Greg's recent activity
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Comment on The Oatmeal: A cartoonist's review of AI art in ~comics
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Comment on The Oatmeal: A cartoonist's review of AI art in ~comics
Greg Link ParentAre you assuming only pretrained, commercial models are in play here? That would make more sense to me, because those are pretty limited and pretty middle-of-the-road in a lot of ways, but I think...Are you assuming only pretrained, commercial models are in play here? That would make more sense to me, because those are pretty limited and pretty middle-of-the-road in a lot of ways, but I think it's a shame to tar the entire field of "AI" (I'll spare you the whole post I've written a few times before about why I dislike the terminology) with blanket statements about what it's capable of based on something that's essentially the McDonalds version of the technology.
You can absolutely create a loss function that'd simultaneously maximise the distance from the training images (i.e. minimise the similarity) while keeping a term that enforces recognisable outputs as defined by a classification model to stop it just returning random noise, for example. I'm not sure what the results would look like, or how much tuning it'd take to create that function in a way that gives a decent output, but it's absolutely within the capabilities of "AI" as most people define it. I might even give it a go if I get the free time, it'd be a fun little experiment!
But, even putting aside the very technical side, I'm still not getting it... Looking at these:
the end result is just a remix of what it knows
you'll always be able to tell that it's borrowing from those without really adding any new style of its own
It seems like you have a very strong idea of where the line is between "remix" and "original"... but I don't have that kind of confidence in the distinction at all. I couldn't tell you what proportion of my own thoughts and ideas are original vs. coming from half seen and half remembered snippets of what I've experienced in my life.
If I can't say with certainty what "original" means in the context of a human mind - my own human mind, no less, the only one I can experience from the inside - I just really struggle with the idea that there's a definitive line of where a machine is or isn't making something original. Does it become original when it passes the point you can't tell it's borrowing? Because I think we're already there in the very best outputs, even though there are by definition 100 or 1000 or 10,000 mediocre outputs for every one of those exceptional ones.
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Comment on The Oatmeal: A cartoonist's review of AI art in ~comics
Greg Link Parent[citation needed] I’m half joking there, but I am genuinely interested to know what you mean, because I hear this refrain a lot and I really struggle to understand what people are getting at with...AI as it is cannot add this element of uniqueness to its output, it can only rehash or remix what's been provided to it
[citation needed]
I’m half joking there, but I am genuinely interested to know what you mean, because I hear this refrain a lot and I really struggle to understand what people are getting at with it.
What’s the meaningful bar for uniqueness that matters in your mind? Because you can trivially get a unique style just by randomising some parameters, or you can get a unique image by using a photo of yourself as the basis for a generated output and asking for a situation you’ve never been in, or you can get into much more interesting (in my opinion) experimental territory by letting adversarial models optimise towards goals like “create things that don’t look like your training data, but that are still interpretable by an image classification model”.
I understand the basis for most of what people say in these conversations, even if I might disagree with it, but the specific idea that AI can’t create something unique is one I see repeated often, almost verbatim, with the assumption that we all accept it as an axiom - and maybe I’m just being excessively literal, but I just don’t get it! That doesn’t seem to line up with what I see at all?
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentDown payments and taxes both depend on the price ratio, not the monthly payment, and the interest rates in the link that flipped the monthly payment were only in play for six out of the last 60...- Exemplary
When you're buying a home, it's not necessarily the ratio of income to house price. It's really the ratio of income to monthly payment.
Down payments and taxes both depend on the price ratio, not the monthly payment, and the interest rates in the link that flipped the monthly payment were only in play for six out of the last 60 years. I think it's still fair to characterise as harder for most people, in most places, most of the time.
But sure, I take your point, there are a lot of variables at play - honestly, the one thing that's usually on my mind in these conversations is this graph, it neatly sums up what I see as the overall problem.
It seems like they value permanent housing a little less than prior generations.
Or see it as less attainable, that's my point. To take a deliberately absurd example, it's not that I necessarily value eating out more than a yacht or a private jet, it's that I know I would never attain either so they don't even factor into my spending calculations.
But in terms of blame, I see it as too nihilistic to not let Gen Z take some of the blame themselves. We can do more as a society to make things better, but a person should always focus on what they can and just not using Uber Eats is not that hard to do.
I dunno, I just see the entire social contract as broken. It's not hard to forego Uber Eats, but why bother? Where's it going to get you? There is no "put in the work and you'll be rewarded", if there ever even really was. And I'm saying all this from the perspective of a relatively high earner - I work far less hard than plenty of my peers, yet I'm rewarded far more; the highest paid jobs I've ever had brought the least positive impact to society; the trappings of "middle class" in my parents' and grandparents' generations are just barely within reach at a very-much-not-middle income nowadays.
The "every little helps" attitude genuinely bothers me because I feel like it obscures the fact that often those little numbers add up to... a medium sized number that doesn't close the gap. But even more, I think it bothers me because it's imposing a sense of fairness on a wider economic situation that's just so utterly nonsensical to me that I feel like surely we can't be collectively pretending that any of this is actually how we want the world to work.
I've gone pretty off the rails here, I know, but for me at least we've long since lost any semblance of economic sanity. I can't bring myself to blame people for not being sensible when the system as a whole feels like a cross between a casino, a Kafka novel, and a piece of absurdist postmodern art.
...I guess I probably fall squarely into your "too nihilistic" bucket, and you probably wouldn't even be wrong to say that.
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentYeah, on that first part I do actually mostly agree with you. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to go all in on luxuries, just that it’s an understandable one given the circumstances. The bit I’m...Yeah, on that first part I do actually mostly agree with you. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to go all in on luxuries, just that it’s an understandable one given the circumstances.
The bit I’m struggling with in the second half, and in your first couple of posts, is that it feels like the elephant in the room isn’t being acknowledged: it is much harder than it used to be to buy a house. Affordability has gone backwards while the rich have become exponentially richer. Focusing on people’s spending habits rather than on that widening chasm between housing costs and income seems like it’s badly misplacing the blame, and it seems odd to say “we just hope that those who come after will do better” when the opposite is what’s actually happening at a societal level.
It’s not how it’s always worked. There were a solid few generations in the 20th century where large numbers of people had the ability to live comfortably on a below-median income, and often even on a single below-median income for an entire household. That has now been taken away directly in the service of making the rich richer. Why focus on the behaviour of the victims rather than the perpetrators?
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentLet’s put aside “are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home”, plenty of people are in the position of “could eat rice and beans for every meal and still be unable to...Let’s put aside “are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home”, plenty of people are in the position of “could eat rice and beans for every meal and still be unable to buy a home”. So what incentive is there for them to do so?
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentEqually, if the numbers just won’t add up either way, I find it hard to blame people for spending on small luxuries rather than saving. Short term enjoyment now over stability later is justifiably...Equally, if the numbers just won’t add up either way, I find it hard to blame people for spending on small luxuries rather than saving.
Short term enjoyment now over stability later is justifiably seen as short sighted. Short term enjoyment now because the money wasn’t going to be enough for stability anyway so why make sacrifices you’ll see no payoff from? Yeah, I can understand that.
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentThis is very, very reasonable - a home is a whole lot more than bricks and mortar, it’s a whole lot more than just money, and it’s totally fair to want that taken into account as a genuinely...we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into making it our home. We love the area and our neighbors. We don’t want to move
This is very, very reasonable - a home is a whole lot more than bricks and mortar, it’s a whole lot more than just money, and it’s totally fair to want that taken into account as a genuinely important part of the conversation. Just because the invisible middle finger of the market treats housing as nothing more than a commodity doesn’t mean we necessarily need to do the same when we’re discussing solutions.
we don’t feel guilty that young families can’t find their perfect homes
Ehhh… I can give this one a charitable reading, but it’s tone deaf at best. The choice to say “we don’t feel guilty” (and talking about “perfect homes”, instead of just “homes”, for that matter) rather than acknowledging the difficulties people face nowadays reads as antagonistic and dismissive rather than being a justified call for empathy about wanting to stay where they are.
We were in the same boat when we were young and had little kids.
At this point I invite the author to fuck the absolute fuck off and go stare at the numbers until they feel sufficiently motivated to rewrite the article in a way that makes their legitimate points about wanting to stay somewhere they love and acknowledges that it is a very different world to the one they bought in, that the people complaining about that have very legitimate reasons to do so, and that the author is exacerbating a genuine problem that exists - even if it’s perhaps justified for them to be doing so, and actually pretty reasonable to point that out.
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Comment on What common misunderstanding do you want to clear up? in ~talk
Greg Link ParentI was going for laymen's perspective - I replied in more detail just above before I refreshed the page and saw your comment, but as it happens it covers this nicely too! Only thing I'd add...I was going for laymen's perspective - I replied in more detail just above before I refreshed the page and saw your comment, but as it happens it covers this nicely too! Only thing I'd add specifically here is that the way the various copyright offices say copyright functions, vs what they actually enforce, vs what the court opinions and precedents say do not necessarily match up well at all.
But yeah, you can absolutely substitute in "expressions of ideas" and it wouldn't meaningfully change what I had in mind, even though I was also talking about the broader public conversation rather than the legally precise one.
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Comment on What common misunderstanding do you want to clear up? in ~talk
Greg Link ParentI really appreciate this reply, actually! I wasn't 100% happy with my own phrasing there as I was writing it - I was trying to simultaneously say that the intangible part is the subject, but not...I really appreciate this reply, actually! I wasn't 100% happy with my own phrasing there as I was writing it - I was trying to simultaneously say that the intangible part is the subject, but not use the word "intangible" because it's the conceptualisation rather than the intangibility that's important here - and "expressions of ideas" is a much better way of communicating what I was trying to say.
But I don't think any of these mechanisms cover pure ideas. Ideas are free.
I am going to push back a little here, though, for two reasons...
Firstly, I'd agree that none of these mechanisms were intended to cover pure ideas, but copyright gets used in increasingly tenuous ways to enforce increasingly abstract "rights": DMCA non-circumvention means it de facto covers almost anything if you wrap some DRM around it, and blank media levies compel users to pay for recording works just in case they might be infringing, to take a couple of examples among many. In practice, patent law as applied in [current year] is more than happy to cover very broad concepts a lot of the time anyway, too.
Secondly, I actually was talking about the general person-on-the-street assumption in that sentence, rather than the legally precise definition. I'm not going to pretend that's why I worded it that way - I didn't, it was clumsy and you've improved it - but I genuinely did mean "the wider conversation starts from this broad impression" rather than "the legislation starts from this premise", and I think that's often the conceptual starting point when these things are discussed because as you rightly say, the whole area absolutely is a source of popular misunderstanding.
in the spirit of the wider topic: I feel the mechanics of copyright, patent and trademark law are often a source of misunderstanding.
Strong, strong agree, and the way I wrote it could easily be interpreted as more patent-y than copyright-y, not to mention the number of discussions I see that totally conflate copyright and trademark (which aren't helped by cases where the IP holders themselves use copyright as a hammer to force an issue that really should be trademark-related). Precision is super important here!
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Comment on What common misunderstanding do you want to clear up? in ~talk
Greg LinkThe primary purpose of copyright was intended to be for the good of the public as a whole, not just the good of the copyright holder. Per the US Constitution: The goal is encouraging the creation...The primary purpose of copyright was intended to be for the good of the public as a whole, not just the good of the copyright holder.
Per the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The goal is encouraging the creation of more things by making it worthwhile enough to invest in them - it was absolutely not intended to enforce some notion of natural ownership over the work. The idea of copyright as a collective good, with the interests of public balanced against a reasonable incentive to create new works, has almost entirely been lost.
The modern conversation almost always starts from an assumption that ideas are private property, something to be exclusively owned, bought, and sold, rather than from the assumption that they are public by default but that it's sometimes worthwhile to grant an artificial, time limited monopoly. Even when talking about copyright reform, it's almost always framed from the point of view of the copyright holder having an inherent right that could perhaps be limited, rather than as society itself being the main stakeholder.
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Comment on Timeout when connecting to a local webserver through the internet, but only on WiFi in ~comp
Greg Link ParentAh crap, sorry about that, I didn’t realise it was a restricted feature - and honestly even if I had I probably wouldn’t have remembered which way around “Ultra” and “Max” sit in the product line!...Ah crap, sorry about that, I didn’t realise it was a restricted feature - and honestly even if I had I probably wouldn’t have remembered which way around “Ultra” and “Max” sit in the product line!
Glad to hear you’ve got it working though, any fix that does the job without breaking anything else is a good one as far as I’m concerned. In my experience this kind of setup on a new project always turns up the esoteric bits that feel like they’re missing, there’s a ton of second guessing of the choices that got there, and then a week later I forget it was ever an issue and it works totally fine for the next however many years.
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Comment on David Cross: Thoughts on the Riyadh Comedy Festival in ~misc
Greg Link ParentYeah, I absolutely get this as well. I remember feeling very similar watching some Nonstop Dan videos on YouTube - he’s reviewing a Saudia Airlines flight to Riyadh and his (same sex) partner is...Yeah, I absolutely get this as well. I remember feeling very similar watching some Nonstop Dan videos on YouTube - he’s reviewing a Saudia Airlines flight to Riyadh and his (same sex) partner is just along for the ride as if they wouldn’t have been detained and quite probably killed if they’d happened to be from there.
Like, I’m not even on the “any interaction with these countries is supporting the regime” side of things - I’m actually pretty firmly on team “most people aren’t their government and building ties between the actual population and the rest of the world is important”, and it’s a fine line to walk littered with genuine grey areas - but you have to at least acknowledge the government if you’re someone with a platform to do so.
Reviewing their services while playing happy families as if others haven’t died for doing the same is wildly disingenuous, as is acting like taking their money and accepting their restrictions to be part of a comedy show is a neutral or apolitical choice.
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Comment on Timeout when connecting to a local webserver through the internet, but only on WiFi in ~comp
Greg Link ParentNah, not at all - much as I love where they sit on the price vs capabilities vs integration Venn diagram, the ui UI (heh) has enough quirks, inconsistencies, and straight up bugs that finding the...Nah, not at all - much as I love where they sit on the price vs capabilities vs integration Venn diagram, the ui UI (heh) has enough quirks, inconsistencies, and straight up bugs that finding the right thing can be a crapshoot. I keep meaning to move to managing mine with terraform, actually, just need to find the time...
Anyway, rambling aside, you're in the right place already! For some reason that page doesn't always load the latest data for me even on browser refresh, so first thing I'd try is clearing all filters (bottom left) and then hitting the tiny refresh icon by the search field (top left). Even if the flows to/from your server aren't marked as blocked and are failing for some other reason, selecting the rows individually will give you a lot of additional info about what the router sees as the connection endpoints, VLANs, IPs, security zones, etc. that can be very helpful for debugging this kind of thing.
If those flows aren't showing at all, it probably means the log level isn't turned up high enough to capture what you need; if you go to
/network/default/settings/cybersecure/traffic-loggingyou can flip "Flow Logging" to record all traffic, which should start populating the previous page pretty much immediately. Then you can make some test connections to your web server again and inspect them easily from the router's perspective, and you can just disable the logging again as soon as you're done if you don't want it keeping those records more generally. -
Comment on David Cross: Thoughts on the Riyadh Comedy Festival in ~misc
Greg Link ParentThank fuck for that. I saw the title and worried for a second that another seemingly decent comedian was making excuses.Thank fuck for that. I saw the title and worried for a second that another seemingly decent comedian was making excuses.
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Comment on Timeout when connecting to a local webserver through the internet, but only on WiFi in ~comp
Greg Link ParentI’m wondering if the router is getting mixed up between whether it’s an internal or external connection, and that’s interacting in an unexpected way with the firewall zones? The defaults only...I’m wondering if the router is getting mixed up between whether it’s an internal or external connection, and that’s interacting in an unexpected way with the firewall zones? The defaults only allow return traffic in a lot of cases, but if the initial connection is external and then the router takes a shortcut once it realises both IPs are internal, that could be changing how it’s hitting the policies (e.g. blocking the internal connection because the allowed return traffic was expected to be on the external connection). It could explain why it’s happy when you use the internal IP directly but not the external URL.
Have you checked the “Flows” panel on the UniFi console? Might be worthwhile to get an idea of how the router is interpreting the connections - whether they’re being blocked, what it thinks the IPs at each end are, which networks/VLANs it thinks it’s routing between.
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Comment on Timeout when connecting to a local webserver through the internet, but only on WiFi in ~comp
Greg LinkJust to confirm, do you mean that’s fine on WiFi as well as wired?Opening https://192.168.1.123:58443 (webserver address) is fine.
Just to confirm, do you mean that’s fine on WiFi as well as wired?
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Comment on UK's Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack shutdown to hit four weeks in ~transport
Greg Link ParentIt does also make me wonder if perhaps the insurance company did some due diligence on JLR's overall cybersecurity situation and basically said "you're asking us for the equivalent of life...It does also make me wonder if perhaps the insurance company did some due diligence on JLR's overall cybersecurity situation and basically said "you're asking us for the equivalent of life insurance on a 106 year old chain smoker, we're not covering shit until you get it up to standard" - basically I'm thinking that it's maybe the same lack of security that caused both the renewal delays and the attack, rather than the timing being a tragic coincidence.
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Comment on UK's Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack shutdown to hit four weeks in ~transport
Greg Link ParentHonestly even if they’d had insurance I kind of feel like when we’re talking about organisations with this level of resources, such a large impact from an attack points to negligence anyway (or at...Honestly even if they’d had insurance I kind of feel like when we’re talking about organisations with this level of resources, such a large impact from an attack points to negligence anyway (or at least incompetence, which is a fine line when your job as leader of a significant organisation is to hire and oversee competent specialists in whatever areas are needed).
They’re apparently losing ~$10m/day from this, and the cost of keeping a decent disaster recovery team on staff with all the resources they need should be somewhere in the low single digit millions per year, so they’ve torpedoed themselves for the sake of saving a few hours of potential losses. Which are now actual losses because of that.
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Comment on Data removal services? in ~tech
Greg LinkThis is pure conjecture, but based on the business models of, like, 95% of VC-funded, YouTube-advertised tech companies I’ve always kind of assumed the data removal ones are a protection racket:...This is pure conjecture, but based on the business models of, like, 95% of VC-funded, YouTube-advertised tech companies I’ve always kind of assumed the data removal ones are a protection racket: they do what they say while you’re paying, and if you ever stop they proactively let everyone know your data is free game again (maybe even get a kickback for doing so). You get inundated with junk again, say “wow, I hadn’t realised how much that service was helping!”, and resubscribe.
I have absolutely no evidence to back that, but from what I can see it’s the amoral profit maximising approach, so I’d almost be more surprised if they’re not doing it.
This does actually help me a lot, thanks for that! I think I interpret the idea of originality quite strongly on its difference from what’s come before, and what you’re saying is that you focus more on its coherence or personality within the body of work.
I was going to say something about distinctiveness but I realised that actually has both connotations too: distinct (different from previous), and distinct (identifiable to a particular style or origin). Even in the vocabulary itself, the concepts are clearly very closely intertwined!
I’ve definitely got a clearer handle on where you’re coming from now, and in some ways I do agree. I think all I’d say is you might be surprised at what AI (as a broad term for neural net technology) can do, far beyond what you see from AI (commercially driven content generation products from major tech companies).
A model with a style truly its own, derived from an incentive function very different to “make something that a human will, on average, approve of for this text prompt”, is entirely possible. I’m not suggesting organic creativity or thought, but if you step beyond just prompting and actually dive into the way systems are trained and the degrees of freedom available there, I think that originality and distinctiveness are absolutely on the table. But probably not alongside profitability, and certainly not big tech levels of profitability, even if it could maybe make for an interesting PhD project or arts foundation grant.