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TheShuttleExperience

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Quite the opposite. As I said, I don't think it's possible to become that rich by being decent. Because you don't become that rich without choosing money over people and relationships, over and over again.
Many people think this way. But you can be rich and chose money over people and still not talk nonsense. You also may chose money over people and relationships without being rich at all. It's like the so called "ordinary people" that complain about rich people but actually behave exactly the same way in their smaller scale and environment.

I for one strictly distinct between my job and my private life for example, even without being an entrepreneur. I would never become a friend of workmates or cultivate contacts to workmates in my private life. There are only two kinds of things I am interested in at work: the money I get and if I can do my job properly as required while having enough compensatory time off.

In my experience, there's only two kinds of true visionaries: People monomonaically obsessed with a particular idea, and people monomonaically obsessed with themselves. Both can have their uses, and both are potentially dangerous.
There are certainly more kinds of visionaries. But most likely not very known and successful... (I guess that's what you mean).

Age probably has something to do with it, since it tends to emphasise personality traits. A narcissist will only become more so the older they get. White might have some peripheral influence, as it's somewhat ingrained in our culture that we're entitled to saying whatever the hell we want, while in many other cultures (also many "white" cultures... though honestly, I don't really get where the distinction is drawn exactly. The contrast seems to be turned way up nowadays, creating an utterly useless cultural model) people take a bit of a dimmer view on that. But in my experience, being an idiot is certainly not the sole priviledge of white people...
Certainly not. But it's noticeable that most political utter nonsense from individuals or certain marginalized groups we see in the West comes from white people.
 

jedidia

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But you can be rich and chose money over people and still not talk nonsense.
That's got nothing to do with being decent, though, it's just being clever. A thing narcissists routinely have issues with...
You also may chose money over people and relationships without being rich at all
Either you make money, or you make peace, but you can't make both. Not in the insane quantities we're talking about here. Doesn't mean that it's impossible to make neither, obviously...
I'm not trying to paint a false "evil rich - noble poor" dichotomy here. I've worked with poverty stricken people for too long to have any illusions about that whatsoever (and I've done it far less long than others have. You learn very quickly in that business...).

But it's noticeable that most political utter nonsense from individuals or certain marginalized groups we see in the West comes from white people.
Of course. That's because it's always the majority doing it to the minority (it's more of a power distribution thing than a numbers thing, though), and guess who the majority is in the west. You go to other places where the majority has a different skin color, you hear the same tune from some other bloke. You just have to spend some effort to notice it, because language keeps getting in the way.
And when you get to a place where there's no significant imbalance of power, that's where things tend to get real nasty.
 

jedidia

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Actually, I think I may have just successfully parsed it: the parenthetical is maybe a bit long to have something after it in the same sentence (something that I've been guilty of on more than one occasion).
Uh, sorry about that. In my defense, I'm nowhere near as bad as Kierkegaard. That's not a great defense, but it is a defense... 😬
 

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I'm just hoping this saga is over before Starship starts flying. After there is a true Starship launch infrastructeure, he can f off to Mars or whatever cave he showed up from. I'm kinda assuming perhaps substance abuse, or weed, is involved, because otherwise the guy has more red flags than china, even for the investors. Free speech absolutist, my retrograde exhaust port. If only he were at least that. I guess we're just witnessing the same phenomenon that happens to dictators as well. They get surrounded with yes-men and become detatched from reality.
I'm wondering , if Bezos were to take over Space X, in a hypothetical later on scenario, if Musk really loses it, would we still see progress?
 
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DaveS

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I'm just hoping this saga is over before Starshiip starts flying. After there is a true Starship launch infrastructe, he can f off to Mars or whatever cave he showed up from. I'm kinda assuming perhaps substance abuse, or weed, is involved, because otherwise the guy has more red flags than china, even for the investors. Free speech absolutist, my retrograd exhaust port. If only he were at least that. I guess we're just witnessing the same phenomenon that happens to dictators as well. They get surrounded with yes-men and become detatched from reality.
I'm wondering , if Bezos were to take over Space X, in a hypothetical later on scenario, if Musk really loses it, would we still see progress?
He has been this all of his life. He was born into extreme wealth thanks to his parents owning a rather successful line of emerald mines in his birth country of South Africa. His father Errol Musk, isn't too dissimilar to Elon. Elon Musk is a hype man and knows nothing of successful business management, he's just the bank vault for his companies like Tesla and SpaceX. There's an entire management layer at both of them dedicated just to managing Elon. Twitter doesn't so what we are seeing right now is what Tesla/SpaceX would be without that protective layer.

And Bezos isn't much better as his space company of Blue Origin is way behind schedule on just about everything. They just delivered the first two flight BE-4's to United Launch Alliance for use on their Vulcan first stage. The BE-4 is to power Blue's New Glenn orbital launch vehicle and IIRC it needs 8 of them.
 

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Speaking of the energy and prices crisis, I realised quite a while ago that things got more expensive here too, but it progressed in a somewhat odd way, with the no-name or store brands getting more expensive first For a while, I just used to buy more 'normal' brands as the cheapest way .The only noticeable change is that I more or less switched to wine, since I realised a good wine costs basically as much or less as two or three relatively expensive belgian beers I used to enjoy. But, as a benchmark, I can absolutely still function on a, say, 5 to 10 bucks per day budget without feeling any strain. Shopping trips have become more rare, but that's a good thing considering how much I used to waste. Despite attempts to lose some weight, pizza is actually stil too cheap here, so it's my go-to junk food. Unless I get it from the dispenser, where it's like 4 times the price in the shop. Still using mostly the console for room heating. I usually let it idle or download throughout the night for background noise, I'm not sure if it isn't actually more wasteful than just using heating :D

The weird part was the fuel 'crisis' this autumn. Normally, the gas stations belong to the store chains like Carrefour, Auchan etc. Despite some reports of it running out in some places, I've never seen that happen, all they did was instate some measures to prevent hoarding. Buuuut, the 'premium' gas stations, like Total and Esso, actually started selling the cheapest fuel, thus leading to huge queues and shortages there. One time, only the premium, full of additives etc fuel was available and actually the cheapest. Didn't notice any change in mileage or, at the very least, it was something like 0.1-0.2 L/100km, so around a mile per US gallon gained at most.

While I'm absolutely certain there are places where it has gotten bad; at least in France/the West , it's not so noticeable for people like me. At the very least, it made me realise just how much I was wasting and how much I could normally save with just a little discipline
 

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It's so smooooooth and an absolute exception here.

Looks very new.

Also, -5°C means only the cap below the bike helmet is mandatory (just like the long pants, soft shell jacket and gloves). Its still too warm for the additional leg warmers and wearing the cold weather shirt below the jacket, as I had to find out after prepping for a winter that never came. 😒 But at least, I am now sure I could still ride my bike at -20°C (including wind effect) without freezing.
 

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I like to visit ArtStation from time to time to check on cool art from industry professionals and hobbyists alike, and apparently artists are raging against the machine now; so aside from usual anime tiddies, the average front page is now dominated with images like these:
ArtStation.PNG

It all started a couple weeks back or so when people noticed AI art being featured and the topic of theft got brought up since software like Stable Diffusion is trained on copyrighted images amongst others - without the consent or knowledge of the original creator that is.

ArtStation's response so far was giving people the option to opt-out from their creations being used to train AI models (so you're opted-in by default) which apparently caused even more of an outcry and many prominent artists have since decided to delete all their uploads and cancel their subscriptions as well. For reference, ArtStation is pretty much the go-to portfolio place for both video game and movie VFX industry, and was bought not too long ago by Epic Games who've been aggressively cornering the video game development market with their tools in the last couple of years now - so this whole development is a pretty big deal and no side is looking like they're backing down any time soon (nor is ArtStation doing anything about these protests, so I'm really curious to see where this goes).
 

jedidia

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apparently artists are raging against the machine now
Expected, but I don't think they have a chance in the long run. The genie has just about hatched long enough to start emerging from the bottle. There's no way of keeping it in.
And copyright does explicitly not apply to derrivative work, and artists would be the first to protest if it did. And that's ultimately what AI-generated art falls under, and interpreting it differently will be a difficult proposal legally.
 

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And copyright does explicitly not apply to derrivative work, and artists would be the first to protest if it did. And that's ultimately what AI-generated art falls under, and interpreting it differently will be a difficult proposal legally.

If it could be demonstrated that, with the right prompt, an AI could be induced to closely reproduce an image that had been used to train it, copyright might become an issue. OTOH, there are other cans of worms that that would open up.
 

jedidia

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Honestly, those aren't the things that worry me the most about AI. What I think we should be talking about is AI ownership. Not that I'd worry about AIs developing sentience anytime soon and there being an issue with personhood. No, that's so far in the future (if ever) that I'm not worried about it in the slightest for now. What I am worried about is the massive distribution of wealth these things will cause once they become truly viable for productive purposes (still a gen or two ahead, but it will come about relatively quickly now. The groundwork is done).

In my opinion, we can't treat AI as just a software product legally. There needs to be a public domain equivalent for neural networks, into which they have to be released after a decade or two (two is stretching it extremely, though...). There's no chance of this happening, obviously, but the consequences of it not happening will be severe as signifficant niches for creative small business will be gobbled up by corporations that are already channeling obscene amounts of money into the hands of only a tiny few people.
 

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In my opinion, we can't treat AI as just a software product legally. There needs to be a public domain equivalent for neural networks, into which they have to be released after a decade or two (two is stretching it extremely, though...). There's no chance of this happening, obviously, but the consequences of it not happening will be severe as signifficant niches for creative small business will be gobbled up by corporations that are already channeling obscene amounts of money into the hands of only a tiny few people.

I don't see that as a problem limited to AI. Copyright is already problematic if you believe that free markets are optimal to the degree that the modern West does (though copyright holders have spent the last few centuries trying to spin it as just another part of property law), and it becomes even moreso in a computerized society where physical cost of duplication is near zero, and that's before you even start discussing the damage that DRM does to society when copyright holders try to cling to the copyright model (far from being a natural part of property law, copyright is inimical to actual property rights, and directly and acutely so when DRM schemes that erode an owner's root access to their computing hardware are thrown into the mix). We're probably headed for dystopia if copyright continues to be a thing at all.

Actually, though, "a decade or two" fairly well describes what the original duration of copyright was in the US: 14 years, with a possible 14 year extension, and both had to be applied for, they weren't automatic (OK, that's more like a sesquidecade or two, so sue me). The current regime under the Berne Convention is just about optimal for technically being constitutional while completely violating the spirit of the US constitution. The clause that empowers Congress to make laws regarding copyright only empowers Congress to grant copyright "for limited Times". Life of the author + 70 years is technically a limited time, but the author's grandchildren will be elderly before the work enters the public domain.
 

jedidia

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I don't see that as a problem limited to AI. Copyright is already problematic if you believe that free markets are optimal
Oh, I agree entirely. And the copyright extension runaway is only likely to continue. Disney will never allow that Micky Mouse enters the public domain. That's why I don't see any reasonable laws concerning AI ownership coming forth anytime, because right now we're just making those worse that we have for similar cases.
It's just that AI adds another layer on top of that where not only something is withheld from benefitting the public and kept under corporate control, it will very actively take things away from the public by making them uncompetitive and put them under corporate control, because they're the only ones that can afford the initial investments. For which I don't begrudge them a profit, but the way things will be going we'll just lose entire creative industries without really ever getting anything back from it other than cheaper artwork at a severe cost to cultural development.
 

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Oh, I agree entirely. And the copyright extension runaway is only likely to continue. Disney will never allow that Micky Mouse enters the public domain.

I doubt that we'll see extension rates exceeding 1 year per year in the long term: AFAIK Disney isn't currently lobbying for any term extensions, and they have less than two years at this point to do so if they want to keep Steamboat Willie out of the public domain. And they have to realize that the closer they get to 1 year per year, or the further they go beyond it, the more likely a US court is to actually take seriously the argument that successive copyright extensions violate the "limited Times" language.

But the majority of the damage is done simply by the US being a signatory to the Burn-it convention. Life plus fifty already keeps a work under copyright for a period that is effectively forever to everyone that's likely to ever care.
 

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cold is approaching me -32° 🥶

Want to switch to the lukewarm side of the jetstream? We have the most extreme winter heat wave ever since new year turned. Warsaw reached almost 19°C on the last day of the year, 10K above average.
 
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