mbgerring

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91.
by mbgerring 5mo ago
I am a working artist. Professional visual artists were furious about DALL-E and Midjourney immediately . If you didn’t see this, or you weren’t aware of it, it’s a self-selection problem. Sam Altman was talking about how we neeeed UBI bec
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
I live in San Francisco, and my personal sample of “normal people” think AI generated imagery looks like shit, abhor the proliferation of slop, and are doing their best to avoid this stuff at all costs.
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and re
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
The people running these companies give interviews every few months where they gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs. The people building this technology are the ones creating the hatred you’re seeing.
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
I have worked in software since 2007 and I have been unemployed for almost 6 months. Getting any new job will require me to use AI tools, even if I think they’re awful, harmful bullshit. I am one of the people you might see using AI, and I
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
In that case, I’m subsidizing your cheap token costs. You’re welcome.
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
Can’t reply to the reply here, but yes, you do pay for it with money. Absorbing all of America’s capital and construction labor capacity to build AI data centers, rather than, for example, reaching parity with every other developed country
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
It’s part of the cost per token
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
Now include the externalized cost in the U.S. of deploying ~100% of productive capital to build data centers instead of, for example, first-world transportation infrastructure, and tell me which one is cheaper
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
I don’t think improvement is accelerating. We went from “computers can’t do these things at all” to “now they can” in a few years with the discovery of transformers, and now we get “it can do the same things, except incrementally better, at
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
“Toked out” is really, really good, thank you for this
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
A lot more of my time was spent fighting to keep the resources I needed to execute my roadmap than I liked. I spent waaaaay too much time explaining why my product area, which covered business critical data and internal processes, was worth
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
I see you moving the goalposts! And that’s fine, because this is also wrong: the pace of AI datacenter construction far exceeds actual demand for AI datacenters or actual AI products. The current pace of construction is purely speculative.
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
You are absolutely smart enough to know the difference between a data center for internet-distributed software and a data center full of GPUs solely for AI, along with the attendant increase in power and cooling needs. Don’t play dumb, plea
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
“AI safety” as it’s understood today is an entire faith-based belief system, incubated in a cult-like community with a high propensity for drug abuse and mental illness, over more than a decade. The reason that real-world harms caused by AI
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
Last time I checked you don’t have to pay that much more for a Prusa than a similar spec Bambu printer. And in any case, Bambu’s well-publicized abuse of open source has driven me off of ever using their printers. I know that only nerds car
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
I think there’s probably a limit to given technologies of social organization, but not biology. I think most people have more potential than they’re ever allowed to reach, and that capitalism is indifferent to the social structures it destr
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
I don’t understand why so many people are convinced that “this time is different.” New tools raise the ceiling of what’s possible. New jobs emerge at the limit of what’s possible with new tools. The jobs doing what we do today will disappea
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Ask HN: Before Open Source took over the server, what was the discourse like?
9 points by mbgerring 5mo ago|4 comments
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
Does anyone remember the conference talk in the early days of React that was titled something like “best practices considered harmful,” or something? Or maybe that was a joke someone made about it. Anyway, the Semantic Web people have been
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
Hello from the distant past, when being able to easily consume a website via API was an exciting and fresh idea for humans, before robots could effectively use the computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
Started with attending Burning Man starting about 12 years ago. Got jealous of my friends who were doing “real” engineering on these kinds of projects, and started volunteering, applying for and winning art grants, meeting other artists, an
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
My current job search has been the longest and most difficult of my career (5 months so far). Caveats: - I’m only applying with climate tech companies - I’m trying to transition back to engineering after a detour into product - I’m trying t
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by mbgerring 5mo ago
There was a change in US tax law that revoked the ability of software companies to classify engineer salaries as an R&D expense, which massively increased the tax liability for many software companies.
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by mbgerring 6mo ago
Google gets nearly all of its revenue from targeted advertising, and Apple does not. Apple has an incentive to restrict or completely deny third-party data collection, because they’ve made privacy a major part of their brand marketing and t
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by mbgerring 6mo ago
Do you have any idea how hard it already is to make a living in a creative field?
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by mbgerring 6mo ago
People who built a career on their mastery of Blender are going to lose their livelihoods. Why is this difficult to understand?
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by mbgerring 6mo ago
“We are building tools to enable entertainment companies to lay people off, and absorb a percentage of those salaries as revenue.”
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by mbgerring 6mo ago
> Every day I'm finding it harder to believe we're not already in a simulation. Seek help before it’s too late.
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by mbgerring 6mo ago
I did read it, what do you think I missed? The article very clearly and explicitly made the point that despite huge speculative funding for an influx of AI startups, San Francisco’s economy isn’t doing all that well. Which I can confirm, as

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