You're right on all points, but it's easy to come to such a conclusion. The harder, and more rewarding path, is to organize with others and figure out what can be done even if it seems hard or impossible, because standing around observing our rapid decline isn't good for anyone.
If the government is failing, explore writing civil software, providing people protected forms of communication or modern spaces where they can safely organize and learn, eventually the current generations die and a new, strongly connected culture has another chance to try and fix things.
This is why so many are balkanizing the internet age gating, they see the threat of the next few digitally-augmented generations.
I typically tend toward indie/small games as well, but there arw definitely some masterpieces put out by large studios. Have you played Red Dead Redemption or Cyberpunk? The amount of fidelity and content and refinement are just unmatched. I can't recommend them enough.
Also, if you like first-person puzzlers I recently picked up Supraworld and instantly fell in love, it's a gamer's game for sure and is one of the best platformers I've played in quite a while.
Two of them, giving us stereo vision. We are provided visual cues that encode depth. The ideal world model would at least have this. A world model for a video game on a monitor might be able to get away with no depth information, but a) normal engines do have this information and it would make sense to provide as much data to a general model as possible, and b) the models wouldn't work on AR/VR. Training on stereo captures seems like a win all around.
> We are provided visual cues that encode depth. The ideal world model would at least have this.
None of these world models have explicit concepts of depth or 3D structure, and adding it would go against the principle of the Bitter Lesson. Even with 2 stereo captures there is no explicit 3D structure.
Increasing the fidelity and richness of training data does not go against the bitter lesson.
The model can learn 3D representation on its own from stereo captures, but there is still richer, more connected data to learn from with stereo captures vs monocular captures. This is unarguable.
You're needlessly making things harder by forcing the model to also learn to estimate depth from monocular images, and robbing it of a channel for error-correction in the case of faulty real-world data.
Stereo images have no explicit 3D information and are just 2D sensor data. But even if you wanted to use stereo data, you would restrict yourself to stereo datasets and wouldn't be able to use 99.9% of video data out there to train on which wasn't captured in stereo, that's the part that's against the Bitter Lesson.
You don't have to restrict yourself to that, you can create synthetic data or just train on both kinds of data.
I still don't understand what the bitter lesson has to do with this. First of all, it's only a piece of writing, not dogma, and second of all it concerns itself with algorithms and model structure itself, increasing the amount of data available to train on does not conflict with it.
These abstractions become a toolset for creating a program that naturally evolves as new goals and constraints are introduced. It also allows other engineers to understand your code at a high level without reading it from top to bottom.
If your code ever has the possibility of changing, your early wins by having no abstraction are quickly paid for, with interest, as you immediately find yourself refactoring to a higher abstraction in order to reason about higher-order concepts.
In this case, the abstraction is the simplicity, for the same reason that when I submit this comment, I don't have to include a dictionary or a definition of every single word I use. There is a reason that experienced programmers reach for abstractions from the beginning, experience has taught them the benefits of doing so.
The mark of an expert is knowing the appropriate level of abstraction for each task, and when to apply specific abstractions. This is also why abstractions can sometimes feel clumsy and indirect to less experienced engineers.
The paper became massively influential because of its contents, not its catchy title. Scientists do not generally read a paper because if its title, they check the abstract and go from there.
Modern surveillance feels pretty active too me. It's embedded into damn near every single facet of my life. I can't escape it and I feel the chilling effect, I feel the oppression. I'd rather take the automated agents.
>"It’s just so inconspicuous that no one thinks about it"
The leading suppliers and vendors that distribute surveillance technology put billions into R&D to make sure of this. It's another of many dark industries.
It's worse than that. The high-flicker, narrow-band LEDs used for most LED streetlights today create insanely bad color discrepancy and distortion due to motion.
It's a crime against nature and a crime against humanity that cities have allowed such a scourge to proliferate, when we have the science and technology for much better LED street lights.
It gets even worse because in order to make up for these discrepancies and distortion, manufacturers just.... turn them up brighter, fundamentally ignoring the problem and only making it worse.
It's bad enough that this affects drivers and pedestrians, but think of all of the animals who don't get a say, and who are even more sensitive to the flicker and lack of color information.
Antique furniture is nice because it looks pretty and uses sturdy materials. I don't buy it for the pleasure of knowing how many hours, days or weeks a person slaved over it in order to pay rent.
Good art is good art. Focusing on the time spent making it is a poor substitution for the ability to critique the art itself.
Anyway, people made this same argument when image editors came into their own. There is a long, tiresome generational tradition of artists thinking the new crowd has it too easy and doesn't appreciate the grit that goes into making art in earlier mediums. We can do better.
If the government is failing, explore writing civil software, providing people protected forms of communication or modern spaces where they can safely organize and learn, eventually the current generations die and a new, strongly connected culture has another chance to try and fix things.
This is why so many are balkanizing the internet age gating, they see the threat of the next few digitally-augmented generations.
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