• 2 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 12th, 2023

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  • Right, these seem like reasonable hypotheses. I see a LOT of “innovation” happening in this space, though. In the future, or maybe even the present, I think it would be trivial to use speech to text and store conversations as small text files. Let’s say anytime it hears a specific brand name, “Cheerios” or “Toyota”, it records the conversation in a text file and sends it to marketers for research. It’s really not unthinkable.

    The recent Mozilla report confirms that cars are using your microphone to determine what song or podcast you’re listening to, and listening to your conversations, so it’s not as if this is paranoid conjecture. If there’s money in it, and no rules to stop them, I think it’s almost inevitable.

    I think automatic content recognition works by capturing still frames at strategic moments, so it may not take as much data as we think. For example, studios apparently hide watermarks that identify shows and movies. Then you would just need to make the tv detect the watermarks, not store and send screenshots of the screen. Then it can send a tiny CVS file of when and for how long you watched the show. It wouldn’t even need to know the name of the show. The watermark could be an alphanumeric code, and so even new shows would be detectable.


  • Great detailed comment. My concern is that I’m not clear on whether the TV tries to collect data even without an internet connection, and sends the collected data if you ever connect it in the future (e.g. for a firmware update). It’s such a poorly regulated industry, I have no trust in the companies imposing any reasonable limits on their own behavior.



  • I think projectors are great. In fact, I currently have one. But there are lots of trade offs. They’re big and take up lots of space, especially the good ones. Placement can be awkward even if you get a short throw, unless you ceiling mount, which isn’t always practical. Relatedly, it can be a pain to hook up to sound because the projector is in the back while you need sound from the front. Image quality can be decent but is still way worse than pretty much all modern TVs. (I hear laser projectors kinda fix this but they’re even more expensive.) It doesn’t turn on instantly; there’s typically a significant warm up period for the lamp. Some units have a noisy fan because the lamp produces a lot of heat. You need a large clear wall space or a rollable screen. I think there’s a reason why projectors are typically in movie rooms and not for more casual spaces.

    All this to say, projectors are great but not for all contexts. I wish the decision to get a projector and the decision to get a privacy respecting device were two completely unrelated decisions.







  • I don’t understand these “That’s just how the world is. Shame on you for discussing it” comments. I think it is very much worth discussing this, even if the conclusion of the discussion is that it’s not worth changing after all.

    You point out similar dynamics on Reddit, but it’s obviously not exactly the same. The design of Reddit is such that there is a much stronger tendency for main communities to arise. By contrast, lots of smaller communities on Lemmy look like ghost towns, where they would be much healthier if they combined numbers. “You’re free to do whatever” doesn’t address the systemic issue.

    That said, I don’t think this is obvious either way. There are tons of benefits to the current system too. That’s why it’s worth coming back to this topic every once in a while. If these sorts of nitty gritty design discussions bore you, why are you on this community?





  • There are positive economic externalities to public everything availability. We don’t live in this kind of world though, someone will always try to claim a larger share due to human nature.

    Saying “Things are inevitably bad because of human nature” is just very weird, since we obviously do have good policies and we try to solve other problems like crime and poverty. It sounds like you already agree that this is good policy? You’re just saying it’s not politically feasible? OK, sure, we probably don’t disagree then.

    That being said, I’m not really interested in arguing about the political feasibility (or lack thereof) of having every resource being public.

    I am obviously NOT arguing that every resource should be public. This discussion is about AI, which was publicly funded, trained on public data, and is backed by public research. This sleight of hand to make my position sound extreme is, frankly, intellectually dishonest.

    there’s also a cost people pay to use these LLMs.

    OK, keep the premium subscription going then.

    What you’re missing though is that there is an extreme shortage of components.

    There’s a shortage, but it’s not “extreme”. ChatGPT is running fine. I can use it anytime I want instantly. You’d be laughed out of the room if you told AI researchers that ChatGPT can’t scale because we’re running out of GPUS. You seem to be looking for reasons to be against this, but these reasons don’t make sense to me, especially since this particular problem would exist whether it’s publicly owned or privately owned.




  • No, I am not ignoring that. I specifically said:

    Even if costs goes up to several tens of million a day for access for the whole world that’s incredibly affordable.

    With how many people are already using AI, it’s frankly mind boggling that they’re only losing $700k a day.

    You’re also ignoring the fact that costs don’t scale proportionally with usage. Infrastructure and labor can be amortized over a greater user base. And these services will get cheaper to run per capita as time goes on and technology improves.

    Finally, there are positive economic externalities to public AI availability. Imagine the improvements to the economy, education and health if everyone in the world had free access to high quality AI in their native language, no matter how poor or how remote. Some things, like schools, roads and healthcare, are not ideally provisioned under a free market. AI is looking to be another.