Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 8th, 2024

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  • I don’t know any AI artists (as in someone who prompts a model and then calls the result a work of art), although most traditional artists i know have come to incorporate AI one way or another in their process.

    You don’t really hear about it because it’s all intermediate material used during the production phase. For example, as a hobbyist writer, one thing i struggle with is writing action scenes cause i don’t have visual memory and i tend to forget a lot about continuity and “spatial realism” (“this guy starts in this corner of the room so there’s no way he could grab that object at that point”, shit like that). With AI I can generate some kind of “story board” of my scene, which helps me write it much better. It’s just laid out visually in front of me and i catch a lot more details.

    Sometimes when i’m toying with an idea i’ll also have a model generate a few variations on it, with different points of view, writing style, focus etc… Even if the writing is mediocre, it gives me a really good idea of how each version could pan out, and whether an angle works or not. I’ll then select the angle that works best and rewrite it entirely from scratch.

    There’s nothing innovative about it, people have been using assistants to avoid tedious work forever. It’s just that before AI you had to, you know, be rich and able to actually pay for the labor.





  • When you read that stuff on reddit there’s a parameter you need to keep in mind : these people are not really discussing Lemmy. They’re rationalizing and justifying why they are not on Lemmy. Totally different conversation.

    Nobody wants to come out and say “I know mainstream platforms are shit and destroying the fabric of reality but I can’t bring myself to be on a platform except it is the Hip Place to Be”. So they’ll invent stuff that paints them in a good light.

    You’ll still see people claiming that Mastodon is unusable because you have to select an instance - even though you don’t have to, you can just type Mastodon on Google, click the first link, and create an account in 2 clicks. It’s been ages. But the people still using Twitter need the excuse because otherwise what does it make them?




  • So for the first 20 years or 2/3 of the entire history of the company, they were unprofitable or barely profitable.

    We must have a wildly different definition of “barely profitable”. Half a billion in 2004 money is a lot of profit, a billion back to back in 2009 and 2010 is a lot of profit.

    I think you’re confusing Amazon with the next generation of loss-leader companies. Let’s talk Uber, let’s talk Twitter, if we want to point at “hugely unprofitable” companies. But Amazon is a beast of its own, they have a very coherent financial story. Even during their money-losing decade they posted insane results, frequently multiplying revenue while barely increasing operating costs.


  • Oh thanks for clarifying in even more excruciating details how a subtraction works that is really helpful.

    Why would you repeat the lie that they’re “usually unprofitable” when the information is publically available in a million places on the internet ? In 2023 Amazon made :

    • 575B$ in sales
    • If you remove costs of goods that’s 270B$ in gross profit
    • If you remove operating expenses (including R&D) that’s 30B$ in net income

    Amazon is factually not “usually unprofitable”, they have in fact made profit (as in money which actually goes into your pocket after discounting all expenses) every year for the last 15 years except in 2022 and some tiny losses in 2014 and 2012.



  • I’m not much of a reddit defender as i pretty much left this place same time as everybody else. However there’s always been a very clear trend in this kind of subreddits. Places like “noahgettheboat” or “iamapieceofshit” or “thatsinsane” systematically attract the worst kind of misanthropic low-lifes. People will see the most abject violence and laugh “haha he fucked around and found out” and of course this makes the most fascistic types feel at home.

    I don’t think they are representative of the overall slant of the community. Most places are progressive by default.



  • There’s absolutely no doubt that lower-end models are going to keep improving and that inference will keep getting cheaper. It won’t be on a Raspberry but my money’s with you. In 6 years you’ll be able to buy some cheap-ish specialized hardware to run open models on and they’re gonna be at least as capable as today’s frontier models while burning a fraction of the energy.

    In fact i wouldn’t be surprised if frontier models were somehow overtaken by vastly cheaper models in the long run. The whole “trillion parameter count” paradigm feels very hacky and ripe for radical simplification. And wouldn’t it be hilarious ? All those suckers spending billions building a moat only to see it swept under their feet.