We already learned that when the US went to war with Irak while lying about WMD, against the vote of the UN.
They did whatever they wanted, just because they wanted to, and nobody could do a thing. They could fake evidences doing so, get caught, kill thousands, spend trillions, and destroy a country with no bad consequences whatsoever.
No blue helmet peace keepers was sent at any point to block the US soldiers path.
Fun fact: because of tkinter, Python embeds a TCL interpreter:
>>> import tkinter as tk
>>> tk.Tcl().eval('puts {hello, world}')
hello, world
''
So you could technically use TCL to query your DB if you cared.
But honestly, DB queries in real life is spread on threads, but then multiple processes, then a connection pool like pg bouncer, so you will unlikely see the difference most of the time. Not to mention the DB choice, the schema, the query quality, the DB configuration, the hardware and how complicated your request are all going to be more likely to affect the speed of request.
Still, interesting. Exploiting all those CPU in Python would cost a lot of RAM given how many processes you would have to spawn.
I would love to see the comparison using asyncio on uvloop to check the CPU are really the bottleneck though.
- it can be automated. CGI still required a lot of human work.
- AI generated content requires way less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at CGI. We already see people getting Stable-Diffusion-proficient in a few hours.
- in the 90, CGI was introduced gently, through selected medias. AI content has access to the full internet right out of the box.
- producing CGI required a lot of hardware, but with SaaS, AI will be available to anybody.
- CGI was first exposed to professionals, who produced for the public. AI is already been used by hobbyists, and soon the public, directly.
- CGI was mostly about visual techs, but AI generated content can be applied to text, sound, molecules, basically any structured data.
In summary, the very nature and context in which AI generated content is taking form means the impact will be larger, stronger, and way more intense.
People are hardly capable at dealing with CGI intelligently, even after 20 years. They trust photos and videos a lot, and react strongly to them. Even when they know they are fake, like in a movie, some emotions will forge they judgement like if it were real.
AI generated content? Forget about it. People are not ready. The emotional impact it's going to have will make you feel like the cancel culture was a whisper in the wind.
I was underwhelmed by the last decade of AI dev, but 2022 is for AI what 2000 was for the dotcom revolution.
Question is, what the equivalent of domain name for AI, something cheap you can buy to sale later?
I think it's still comparable if you view it as "Generative AI is to CGI what CGI was to practical effects".
- CGI can be automated, practical effects required a lot of human work
- CGI content requires less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at sculpting / painting / makeup / carpentry / stunts / whatever to become good at practical effects. We already see people getting $MODELLING_PROGRAM proficient in a few weeks.
- producing practical effects required a lot of hardware, material and tools but with CGI you just need a powerful computer. CGI will soon be available to anybody as computers become cheaper
Your last two points are probably only true for AI generated content but there are still some barriers to people setting up their own AI models (technical know how, hardware) and there are certainly limitations on what type of content can be produced (you need a big and reliable dataset of examples).
Overall I think this will have a similar impact but probably more widely distributed in both terms of access and impact.
Having worked in CG for several decades, this is a pretty misleading summary. CG takes a lot of manual work, and there are other reasons and benefits to using CG than how much manual work it takes. It’s often less work than practical but not always. There are certain kinds of things that can be automated (with a lot of manual setup work!) but most of what you see in movies also involves lots and lots of manual work for every single shot. It’s not unlike how machines get used to automate certain parts of practical effects work, using for example, compressors, electrical rigging, vehicles, pneumatics & hydraulics, gas & explosives, etc..
> We already see people getting $MODELLING_PROGRAM proficient in a few weeks.
This is similar to saying we already see people getting C++ proficient in a few weeks. Some people can write very useful & interesting programs within a few weeks, but nobody understands all of it by then, and nobody’s getting a high paid career on just a few weeks of noodling. It takes a long time to understand all the ins and outs, and independently it takes a long time to understand complementary computer science fundamentals. Same is true for Maya, Blender, Houdini, etc.. Someone might have something cool to show after a few weeks, but nobody is ready to make a CG movie by then, and nobody is landing the good jobs in CG. (By “nobody” I’m talking about statistical relevance, not that it has never happened.)
Another reason a few weeks is insufficient for landing good jobs is that the CG industry is highly competitive; you have to be better than the guy who’s gone to art school and played in Blender for a few years if you want that job.
True, I just think that because of all the leverages in place for AI content generation, the effects will be orders or magnitude bigger. But it's just speculation, let's get the pop corn and watch the show.
> AI generated content? Forget about it. People are not ready. The emotional impact it's going to have will make you feel like the cancel culture was a whisper in the wind.
Forget about it? People are not ready? When has that ever been a blocker? This is like a new era of 80s computing where some people will get a home computer and their dork kids will dork on it and produce some unbelievable stuff in the decades to come. I'm scared, slightly optimistic, but what is available right now as commodity, there ain't no stopping it.
Sub-textual thought experiment: how big can Hugging Face get?
Can they achieve a Monopoly on Art Production into the Future?
To build their moat: they build the largest supercomputer for image training, acquire the largest image training set (~10B), and then institute an IDF Unit 8200 style Garin Lotam recruitment effort of the best artistic talent on earth to feed new forms into the machine, and everyone else simply forgets they ever knew how to make art in the first place as the drawing prompt becomes as ubiquitous as the google search box ;)
Salting won't work in this particular case. You need to match plaintext against a blacklist. Salt per entry is too expensive, salt per blacklist is exploitable.
a salt for a password is when we know the username and the salt so can combine the salt and provided password to compare against the generated hash value.
in this case all we know is the phone number, how does a salt help us look up a given phone number in a set of salted / hashes if we dont know what salt to combine it with?
You shard the number into groups with a salt for each, until you reach a number of combinations that is computable for FB size on a check request, but way too long pre-generate. You can combine it with some bloom like filter to increase efficiency.
Indeed, and the surprise is that... it's a surprise to many.
I think inertia allowed things to go sideways for a long time in a lot of professions, without paying the price for it soon enough. It stayed unseen for long because those jobs are often not affecting directly the structure main goals, like sales, manufacturing or field agents. They are support jobs, and help the structure maintain its integrity on the long run.
So it takes time for the problem to be detected, and for the top to even become motivated to fix it. It's quite possible they didn't even know it was a problem, or didn't think it was important. Hell, the person currently in charge have likely arrive at the post way after the decisions to destroy those jobs has been taken, years after years. Each year, one small increment at a time.
We are seeing an extreme version phenomenon in the health system in France. Extreme because it touches more than support jobs. Hospitals are full of exhausted staff that are asked to make yet another effort, "just this once". Getting appointments for specialists now take months, even for repeated sessions. Doctors are making much less money than I do in IT, for much more work, responsibility and administrative pressure. This frog has been boiling for quite some time.
It was an easy to predict consequences of the shift of paradigm in the last thirty to forty years.
With the removal of companies middle layers, paths from operational positions to top management have basically disappeared. That means that at most companies, top managers have made their whole career there often starting in corporate finance jobs or at management consulting firms and have no experience whatsoever of what working for them as an employee is like.
Usually the army fares better here because it still promote from inside its own ranks but apparently it was not enough to avoid this.
Indeed, for the hospital it's probably part of the story: directors are now not required to have been doctors before.
Maybe having pairs (one doctor, one non doctor) for those jobs would be a solution.
But it's probably not the only problem.
France has a budget problem, it's been borrowing more and more, and producing less and less. We can't maintain our way of life without cutting some spending, and you do it where people complain less, or where consequences will be seen way down the road.
Sorry my answer was strictly about the issue with labour in the USA.
The French hospital issues are entirely different. I could a write an entire essay about it - I’m French myself. Most of it is due to brain dead management by the Health Ministry in the 90s. It was thought that by training less doctors, there would be less acts done and it would cost less to the sécurité sociale. The order agreed because it protected their revenue. Add to that that far too many acts which could be done by support staff have to be done by a doctor to be reimbursed and widely underpaid nurses and you get the current shit show.
The US has done much the same thing. Almost all graduate medical education (residencies) is funded by the federal government through the Medicare program. But despite increasing demand, Congress has held that funding roughly flat in order to keep Medicare costs under control. So we have a ridiculous situation where students are graduating from medical school but can't actually practice because they can't get matched to a residency slot. This is leading to delays in care and overwork for existing physicians.
Someone has given you a bill of goods. Any US MD/DO graduate will get a residency position, but there are a few every year that only apply for Orthopedics or Ophthalmology and don't select a backup IM/FM program and thus wind up unmatched. There are IM/FM/PEDS/Internship positions open, but they choose to pass and reapply next year. The only reason they couldn't get any residency is bad advising or an issue which is expected to prevent them from getting a medical license.
The Boomers climbed the ladder then cut all the opportunities out from below them and pocketed and spent the money and didn’t save for retirement.
As a whole, they are clearly going senile and mentally declining a lot faster than their parents. Also they’re selfish whiners. Most of em deserve cattle call retirement line up take your meds in run down projects they never bothered to upgrade.
Yes, but that wouldn't cover you for the unknown side effects of having a partial gene transferred to another specie with no way to know if in another context it could be express differently, with powerful effects.
The problem with complex systems with million of inter-dependent variables is that the unknown unknowns are too many and the only effective filter is time. However with those technologies ability to introduce powerful changes very fast, and little incentive from companies making them to allocate a lot of time, resources and prudence to study their aftermaths, the asymmetry of risk is not playing in our favor.
This gets into handwaving territory. Vague negatives that are impossible to disprove or even evaluate. At some point you have to insist those objecting actually have a point.
That's the problem with unknown unknowns. You cannot define them. We just know they exist, because the first thing science teaches us is the vast amount of thing we are ignorant of.
What you can define, however, is the asymmetry of risk.
For example, if a system is very complex, introducing series of intense rapid changes to it has chances of creating a strong disturbance because of cascading compounding effects on dependencies of said system. And because of the sheer size of the system, we cannot model it all, and hence we cannot predict such consequences and certainly not protect ourselves again them.
If you highly depend on the system stability, then a strong disturbance has in turn a high chance of being in your disfavor.
Nassim Taleb as a great bit about this his incerto.
In the case at hand, the asymmetry is in not in our favor, and we should be prudent. And we are not being prudent.
I'd say the irrational hand waving is rather from the people driving blind, yet stating we are doing just fine because most of the time we are arriving at destination just fine.
Especially since the first people stating we are doing just fine are the ones that have a huge conflict of interest in the matter: the ones performing the changes and expecting to benefit from it.
Now I understand that often the debate is full of facebook mums, which doesn't help giving a lot of credibility to the argument I'm raising right now.
Still, I think it's important we remain alert and objective about the matter, and I don't think any side is. Certainly not when so much money is involved.
Interesting. As a counterpoint, I was in Norway a month ago on business and as a tourist. Did the Norway in a nutshell thing from Bergen to Oslo with time in Bergen, Flam, and Oslo. I used the Bergen and Oslo day passes for unlimited public transport in those cities. The later was especially handy, as it generates QR codes for both public transport and entry to most museums. My travel passes were handled via barcode docs on my phone. My tickets to a concert in Oslo was via an app on my phone. Route planning for site-seeing (which bus, tram, ferry, or rail) was via an app on my phone.
I paid for restaurants using credit cards directly to payment terminals.
I found the whole experience very easy and enjoyed how much I could handle on my phone.
So if you lose your phone, forget your phone, if you don't have any battery, or if you have any internet issue, you can't order.
You cannot have the whole menu in front of you, you have to scroll and change sections. If it's cold, you can't order without talking your gloves off, if it's sunny, you better have a very bright phone or the menu will be unreadable.
As everything in China, you cannot pay without being electronically tracked, and you can't give a tip without going through a system that will likely take a cut. I will refrain to reach the Godwin point here since I assume it's been debated ad nausaum.
And of course, if something is not on the menu, you can't order it.
As usually with systems that are 100% digital, it gives you zero margin of maneuver outside of the happy path.
I don't want every restaurant to turn into a Mac Donald. If I want Mac Donald's, I go there.
McDonalds (and most of their competitors) are actually pretty good/ok for customizations. Usually what's missing is some edge cases like "no ice" or fully exhaustive lists.
This is not entirely correct, many places still do accept cash and allow you to order without your phone. It just so happens that most people prefer to order and pay by phone.
We had a sushi restaurant (in Canada) that belonged to Chinese expat that worked with the whole QR code + order + pay on your phone and I did find it pleasant. I would go as far as saying that I prefer it.
It might be cultural, but I can count on a single hand the number of times I went to a restaurant and the interaction with the waiter/waitress improved the overall experience.
While it is not something common, it just happens.
In Australia the food culture is you can customize almost anything on the menu and customers expect to be able to pretty much choose whatever combination they want as long as you have the ingredient and they can pay for it.
In France, a menu may not contain something you can eat, but some restaurants will create a full dish for you on the spot. It's very common restaurants with a Michelin star for example: as a veggie and foodie, I get regularly this treatment since french cuisine is very centered on meat. Some restaurants have the menu changing every day (I ate in one this week) depending of the farmer's market. The waiter just let you what's available. I know of at least one restaurant with no menu: you express a theme, and the chief will try to invent something matching it.
In Thailand, there was a restaurant were I used to go that had a regular menu for tourists with high margin meals, and a secret menu for regular customers that was actually good.
In Mali and Argentina, some restaurant menus are fake. You can't order most items, while there are items that you can get pretty much everywhere (riz au gras, pollo a la milanesca) even if it's not in there.
Now, it's tempting to decide that one path is optimum and shape society to only provide it. However, you kill diversity, margin of security, innovation, charm, and so on.
Don't get me wrong. Making the happy path the easiest and proffered way is OK. Offering a digital menu and payment system as a main option is great.
But making alternatives close to impossible is, at best, a good way to end up with with a bland life, and at worse, will create a dangerously inflexible and intolerant system.
It's why we should keep cash, paper forms and phone support despite the automated main experience been more efficient when all goes well.
They give you a beautiful piece of paper, and when you order something on it, the waiter tells you it's not available.
After the 10th item on the menu not being available, you start to understand that the menu is more like a checkbox a restaurant must have to appear worthy of the name, rather than an actual useful object.
Not all restaurants are like that in Bamako of course.
But it's a great fun to take new comers to diner, and let them be puzzled for a while until reality sink in. I still remember my first time, my colleague looking at me ordering ice cream with eyes saying "oh, sweety...".
I'll let you in on a little secret: you can order anything they can reasonably make without inconvenience. E.g. "Can I have a vegetarian version of this?" often yes, sometimes no, but you can ask.
I’ve never had trouble ordering a custom dish or special options. If there’s a price difference, the server tells us what to order on the menu, and tells the kitchen what to actually make. If it’s a family shop, sometimes they update the menu for next time.
I’m sure there’s places that won’t let you order off menu. I wonder whether QR menus increases the number of them, though.
The problem with this reasonning is that it relies on potential, on hypothetical, on hope.
But the problem is not, it's just physics, and it's comming for sure.
Not attempting to solve it with what we know right now because we might pull off something out of our sleeve at some point doesn't seem neither rational nor scientific to me.
However, if we do tackle the problem, we give ourself a margin of security that we can later on remove if we actually manage to innovate out of out petri dish.
They did whatever they wanted, just because they wanted to, and nobody could do a thing. They could fake evidences doing so, get caught, kill thousands, spend trillions, and destroy a country with no bad consequences whatsoever.
No blue helmet peace keepers was sent at any point to block the US soldiers path.