It's not the Encyclopædia Britannica. I could see if this site was expected to be source or reference material as you suggest. Maybe I'm missing something and it's supposed to be authoritative. But I don't see why someone would be full of worry that a random web site on the internet is posting information that may or may not be accurate. Happens all the time.
Thanks for the explanation. I honestly wasn't sure what could be causing "plenty of worries" in this context. At least now I know what the issue might be.
If that's all it takes then cnn.com or foxnews.com must be excruciatingly worrying. It's worse than AI imagery. There are people who are knowingly distributing misinformation, and sometimes being paid to do so.
I think something that's at play here is that the site looks like it is meant to be authoritative and genuine, and could be unexpectedly deceptive, while many other sites are expected to be deceptive and that is accepted and doesn't cause plenty of worry. Kind of strange though. A random internet site might have some fake images on it, which causes plenty of worry, but we're okay being lied to 24/7 by official channels. Or maybe we're plenty worried about that too? Doesn't seem like people are plenty worried about it.
I don't mind it at all for decorational images, but in this case I would mind. I suppose I would mind the inaccuracy, the worry that the creatures might not look exactly like the real world ones look.
Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me, even if I can't tell the difference.
It can matter to you without it being a grand philosophical, ethical or commercial concern.
That's where I'm at with this stuff, and I think I am in good company.
The image represents a facsimile of seeing the real world with my own eyes, which an AI image does not. That is important to me in this context, that of learning about the real world by literally observing it.
> Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me
I also very much felt like it doesn't really matter, perhaps too much and without considering other potential points of view, that's why the "plenty of worries" seemed so strange to me. How could you experience plenty of worry over an internet site being disingenuous about facts or images? You'd be freaking out all the time. But I can see now that it could be serious for some people in this case.
In my own experience, whenever I detect something AI generated I lose the ability to evaluate how much I can "trust" something. Compare an article on Medium with a published book on the same topic; both are human-originated but the substance of one implies authority, quality etc. Generating a website and pictures with AI requires very little effort and care, and I have no interest in carelessness. Like most humans, I can't help but evaluate the author alongside the art.
"Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts"
"We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo"
"Despite six IPCC reports, 28 COP meetings, hundreds of other reports, and tens of thousands of scientific papers, the world has made only very minor headway on climate change"
"projections paint a bleak picture of the future, with many scientists envisioning widespread famines, conflicts, mass migration, and increasing extreme weather that will surpass anything witnessed thus far, posing catastrophic consequences for both humanity and the biosphere"
I don't mean to lessen the impact of that statement. I think climate change is a serious problem. But also most of the geologic time that genus Homo has existed, Earth has been in an ice age. Much of which we'd consider a "snowball Earth". The last warm interglacial period, the Eemian, was 120,000 years ago.
That's an interesting bit of detail. As you intended, it does not lessen the impact of the statement: "conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives". It confirms it, with some additional context.
To me, it seems to make it even more significant. Because as you point out, Homo evolved under ice age conditions over millions of years. Well, here we are about to be thrust into uncharted territory, in an extremely short period of time. With very fragile global interdependencies, an overpopulated planet, and billions of people exposed to the consequences.
Right? I would only caution that neither has the ice age been particularly kind to humanity. It seems at least a couple times to have almost gotten us all. There's a genetic bottleneck in genus Homo which seems to date back ~80k years, which aligns suspiciously with the Toba supervolcano eruption. And another around 850k years ago. During each there were likely fewer than 2,000 breeding humans.
Earth has certainly thrived with a warmer climate. No reason we can't too. The problems - for us and other life - stem from the rate of change. Which is easy to see is very very rapid compared to the historical cycles, but still a slow motion trainwreck compared to an asteroid strike, supervolcano, or gamma ray pulse, all of which it seems Earth has experienced. Life and human society will adapt if it has enough time. The quicker the catastrophe the more challenging that is.
I guess what I'm saying is that we're not doing ourselves any favors, but we also shouldn't underestimate mother nature's ability to throw us a curve ball in the 9th inning that makes everything worse. Life has endured an awful lot on this little rock.
What you just wrote is the same as: 'the entire lifecycle of humanity has no precursor to the conditions' we are about to face.
We aren't facing the ice age that has been the last 120,000 years.
I'm sure the rocky planet will survive just fine, maybe even some extreemophiles, even if we completely screw up the atmosphere. Not 6 billion humans though.
I can both be alarmed at how quickly the ice age humanity has evolved within is ending, and find that a very funny way of phrasing it. These things don't conflict in me, though it seems triggering to some. People are downvoting me with moral conscience, but I'm just over here laughing at a funny conjunction of paleoclimate and word choice. :) People getting offended by it kinda makes it funnier.
this is the same style comment as "no offense, but <offensive thing>"
if you didnt intend to lessen the impact of that statement, why say something that is specifically meant to lessen the impact of the statement? just say what you want to say without the hedging.
I remember reading a story from Robert C. Martin, if I recall correctly, about writing an application and trying to decide which DB to use. In the end, they put the DB access paths behind an abstraction and decided that they'd just use the file system to start with, and easily switch it out later. In the end, they shipped, and never did need to use a real DB.
Looking at the level of detail, and the thoroughness, I wouldn't have expected it to even be possible to complete it in 20 years. How much time does this guy spend driving truck? Amazing accomplishment and display of dedication and creativity.
20 * 365.25 = 7305 days. Assuming their "near a million buildings" number tracks to somewhere around 950,000, he would have had to build 130 "structures" a day on average.
This is all round and not precise numbers, considering he had to have days where he couldn't build, I'm guessing on the number of structures, and he started in 2004 (22 years ago), accuracy is not possible. But still, even if we fudged it down to 100 structures a day: This is BONKERS.
The man has a prodigious skill at building simple models and painting them. I am incredibly impressed. And I am curious if he did it all alone or if he ever had help from friends/family, even just simple cutting of the balsa wood into simple templated shapes for him to later construct. (To be clear, even if he had help it takes nothing away from how impressive this is)
Like what though? Every building is a little different and the fastest way I can think of is laser cutting or CNC which is still pretty slow. Unless he was whole hog CNCing entire city blocks that is. Though the article mentions “balsa wood cut with an X-Acto knife”. If that part is true, this is utterly incredible and I have no idea how he pulled off more than 100 buildings a day.
Looking at the pictures in the article, the level of detail is not particularly great in some parts. It seems like many building have very simple shape and color. With some modeling skill, I can imagine carving and painting 100s of these in a day. Although I can't imagine doing it for 20 years.
I would however like to know what his research was like. Was he just following Google Maps/Earth? They were released in 2005 and 2001 respectively and NY has had coverage from the get go.
You don't need CNC for speed if the job is fixed and simple. You can make simple jigs and holding fixtures which firmly hold the object with features to help guide tooling. A number of these can be made to speed up all sorts of operations.
Same as what happened to that Ford aircraft carrier, some fire incident in the kitchen that was. I doubt aircrafts have a kitchen yet, but toilets could catch fire, right ?
Understaffing is no excuse at an airport that size with that kind of airspace. Somebody high up in the food chain with integrity and authority should be closing the runway if staffing is so low that it becomes unsafe. And I'm no expert, but having enough staff for separate air and ground control seems like a minimum safety requirement unless it's a tiny airport.
Not having distraction devices in a classroom is such a basic concept. I'm surprised it required government intervention. Every half decent school principal should've banned them in their school, and if the principal didn't, the individual teachers should have banned them from their classrooms. The first time a kid had to have a question repeated to them because they were looking at their phone should've been the last time phones were permitted in that class.
Part of the problem is with each step down the ladder there's less authority and support and more chances for blowback from angry parents going higher up the chain. Teachers fear not getting support from principals if they're DIYing a device ban, principals fear blowback from complaints to the board or superintendent etc.
There's also the normalization problem at the teacher level where kids are used to using them in other classes so it's a bigger lift to get different behavior in one specific class.
I haven't used a mouse in ages, but I haven't used a trackpad - ever. I've never found one that matches the accuracy, speed, and overall joy of using TrackPoint to move the mouse cursor.
Yeah it’s really a shame that the track point wasn’t adopted globally (I’m assuming for patent reasons, but surely any patents must be expired by now).
For years I used a Trackpoint external keyboard plus a mouse. The track point is great for small movements when you’re primarily typing, and the mouse is great for when you are primarily moving the cursor.
Love GIMP. Always capable of doing anything I need done with raster images or even PDFs. Lately I've been opening PDFs and lightening the pages so that they can be printed without wasting a bunch of toner on backgrounds that are meant to be white but were scanned in as a light grey.
Sorry, I don't have to do it in sufficient quantity of frequency to encourage scripting. And while doing it manually, I notice that the required tweaking of levels changes depending on the content of the page and how poor the scan is. I'm not sure an automated solution would provide satisfactory results consistently.
What would be so worrying about someone using AI to generate images for their site?
reply