rand_alpha19

Maybe you could read the article and learn something:

But the tiny electronic devices remain a vital means of communication in some areas - such as health care and emergency services, thanks to their durability and long battery life.

“It’s the cheapest and most efficient way to communicate to a large number of people about messages that don’t need responses,” said a senior surgeon at a major U.K. hospital, adding that pagers are commonly used by doctors and nurses across the country’s National Health Service (NHS). “It’s used to tell people where to go, when, and what for.”

Smartphones do a lot of things that might not be needed (look into how many different sensors they have). Sometimes a person doesn’t have access to a charger or time to charge a device and running out of battery could mean someone dies.

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You say that like I’m unaware - maybe I should needlessly remind you that most of these fines are generally in the millions of dollars. A step in the right direction is not a bad thing.

Regardless, I’m not sure shareholders will think of it that way if the anti-trust practices continue and the fines accrue. The EU likes to be punitive when their orders are ignored.

I’m glad that corporations are actually receiving fines that are commensurate with their earnings and scale. Hopefully it’s enough to get them to not do this shit.

Speaking as a technician (associate’s degree), every engineer in my country makes easily double what I do. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers are just examples of professions that are paid more for their expertise than their actual work output. I would have to work 60-hour weeks just to get paid what a fresh engineering grad would get.

If you think you’re at the top of your pay scale and want to earn more, then you should probably think about further education or look into travel nursing if travel is interesting/a possibility for you. Some kind of specialized knowledge like radiation, imaging, or anesthesiology would probably help.

That’s great - I am obviously not talking about you in that case. I understand why people want to use it, I just don’t think Discord’s features are good enough to justify the mass adoption and the walled garden and UI are bad.

Yes, that’s how I ended up there too. At the time, Skype sucked and Mumble/Ventrilo/etc. were seen as too old-school for my friends (and a lot of them didn’t have PCs, just smartphones). We also tried Google Meet, Zoom, and Facebook Messenger at various points but Discord always seemed like the most reliable.

Yes, exactly! At this point, some of these communities have been on Discord for years and have specialized bots for certain tasks. They don’t want to start over, and I don’t want them to either - there’s tons of real work that these communities have put in. I think that these messaging services that want to make headway in the space Discord occupies need to reduce the friction in switching because a lot of Discord admins do believe that the feature set is better, they just can’t easily move over.

This happens to organizations all the time and it’s a known issue - Discord communities are no different. I’m hoping something comes along in the next few years if it doesn’t already exist in its infancy right now. Even at the user level, I know many people are confused about Matrix. I don’t know how exactly to fix these issues, but they need to be priorities.

We’re not fixing Discord’s problems, oh my god. We’re trying to get their existing users to go somewhere else even though it’s what’s familiar and Discord works for them.

Also it’s definitely possible to code an import tool that scrapes a given server for info on how to structure things on the new platform, so idk what you think you’re gaining by insulting my comparison to an aspect of a service that makes users motivated to switch.

I don’t know who shat in your coffee, but get a fucking new cup.

Unfortunately, a lot of fandom communities, video games, and (ugh) hobbyist development projects have Discard servers instead of a forum or similar.

It provides a weird IRC-but-not-really type experience that is similar to MSN in some ways. A lot of younger people flock to it because they find computer stuff difficult and they just want it to work, be easy, and have an app. The UI is trendy even though it’s horrible to actually navigate due to all the wasted space and buttons.

I really just think it caught on at the right time, though the video calling is pretty good. What I have a problem with is that you need to join a server to access any information inside of it, so it’s not searchable from outside of the Discord ecosystem. For dev projects or large communities, that sucks and makes the internet a worse place.

Who gives a shit? The people who use it that you apparently want to switch to something else, for one. Shouldn’t it be easy to switch, like going from Chrome to Firefox? That’s how we get out of Discord hell.

Anything that wants to meaningfully compete with Discord will probably also need to be able to near-seamlessly port over existing Discord servers to the new platform, since it’s so established now. Is there a competitor that can do that?

Maybe not the best example, but The Prestige was very fun. I thought the reveal was worth waiting for, it sort of felt like a whodunit.

Alright, reading is hard, but here we go. If:

pieces of art metadata are being traded like securities

Then:

yes, the SEC should regulate their trade

They should be regulated according to securities legislation. Wow! We did it! Does little baby get it now?

The problem comes when producing work. A generative model will only produce things that are essentially interpolations of artworks it has trained on. A human artist interpolates between artworks they have seen from other artists, as well as their own lived experiences, and extrapolate […].

Yes, but how does that negate its usefulness as a tool or a foundation to start from? I never made any assertion that AI is able to make connections or possess any sort of creativity.

Herein lies the argument that generative AI in its current state doesn’t produce anything novel and just regurgitates what it has seen.

There’s a common saying that there is no such thing as an original story, because all fiction builds on other fiction. Can you see how that would apply here? Just because thing A and thing B exist doesn’t mean that thing C cannot possibly be interesting or substantially different. The brainstorming potential of an AI with a significant dataset seems functionally identical to an artist searching for references on Google (or Pixiv).

Having someone copy your voice to make it say things you did not say is something many will be very uncomfortable with.

So is this your main issue? I’m just not sure that that is really a valid reason, since many people are very uncomfortable with like, organ donation, pig heart valves, animal agriculture, ghostwriters, real person fanfiction, or data collection by Google. I’m sure there is something in the world that most people see as either positive or neutral that makes you very uncomfortable. For me, it’s policing.

On the economic front, I agree - these companies should have been licensing these images from the start and we should be striving to create some sort of open database for artists so that they are compensated. It’s possible that awarding royalties, while flawed, may be a good framework since they could potentially be paid for all derivative works and not simply the image itself. But that may be prohibitively expensive due to the sheer number of iterations being performed, so it’s hard to say.

It’s not theft, the artist still has their work. If anything, it’s copyright infringement. When some 16-year-old aspiring artist uses another artists’ work as a reference or traces something, what’s that?

I guess you could call it practice, but then doesn’t AI do the same thing by iterating based on its dataset? Some AI outputs look terrifying and janky - so did my art when I was younger.

I dunno, like this issue isn’t as simple as I used to think it was. If we look outside of economics (because artists need money to survive, like all of us) is there actually a problem here?

I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about all of this, but it’s pretty obvious AI isn’t just gonna go away like NFTs did. I really am interested in discussion, I’m not trolling.

So like, I guess I’m just wondering how that refutes his point that it’s a tool for artists then.

I personally am aware of people who run local LLMs trained on their own art so they don’t have to spend as much time sketching or doing linework.

Maybe you’re just not as open-minded about this as you could be? It’s being used in sketchy ways by a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place, especially at the idea stage.

He argued that it’s just the same when an artist draws inspiration from other peoples’ art and creates their own - which is just plain false.

Hey, can you articulate the difference though? Stating this as a plain fact seems kinda like you’re constructing reality to fit your opinion and maybe that’s what your friend is pushing back on.

It’s true that AI is often trained on copyrighted images, but artists use copyrighted images as references all the time. I know AI can’t be literally “inspired,” or have artistic intentions, but like, what actually is the difference? Other than philosophical differences that involve like, the inability to emulate actual creativity.

Seems like AI is just faster, because it’s a computer that can do tons of adjustments instantly instead of iterating over time like a human. Anyway, just food for thought. I don’t think AI is going to replace artists entirely but a lot of companies are definitely going to try to see how far they can take it.

For reference:

• Jus sanguinis: citizenship based on parentage
• Jus soli: citizenship based on location

Probably yt-dlp, it’s a pretty popular and relatively simple terminal application.