Hackworth

I do get what you're saying. And I should say I have enormous respect for people who choose to have children and follow through with raising them. But it's a type of selfishness to want to extend one's particular family line rather than choosing to adopt one of the many children who currently need a parental figure in their lives. If there were few of us and this was a matter of actual continuation of the species, the common societal framing would make more sense. But as it is, the choice carries no real ethical/moral imperative other than the responsibility to potential offspring.

Doing something or not doing it because it's the right thing for you is not inherently selfish. It's exactly the freedom we all cherish. And I think the typical framing of selfish/selfless does more harm than good in this case. We may just disagree over semantics. But at least here, "selfish" carries negative connotations, as the disregard described in the definition must assume some entitlement that the group has over an individual's decision. I'm mostly pushing back against the foundations of that entitlement. Thanks for engaging with this thoughtfully. I appreciate the discussion!

Selfishness is by definition about having little regard for others. I don't really see the connection; how is refraining from procreation a disregard for others? If anything, choosing not to have kids is selfless, as it is being unconcerned with propagating my genetic lineage. The nice thing about sentience is that we're not beholden to our biology. In most cases, we consider it a good thing to rise above being driven by instinct.

I just don't want kids.

I am also arcane as fuck, cause I shop at Horno's Magic Item Hole.

If it's been with us all through history, I guess the further back you go, the more likely it is that you will have seen someone be crushed by the hand. And global travel? That's the foundation for a persistent global mythology that'd probably dominate our storytelling for a while. I don't know what all happens between then and the point where we have satellites that track the hand all the time, but I bet there's potential for a novel. Or an anime. Or at least a comic.

Data centers can also use closed-loop cooling, air cooling, immersion cooling, etc; they're just using potable water because it is the cheapest (for them). But even if they didn't innovate at all, the high end of that estimate is like 0.02% of yearly global freshwater withdrawals. As you say, the devastating part is that location constraints determine who bears the externalities.

Ghoulish

Hah, yeah, I also noticed the contrast. If I were cutting a video about this, I'd definitely use the first bit and not the second. I think there's a kernel of truth in AI accelerating science. But the the weird hierarchy with Physics as the top is just the common misunderstanding about the nature of emergent properties mixed with some old-fashioned elitism. And we're way closer to the AI surveillance state than we are to automated AI research laboratories.

As I understand it, CLIP (and other text encoders in diffusion models) aren't trained like LLMs, exactly. They're trained on image/text pairing, which ya get from the metadata creators upload with their photos in Adobe Stock. Open AI trained CLIP with alt text on scraped images, but I assume Adobe would want to train their own text encoder on the more extensive tags on the stock images its already using.

All that said, Adobe hasn't published their entire architecture. And there were some reports during the training of Firefly 1 back in '22 that they weren't filtering out AI-generated images in the training set. At the time, those made up ~5% of the full stock library. Currently, AI images make up about half of Adobe Stock, though filtering them out seems to work well. We don't know if they were included in later versions of Firefly. There's an incentive for Adobe to filter them out, since AI trained on AI tends to lose its tails (the ability to handle edge cases well), and that would be pretty devastating for something like generative fill.

I figure we want to encourage companies to do better, whatever that looks like. For a monopolistic giant like Adobe, they seem to have at least done better. And at some point, they have to rely on the artists uploading stock photos to be honest. Not just about AI, but about release forms, photo shoot working conditions, local laws being followed while shooting, etc. They do have some incentive to be honest, since Adobe pays them, but I don't doubt there are issues there too.

Trump appointees have ties to companies that stand to benefit from privatizing weather forecasts