around. Plus they don't just check the location (bad enough), they pull the entire record so all your texts and posts and all that, open book. The only reason they don't have a record of the actual voice calls is that's not something the system tracks.
Yet.
Wait until some corp or phone company or whoever institutes some AI system that'll automatically index and record all your calls. They'll bill it as a convenience. "Tired of forgetting stuff? Want automatic integration with your calendar and so on? Just don't say no, don't uncheck this box, and we'll take care of the rest." Suddenly cops won't even have to ask "what were you talking about on these dates to this person?" They'll have full transcripts and recordings.
So now everyone has an electronic leash. And it's already been established all over the country that all police and prosecutors have to say is "but crime" and presto, every single movement of yours is up for scrutiny.
It always starts small. And with something "obvious." Like "for the children."
Privacy has no meaning if you poke seventeen thousand exceptions through the firewall that's supposed to shield it. The exceptions are always framed as reasonable and for a good purpose. Then, once they're established, those exceptions just become the norm and things get funneled through those holes.
Due process is supposed to examine each exception, every time, for a reason. To ensure there's no other way, that there is other evidence indicating there's a need to breach the wall and allow the leak to happen this time.
Except what's the number one thing you'll hear from a cop or prosecutor? "We don't have time for that." They hate rules. They hate "procedure." They just want carte blanche. So does the government. They'll always have a good story, but once they ram an exception through, that exception becomes standard and opens the floodgate.
Cue the people below me saying "so you want terrorists to get away with it" or "you want murderers to walk free."
Which is a strawman designed to move the point away from privacy and toward something you can't win against. What I want is rules, laws, to be followed. And those laws should not be written to turn citizens who have been convicted of no crime, or indicted of no crime absent actual evidence into suspects who have no privacy.
"We think this guy is going to do (insert excuse) stuff so we want his entire life opened to us." Okay, why do you think that? "Well, we just do, so open up. All the data, right now, and hurry the fuck up about it too."
That should not be good enough. But it often is.
Privacy advocates always get eyes rolled at them. Get heavy sighs of exasperation. People accuse them of wanting to enable anarchy and allow chaos to reign.
Then the same fucking eye rolling heavy sighing folks wonder how and why they're getting ads and coupons for baby formula when their sister only told them four hours ago she's expecting. Or, worse, wonder why they're sitting in an interrogation room and only later find out it's something stupid like "well you were in the same forum with this guy we're sure is bad, and traded messages with him, explain that."
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Comment on Are most political talks performative? in ~talk
DavesWorld LinkSocial interaction encourages virtue signaling. Sameness. Groupthink. It used to be, you were only really performing for your inner circle and a few locals, most of the time. Your town, your local...Social interaction encourages virtue signaling. Sameness. Groupthink. It used to be, you were only really performing for your inner circle and a few locals, most of the time. Your town, your local council, the people you saw at the bar or the track or the store. And they knew you, and could talk to you, and more importantly would see you regularly; all of this acted to moderate things. It's a big reason why it was much rarer for all hell to break loose over (insert some issue).
Now though, social media connects the entire world. Someone who has five followers on Twitter or whatever can post something, but somehow some "stranger" comes across it. That stranger doesn't think of you as a person, you're just some basically imaginary construct on their screen. If they knew you personally, they'd have some level of moderation in how they react. As someone who's not quite real though, they can flame on and indulge in their desire to use you.
So if that stranger likes/dislikes the post, they can amplify to their followers, and so on, and so on. All in the same fashion. Going viral is when the amplification keeps multiplying. A bunch of people bandwagoning behind other strangers who they don't really think of as actual people, just "things" on their phone.
That amplification is enormously magnified when you factor in virtue signaling. No one wants to "stand out" or "be different." They certainly don't want to "be wrong", or get "called out." Particularly not by strangers, and definitely never by many, many, many strangers. Which is what social media does; enables the mob to pivot in minutes, as the links and retweets and shares zip around the world at the speed of light.
So you have the virtue subjects, which right now include things like climate or identity. There's only one "right answer", "right thing to say" in those areas. With no nuance because social media with its limited space encourages soundbites rather than discourse. None of that encourages, or even tolerates, nuance.
So, for example, some guy who does Instagram posts of his heavy equipment business will be fucking crucified if he were, say, to post a picture of a pile of tires he's left on a job site. Maybe the caption is something like "rain started, my truck's already full, and my (heavy machine) needs fuel. I'll leave these for another day."
That's perfectly reasonable, if you stop and think for about two seconds. But social media doesn't encourage nuance. So someone comes across it and decides to ham it up for their audience, and say something like "how fucking dare you leave tires polluting the environment, don't you know how damaging that is you evil asshole?"
A bunch more jump on signaling their own virtue, because there's no nuance and they definitely don't want to be the one going "well, I mean, he said he'll be back" or something similar. No, they all just pile on with "yeah" and "fuck that guy" and "evil polluting bastard" and so on, because those posts will get likes and agreement and they want that validation, rather than becoming a target.
It all multiplies, until when that guy wakes up the next morning and checks his feed, he's become a trending topic where millions of people are like "fuck you asshole."
All because he posted something that someone else decided to virtue signal over, and it caught the gestalt just right to begin multiplying. The same way a nuclear reaction multiplies; atoms smashing into each other. Only instead of atoms, it's people with smartphones and time on their hands looking for validation from invisible online people who will like and thumbs up and retweet when they join the mob and dump on one poor guy who ran out of time on a job site.
That kind of thing happens all over social media, all the time. Most of what they pile on about isn't a big deal and isn't someone who's a cackling mustache twirling villain. But it's online, and can be retweeted and shared and commented on, and everyone wants that dopamine hit of others agreeing with them. So they pile on whatever today's, or this hour's, pile happens to be, and shit just keeps turning into huge mountains of more shit.
Politics already worked like that once mass media became a thing. Reporters had national audiences with editors who needed content and "stuff to talk about." So newspapers, tv networks, radio, whatever, they needed that stuff. Scandal and conflict and "problems" are more interesting than "everything's fine, all is well." So you started seeing reporters angling for problems rather than facts, and the problems or potential problems were what led. Until, in the era just before social media started, media considered politicians content and politicians considered media the enemy.
That transferred to social media because in the earliest days, traditional media amplified other traditional media as it began to appear on newfangled social media. The reporters covered each other, mentioned each other. Then they started realizing they could get comment from "the people" via social media cheaper than sending a reporter/crew (who they have to pay for) out to get comments. Which is why you see every news whatever leaning on Twitter and Facebook in their stories. They just sample the gestalt mob's reactions and report that as fact.
Which just amplifies the virtue signaling aspect. Drawing in more people who hear about whatever's going viral, whatever opinions the mob is amplifying, and thinking "I don't want to be different."
Basically, most people are terrified of not being accepted. They need everyone else to accept them. They can't disagree with the mob because they don't want the mob to turn on them. So everyone, online or off, normally just teaches themselves to hew to the groupthink line.
You only see chaos and social war when two opposing groupthinks clash, because both sides are investing their identities into their chosen groupthink. Each has their own segment of people they're virtue signaling to, who they don't dare offend. And, usually, offending those who aren't in their group is just an added bonus that their group will applaud.
A lot of the "hot" political topics are pushed up like this, and act in this fashion. It's why you'll see left and right sides playing to their own audiences, which is just another example of amplification of this whole trend. MAGA people can't be seen as soft or weak on liberals, and liberals can't be seen as tolerant of intolerant MAGA assholes, and that multiplies atop the actual issue, and turns into the shitstorms we call "politics" and "societal discourse" today.
And when there's a schism, not across party lines but within a large groupthink faction, that's where the hell really burns hottest. They're all virtue signaling amid their own kind, but now there's a disagreement over which virtues are best.
Do we allow for some variation in how we deal with some issue? Maybe one side thinks single occupancy bathrooms is the right way, but others think that just avoids the real issue they consider more important. So they start virtue signaling within their own faction, and people struggling to figure out which side they don't want yelling at them start panicking as they begin to get caught up in the fighting too.
Before you know it, you start seeing those schisms begin to solidify into breakaway factions as feelings get hurt and the dopamine stops flowing to be replaced by adrenaline that fuels not satisfaction but fight-or-flight. Then reporters pile into it, covering the splits and chaos, and people start to shift to virtue signal over the fighting rather than the issue. Accusing each other "you're a bad liberal" or "you're a Republican in name only" and so on.
Basically is everyone would just be more self confident, and look inward for gratification rather than outward for pats on the head, we'd all be better off. There'd be less chaos and discord. Confidence would replace desperation.
Instead, we have a global playground no different than a school playground. With factions and lines being drawn for reasons just as stupid and petty as those kids did when you were in school. Jenny wore the wrong kind of shoes, shun her. Jimmy is making the rest of us look bad in front of Coach, shun him. Felicia doesn't separate her recyclables from her trash, shun her. Frank drives a diesel truck instead of a two-seater electric, shun him.
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Comment on Most people think playing chess makes you 'smarter', but the evidence isn't clear on that in ~games.tabletop
DavesWorld LinkI feel most folks consider chess that way because chess is a good storytelling tool to indicate a character is educated, or even that the character is actually intelligent. You don't tell the...- Exemplary
I feel most folks consider chess that way because chess is a good storytelling tool to indicate a character is educated, or even that the character is actually intelligent. You don't tell the audience "this person is smart." Well, good stories don't do that. They don't have other characters wander in and say "wow, you're smart Jeb."
What they will do is try to find things that push the audience to draw the conclusion they want drawn. So things that push an assumption of "oh, that character is smart" are peppered into the story. You'll see how the character has a library, and maybe books are put in places that indicate they're actively being read. There might be a lack of sports or similar hobbies, because those are tropes that tend to push not in an intelligence direction but more in an everyman or athletic direction.
And we'll see how the character plays chess. There'll be a chess board, and not one that's packed up. Or one that's usually set up ready to start playing. Often they'll show the board in mid game of some kind.
Tropes like that permeate through cultures and start to have this kind of influence. Like how glasses are considered smart and/or nerdy and/or weird and/or outcast. You put a character in glasses and have them stammer a bit, but when they do talk they have deep information on subjects, and the audience starts to assume "okay, smart but odd." Which trickles out into reality, and people start treating actual real people who wear glasses like that too because they see so many movies and plays and shows and so on where those characters are those things.
In a similar fashion, when you want the audience to conclude a character is a good negotiator, or a risk taker, you make it clear they're a good poker player. Audiences associate poker with these traits, so when it's made clear the lead is an accomplished, possibly successful, poker player, the audience will be far more accepting when the character is depicted as being able to "read" people, or when the character is willing to take chances.
Basically, people are dumb. Or at least lazy. The brain throws up the "obvious" thoughts when things appear or occur in life, and most folks just take that first mental reaction and let it run. So you see chess, your head pops out connections to stories you've experienced, and you think "oh, if my kid played chess, my kid would turn out smart because chess makes you smart."
Chess makes you good at recognizing chess patterns on a chess board. And if you're good at chess, you're good at remembering patterns so you can use your recollection to play into or out of positions that occur during gameplay. No offense to chess players; every game is like that.
Why do games become boring sometimes? You figured out enough of the patterns that you're no longer delighted or intrigued by finding them during gameplay. It's why most people find tic-tac-toe when they're a kid, and usually move on from it in less than a year.
It's also why chess masters can play dozens or more of games simultaneously against school kids or something; it doesn't take someone who has a ton of chess pattern knowledge much effort to glance at a board, see an obvious pattern they've seen thousands of times, and do what they've learned to do in those game states.
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Comment on AI, automation, and inequality — how do we reach utopia? in ~talk
DavesWorld LinkIt's a big subject, one with so many moving parts and social/economic/civilization concerns, with a variety of (good and bad) actors involved or injecting themselves into it, that it seems...It's a big subject, one with so many moving parts and social/economic/civilization concerns, with a variety of (good and bad) actors involved or injecting themselves into it, that it seems impossible. But any journey is accomplished by putting one foot in front of the other.
It's not impossible. Which isn't to say it won't be a journey, a tale that'll definitely make the history books and be taught in school to the amazement of the utopian children as those innocent kids boggle over how backwards and greedy the world before their time used to be.
Between here (capitalism teetering on the edge of dystopia) and there (a world where basic material needs such as food, housing, utilities, and medical care are readily available to everyone at no real cost) is the history part. And is the part people will tell you is impossible.
For example, capitalism is diametrically opposed to anything involving utopia. Any utopia technology is anti-capitalism, because capitalism only functions if you have scarcity and fearful masses. The fear has to revolve around not having enough, so prices get bid up and that fear can be used as a lever to convince the masses to accept what owners and the wealthy tell them. Which will be "do as we say, work here, take what we offer, and shut up the whole time."
So if you have what I'll be calling a "Bot" technology, the earliest stages will involve capitalistic concerns pulling strings and pushing buttons to delay or destroy it. They'll use governmental capture to inject obstacles and detours that add what'll probably be at least decades to the full natural adoption. All sorts of rationals will be trotted out, dressed up as safety or fairness concerns, and so on. Anything that allows Owners to keep control of what would be (in this example) a steadily decreasing cost of supply while they continue to charge and enjoy vast profits.
Because when the major actors in capitalism are megacorps, they have the resources to ensure they continue to rule. They invest in government, they invest in societal manipulation and control (look me in the eye with a straight face and say "professionals" don't know how to leverage today's social media to manipulate, manage, and control the masses), and they do all that so they remain in charge.
They do it to beat back upstart competitors. They do it to deny the basic rules of capitalism, which (in theory) describe how more efficient and agile and clever competitors will force prices to fall as supply rises (among other basic tenets that don't apply in the actual practice of capitalism as influenced by today's mega-entities). They do it to remain in charge.
For this purpose, a "Bot" technology is an increasingly automated technological solution to a production need. That need could be some form of manufacturing, of refining of some raw good, of production of some raw good. It's what would almost certainly be a growing collection of component technologies that increase the automation and reduce costs.
For example, if you plant a field by hand, weed and water and tend it by hand, then pick and deliver the food by hand, and finally process the food by hand prior to it finally arriving in some location (a store, a market stall, whatever) where a citizen will obtain it, take it home, and eat it ... that's expensive. Not simply in money; but in raw capital costs. Human capital like time and energy.
At every step, many humans were involved. Primitive farming techniques are immensely labor intensive, which is why a major source of technological advancement throughout human history has been looking for ways to get more food out of the same field with less human interaction.
Which has worked; what used to be an entire village spending a pretty sizable chunk of their collective time to ensure they have food for the year until the next major harvest season has steadily shrunk. Until today a vast farm capable of feeding hundreds for a year can be operated by a small handful of "farmers." Right now, they use a lot of machinery. Planting machinery, watering machinery, fertilizing and pest control machinery, harvest machinery, and of course transportation machinery that delivers the raw food to a processing facility (full of more machinery) which will clean, and often cut and sift and filter and cook and package the raw food into finished food.
The agricultural revolution freed vast segments of human population from needing to produce food, enabling other professions to be given human time to focus on. That's what the shift to BotTech will finish doing; completely free humans from needing to make all these necessary processes happen. From having to be involved step by step to ensure they take place.
It's not at all a stretch to imagine how technological progress continues to advance. Right now, farm machinery still has a human in the driver's seat. Many, possibly most, farm jobs in most foodstuffs involve sticking someone behind a steering wheel, perhaps a steering wheel next to some levers and buttons that Do Things, so that human triggers off or monitors the machinery doing the actual work. Actually shoving seed in the ground, or spraying water over the furrows, uncovering mature plants so they can be scooped up, and so on.
Automating today's semi-automated harvesters isn't a big leap of any kind. Especially not in a controlled environment like a farm field. Maybe a human might (drive, tow, or remote control) a machine to the corner of the field and push a go button, but even that will eventually fall before the advance of tech. So eventually you have the farm basically operating itself.
There's land, suitable for growing. Someone rolls up with machines and sets them up. There's a barn or whatever they park in when not in use. Then they drive out as needed, to clear and plow, plant, water, monitoring, all of it. Completely automatically, no human needed. When you can do that, just drop off machines, ensure the site is getting needed deliveries of seed and water and fertilizer and whatever else, and come back three or six months later to see the machines have trucks full of grain (or potatoes, strawberries, whatever) ready to be delivered ... that's BotTech.
If you have BotTech, you pretty much probably have (or will shortly on that technological advance timescale) BotTech that delivers it too. And also have BotTech that processes it. If the farm can plant, water, tend, harvest, and finally drop off truck after truck of potatoes at your factory, all without humans having to sit there and "work" to make it happen, there's likely no real reason your factory has to have humans "working" to have it process the potatoes.
Maybe it just washes and bags them before they get loaded into another truck that delivers them to the store. Maybe it cleans and cuts and fries them into chips before they're bagged and delivered to the store. Maybe they're dehydrated and boxed up for use as instant mash potatoes.
Whatever the actual product is, we're talking about raw foodstuffs showing up as a factory input. If the farm side is fully capable of full automation, the factory side probably is too. At that point, you have BotTech covering farm all the way to the store.
If you can get food to the store via BotTech, it's not much of a stretch to assume a little BotTech doesn't help at the store too. And if not immediately, during the first wave of those BotFarms feeding those BotFactories, probably quickly enough afterwards. If the farm can BotDrive potatoes to the BotFactory, and the BotFactory can prep and drive them to the store, then the store can probably have automated receiving that unloads them into the store's storage, and then probably even some form of a Bot that takes them as needed out into the store to wait on a shelf for a human to decide "ooh, I want to eat that".
Maybe you might have a human lift them out of the StoreBot to put on the shelf or whatever, but soon enough that'll go away too and it'll be completely fully automated from farm to consumer. Where, at no meaningful point during the process, was a human required to make it happen.
Sure humans are almost certainly monitoring, but as for having to actually work, not so much. Humans might approve decisions for where fields go, but that can be Bot since computers can take all the same information and run algorithms and analysis and all that to decide "no, this field sucks for wheat but would be okay for carrots" or whatever. Humans might check reports, "today Field 4C got water and there are no major pest problems; it's on track to yield a great load of carrots in another five weeks." But as for working, no at this point in the tech human work isn't needed like we know human work is needed today.
If you can do it with farm fields and food factories, you're probably already doing it with the rest of the supply and manufacturing sectors. As well as the transportation arena to deliver all those goods here and there. Again, we're talking about collections of tech, that build one atop the other. Combining to automate it all.
It doesn't have to be a Star Trek molecular assembly matrix like a replicator to be BotTech. After all, what would any of us care about the details? All we'd know is you send these (detailed list of probably six or eight) machines out to (farm site), make sure they have power and inputs (water, oil, seed, whatever), and come back at the end of the season to find potatoes are ready to go. Sure they didn't appear "magically", but they basically kind of did anyway, even though they did get planted and grew the way potatoes always grow once planted.
If everything's automated, it removes human labor as a major cost. Which is where part of the disruption will come from, because capitalism (giant agrocorps in food, but it'll be all corps in all major market sectors) will want to keep the gains for themselves. They'll want that humanless farm, that humanless food factory, and so on. Which doesn't work, because if society requires everyone to pay money to get (insert anything they need, survival or luxury or other) you can't fire the entire populace.
But that's a social concern, not a technological one. It'll take time, and require the people of the world to endure what I'd expect will be decades of needless upheaval, but eventually the truth of BotTech will win out.
Sure agricorps will be able to control FarmBots and FoodFactoryBots for a while. Sure they'll probably be able to pay or force government to insert roadblocks and laws and so on that keep "little people" from using the tech to tear away from the capitalism need to buy from corporate sources, but sooner or later the truth wins out.
What will the truth be? Again, we're postulating increasingly automated technology. Mining tech, tree harvesting tech, rubber harvesting tech. If you can automate factories, you can probably (and if not immediately, then at some point in almost all cases) figure out how to automate anything. Shove raw inputs in one side, and out the other comes whatever you wanted that factory to make. Bleach, rubber, computer chips, lawn ornaments, it wouldn't matter.
It's not "impossible", it's just an application of tech. You have technology that processes the thing, whatever it is. If there are steps, they figure out tech that does each step, and sometimes they'll figure out tech that can do multiple steps all in one machine, in one stop. Then you need other tech to move and hand off the whatever to the next step. Conveyor belts, robotic arms, self-drive carts, whatever; any tech that plugs into those gaps between the processing, so the flow can continue without a human having to "work" and fill that gap is what we're talking about.
After you have the tech, it'll start miniaturizing. It'll become more efficient, require less energy. Become faster, become less wasteful. What's a huge factory spanning block after block in size initially becomes, at some point, a collection of machines that are a more manageable size. Sooner or later, tech marches on.
Most factory work for humans, especially in recent decades, has been gap plugging. The machines do most of the actual work, but humans are needed to use human manipulation (with human hands and human minds controlling those hands) to take the work item out of machine 24 and hand it into machine 25. Just with tech that automates that "handing off" step humans are needed for now, you're quite a ways towards full humanless automation.
Economically, prices would start dropping towards the cost of supplies. Raw materials, of any kind. Which would see their prices dropping as well; if you can set a MineBot loose on a mountain that has (insert whatever desired minerals) and just see mined minerals roll out ready for processing, and the processing will be done fully automated too, prices will drop.
Again, it might take time, as firms of the era fight to keep their place within the loop, and they'll almost certainly succeed in adding decades to the transition time. But eventually things get too cheap for anyone to be able to argue they're a necessary part of the step.
Take food again, but (again) this applies to any market, any product. When anyone can run publicly available analysis to find suitable land, show up with FarmBot tech, make some arrangments for inputs to be made available (more Bots of various kinds), and just get food at harvest ... that's what you call readily available.
When BotTech is new and shiny and costs tens of millions per "bot", it'll still be a corporate thing. And we'd still be in the midst of "if you don't hire anyone for a paycheck, none of them can afford to buy your foods, which is why you're angry about how store shelves are regularly stripped clean by hungry thieves". That's the upheaval transition period I keep referring to.
But what's new and expensive eventually becomes not so much. BotTech will feed on itself. As (whoever) develops Bot technologies, those techs begin to eliminate costs from the process. Supplies become more available, and easier to process. Think of what CNC machines being available at a "hobby" level are doing, for example. CNC used to be million dollar machines, but now most people (maybe they save for a few months, but my point stands) can afford to purchase and operate them. Sure it's not industrial scale, but it's affordable. And next year, next decade, (etc) it's even more affordable and more available.
So the BotTech will advance, and at some point becomes so cheap and so available that it becomes patently obvious to society as a whole that trying to pretend most of what society needs to function is scarce will stop being something society believes. That's about the point you'll see governments, for example, deciding to just deploy FarmBots to feed their citizens. They'll take food (probably a lot of basic necessities, but let's just discuss food) away from profit oriented concerns and simply make it available to citizens.
Right now, that's something impossible to consider. How expensive would it be for the United States Federal Government to assume all farming operations in the country? Probably way, way, way more than they could afford, even if they diverted all federal income to the need. Paying to plant and maintain and harvest and deliver all those fields?
But with BotTech, when it's automated, it's mostly a one-time cost to install the Bots. And at that point, they're also equally cheap to maintain, and likely the maintenance is largely automated too. After all, if you have BotFactories, there's no reason you can't have MaintenanceBots that fix stuff or haul it off to the FixFactory to be fixed. And the Maintenance sector has all the same cheap raw goods and BotFactories to product parts and so on that the rest of the market sectors have.
So at some point, large concerns (probably some form of government) begin taking over basic market sectors. Food just shows up at the local "store", but it might be more of a distribution center at that point. And with Bots, it's not like you're trudging in to collect your burlap sacks of potatoes and grain and so on. You'd be looking at shelves of stuff you look at now; boxes of instant mashed potatoes, bagged minute rice, packages of chicken breast, whatever.
Which, again, would start happening everywhere. If you can Bot a farm and a factory, you can probably (again, sooner or later) Bot construction. So the barn, the house, the office building, the whatever, is mostly built via automation. Eventually completely by automation. Raw materials flow into BotFactories, are loaded into BotTrucks, and delivered to BotConstruction site. Come back a few days or weeks (whatever) later, and that place you pointed to and said "make a house be here" now has a house here.
Everything starts to work like that. Especially when so much of the basic needs work like that. A world where you never ever have to fear an empty stomach because the store/center is always there and always has more than enough food for you, that's a world where people eventually stop thinking in terms of fear. In terms of being afraid of scarcity.
Clothes, household goods, same. Clothes are at the clothes store. Bleach and soap and whatever, closet racks, shelves, anything; these products just start showing up. Governments can just push buttons and say "okay, so we opened up two new housing sectors here and here, and anyone who wants to put in for a room (or a house, shed, shack, condo, whatever) just needs to let us know."
Everyone has shelter, is fed, has clothes and basic supplies, and when they're sick they get treated.
Because what does "labor" and what would remain of the "labor economy" look like in a post-scarcity economy like we're postulating?
This is where people will bring back their "impossible" notions and cling to them. Because, again, right now all the stuff you need for life is expensive, so it's tough to think of a world where all that expense has been eliminated. Food takes dozens and dozens of people to grow and process and deliver to you in the amount you need to survive over a year, so "free food" seems impossible. But when it's very possible, where does that leave the market?
Luxury and innovation. Creativity. Sure anyone can get a bag of potato chips, even a bag of hot pepper cheese coated potato chips even. But some foodie oriented person who wants to play with settings and figure out new inputs? Who wants to come up with new flavor combinations, new preparations, and so on? That person, all those persons, can and will be doing that. Again, if not immediately during the early waves, eventually they will. Sooner or later. The tech keeps becoming cheaper and more available, and after it's out from under corporate and wealthy control, the advancement of Bots will keep happening.
And again, not just food; any market. Someone wants a new smartphone form factor, a new shape for it perhaps, they'll pretty much be able to make that happen. And if they like it, someone else might. Or might after they see it. Life begins to become incredibly trendy in an agile manner unheard of today. Right now, you talk about the "season's fashion" or "the latest model of (insert gizmo here)." And "latest" is measured in terms of annual or even multiple years.
When "latest" is "from this morning", trendy is definitely something I can see large segments of society latching on to. Something they'll seize upon to fill their time and amuse themselves with. Some people will be changing out their clothes, their "cars", their phones, their desks, maybe even their interior decorations, as often as it occurs to them to do so.
Right now that seems not just impossible, but insane. You read about billionaires who say stuff like "I never wear the same socks twice" and you think that's incredibly wasteful. But when socks cost literally nothing, and the "used" socks can be automatically cleaned and/or recycled to be repurposed without cost, that kind of decision becomes society wide. Right now, one rich guy can indulge himself, wallow in the amusement of knowing the socks he puts on are his and his alone. But eventually everyone's socks are one-time use.
Capitalism preaches that post-scarcity is impossible. Worse, insane. Capitalism doesn't exist in a society that has access to all its necessities basically for free. Capitalism will fight to hold that turnover off, fight to delay and prevent it, but sooner or later (knowing humans as I do, probably much more later than sooner), the availableness of BotTech will win over.
At that point, humanity will have begun to reorganize itself. People will devote themselves to the "fun" stuff, and I don't mean recreation. There'll be a lot of actual fun, actual recreation, but most people will probably be "indulging" themselves in creation. Innovation. Thought. Some people will actually create in the way we think of that word now, as in artistic creation.
But some will have the time to think. Every great thing you and I love came about because some human thought it up. And probably multiple humans got involved to continue the thought, innovating and developing and processing the thought until it became a reality, then a developed reality, and finally a piece of our reality we never think of because it's so ordinary and common and accepted.
Used to be, night was scary. Everything gets dark when the sun isn't there. Someone harnessed fire, and then candles and lamps came along. Someone else eventually figured out light without fire, and we had light bulbs and spotlights and so on. These days we have LED lights that are insanely energy efficient without sacrificing brightness.
There's a reason most serious science fiction thinkers eventually conclude a post-scarcity society sees a dramatic acceleration of human advancement. Because if you sit down and think it through, there's no real reason that a human society that doesn't spend the bulk of its waking hours struggling to survive (working to afford rent and food and so on) wouldn't find itself awash with ideas. Some of those ideas will be good ones, and when implementing them wouldn't be a random "win the lottery" kind of quest, a lot of the good ideas will take hold.
New technologies, new processing methods, new whatever. Sooner or later basic physics starts to fall. What happens when it's not a handful of "lucky" and "dedicated" physics professors scattered around the world who are paid to sit and consider physics. What happens when it's a lot of people, all of whom have time on their hands, who find physics amusing and enjoy its problems and issues. How much advancement happens when you have millions upon millions of people considering something like "physics."
Sure people will be considering better light bulbs and better water slides too, but some will be working on base techs. Like physics and physics manipulating techs. Engines are a physics manipulation tech; you take a mechanical linkage and drive it via explosions supplied by gas. Then we invented magnetic control techs and came up with electrical engines; just supply power and they spin.
At some point, someone figures out how to harness technology that can manipulate things on a molecular level. Why? Because that's what humans do, when they have time and aren't prevented from doing so; they think about things. Someone will be thinking about how to use fields and energy waves and whatever else to do what they want. And that person will eventually (either directly, or down the chain from someone else who finally puts it all together) come up with something like a replicator.
And at that point, you are living in Star Trek. With a magic machine that creates basically anything you want, so long as you hook it up to power and a soup bowl of raw materials.
Replicators are probably centuries away, maybe even millennia. But BotTech, we basically have most of what we need for BotTech now. Little pieces here and there might need a bit of work, and someone has to put it all together. But the only real reason we don't have FarmBot now is economics and "it's impossible" thinking.
Sooner or later, the involved tech pieces continue to advance, and someone will decide to start putting them together. Then there will be fighting and resistance and corruption, but the tech will keep advancing. Becoming cheaper, more available, less onerous to obtain and maintain.
Sooner or later the turning point happens, and BotTech takes over society. And we begin to enter post-scarcity.
A journey happens when you keep putting one foot after the next. How long you walk is up to you, but if you keep walking, you get somewhere. Sooner or later.
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Comment on An equitable solution to a problem at work regarding sick leave and staffing? in ~life
DavesWorld LinkIt's not right, and everyone knows it. Even the owners, except they're allowing their greed to carry the decision. What happens if you're sick, and interact with others? You get them sick. Working...It's not right, and everyone knows it. Even the owners, except they're allowing their greed to carry the decision.
What happens if you're sick, and interact with others? You get them sick. Working while sick saps energy, hurts you, causes pain and discomfort, and very likely increases the time you'll suffer while sick since you heal slower.
Everyone knows all this. It's just capitalism encourages people to ignore it in favor of money. For owners and companies, it's "not shutting down" in some form. They want the money to keep rolling, the work to keep happening so it brings that money into their coffers. For self-employed people, same.
For workers, they fear the consequences of a greedy owner/boss/etc who will punish them for daring to prioritize not just their own health (recovering from the illness), but the health of others (who risk getting sick when someone who is interacts with them.)
Owners just don't care. That's the bottom line. They're not the one getting sick. And usually, an owner or boss has control over their own schedule and position so they don't have to actually interact all that much with a sick employee. So they don't personally risk very much when they demand "no, come in; keep working."
Most people are very bad at consequences, at forecasting, at examining ramifications that aren't instantly direct. So when an owner/boss demands a sick employee come into work, some people genuinely are incapable of understanding that "sick person interacting with other people risks the sickness spreading."
Now, an owner/boss might not care that people on the bus or at the grocery store you interact with will catch your sickness. But they should care if their other employees get sick. Except, again, they don't because they just require/force everyone to continue working regardless.
Even though the owner damn well will often stay home and recover when they get sick. They're in charge, and at that point they're considering their own pain and discomfort, their own health. Of course, when they feel horrible and have trouble functioning, they tend to their health. But you, as a worker, you should just snap to and obey as far as they're concerned.
It's the same reason the parents send sick kids in. Not parents who don't realize their child has gotten sick, or parents of children who are sick but who aren't showing yet. But parents who know their kid woke up this morning obviously sick, and send them into the school/daycare anyway. Why? Same reasons as above; they fear punishments and loss of money for doing what used to be considered the right thing and taking care of their sick kid. And further, doing so at home so the child doesn't spread the illness amongst other kids.
So a kid wakes up with flu or fever or whatever, and is bundled off to school because that's what happens these days. Soon enough, as you noted, all the kids have it. Which is utterly unnecessary except everyone involved except the damned owner, and some bosses, is under pressure to just ignore basic biology and "gut it out."
Flu can kill. Fever can kill. Some illness may look "benign" or "normal", but could be something serious like pneumonia and such. But the expectation is to ignore biology and come in anyway, spreading the disease.
So no, it's not right. Yes, your owners are assholes. What can you do? Only the same as everyone else; decide how much risk you want.
Honestly, as a teacher, and having heard in increasing amounts in recent years how hard it is to find and keep teachers, there's an argument to be made for you telling the owners (politely) you're staying home because you're too sick to work. You don't even have to get into how you'd be passing that sickness on to your students and coworkers, even though that is what happens and everyone knows it; just that "look, I'm just sick, so I'm not coming in."
Yes your owners will be upset. Because they're prioritizing their income over the wellfare of everyone else involved. Including you. After all, you're "just a worker." What do they care about you?
Until you leave. Then they care. Because abusing you is fun and games until they realize they don't have a replacement, or can't hire one at your wage level. Then, suddenly, they're upset they didn't treat you a little better. At least just enough so you didn't leave their employ. At that point, they do care.
But, again, no one can decide for anyone else what that person's tolerence for risk is. Here, the risk of getting and staying sick, the risk of working through the pain and discomfort of being sick, and the risk of your owner actually being a big enough asshole (with other options to replace you) to decide to fire you.
Why would an owner/boss fire a sick employee who calls out? As a warning to other employees. So they all whisper to one another. "Sara was sick, and they shitcanned her. I need my job, I'm barely scraping by. Fuck it, I'll come in even if my husband has to drag me in on a cart."
That's what they want when they do stuff like demand you work sick, demand you come in. All so their income doesn't suffer even a slight interruption. It's evil, except so many people do it a lot of folks consider it almost normal.
Something can be normal, and wrong, all at the same time.
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Comment on Is TV advertising still relevant? Does anybody under 60 even watch traditional TV anymore? in ~tv
DavesWorld Link ParentUp front, I'm not a sports person so I have no horse in the race. I'm not so sure how sports on streaming will look. What does the NFL charge for their rights, just as an example? Google ......Up front, I'm not a sports person so I have no horse in the race.
I'm not so sure how sports on streaming will look. What does the NFL charge for their rights, just as an example? Google ... something like eight billion a year? Maybe I'm looking that up wrong. Anyway, it's a lot. Even "small" sports like baseball or hockey are not cheap.
Is a streaming service going to pay that much? And the real question, are they going to pay that much and not recoup from advertisers? Better question; what streaming service can afford to pay that and not get the money back in some way? Because, and just as an example, even Netflix can't afford to pay billions a year without basically rearranging themselves into SportsFlix due to cost.
And how are the non-sports fans gonna feel if they know their subscription could be funding series and movies ... or sports they don't watch. I'd be irked. A billion dollars funds a lot of content. I don't necessarily mind they fund movies and shows I won't watch, but those are things I might. Sports ... not interested. Sure sports are popular, but it's not like the non-sports fans are this vanishingly small segment.
Some of the streamers might buy in as a loss-leader, to build subs, sure. They've already been trying that though. Part of the industry's issue right now is they've been spending borrowed money and aren't getting it back from consumers. Hoping to build up to a critical mass like Netflix has so they can cash in, but only Netflix really has that critical mass. The loan payments are coming due, and interest rates are up; who could afford to keep loss-leading even on content, much less start doing it in a major way with sports?
I can see the services adding a special subscription option, similar to what the sports leagues have been running a while now (NFL Sunday Ticket, etc...), but how many subscriptions do they need to recoup shelling out billions annually on sports?
The whole thing seems like a big "hmmm ... we'll see" situation to me. Because there's just a lot of money involved, and a lot of ways it could go since one way or another they're gonna want their money back if they keep shelling out the leagues' asking prices.
To be clear, I'm not saying sports doesn't turn up on streaming. I am saying I don't really think we're going to see a future where Netflix or one of the presumably three to five services that survive after all the failures and merges we're going to see over the next handful of years just add sports without modifying their pricing somehow.
Maybe it'll be ads, maybe it'll be a rider subscription, maybe it'll be a spin-off subscription, but I doubt it'll just be "new to your monthly subscription: every game, included for free along with everything else you've come to expect and love from us!"
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Comment on "No CGI" is really just invisible CGI in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentSpielberg famously had to work around not having a shark to show in Jaws. And for decades now, film students and critics and directors have praised the genius of that decision. How it added...Spielberg famously had to work around not having a shark to show in Jaws. And for decades now, film students and critics and directors have praised the genius of that decision. How it added tension and stakes, how it took advantage of the unknown to let the audience play with so much that was going on in their heads. In the theater of their minds. Which worked brilliantly.
Today's directors, sometimes not even on the student level with the way technology has advanced, don't often have to "settle" for working around something. CG and effects houses/programs can put just about anything on the screen for the audience. No messing around with a mechanical shark that keeps breaking, no stunt guy who can't see in the monster suit and refuses to do certain things you want because of it, none of that.
Restraint is a powerful creative tool. Needing to work a problem, to have to sit down and think of options, is incredibly useful. But so many in this era of movies, even TV these days with prestige budgets, they don't have any such limits. They just say stuff that used to be insane, that would make the producers laugh nervously before demanding the real plan. Now they say crazy stuff, and the producers are like "okay, so we'll have VFX do that."
Parker and Stone with South Park have a story they told about the "In the Closet" episode. They were like "we want to have an episode where we riff on Tom Cruise being gay." And the lawyers were like "fuck no, you can't say that, instant lawsuit." Even after Parker and Stone pleaded, and pointed out how funny it would be, no. The answer was no.
So they thought some, and were like "okay, so can we say Tom Cruise is in the closet?" Lawyers were like "no, just no." Then they thought some more, and were like, "okay what about this. We'll have Tom Cruise physically be in a closet. Like, we'll put our Tom Cruise in a closet on screen. Then can we say Tom Cruise is in the closet?"
And the lawyers were like "okay, that you can say." And the episode works brilliantly. It's amazing how funny it is when they build up to it. Way funnier than if they'd just had the characters wander around ripping on Tom Cruise for being gay or whatever.
Limitations enhance creativity. Anything that makes an actual creator (not those lame Youtubers who call themselves 'creators' just for vlogging to their smartphone) sit and think is a good thing.
CG is an amazing tool for storytelling. But when you just lean on it because you know you can have a digital artist listen to you describe something, and have it appear, it turns into the kind of thing this thread is lamenting. Where you wonder where the magic that used to be an essential part of cinematic storytelling has gone.
The audience's imagination is a powerful tool. But you'd never know that if you never have to use it. It's a forgotten paintbrush in the bucket that today's productions don't know how to use.
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Comment on "No CGI" is really just invisible CGI in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentI'm a huge fan of writers and scripts, but on Endgame, as good as the movie is, as good as the movies those writers had given us were up to then, they still hadn't nailed what we got in the final...I'm a huge fan of writers and scripts, but on Endgame, as good as the movie is, as good as the movies those writers had given us were up to then, they still hadn't nailed what we got in the final form.
One of the behind the scenes bits concerns the climatic moment of the entire epic. Where Tony steals the gems off Thanos, and holds his hand up. They knew they needed him to say something. To have something. The moment needed it.
And they didn't know what the fuck to have him say. They tried all kinds of stuff apparently. And then one of the editors, I think, was like "just have him say 'I am Iron Man.'"
Which is a genius line for that moment. It's perfect. It brings the arc back to Tony's origin, it plays off Thanos' having been wandering around grimly stating "I am inevitable", and all that. But that line, that moment that brought the infinity saga finally to rest, that put the last bits of ink on the page of Tony Stark's arc in the MCU ... the writers didn't have it. Neither did the directors.
They worked it, played with it, massaged and trialed and failed it, until they found it.
That moment is both amazing, and super annoying. Because I love writers, but they didn't have that moment figured out. And you really think that'd be a moment you write towards, throughout most of the story. But they just kind of wrote, and got there, and were like "hmmm, I dunno." And the directors even were just like "ehh, whatever, come back to it."
Sure they did get there, eventually. But what if they hadn't? Further, that moment, the final version of that shot we got in the finished film, that was a pickup. They had to bring Downy back in and put him in the dot suit and act out a bunch of stuff they'd come up with to see and hear.
You write a script so when you put a cast and crew together, you know what everyone's there to do. I feel like it's an important part of the process, and it's one of the things that CG and various other "techniques" have encouraged this era of filmmakers to let go. Used to be, you had to have your shit figured out before you called action. Now, they're all just like "ehh, whatever, come back to it later."
Little less "eh" would be nice these days is what I'm saying. Little more "we know" would be a welcome return to good filmmaking. Gosh, even a plan maybe. You could call it a script, use it to generate storyboards, which were this thing productions would use to map out who was where doing what while the camera did X and Y and Z to see it.
Eh, whatever.
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Comment on ‘Red One’ down: How Dwayne Johnson’s tardiness led to a $250 million runaway production in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentI don't know what's going on with Johnson. He might genuinely be incredibly bad at time management, or at listening to staffers hired to help him manage it. He might also just be a pompous prick...I don't know what's going on with Johnson. He might genuinely be incredibly bad at time management, or at listening to staffers hired to help him manage it. He might also just be a pompous prick who feels he's the most important thing and everyone else will wait for him. There's no way to know from that article.
But on the late thing, I used to be late. I was late to work, late to appointments, it just happened all the time. Because things would happen. I wouldn't sit down and figure out travel times, or prep times, or "get ready to leave" times. I'd leave things until the last moment, then scramble, then have unexpected stuff come up (traffic, calls, interruptions, forgot something, etc) and after adding it all up it equaled late.
I just got tired of it one day. And decided to no longer be late guy. And honestly, I think some version of that is the only real solution. Anything else is just penny-ante tiptoeing around the real issues; that you're not making leaving on time important. That you're not being mindful of schedule or commitments.
When I commit to something, I commit to it. Which means I sit down and think through travel time, prep time, get ready time, all of it. And apply it to the schedule, then add some fudge and delay factors. If anyone's gonna wait, it'll be me at the destination because I'm early; not everyone else.
But I'm not a multi-millionaire for whom a temporary corporation worth tens of millions of dollars will wait on. Then I guess it's okay. What does Johnson care? He's getting paid, and they pay it because he brings in the bucks. Which is something I see so many people not understanding about Hollywood.
A-list isn't an award, or a recognition of acting talent or "due" or anything. It's an acknowledgement that the actor will bring in an audience. When Johnson wants to be magnetically charismatic, he can be. He does it a lot in interviews, on talk shows, in movies, on tv, lots of places. That's why he's A-list. You hear he's in it, you're interested because it's him.
I was thinking about A-list the other day when I was trying out another Brit tv series that didn't pan out.
They never seem to factor charm or charisma or the ability of an actor to pull an audience. They seem to just audition people, and almost pick at random most of the time. Like it's taking turns or something. So when I stumble across some BBC/UK series, even a lot of their movies, if I put it on I'm often left perplexed why I'm watching.
Because few of their concepts are that compelling, that I'll watch just for the concept. Something like "ooh, I like bank robbery stories" or whatever. Few concepts are that compelling, for anyone. What you're usually watching for is the performances, because a compelling actor makes any material come alive.
A star anchors a production, even if it's just a TV star. Johnson might be a shit as a person (maybe, maybe not), but on screen he's magnetic. I'll consider watching anything he's in because it's him. There's actors like that. A-list, B-list, even C-list (aka genre stars).
Like Jason Statham or Gerard Butler. A lot of their films are them, maybe one or possibly two other faces you might vaguely recognize, and then a whole list of cheap nobodies. But you watch because it's a Statham or Butler film; they're the draw. They're the reason the film gets made. You gave it a chance because they're in it.
Take just about any of their films, and replace them with some stunt guy, or a fit nobody who'll take a fraction of their paycheck for the chance. Sure you saved having to pay their fee, but you also end up with a movie a fraction of a fraction of the previous audience will bother watching. Because they look at it and are like "who the hell is this random person starring in it?"
Like the UK approach, where I see something in a list that sounds like it might have a decent shot at being fun or interesting, but then I look through the cast list and it's just a big block of nobodies. And maybe I put it on anyway, but after half an hour I'm like "none of these people have any draw ... they're all background actors, just that some have been put in lead roles."
Johnson might be an asshole who's had great PR up until now, or maybe he turned into an asshole because power went to his head (wouldn't be the first, won't be the last), or maybe he's just the victim of a smear campaign because some folks have an axe to grind. But in the right role, in the right conditions, when he decides to flip his switch to turn his charm on, he's a lot of fun to watch.
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Comment on AI video won't work in Hollywood, because it can't make small iterative changes, former Pixar animator says in ~movies
DavesWorld Link ParentYes, the AI generators have to regenerate the entire image to address a change. However, when you're talking about a well funded entity (such as a professional computer effects or animation...Yes, the AI generators have to regenerate the entire image to address a change.
However, when you're talking about a well funded entity (such as a professional computer effects or animation company), the computers will be able to regenerate a desktop sized image in seconds. Well less than a minute. Even if you scale up the resolution and complexity and all that, it's still really fast. And that's today; what happens next year, or five years from now? With faster computers and better AI programs?
Even today though, how much faster is it than a human team? Because I read credits on animated movies. They have whole teams that do nothing but focus on light, others that do backgrounds, others that do textures or cloth, some focus only on characters, and so on. Lot of people laboring on little pieces, and a lot of the time the audience doesn't even really take full note of it.
Further, I think the most likely use of AI tech here will initially will be via the drafting and drawing board process. The AI kicks out options, and that acts as a spark for humans who look at it.
And further still, any image an animator or artist wants to change ... they can still change. A professional illustrator or artist or whoever can take any image, human or AI, and make modifications to it. Maybe the image is great except for some little things. They could spend months having the hand animated teams redo that stuff for a high level guy to then tweak and approve and play back-and-forth with them over, or they could have the computer run overnight and then the guy comes in next morning and has the day to fiddle with tweaks.
Change is scary. I get it. A lot of people who like what they do are worried about not being paid to do it anymore.
But Hollywood has always churned through people. They capitalize on the dreams of "working in Hollywood" to not pay what they might have to if, say, working in Hollywood was considered the same as staffing a remote arctic oil field or deep sea factory fishing trawler. Which is to say, for every anyone who gives up on Hollywood, more than just that departure is waiting to step in and have their shot.
With animation, it's always been incredibly labor intensive. The corporate biography of the Walt Disney company, for example, talks about how switching away from Walt's vision of all animation all the time saved the company. Because it was taking years to produce feature length animation films. They needed revenue, and live action gave them that in a timely manner because a feature could be shot in a couple of months, then edited and prepped and released in a couple more.
Why is no one doing feature length traditional hand drawn animation now? Cost. No one wants to pay scores of artists to draw in the traditional manner for several years to produce all the frames needed for a feature. Heck, no one really wants to pay for them to do it for a four minute cartoon, much less a feature. They all use CG animation because it's cheaper, and use CG production techniques even when they bring in hand animators for some aspects for the same reasons.
I miss Don Bluth. He had a dream, and it was to do feature length animation projects. He was pretty darned good at it. But his star faded because his projects didn't earn back. Which is a shit reason to write off a creative type, but the money pays for the art. That's pretty much how it's always been, and AI is not the reason for it.
AI could save it though. Maybe.
One of the ideas in the back of my head is some pro animation team taking an AI art program, and project training it on all their key frames and hero character art and all of that. The stuff the big names on the team would draw, while the scores of people listed in the parts of the credits no one ever really reads does the bulk of it. Grinding it out while those big names get to be creative.
They train the project AI on their best bits. The style and look of the project. Is it bright, is it gritty, how angular, all the seventeen million things that could tweak how art looks. Represented by the art they give it to emulate.
Then they keep doing that, while the program team starts having the AI churn out what they need for the project. The animator team reviews and tweaks and revises, sometimes altering, sometimes ordering regenerations.
I have a feeling, once AI programs are a bit more commercial and a bit less hobby/laboratory mode, we might get some projects that look more like that lauded lost yesteryear of glory animation. How quickly could a Pixar level bank of computers generate a Secret of Nimh kind of film? I bet way less than the ~30months Wikipedia lists Nimh having taken by hand.
If the computer churns for a year, and the team spends their time tweaking and finding the magic instead of cranking out iterative frames of background stuff and getting yelled at for taking too long, that's the kind of thing that could be economical. Which could bring back a lot of animation styles we don't get anymore because they're not economical.
Or, we could scream the sky is falling and bury our heads in the sand waiting to feel the thump on our asses.
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Comment on Key moments from landmark US Supreme Court arguments on Donald Trump’s immunity claims in ~news
DavesWorld Link ParentImpeachment (with a corresponding vote-to-convict) is the mechanism designed to address this. Unfortunately, like everything else in the modern implementation and practice of the American...- Exemplary
Impeachment (with a corresponding vote-to-convict) is the mechanism designed to address this. Unfortunately, like everything else in the modern implementation and practice of the American Constitution, there are many, many, many people not acting in good faith.
What does that mean, good faith? Consider impeachment. If a President takes illegal actions, the proper response is for Congress to step in. That's one of the points of Congress; to act as a counterbalance to the Presidency, and the Supreme Court is to act as a counterbalance to them both. In theory they all balance the government so it functions.
But the whole process assumes good faith. That all actors within the system are not seeking to abuse the rules for self gain, or to avoid the rules, or to circumvent restrictions and problems. Without good faith, impeachment is either abused for malicious purposes, or not enacted when a potential impeachment target has political allies who can block the impeachment.
Note, political allies. Who would be acting for political purposes. Not for factual ones, or good faith ones. Simply out of an "own team" reason. Trump was impeached, barely, but the vote whet along party lines. As was the vote to convict in the Senate, which prevented him from being removed from office.
That's not good faith. Trump did things, and they seem to meet the general definition of bad actions and bad leadership. Of leadership and character and activities that are anti-American, against the best interests of the Nation as a whole. Jimmy Carter, as one famous example, gave up control over personal assets (modest though they were) simply to avoid the appearance of financial impropriety that might lead to even an assumption he was acting in bad faith.
Meanwhile, Trump did everything but issue an official directive under the Presidential Seal that anyone visiting Washington had better be staying in one of his properties (which he financially benefits from). Which is one of the least of the things he did that are arguably impeachable. Which he was not punished for by removal from office, simply due to bad faith actors in Congress shielding him from any consequences.
One of the points mentioned in the article, raised by conservative Justices, was "well if a President isn't absolutely immune, he can be politically punished by vindictive prosecution."
That's ultimately a separate issue, and they damn well know it. The point of a trial is to find facts and determine truth, and then take steps based on that. Can the trial process be abused? Oh most certainly. Which is another example of bad faith actions. A prosecutor anywhere in the country can more or less decide, on a whim as long as that whim has some paperwork behind it, to indict someone. And use that indictment to proceed to trial. Forcing that person to stand for trial.
Which is where checks and balances supposedly come back into it. Because those exact things happened in England and Europe back in the 1600s and 1700s. The Forefathers knew this, hated it, and tried to build a system with balance. Which is why there's a judge, who can rule on things and ride herd over the trial. And why there's a jury of your peers who can decide whatever they want, regardless of what the prosecutor or even judge would want.
It doesn't matter what a prosecutor rolls into court with. They can back up endless semi-trailers full of evidence, even actual truthful evidence. The fact is, in American criminal jurisprudence, if the jury votes not to convict, the defendant is not guilty under the law. Reference OJ Simpson as an extremely high profile example.
So while standing trial is a burden and hardship, especially if you don't have means to hire a high priced (and presumably highly skilled, since they're charging so much) legal team to manage your defense, it's still better than letting a prosecutor or judge unilaterally decide guilt or innocence. And it's better than anything else we've come up with, since the jury of ordinary people (your "peers") is less likely to show up with the kind of motive a bad faith prosecutor or judge might be burdened with.
As for power, that's why power is so Goddamned dangerous! It's power. That's why we call it power. It gives you power. And bad faith actors abuse power. That's what someone acting in bad faith does. They'll act out of selfish need, greed, malicious intent, and a whole host of negative things that have nothing to do with the good of the nation or the welfare of the citizens or the health of the government or anything positive.
Like Trump does constantly.
None of this shit would apply to a good faith President. Someone who acts in good faith, who stops to consider the appearance of impropriety, of illegality. A President who shapes their every official act (whatever they might think or even say in private) with a fundamental goal of upholding the faith and trust the American people place in them after having elected them. A President who seeks to be a good President, rather than simply just being a winner who wins and is immune to consequences.
The American Right Wing of politics has descended into extremism. Many, many, within it truly believe to their core that their intentions for the nation, the things they wish to do, are correct and everyone else is wrong. Not just wrong, dangerously wrong. And because they believe this so strongly, it's become fanaticism.
Now, if they believed as they do, but acted in good faith, we'd all be fine. The Right Wing would stand up and argue their points, debate them, present them, all within the framework of the American political system. If they didn't see their desires codified into law or official act, they'd just try again later as would be their right. But the debate would moderate things, the need to find consensus would moderate it. That's why we vote; to find consensus.
But they don't act in good faith. They're fanatics. They believe so strongly in their desires that they're willing to lie, cheat, steal, sometimes even kill. They're willing to defraud the entire nation, abuse millions and tens of millions of people ... anything that gets a win. That puts them any step closer to being able to enact their political wishes.
And under that mindset, they don't give a fuck about Trump. In fact, punishing Trump damages the extremist Right's cause. They need someone like him to push through to the place they want American taken; a place where they're in charge.
They don't want democracy. Which is defined by voting. Why do we vote? If I want vanilla and you want chocolate, the group can argue and hate each other, or we can vote. Maybe vanilla wins, maybe chocolate wins; and either way, the group can vote again next time.
The Right doesn't see it that way. They see that as an affront. Worse, as a crime; just one they can't actually charge you with. Though they very badly want to. When they want to close the border, or remove women's rights or voting rights, or round up non-Right citizens, or any of the other things they're eagerly pursuing, they see that as their just due. Because they believe that strongly their way is the one and only way.
It's textbook fanaticism.
They can't allow Trump to be held accountable. They need him to be reelected, and do what they now very much expect him to do.
Which is remove the rule of law officially.
All of this is why it's not melodramatic to say we're on the verge of civil war. That's what war is; a failure of diplomacy. A failure to find non-violent means of resolving a disagreement.
The places the Right wants to take us have a non-zero chance of triggering that war. But that doesn't matter, because they're right. And if they can get Trump back in office, they'll have a chance to have control of the military.
Now it's really fashionable for anti-gun people to assume the US Military is invulnerable, but that's not the case. Especially not in a civil war scenario. Looking at the history of American military deployments over the last century bears out how an opponent doesn't need tanks and fighter-bombers to resist.
Further, if Trump (or any fanatic leader) orders US units to fire into crowds of US citizens, deploy into US towns and round up US citizens to be taken to internment camps is going to accelerate that civil war. The idea of being a soldier is to simply obey, but each and every soldier is a person with a brain and morals. Some are not going to do the things the Right wants.
So there'll be units fighting amongst themselves, with tanks and fighter bombers and rifles and fuel air explosives and all that. That's what civil war means. It doesn't mean "the military" is a monolith faction that will just kowtow to the leader. Some of them won't. Some of them will join the resistance. Some of them will be engaged by fanatic fellow soldiers, which is why when the war starts it's likely going to start with news of units fracturing apart as some soldiers decide "yes, finally, we get to kick ass" and other soldiers decide "hold the fuck up; this is illegal, immoral, and just flat wrong."
Good faith on the part of SCOTUS and Congress and the Presidency, and indeed on the part of candidates and parties, would head all this off. But good faith is part of history. No one acts in good faith anymore. They're too busy trying to win.
And damn the consequences. Just win baby.
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Comment on Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed in ~tech
DavesWorld Link ParentThere actually was a period, before 1993ish, up to about maybe 1995, where ads were super rare online. I mean really rare. And when ads started showing up, there were years of upheaval and...There actually was a period, before 1993ish, up to about maybe 1995, where ads were super rare online. I mean really rare. And when ads started showing up, there were years of upheaval and questions and media pieces about the whole thing. But the marketing folks persisted, kept waving money, and everyone just ... kind of ... let it happen. And now ads are everything unless you run an ad blocker.
And some marketers and even some tech companies (Google, which has turned itself into a giant marketing firm) are looking for ways to ban or eliminate ad block because it's not fair they can't earn every possible cent off your eyeballs, back, and balls.
No, because whatever theory might be in play, in practice people use downvote as disagreement. As in "I disagree, so downvote." That's it. That's all they use it for.
It's already bad enough, to turn that phrase, to see threads where people didn't upvote comments. You see that and you just know they were all like "yeah no, fuck off." Else they would've given it a vote. But no, they disagreed and had to settle for not upvoting.
Basically, people suck. The problem's always people. Tildes as currently laid out has one of the better systems to ward off the peopleness of people from screwing it all up. Adding in downvotes will just put the whole site right back into that "fuck you, downvote" area which doesn't work at all.