> the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?
Perhaps; but I would argue talking to many AI evangelists is a form of selection bias. Which makes the false dichotomy conclusion reasonable given the inputs, but still inaccurate given reality.
True, it's a form of false dichotomy, but I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion. It's also an incredibly common conclusion in politics after people gain a somewhat superficial understanding of both sides. I wonder if it might play a key role in social polarization.
For me the strongest arguments are the ones that can argue the opponent's side as effectively as the opponent, and then show why it's weak. And that feels entirely incompatible with a dumb-or-evil argument.
>I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion.
That's a wild take and a wild leap. For my own part, I see the failure or refusal to comprehend someone else's preferences, values, or boundaries as itself a profoundly human quality, even if it's a quality I don't love, rather than one which would cause me to see someone as less human.
I will admit that, when there's enough nonsense money being thrown after a vaunted object, sensible discussion can feel pointless. Prudence goes deaf amid the din of hype.
And yes, steelmanning can be highly persuasive, but not when premises are radically different enough between two parties. It's really a more productive tool to improve your model of someone else.
There have been such a large number of OCR tools pop up over the past ~year; sorely in need for some benchmarks to compare them. Would love to see support for normal OCR tools like tesseract, EasyOCR, Microsoft Azure, etc. I'm using these for some projects, and my experiments with VLMs for OCR have resulted in too much hallucination for me to switch. Benchmarks comparing across this aisle would be incredibly useful.
> This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives.
I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.
Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?
I think you have to define what you mean by "less concerned." I'll take a stab at it, which is that Chinese energy use has grown 7% while US energy use has remained roughly flat. The reason I say that this only works because you devalue Chinese lives, is because Chinese energy use remains less than half (possibly even less than 1/3rd by some measures) what it is in the US per person. If the US reduced energy usage by 10% and China's grew by another 10%, it would still be the case that Chinese people relatively speaking are living in conditions that we in the US would consider extreme hardship, as a direct result of having less energy.
Essentially you're saying that the US should bully the Chinese people into increasing hardship because it's the only way to meet our climate goals.
I had tons of these "visual styles" and I remember how MS liked to patch themeui.dll and uxtheme.dll often rendering theming broken.
There were also attempts at customizing XP booting screen to achieve the perfect "it's not Windows" effect but that could easily render installation unbootable
What an interesting use case! And interesting composition.
One thing that's interesting about the AI violin cover is that I'm not sure those runs would be physically possible at that speed on a real violin. So that composition can _only_ be played digitally, I believe.
When I used to do larger more orchestral arrangements, I was constantly getting dinged by the instrumentalists that while they were theoretically musically possible, certain runs or passages were very unnatural on the instrument that I scored them on.
For a long time I really hoped that some of the more professional notation tools such as finale would add in an ability to analyze passages and determine how realistic/natural they were for the instrument that they were set to.
Not OP, but on the off chance you haven't seen this, I found the suno explorer thing quite nice. Hitting random a few times, I'll usually stumble onto something interesting. This was the first demo I heard where some of the AI tunes gave me goosebumps close to what human music does.
It's unclear to me whether it will result in more homogeneity, as a result of prompts being a coarse medium that results in the AI choosing what it's seen to fill in the rest, or less homogeneity, as a result of more people with non-mainstream tastes being able to create music aligned with their niche that otherwise wouldn't exist due time/money restrictions. I think the latter seems a bit more likely, but time will tell.
There's not really any need to speculate when this has already played out in other mediums - would you say that the proliferation of LLMs has led to an explosion of novel and interesting works of fiction, or just an explosion of cookie-cutter slop ebooks?
I would say too soon to tell. There has been an uptick in ebook slop, but I'm not sure if it's impacted the homogeneity of literature, because I don't think anyone is reading ai ebooks. It's not enough for it to exist to impact culture, it has to be being consumed.
Music is a uniquely interesting case, since music has a much lower barrier of entry to consume.
My thought to who you replied to exactly. Am I going to invest several days to read an AI slop novel? No. But I will take several minutes to read a blog post and likely have read many that were AI generated or assisted.
> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations
Airline cancellations. Seeing as they're talking about making a change, I assume it's airline cancellations, since no airline will currently refund you for a passenger cancellation.
Even though I’ve flown a dozen or more airlines in my life, I actually felt true loyalty towards Southwest because of their amazing no fee policies. And it was worth playing the “check in quickly cuz there’s no assigned seats” game for all the other benefits. And we’ve flown so many flights as a family due to that. It removed all the stress from the ticket purchasing process.
This CEO is a freaking idiot. Is this an excel jockey/MBA a-hole like the kind that ran Boeing and Intel into the ground?
What’s wrong with the board that voted this idiot in?
An activist investor, Elliot, acquired a significant stake in the company and organized a shareholder revolt about Southwest's margins. Paraphrasing their presentation on the issue [0]:
Management Has Historically Ruled Out Industry-Standard Commercial Initiatives [like assigned seating, different seat classes, and checked bag fees]
The plan is to make SWA as similar as possible to other airlines to get their numbers to the same place, increasing the value of already owned shares. They don't care if it destroys SWA's customer base because they'll have sold off their stake by then.
They could have added something like $30-50 to each ticket, blamed inflation, and been done. They used to be the premium choice vs airlines like united, which charge way more for intentionally separate coach seats with no legroom or luggage allowances.
I see they offer free cancellations and refunds for their two top-tier tickets, but can't find a reference for them offering it for all tickets. Do you have a link?
Before, you could cancel within 24 hours of boarding and get your full amount as at least a credit without any extra fee for any ticket class. That credit had no expiration. Now, there's a fee and expiration for this credit.
They want to benefit from passengers who don’t know their rights, because they won’t request a refund.
Similar things happened to family members multiple times where their initial flight (overseas) was delayed by 6 hours, they had many issues, and nobody provided information about their rights. I told them about what to ask for and voila, $1100 refund.
If the flight is delayed by 3 hours, you will get a refund if you cancel. This is great if the delay is long and there is a flight on a competing airline that would let you get out sooner.
I think charging a fee for passenger cancellation insurance is reasonable; the airline takes on a decent amount of risk if a consumer can cancel at any time.
That would be reasonable, but I think I could take it or leave it. Planes fill up more than hotels would be my guess, so they'd need a buffer window of like a month? At which point the difference between having and not having cancellation protection seems negligible to me.
I think we’re making a lot of assumptions here. For all we know one to two weeks could make a lot of sense.
I understand airlines are very feast or famine and often operate on very thin margins, but at this point I’m willing to pay a little more for the experience to not be so categorically and consistently
miserable
I think for me my main gripe with air travel is how hard it is to predict the price and how high the prices are. It takes me like a day of research to book a flight due to how careful I have to be to confirm what luggage I'm allowed/etc. And it's incredibly easy for me to get burned because aggregator sites like Google flights can't tell you eg how much a carry-on would cost, so I have to try to determine if the cheaper flight is _actually_ cheaper, etc etc. And I'm tired of having family have to pay crazy hundred dollar + fees for an extra carry on because the eco light ticket (although the ticket just says eco on it) doesn't actually include a personal item, that's only part of the eco ticket, and since you're at the counter that's going to be $100 fee for you to carry a purse onto the plane. -_- Shout out Condor.
Otherwise I find everything ok. The flights are fine -- packed but it is what it is there's high demand. I could do with/without the food if it reduced the price, I can pack my own. But otherwise I find them fine.
This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?