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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#271

Post by KaiserPro »

scrollaway wrote: post #208
KaiserPro wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until recently, I could, if I wanted to have a living doing VFX. I could, if I wanted to, craft new worlds, and get paid for it. In two years, that won't be the case. Its the same for virtually all other Arts based job. An economy that currently support say 100% of the people now, will at most be able to support 10-30% in a few years time. > It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Di…

My girlfriend is a ceramist. She makes porcelain pieces ( https://malinamore.art/ ) that are sold for hundreds or even thousands of euros. Why would someone buy a plate off her, when they could get one from IKEA for 1.50 eur? Yet ceramics is not a dead art. Beats me?

Correct!

but 200 years ago there were loads of ceramic manufactures, employing hundreds of thousands of skilled potters. even 50 years ago, there were thousands of skilled ceramists in the UK. now its single person artisans, like your very talented other half.

Now, that reduction in work force too 200 years and mirrors the industrial revolution. GenAI is looking like its going to speed run that in ~5-7 years

I should be more clear, there is a difference between dead art (memorizing stories) and non viable career for all but 1% of people compared to now. I'm talking about the latter.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#272

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

> But the dream has died.

I don't know why shitty ecosystem around cryptocurrencies drives the author to this conclusion. Crypto is the most convenient and respectful of your human rights way to just send money. It's there, it's useful and in many cases absolutely vital.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#273

Post by redhale »

> But whose creative output consists solely of doing things a million people have already done? Is everyone else working on projects built exclusively out of lists of primes and rebalancing binary trees?

Yes. Most developers in the corporate world are building CRUD apps that are 90% boilerplate. Hopefully this helps explain the disconnect.

And even if GenAI progress stops here and it never gets better, it's incredibly useful. Why do people realize that it can't do EVERYTHING and then get stuck to the view that they can't use it for ANYTHING, confused as to why others are getting benefit from it?

Two things can be true (and I believe they are): the hype can be "staggeringly overblown" AND it can still be useful in many cases.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#274

Post by Semaphor »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #241
Semaphor wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, if you have one of those. Vastly more expensive and more involved to install, especially when renting. I’ve never used one because I’ve never been at a place with one.

When I rented I had a standard ceramic hob and still didn't see the point... sure, you gain some time, but it's maybe 5 minutes of unattended time where you can often be doing something else, vs. much worse taste. But I understand that with slow cookers it can make sense for other people. With induction I think it's outright pointless. As an anecdote, in my country there is a very popular brand of supermarket pizzas,…

> vs. much worse taste

I have never had that issue when heating stuff up. Your pizza example is not reheating (and generally you never want to reheat anything that’s supposed to be crispy in the microwave; though not on the stove top either).

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#275

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #272

> But the dream has died. I don't know why shitty ecosystem around cryptocurrencies drives the author to this conclusion. Crypto is the most convenient and respectful of your human rights way to just send money. It's there, it's useful and in many cases absolutely vital.

Yeah, people in Russia and Iran use it all the time to circumvent the sanctions. A godsend, basically.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#276

Post by EraYaN »

yieldcrv wrote: post #258
lovich wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of your examples are fallacious arguments that are weak or just generally wrong but your first one is >”list them” If you are arguing that something exists, then being asked to prove its existence is table stakes, not poor arguments You starting with a strong argument in your list of bad arguments and then ending with shit that mocks anyone calling you out makes me believe that you are not discussing this topic…

unfortunately the same thread has been had for any tangentially crypto thread on HN for the last decade and a half, so it just doesn’t feel like my prerogative to answer such a lazy and abstract question yes, that means we are at an impasse. use the search, ask an LLM, if even that is too much initiative for a quite outdated skeptic to take even now then I can’t help you there are hundreds of billions, maybe trillion…

Most of the financial services and systems are all still on very boring old databases (hell quite some cobol still touches a ton of it). Since well they don't need to get hype funding for their Series A or whatever. Databases are just pretty good and processing data efficiently. It's a tiny tiny part that actually runs on some blockchain.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#277

Post by silveraxe93 »

sunnybeetroot wrote: post #207
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #118

I disagree with many of the points on LLMs (but broadly agree with 80% of the post). But regardless of agreeing or not, it was a pleasure to read this because it's beautifully written, the arguments are solid, it makes you think, and the website has a personality, which is rare nowadays. I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the…

It is a nice read but something tells me it’s AI generated due to the frequent em dashes so I wouldn’t place all bets on it being entirely human written. Edit: I apologies, the author has pre-gpt posts that use em dashes so likely it’s part of their writing style.

I disagreed with a _lot_ of what they said. But I really hope the author doesn't suffer the indignity of reading this comment.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#278

Post by kzrdude »

vasco wrote: post #32

Well they even call them "content creators", is there anything more whatever? It's literally "whatever" content needed to load the ads around it. It's not painters or musicians or documentarians, it's content creators.

I'm delighted to see the point about "content" in the blog post, finally someone saying that (I also think so and have thought so).

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#279

Post by whoisyc »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #202
chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

I hated this feature until I realized I could just type the closing quote anyway and it wouldn't double up. Doesn't seem to bother me now that I'm used to it. Once in awhile my editor tries to get too clever and messes things up, but not often

That’s what GP said about “harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally” though. In a dumb editor you type a quote and you get a quote, in a “smart” editor whether or not you get two quotes, one quote, or no quote at all is context dependent and more confusing.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#280

Post by maleno »

raincole wrote: post #44
gyomu wrote: post #10

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge th…

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…

I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is not subjective, does not require judgement, does not depend on taste, context, history, and all the other many things the reputation and impact of a work of art depends on.

As ever, the standard defence of LLM and all gen AI tech rests on this reduction of complex subjectivity to something close to objectivity: the picture looks like other pictures, therefore it is a good picture. The sentence looks plausibly like other sentences, therefore it is a good sentence. That this argument is so pervasive tells me only that the audience for 'creative work' is already so inundated with depthless trash, that they can no longer tell the difference between painting and powerlifting.

It is not the artists who are primarily at risk here, but the audience for their work. Artists will continue to disappear for the same reason they always have: because their prospective audience does not understand them.

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