ClamDrinker

@ClamDrinker@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨3's grip looks the most comfy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Surprised I had to scroll down so far to find 3, it’s just the same as 5 but with better grip around the finger tips, which avoids the pen from twisting when you hold it tightly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ah shit. Here we go again.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Still better than having to go right as you step under the water, and then having to perform a sacred rain dance to hold it in

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do AI bros and other staunch AI defenders seem happy about the potential of killing off the creative industries?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m someone who talks about AI a lot on lemmy, people might call me pro AI although I consider myself to be neither pro nor anti, but admittedly, optimistic about AI in general. I work with people in the creative industry, artists, writers, designers, you name it.

  As others have mentioned already, your question to my knowledge does not reflect most people’s view on AI neither online and even less so in real life. And I talk and participate in communities that are overwhelmingly pro AI. The “AI bros” you mention sound like caricatures to me.

  There are some who have become bitter by lies and misinformation spread about AI that are intentionally hateful as a kind of reverse gotcha, but thats about it. You have those on the anti AI side as well for different reasons.

  I dont consider AI to be anywhere close to being a threat to the industry, other than indirectly through the forces of capitalism and mismanagement. Your question indeed seems very insane to me. Most people that use and talk about AI to me seem more interested in using it to make new creative works, or enhance existing works to greater depth in the same time. Creative people are human too and have limited time, and often their time is already cut short by deadlines and their work has been systematically undervalued even before AI.

  AI as it currently stands on its own simply has no feeling of direction. Without much effort you can get very pretty, elegant, interesting, but ultimately meaningless things from it. This cannot replace anyone, because such content while intriguing doesnt capture attention for long. It also cannot do complex tasks such as discussing with stakeholders or remaining consistent across work and feedback.

  With a creative person at the wheel of the AI though, something special can happen. It can give AI the direction it needs to bring back that meaning.

  This is a perspective a lot of people miss, since they only see AI as ChatGPT or Midjourney, not realizing that these are proprietary (not open source) front ends to the technology that essentially hide all the controls and options the technology has, because these things are essentially a new craft on their own and to this day very little people are even in the progress of mastering them.

  Everyone knows about prompts, but you can do much more than that depending on the model. Some image models allow you to provide your own input image, and even additional images that control aspects of the image like depth, layout, outlines. And text models allow you to pack a ton of pre existing data that completely guide what it will output next, as well as provide control over the internal math that decides how it comes to its guess for the next word.

  Without a creative and inventive person behind the wheel, you get generic AI material we all know. And with such a person, you get material at times indistinguishable from normal material. These people are already plentiful in the creative industry, and they are not going anywhere, and new people that meet this criteria are always welcome. Art is for everyone, and especially those who are driven.

  Really the only threat to the creative industry in regards to AI is that some wish to bully and coerce those who use the technology into submission and force them to reject it, and even avoid considering it altogether like dogma. This creates a submissive group that will never learn how to operate AI models. Should AI ever become neccesary to work in the creative industry (it currently doesnt look like it) these people will be absolutely decimated by the ones that kept an open mind, and more importantly, the youth of tomorrow that always is more open to new technologies. This is a story of the ages whenever new technology comes around, as it never treats those that reject it kindly, if it sticks around.

  The loom and the Luddites, cars and horses, cameras and painters, mine workers and digging machines, human calculators and mechanical calculators, the list goes on.

  So no, being pro AI doesnt neccesarily mean you are participating in the downfall of the creative industry. Neither does being anti AI. But spreading falsehoods and stifling healthy discussion, that can kill any industry except those built on dishonesty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Stocks for what? AI? I can’t have stocks for a technology. I could get stocks in companies that use AI, but the only ones that are on the stock market I’d rather die than support a single penny to. But they are not the only ones using the technology.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems a bit strange to blame AI for this. Meta has always been garbage and using technology to it’s worst effects.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Generated X⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While I’m not particularly fond of using AI for any kind of truthful information, this post reeks of the classic “Quit having fun!” meme. Your value judgement of AI is no more valid than anyone elses, and honestly in my opinion, very misdirected and anger fueled.

  It’s in everyone’s best interest for AI content to be honestly declared. You are almost certainly already consuming AI content from somewhere without knowing it because angry hate mobs have conditioned people to just lie and obfuscate their AI usage to avoid being the target of your hate. And if not, you will eventually due to the power of the technology, as the entire creative industry is already silently intergrating it, as everyone with an open mind knows, but the benefit of honesty towards closed minded angry people is none, and that status quo is a shame.

  Good AI usage is impossible to detect, and we should encourage honesty in regards to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure such cases exist, but where I’m from people don’t really get paid to host turbines, maybe companies at times. They dislike them because it affects the view in the area, and especially if you live very close to them the blades can cause noticeable flickering shadows. That latter point has a lot more weight to it in my eyes, but people do really care about the former as well, and it’s kind of hard to push on people when they live there and not you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is competition in battery production. Pretty much all of society would be better off with better batteries, so price gauging in an industry like that is quite hard. And if it was, it would not go unnoticed.

  The problem is simply the technology. There’s advancements like molten salt batteries, but it’s practically in it’s infancy. The moment a technology like that would become a big improvement over the norm, it would pretty much immediately cause a paradigm shift in energy production and every company would want a piece of the pie. So you’ll know it when you see it. But it might also just start off very overwhelmingly like nuclear fission and very gradually improved with the hope it can scale beyond the current best technologies for batteries.

  All we can do is wait and hope for breakthrough, I guess. Because cheap and abundant batteries could really help massively with reducing our carbon output.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  2160 GW is it’s rated capacity. I’m not sure how you got from there to 14.2 dollars per watt, but it completely ignores the lifetime of the power plant.

  Vogtle 3&4 are really a bad example because unit 4 only entered commercial activity this year. But fine, we can look at what it produces just recently.. About 3335000 MWh per month, or about 107 GWh per day. We can then subtract the baseline from Reactor 1 & 2 from before Reactor 3 was opened, removing about 1700000 MWh per month. Which gives us about 53 GWh per day. The lifetime of them is expected to be around 60 to 80 year, but lets take 60. That’s about 1177200 GWh over it’s lifetime, divided by the 36 billion that it cost to built… Gives you about 0.03 dollars per kWh. Which is pretty much as good as renewables get as well. But of course, this ignores maintenance, but that’s hard to calculate for solar panels as well. As such it will be somewhat larger than 0.03, I will admit.

  Solar panels on the other hand, often have a lifetime of 30 years, so even though it costs less per watt, MW, or GW, it also produces less over time. For solar, and wind, that’s about the same.. So this doesn’t really say much.

  But that wasn’t even the point of my message. As I said, I agree that Nuclear is slightly more expensive than renewables. But there are other costs associated with renewables that aren’t expressed well in monetary value for their units alone. Infrastructure, space, approval, experts to maintain it.

  Let’s ignore that no grid in the country actually needs 10hr storage yet. Because they cannot. They can’t do it because there’s not enough capacity. If the sun is cloudy for a day, and the wind doesn’t run. Who’s going to power the grid for a day? That’s right. Mostly coal and gas. That’s the point. Nuclear is there to ensure we don’t go back to fossils when we want to be carbon neutral, which means no output. If you are carbon neutral only when the weather is perfect for renewables, then you’re not really carbon neutral and still would have to produce a ton of pollution at times.

  I’m glad batteries and all are getting cheaper. They are definitely needed, also for nuclear. But you must also be aware of just how damn dirty they are to produce. The minerals required produce them are rare, and expensive. Wind power also kills people that need to maintain it. Things aren’t so black and white.

  Also consider that PV and batteries have always gotten cheaper over time, while nuclear has always gotten more expensive.

  This is not true, and it should be obvious when you think about it. Since this data fluctuates all the time. Nuclear has been more expensive in the past, before getting cheaper, and now getting more expensive again. Solar and wind have had peaks of being far more expensive than before. These numbers are just a representation of aggregate data, and they often leave out nuance like renewables being favored by regulations and subsidies. They are in part a manifestation of the resistance to nuclear. Unlike renewables, there are many more steps to be made for efficiency in nuclear. Most development has (justifiably) been focused on safety so far, as with solar and wind and batteries we can look away from the slave labor on the other side of the world to produce the rare earth metals needed for it. There is no free lunch in this world.

  For what it’s purpose should be, which is to provide a baseline production of electricity when renewables are not as effective. A higher price can be justified. It’s not meant to replace renewables altogether. Because if renewables can’t produce clean energy, their price might as well be infinitely high in that moment, which leaves our only options to be fossil fuels, hydro, batteries, or nuclear. Fossil fuels should be obvious, not everyone has hydro (let alone enough), batteries don’t have the capacity or numbers at the scale required (for the foreseeable future), and nuclear is here right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Solar and wind are cheaper yes. Batteries, no. If batteries were that cheap and easy to place we’d have solved energy a long time ago. Currently batteries don’t hold a candle to live production, the closest you can get is hydro storage, which not everyone has, and can’t realistically be built everywhere.

  Look at the stats. The second largest battery storage in the US (and the world) is located near the Moss Landing Power Plant. It proves a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned. That sounds like a lot, but it’s located next to San Jose and San Fransisco, so lets pick just one of those counties to compare. The average energy usage in the county of San Clara is 17101 GWh per year, which is about 46.8 GWh per day, or 46800 MWh. So you’d need 8 more of those at 6000 MWh to even be able to store a day’s worth of electricity from that county alone, which has a population of about 2 million people. And that’s not even talking about all the realities that come with electricity like peak loads.

  Relative to how much space wind and solar use, nuclear is the clear winner. If a country doesn’t have massive amounts of empty area nuclear is unmissable. People also really hate seeing solar and wind farm. That’s not something I personally mind too much, but even in the best of countries people oppose renewables simply because it ruins their surroundings to them. Creating the infrastructure for such distributed energy networks to sustain large solar and wind farms is also quite hard and requires personnel that the entire world has shortages of, while a nuclear reactor is centralized and much easier to set up since it’s similar to current power plants. But a company that can build a nuclear plant isn’t going to be able to build a solar farm, or a wind farm, and in a similar way if every company that can make solar farms or wind farms is busy, their price will go up too. By balancing the load between all three renewables, we ensure the transition can happen as fast and affordable as possible.

  There’s also the fact that it always works and can be scaled up or down on demand, and as such is the least polluting source (on the same level as renewables) that can reliably replace coal, natural gas, biomass, and any other always available source. You don’t want to fall back on those when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. If batteries were available to store that energy it’d be a different story. But unless you have large natural batteries like hydro plans with storage basins that you can pump water up to with excess electricity, it’s not sustainable. I’d wish it was, but it’s not. As it stands now, the world needs both renewables and nuclear to go fully neutral. Until something even better like nuclear fission becomes viable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Federated social media from before it was cool⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah and honestly, this is largely a reasonable standard for anyone running an email server. If you don’t have SPF, DKIM and DMARC, basically anyone can spoof your emails and you’d be none the wiser. It also makes spam much harder to send without well, sacrificing IP addresses to the many spam lists. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people setting up their own mail server were made aware of these things because of being blocked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is so much wrong with this…

  AI is a range of technologies. So yes, you can make surveillance with it, just like you can with a computer program like a virus. But obviously not all computer programs are viruses nor exist for surveillance. What a weird generalization. AI is used extensively in medical research, so your life might literally be saved by it one day.

  You’re most likely talking about “Chat Control”, which is a controversial EU proposal to use scan either on people’s devices or from provider’s ends for dangerous and illegal content like CSAM. This is obviously a dystopian way to achieve that as it sacrifices literally everyone’s privacy to do it, and there is plenty to be said about that without randomly dragging AI into that. You can do this scanning without AI as well, and it doesn’t change anything about how dystopian it would be.

  You should be using end to end regardless, and a VPN is a good investment for making your traffic harder to discern, but if Chat Control is passed to operate on the device level you are kind of boned without circumventing this software, which would potentially be outlawed or made very difficult. It’s clear on it’s own that Chat Control is a bad thing, you don’t need some kind of conspiracy theory about ‘the true purpose of AI’ to see that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proud globohomo⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but most people dont have that or take way too long than is worth for a simple meme. There already exist models to unblur entire images in seconds. Ai should take the shitty work lol.