Personally I've found that "well curated" sometimes becomes a double-edged sword in Costco's case. Mainstream brands can be expected to be available perennially; however, smaller/niche items and brands will often get cycled out or replaced by something else which may or may not be comparable.
Many times I've found products at Costco that I enjoy, only for them to suddenly stop carrying them a week or a month later.
A typical grocery store will carry on the order of 40,000 unique products. Costco is hard limited to a max of 3,700 unique products. If a store wants to bring a new product in, something must be rotated out. This also means that if a product wants to stay in Costco, it has to sell a certain minimum number of pallets, per month, to be worth it.
Several years ago there was a craft beer joint in my area that had a gimmicky "stock market" system for their pricing - the more a certain beer was purchased, the higher its price became, and the less popular brews slowly dropped in price to stimulate demand. Ultimately, they dropped this system for being "too irritating" and moved to a standard static pricing model.
It sounds like the Wendy's thing is based more on time of day and historical analysis of sales, so we will have to see how it plays out. But I think and the end of the day people will become more annoyed when their favored menu item is more expensive simply because they arrived at the restaurant sooner than they expected, or whatever other criteria Wendy's starts basing their pricing on. Having price tracking on their app does seem like the next logical step, but ultimately an annoying gamification (and vaguely dystopian) in my opinion.
Perhaps their customer base feels different and they've done their research on that - I'm not in that group so I'm more of a bystander here.
Indeed, it seems like their whole plan to address profitability issues is just "get bigger", but all that's done is create a bloated, immobile monster that's completely lost touch with thee customer base that got them to where they are.
At ~7000 employees, Unity has roughly double the employees that Epic has - where is all the labor going? To me it's pretty clear that Unity is more interested in being a commercial product/platform whereas Epic is leaning into the engine/technology side and developing their own games. Theoretically both angles can be valid, but I think Unity has completely misunderstood why most of their customers chose then in the first place.
> The one good thing I see out of the coming AI cambrian explosion is that it'll hit the bracket of top 10% to 1% earners the hardest, while those above and bellow are safer.
What are you basing this on? Perhaps I'm missing your exact meaning of "AI cambrian explosion" but right now I think it's arguable that artists and writers are the most threatened by this wave of generative AI - neither of which are usually considered top paying positions.
I'm mostly trying to extrapolate from current code and text generation abilities, so I know any prediction has a high chance of striking out.
Legal professionals that work on boilerplate could see simple contract generation being taken away from them for instance, and even run-of-the-mill developers could see themselves competing against much cheaper app/website generators.
Even if you can beat the AI, you might be forced to make your rates more competitive since the new baseline solution anyone can get for $10 would be a lot better than before.
> Legal professionals that work on boilerplate could see simple contract generation being taken away from them for instance, and even run-of-the-mill developers could see themselves competing against much cheaper app/website generators.
I don’t think people will use AI in its current (hallucinating) state if there is money or lives on the line.
While it will inevitable be larger in the future, Godot's current executable size is so small something like this could actually work.
At the very least I would want something like Unity Hub which can manage both projects and engine/editor version installations. Being locked into whatever version of Godot Epic Store considers to be "current" sounds like a nightmare.
>To use Take It Down, anyone—minors, parents, concerned parties, or adults concerned about their own underage images being posted online—can anonymously access the platform on NCMEC’s site. Take It Down will then generate a hash that represents images or videos reported by users as sexualizing minors, including images with nudity, partial nudity, or sexualized poses. From there, any online platform that has partnered with the initiative will automatically block uploads or remove content matching that hash.
This sounds impressive if you don't know how file hashing works. If a malicious actor wants to get around this, all they would have to do is change a single pixel and/or re-export as a different format.
Not necessarily. There are much newer technologies than simple hashes of files now, which are effectively content-aware image hashing algorithms which are highly resistant to manipulation techniques (re-encoding, resizing, even things like rotation/blur) they are of course tunable algorithms which the more you want to catch the more false positive rate there is but you can already today do much better than simple file hash.
I think it's definitely more useful, especially long term, in a more controlled system where the government agency that is handling the actual CSAM is simply submitting hashes of the content the company (Microsoft, Apple, or whoever else) to add to their database with which they can use to flag/review suspicious content.
However, the system described in the article is open to the public, and simultaneously privacy/anonymity oriented. I see this as a double-edged sword. While it does protect the identity of legitimate users, that also opens it up to nefarious actors flooding the system with images/videos taken from legitimate content creators on OnlyFans other sites, potentially getting those creators' content flagged/removed. Even if this simply triggers a manual review, you could feasibly spam the system with so many that it grinds to a halt.
Your own links talks about how perceptual hashing hasn't been proven to be robust enough for this use case, and also introduces a new problem: Hash collisions, such that you can generate images that hash to the same perceptual hash as an illicit image.
If I understand correctly, Samaritans have the same ethnic roots as Jews. The differences were more religious and ideological than racial. So with that in mind, saying the term "good Samaritan" is specifically racist doesn't really hold water. Xenophobic, maybe. The lines kind of blur when you're talking about groups that are divided by some odd combination of ethnicity, religion, and nationality.
Regardless, if you look at the actual context, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is arguably meant as a message against racism and preconceived notions about people from other ethnic groups or countries.
> If I understand correctly, Samaritans have the same ethnic roots as Jews. The differences were more religious and ideological than racial. So with that in mind, saying the term "good Samaritan" is specifically racist doesn't really hold water. Xenophobic, maybe.
According to the Australian Human Rights Commission (an independent government agency) [0]:
> Racism takes many forms and can happen in many places. It includes prejudice,
discrimination or hatred directed at someone because of their colour, ethnicity or national origin
So, even if a difference is "ethnic" rather than "racial", it can still be "racism" (at least by that definition of "racism"), since "racism" can be based on "ethnicity" or "national origin" rather than "race".
Contemporary science does not support any distinction between "race" and "ethnicity": the distinction is just a cultural construct specific to certain societies. So culturally-specific, in fact, that it even differs between different countries in the English-speaking world: US government publications officially acknowledge a distinction between "race" (e.g. African-American) and "ethnicity" (e.g. Hispanic) – even while admitting the distinction is grounded in the particularities of US culture and history rather than anything scientific or universal. By contrast, Australian government publications studiously avoid making any official distinction between them, and in practice treat the two concepts as interchangeable.
The thing that bugs me about "influencers" is that it seems in a lot of cases the content is formulated as a host for ads and monetization, rather than the creator focusing on creating worthwhile content first with advertising as a secondary concern (in a lot of cases non-endemically.)
Obviously, what is considered "worthwhile" is entirely subjective - people wouldn't be following, say, Kylie Jenner on social media if they didn't see some sort of value in it. Also I'm pretty sure a lot of people just don't care about being advertised to, or even enjoy it, if it's in a niche that they follow.
To me, it feels more insidious, especially when the line blurs between what is and ad and what is not. I hate being marketed to in such a way that it is so interleaved with the "actual" content - it starts making me question the validity of the content. By example, I used to browse Pinterest every now and again (mostly as a time waster) - it was interesting to search certain keywords and save things that looked interesting or sparked my curiosity. There were ads spaced every several tiles, but in general they seemed more or less separated from user-submitted content. Now, there are ads seemingly every third or fourth tile, and many "normal" tiles are ads as well, submitted by corporate accounts. I've pretty much stopped using it entirely.
There's also the fact that many of these influencers are deliberately cultivating parasocial relationships - causing their fans to create false emotional attachments as a marketing strategy. It's wildly unethical and often quite harmful to their victims.
I think we're kidding ourselves to think that some nebulous concept of "the artist's journey" somehow informs the end result in a way that is self-evident in human-produced digital art. Just as with electric signals in the "brain in a vat" thought experiment, with digital art it's pixels. If an algorithm can produce a set of pixels that is just as subjectively good as a human artist, then nobody will be able to tell - and most likely the average person just won't care.
On the other hand, I would say that traditional mediums (especially large format paintings) are relatively safe from AI generation/automation - for now.
> On the other hand, I would say that traditional mediums (especially large format paintings) are relatively safe from AI generation/automation - for now.
Why do you think that? I think large format paintings might be in just as much danger.
There’s a large industry of talented artists in China, Vietnam, etc who copy famous artworks by hand for very low prices. They’re easily accessible online: you upload an image and provide some stylistic details and the artist does the hard work of turning the image into brush strokes. It’s not “automated” but I’ve already ordered one 4’x2’ AI generated painting in acrylic relief for less than the cost of a 1’x1’ from a local community gallery. I put in quite a bit of work inpainting the image to get what I want but it would have been completely impossible to get what I want even six months ago.
I’ve only ever purchased half a dozen artworks in my life and they were all under a few hundred bucks but with this new tech, it just doesn’t make sense to buy an artists’ original work unless it’s for charity. The AI can do the creative work the way I want and there are plenty of artists who are excellent at the mechanical translation (which still requires a lot of creativity, mind)
You don't even have to go to China - I had a very nice painting painted from a photograph for a friend done by another friend's mom who just like painting landscapes.
It looked great and all I had to do was pay for supplies, which was still less than the cost of the framing.
I didn't know there was an industry for that, I guess I should have figured. I might look into that for my own purposes.
Although for what it's worth when I said "large format paintings" in my mind I was thinking very large paintings - like Picassos's Guernica - larger than something the average person would have hanging in their home. To the point that the cost of producing it and transporting it is large enough that a buyer is more likely to take personal interest in the artist and much less likely to knowingly purchase something AI-generated or otherwise automatically produced.
I think we're kidding ourselves to think that clustering features of existing works and iteratively removing noise based on that clustering is somehow comparable to building up human experiences and expressing them through art.
Using the "brain in a jar" thought experiment, you're making the assumption that the iterative denoising process is equivalent to the way the "brain in the jar" would generate art. Since the question is whether or not the processes are equivalent, it seems nonsensical to have to assume their equivalence for your argument.
I don't think the artist's journey necessarily informs the end result in some way - but I believe it can be an important experience for the artist. Then again, artists can still do this in the era of generative art - there's just not much as much chance of being rewarded for it. If this leads to fewer people wanting to explore art, then I think we've lost something. But it's not clear to me where things are headed I guess. This could be a huge boon in letting people explore ways of expressing themselves who otherwise lacked the artistic ability to want to try.
>But to answer your question if we would have been stuck with 1992 technology the internet would have evolved differently, and mainframes would play a much bigger role, to the point that your desktop computer would be just a thin client, running the latest amazing software accelerated by mainframe computers. You would submit jobs from your computer, the mainframe would calculate it and get back to you.
We're kind of getting back to this in a roundabout way, with more and more programs and services being run as web applications in a browser, or otherwise being inseparably tied into cloud technology/storage (looking at you, Adobe.)
With the advent of AI tools that require significant GPU hardware to run there may actually be a legitimate basis for it, but in general it just seems an excuse for companies to have their own tightly-controlled ecosystem which can be continually monetized and exploited.
It always strikes me as ironic that the PC won over the mainframe because it was your capital-P Personal Computer, not a terminal that simply ran what the high priests in the mainframe room told you you could run, and now the PC is anything but yours to control.
Or startups like Mighty.app where, if your computer is too slow to run Chrome, just stream Chrome from the cloud. I just...don't even know what to say.
Mighty is such a great example of attacking the symptom(s) of the problem ("Chrome/the web is slow") rather than the root cause (rampant page size/complexity bloat, inefficient use of RAM/CPU, etc.). What a waste of talent and money.
Idealism? Hardly. The fact that anyone thinks that Mighty needs to exist signals a problem with the entire web and/or app development ecosystem, in my opinion.
We should be talking about ways to either 1) make it possible to develop performant and resource-sensitive web apps, or 2) make it dramatically easier to make native/native-feeling apps in a way that doesn’t involve so much legacy cruft.
The lack of a solid reason #2 is why Electron-based apps exist and are thriving. Making native apps for each individual platform is hard and resource-intensive.
I have long been a proponent of native apps, but I will be the first to admit that it’s not that simple for small/resource-limited teams. The rise of Electron/etc. is a failing of the pro-native segment of developers. We need a better alternative.
Sure, it signals a problem - I just don't get what you think this group of people should've done with that problem other than what they're doing. They're solving a real problem with a real solution - you're just talking about what the ideal world would look like, but it's not actionable by a team like Mighty in any way.
Many times I've found products at Costco that I enjoy, only for them to suddenly stop carrying them a week or a month later.