The easy counter-argument to this, which Mr. Stanks alludes to, is that there's a difference between giving everyone data, and giving law enforcement data.
> I’ve seen some very high quality NSFW AI video in the last few months. Those models are not far behind and the search and training space for porn is smaller than being able to generate anything.
Agreed. In my opinion, the primary limitation of the porn models is actually poor labeling of the training set. The company that manages to produce a well-labeled, porn-tuned AI image model is going to absolutely clean up.
The extractive dark patterns that will emerge from a parasocial chat "AI relationship" that can generate porn images relevant to the chat on the fly will be staggering. Once that proceeds to being able to generate relevant video, all holy hell is going to break loose.
> The company that manages to produce a well-labeled, porn-tuned AI image model is going to absolutely clean up.
For anime/non-photographic content that essentially exists (Pony, then Illustrious, then probably some new-fangled thing by now that I don't even know about), thanks to the meticulously tagged booru image corpus. However, as strong as these models are on matters of anatomy and kinks, they're limited in other ways due to the hugely biased dataset and dependence on tag soup prompts rather than natural language (many find the latter a plus, not a minus, though).
I haven't heard of any proprietary/cloud-based NSFW model that would be massively better than what's available for free. There are many NSFW-friendly services, but by and large they're just frontends to models trained by other people.
You can get 3D printers from BestBuy(!) for $200 retail. At that point, the cost of the filament is going to quickly exceed the cost of the machine.
At the $200 price point, your Bill of Materials is roughly $65 (about 1/3 of the retail cost). I challenge you to buy the raw materials of a 3D printer for under $100 let alone $65.
> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?
It's really hard to beat injection molding for scale.
However, what 3D printing did shift was building molds and prototypes. And that shifted small volume manufacturing--one offs and small volumes are now practical that didn't used to be. In addition, you can iterate more easily over multiple versions.
The limiting factor, however, has always been the brain power designing the thing. YouTube is littered with videos that someone wants to build a "thing" and then spends 10-20 iterations figuring out everything they didn't know going into the project. This is no different from "real" projects, but your experienced engineering staff probably only take 5 iterations instead of 20.
That point was the crux of Matt Levine's argument: Terra and Luna were unregulated and easy-to-game securities. So you can't complain when the smartest people on Wall Street figured out how to pop the balloon in their favor -- (not ai emdash) particularly when it's their job.
I will quote the first few paragraphs leading up to it though:
>The basic story of Terra is:
>Terra was a big crypto project, led by a company called Terraform Labs and a guy named Do Kwon, which at its peak had a market value of about $50 billion.
>It had a token, the currency of its blockchain, called Luna, which at its peak traded at almost $120 per token.
It also had an algorithmic stablecoin, TerraUSD, whose mechanism was that it could always be redeemed for $1 worth of Luna.
>That’s a bad idea! The problem, which was extremely obvious and which everyone knew about, was that, if people lost confidence in Luna, there would be a death spiral: People would redeem TerraUSD for Luna and sell the Luna, which would drive down the price of Luna, which would lead to more redemptions, which would create even more Luna, until Luna was trading at a tiny fraction of a penny and every TerraUSD would be redeemed for millions of them.
>In May 2022 that very much happened. Terra collapsed, people lost a lot of money and Do Kwon got 15 years in prison for fraud.
>At its peak, though, Terra was a pretty big crypto project, and it had various dealings with some very smart and somewhat sharky trading firms like Jump Trading and Jane Street.
“Can’t complain” doesn’t make it legal. I had this argument a number of times with cryptobros at the time “if it’s on the chain it’s fair game” I heard quite often. Just, no. Just because some code allows you to get away with something doesn’t make it not illegal[1].
The thing is you or I don’t get to say what is or isn’t a market that is covered by market abuse laws. Regulators do, and while it’s true to say none of the relevant regulators had stepped up and conclusively shown these markets were under their jurisdiction, they had repeatedly said they were looking into them and given hints they felt they had jurisdiction. Heck, I was in a meeting with Kevin Warsh around 2014 or so[2] where he asked about bitcoin so it’s clear the fed was at least looking into crypto at that time long before they made public comment. ISTR talking to the cftc at the same time and they asked about it too.
So “unregulated” in this context doesn’t mean “not covered by regulation” it means “regulatory status extremely uncertain”. If you want to go in with a very aggressive strategy you’re taking some risk that regulators will post facto go after you because they do that a lot in conventional markets.
[1] Market abuse in this case, but it’s obviously the case in cybersecurity also.
[2] This isn’t some kind of weird boast btw, cbankers and regulators meet with people from industry all the time as part of their normal information-gathering process and he met with a group of us who were working with some bank on detecting things like market abuse. He had some sort of academic position at Stanford at the time iirc looking into various types of bank regulation, but he was still plugged into the fed governors because he had only just left that.
> I had this argument a number of times with cryptobros at the time “if it’s on the chain it’s fair game” I heard quite often. Just, no. Just because some code allows you to get away with something doesn’t make it not illegal[1]
But that is/was the cryptobros argument: Code is Law! And now instead of fixing the algos they're going right to suing each other just like TradFi with TradLaw.
> I don't know anything about that industry but there has to be a way to paint cars in a safe way, right??
There are. They just cost more and take more time.
> But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic
People say this all the time, but semiconductor fabs simply aren't very toxic compared to just about every other industrial manufacturing process. Mostly this is because everything is sealed and sealed and sealed some more.
Yes, they handle stuff like arsenic gas (arsine AsH3), but they really try to reclaim it all. The semiconductor waste stream is often purer than most industrial inputs. Yeah, old plants would just dump crap into the environment. However, for modern semiconductor facilities, it is generally more economic to reprocess your waste than try to purify from primary sources.
Now, PCB manufacturing, on the other hand, is quite terrible or at least it used to be. I don't know if people have sealed and automated that yet.
So why is it that every 3D CAD program other than FreeCAD seems to have something that solves this problem "well enough" that most people doing simple designs (aka everything you could possibly print on a 3D printer) don't seem to bump into it?
>
So why is it that every 3D CAD program other than FreeCAD seems to have something that solves this problem "well enough" that most people doing simple designs (aka everything you could possibly print on a 3D printer) don't seem to bump into it?
"This problem is not unique to FreeCAD. It is generally present in CAD software, but most other CAD software has heuristics to reduce the impact of the problem on users."
So, the problem exists in (nearly?) all CAD systems, but in the big expensive commercial CAD programs, a huge amount of manpower was invested to hide the problem better to the user ("heuristics to reduce the impact of the problem on users") so that the users will see much more rarely see such a problem, and thus often won't be aware of the existence of the topological naming problem.
Do you know of any free/open-source examples that solve this problem well?
I'm not an expert, but these types of heuristics intuitively seem hard to model. The goal is to guess the user's design intent. There's often no single correct answer, it may require information from parts of the system that the core application's model doesn't have, there may be many heuristics depending on what's being designed.
These heuristics seem like exactly the sort of thing that commercial CAD applications can afford to spend resources on, and that open-source community-driven applications would struggle with.
> Do you know of any free/open-source examples that solve this problem well?
No. Sorry, I should have been clearer. None of the open source programs handle this.
> These heuristics seem like exactly the sort of thing that commercial CAD applications can afford to spend resources on, and that open-source community-driven applications would struggle with.
This seems like one of those things where "the industry" converged to a solution and the people outside of it simply don't know what it is.
> Then they can put all their data in EU servers and not worry US authorities can look at it even with a valid warrant and a court order.
I have yet to see the EU ignore a valid judicial warrant except in the most extreme cases.
The point, however, is that you have to have a valid judicialwarrant and not some random-ass piece of paper generated by Adderall-addled sycophants of fascist South African nepobabies.
This article completely fails to mention any of the horrific interpersonal dynamics of the family members who owned Fry's which, I suspect, was the primary reason why the chain had no way to arrest its downfall.
Fry's owner had a strange side business. It was called the American Institute of Mathematics.[1] Its headquarters was originally behind a small door in the Palo Alto Fry's Electronics building.
This was followed by a project to move the Institute into a replica castle in Morgan Hill with a private 18-hole golf course. Really.[2] "The plans for the four-level castle include a 76-car underground garage, large wine storage facilities, a library, a 145-seat auditorium, 20 guest suites, dining facilities, lecture halls and conference rooms, locker rooms and exercise facilities and a gift shop."
There was some construction, but the $60 million castle was never actually built. The private golf course was built, and there are a very few reports of play there, although it's so private that golf sites aren't sure if it's still operating.
In 2022, the Institute of Mathematics moved to Caltech.[3]
Whether the whole thing was a tax shelter for a golf course remains a good question.
Another important detail which the article glosses over is that, when Frys' supplier relationships started failing around 2019-2020, their product selection absolutely went to hell. When I visited a store in 2020, they had zero hard disks in stock - internal, external, mechanical, SSD, you name it, they didn't have it. I don't think they had any computer motherboards, CPUs, or memory, either. Plenty of cheap, generic shelf-fillers like hand sanitizer and light bulbs, though!
In that era I remember they had mostly fidget spinners. I think the staff were really bored at that point because half the fidget spinner inventory was in those clear plastic security boxes for what was a useless $10 toy.
I have a collection of photos from a trip I took to a Fry's shortly before its demise. Some of the things I saw on display were:
- Multiple aisles of nothing but cheap, no-name hand sanitizer (all the same kind, too - not a broad selection)
- Another entire aisle of pepper spray (again, a single item, just spread out really thin)
- Cheap LED bulbs (the screw-in kind, not components)
- Portable fans
- Bluetooth party speakers (really big ones that looked like oversized roll-aboard luggage)
I don't remember seeing any fidget spinners - but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the shelf-filler items were stocked on a store-by-store basis. It certainly didn't give me the impression of a carefully planned operation.
I had seen a rumor that personal finance issues of one of the family members lead to loss of business credit which lead to the consignment model which lead to no inventory which lead to the end.
Do you give everybody your tax returns? No? Then you have something to hide.
Do you give everybody your phone records? No? Then you have something to hide.
Do you give everybody your web history? No? Then you have something to hide.
etc.
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