Frontend dev here. I think it’s important to remember that there’s not necessarily one use case to rule them all when it comes to the web. If this helps a smaller project that is Python-first get their work in front of a wider audience, is that a bad thing? I’m inclined to think it’s just fine to have lots of approaches available.
The beans chapter stuck with me too. Just fished out my copy:
> The best instruction I've read for how long to cook beans comes from a collection of recipes called "The Best in American Cooking" by Clementine Paddleford. The book instructs to simmer "until beans have gorged themselves with fat and water and swelled like the fat boy in his prime."
It seems obvious to me that anyone supportive of psychedelic treatment should be supportive of this kind of investigation. It does no one any good to suppress or ignore stories of negative experiences with psychedelics. On the contrary, research like this can help develop better screening protocols or follow up treatment to help minimize these effects, or even treat people who are suffering long term negative impact from a difficult trip.
While better understanding is certainly useful, the framing does seem a little unfair to me. It's not like other treatments don't have their downsides. Most people will tell you they don't like seeing the dentist but few would say it's not worth it.
I've had bad trips on psychedelics and I actually think they tended to be some of the more beneficial ones for me in the long run.
Seems unfair to compare a "bad trip to the dentist" to a person experiencing severe psychological effects liking being unable to make human connections and feelings of loneliness for 30 years
Many of these experiences seem to have drastically impacted peoples lives in a very negative way. Much worse than a toothache!
What does it mean to have a "bad trip to the dentist"? A dentist can also cause decades of discomfort, but most trips (both drugs and dentists) turn out great!
I agree! I also think it would make sense for people not supportive of psychedelic treatments to be interested in this, for various reasons, including what you said, and also as an educational tool too teach kids so they don't try it illegally, which seems to be a major concern among those not supportive of this kind of research.
Full disclosure: I live in Sweden,a country famous among other things for it's Draconian stance on drugs, and I'm less than amused by the propaganda that passes for narcotics education here.
I did this for a few months while I was transitioning back from parental leave and was similarly insanely productive. It just made me absolutely ruthless about prioritizing. Part of it was motivation to keep up with ft colleagues while knowing I had a hard deadline when I would be back on baby duty, so not sure how replicable it is now, but it was wild to go through a few workdays with all the day trimmed out, and then have a very full extended weekend with family every week.
But does ruthless prioritization mean you’re making other people do that work? You might feel more productive because you cut your day down to well defined tickets. But who is doing the dirty work to define the tickets, iterate with product, mentor and unblock other engineers, do on call, work on incident review actions etc etc.
Hey, for the Senior Frontend role, I fit your ideal candidate profile quite well, plus your bonus points. Would love to chat. Is there an email you'd prefer or a way of tagging an application from HN?
You can apply on Ashby here - https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inngest (we use that as an ATS). If you want a quick chat beforehand you can reach out to me - tony [at] inngest.com
As far as Stable Diffusion goes - when the released SD 2.1/XL/Stable Cascade, you couldn't even make a (woman's) nipple.
I don't use them for porn like a lot of people seem too, but it seems weird to me that something that's kind of made to generate art can't generate one of the most common subjects in all of art history - nude humans.
For some reason its training thinks they are decorative, I guess it’s a pretty funny elucidation of how it works.
I have seen a lot of “pasties” that look like Sorry! game pieces, coat buttons, and especially hell-forged cybernetic plumbuses. Did they train it at an alien strip club?
The LoRAs and VAEs work (see civit.ai), but do you really want something named NSFWonly in your pipeline just for nipples? Haha
I have in fact gotten a nude out of Stable Cascade. And that's just with text prompting, the proper way to use these is with multimodal prompting. I'm sure it can do it with an example image.
I seem to have the opposite problem a lot of the time. I tried using Meta's image gen tool, and had such a time trying to get it to make art that was not "kind of" sexual. It felt like Facebook's entire learning chain must have been built on people's sexy images of their girlfriend that's all now hidden in the art.
These were examples that were not super blatant, like a tree landscape that just happens to have a human figure and cave in their crotch. Examples:
Not meant in a rude way, but please consider that your brain is making these up and you might need to see a therapist. I can see absolutely nothing "kind of sexual" in those two pictures.
Not taken as rude. If its not an issue, then that's actually a positive for you. It means less time taken reloading trying to get it to not look like a human that happens to be made out of mountains.
Well for starters, ChatGPT shouldn't balk at creating something "in Tim Burton's style" just because Tim Burton complained about AI. I guess its fair use unless a select rich person who owns the data complains. Seems like it isn't fair use at all then, just theft from those who cannot legally defend themselves.
Fair use is an exception to copyright. The issue here is that it's not fair use, because copyright simply does not apply. Copyright explicitly does not, has never, and will never protect style.
That makes it even more ridiculous, as that means they are giving rights to rich complaining people that no one has.
Examples:
Can you great an image of a cat in Tim Burton's style?
Oops! Try another prompt
Looks like there are some words that may be automatically blocked at this time. Sometimes even safe content can be blocked by mistake. Check our content policy to see how you can improve your prompt.
Can you create an image of a cat in Wes Anderson's style?
Certainly! Wes Anderson’s distinctive style is characterized by meticulous attention to detail, symmetrical compositions, pastel color palettes, and whimsical storytelling. Let’s imagine a feline friend in the world of Wes Anderson...
Didn't Tom Waits successfully sue Frito Lay when the company found an artist that could closely replicate his style and signature voice, who sang a song for a commercial that sounded very Tom Waits-y?
Yes, though explicitly not for copyright infringement. Quoting the court's opinion, "A voice is not copyrightable. The sounds are not 'fixed'." The case was won under the theory of "voice misappropriation", which California case law (Midler v Ford Motor Co) establishes as a violation of the common law right of publicity.
Not specifically SD, but DallE: I wanted to get an image of a pure white British shorthair cat on the arm of a brunette middle-aged woman by the balcony door, both looking outside.
It wasn‘t important, just something I saw in the moment and wanted to see what DallE makes of it.
Generation denied. No explanation given, I can only imagine that it triggered some detector of sexual request?
(It wasn‘t the phrase "pure white", as far as I can tell, because I have lots of generated pics of my cat in other contexts)
You are using someone elses propietary technology, you have to deal with their limitations. If you don't like there are endless alternatives.
"Wrongly denied" in this case depends on your point of view, clearly DALL-E didn't want this combination of words created, but you have no right for creation of these prompts.
I'm the last one defending large monolithic corps, but if you go to one and want to be free to do whatever you want you are already starting from a very warped expectation.
I don’t feel like it truly matters since they’ll release it and people will happily fine-tune/train all that safety right back out.
It sounds like a reputation/ethics thing to me. You probably don’t want to be known as the company that freely released a model that gleefully provides images of dismembered bodies (or worse).
Oh the big one would be models weights being released for anyone to use or fine tune themselves.
Sure, the safety people lost that battle for Stable diffusion and LLama. And because they lost, entire industries were created by startups that could now use models themselves, without it being locked behind someone else's AI.
But it wasn't guaranteed to go that way. Maybe the safetyists could have won.
I don't we'd be having our current AI revolution if facebook or SD weren't the first to release models, for anyone to use.
It gets lost in the culture wars, but as I understand it, the whole point of the concept of “structural racism” was that mustache-twirling racists aren’t required for modern laws and policies to have a targeted, negative effect on specific minorities. A legacy of historical racism can set the stage for the intended effects to metastasize and remain as generational problems.
ISPs are some of the biggest monopolists in the US market and bribe and lean on politicians to keep out competitors. Relative to other industries, they thus lean on the infrastructural status quo (and all the inequity baked into that) to make the most money at the lowest cost to themselves, so your argument doesn’t really track.
That’s laughable. I can get one bad broadband provider, one incredibly low-speed DSL provider, or bad coverage, data capped 5G service in my neighborhood in LA. Fiber isn’t available at all and when I asked if they had any intent to expand coverage to where I live they straight-up said “no.”
Having a reliable, fast internet connection is (almost) as critical for modern life as electrical service.
IMO, it falls into the same bucket as other utilities - water, power, etc an should be heavily regulated to ensure adequate and reasonably priced access.
Honestly it should just be something run by local governments or non-profit utilities.
This isn't a typical consumer product you buy at the store where I'm worried that the government will be bad at responding to consumer tastes, what consumers what out of their internet access is extremely simple: fast and reliable internet, that's basically it. It's not something where's a lot of questions of exactly how and where to advance things and give different offerings, like a smartphone or brand of yogurt or whatever.
You say that it's simple, but it's not like electricity where you can just measure it and see if it's the right voltage and frequency throughout the day.
How many and which upstreams to connect to makes a big difference. What technology is used for the last mile access network makes a big difference. Who to peer with and who to let run CDN appliances in the network makes a big difference. Oversubscription ratios in various parts of the network make a big difference. Address policies make a big difference.
Now, if the municipality wants to run last mile and hand it off to whatever ISPs want to take it in some central locations? That makes the municipal job simpler: they just need to measure quality on their network, and anything that happens after the handoff to the ISP is not their problem. But that's a more complex product for users than a single provider to blame for everything.
> the whole point of the concept of “structural racism” was that mustache-twirling racists aren’t required for modern laws and policies to have a targeted, negative effect on specific minorities
You cannot have a targeted negative effect without mustache-twirling racists; what you have instead is an incidental negative effect. I discussed this elsewhere in the thread, but the "disparate impact" clauses of various civil rights legislation attempt to deal with precisely this -- cases when in the absence of any intent to discriminate along protected lines, nevertheless an outcome arises that impact those protected groups differently.
I posit that this part of civil rights legislation is fundamentally flawed, because it is basically not impossible that any policy or action, public or private, impacts all subgroups of a population in equal measure. Make a law regulating taxis? There's a disparate impact on men, who are 85% of all cab drivers. NFL negotiates player pay? There's a disparate impact on black people, who comprise over half of the players. Covid policies close ski resorts in Colorado? There's a disparate impact on white people, who are the overwhelming majority of both people who work at ski resorts as well as those who visit. In none of those cases is there an intent to cause protected groups to be affected differently, but they are.
IIRC they swept because Hugo membership is open and they made a coordinated effort to join and sweep those categories. The idea of a coordinated anti-diversity effort pissed off a lot of people. For a few friends of mine who are lifelong sci-fi nerds, it was motivation to finally join Hugo so they could vote “no award”.
Amusingly (or enragingly) one of the effects of the Sad Puppy voting slate in 2015 was that it pushed William Patterson's magisterial and definitive biography of Robert A. Heinlein -- who the Puppies mostly adored -- off the shortlist for Best Related Word (a Hugo category usually occupied by scholarly works of SF history and criticism) in favour of utter garbage like "Wisdom From My Internet" by Michael Z. Williamson because the Sad Puppy organizers were so out of touch with events outside their bubble that they weren't aware the biography had been published.
You can take this as an illustration of the risk of an organized voting slate scoring a huge own goal.
They swept for of the same reason the Chinese worldcon was a mess: we are used to operating much of society by an unwritten set of rules that assume everyone is pretty much a good actor. Sure, they may have an axe to grind, and might stretch things, but no one will deliberately find loopholes at scale to abuse. This worked for several millenia. Whole countries used to not have written constitutions, just unwritten agreements on how to behave.
But in the age of the internet, it's much easier to find communities that you can break this way. These systems are resilient to a few people who are bad actors, but totally fall apart if there are coordinated actions.
It's exactly what the Republican party is doing in the US now. And what Trump supporters plan to do if he's elected with Project 2025.
