dragonwriter

> UBI will cause instant inflation and everyone will be in the same place they started from.

Well, no, even if it causes inflation, everyone won't be in the same place they started from, because (even if you assume no additional progressive tax or other revenue stream is established alongside it) a flat per-capita additional personal income stream doesn't result in the same distribution of income as existed without it. It would narrow the (relative) range of income distribution, making the poor better off and the rich worse off (assuming no overall change in purchasing power.)

Flock has real human officers who direct it and shareholders who profit from it (those groups overlap), it is not an inert object wielded by the State.

This doesn't reduce the responsibility of the state for misdeeds it does or attempts with Flock, but neither does the State’s role absolve Flock’s leadership and owners of the misdeeds they do and profit from, whether or not some or all are at the request of the State.

Its a protection for the person who deploys the model and controls the context against some exploits, on the expectation that that operator will take steps to prevent large scale context manipulation.

It is not a protection for society against the person deploying the model.

> It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover.

Not under that much cover, just the more overt part of it directed at a different demographic than the primary foci of earlier rounds of US racism (though it provided a lot of excuse for actions directed more in line with classic US racism, and set the stage for the renaissance of more classicly directed, out-and-proud racism that has characterized the Trump era.)

If you are going to limit the 5th Party system to the first half of the long 1930s-1990s period of overlapping realignments (which is pretty reasonable), then the 6th Party system should be the second half of that period, and the period from about the end of the Clinton Administration on should be the 7th Party system; you can call now the 6th Party system if you call the entire long realignment period the 5th (which makes some sense, too, though there is a pretty significant difference between the New Deal dominant period and the Civil Rights dominant period of the realignment), but to split it somewhere in the middle but then lump the period after with it makes little sense.

The complaint has some basis but is greatly exaggerated.

When the whole stack comprising the model is used, it occasionally produce erroneous anatomy and require running qitha different seed to get a good result; this is much less common than with Flux 2 Klein. Also, the step distilled version of the model, particularly, isn't great at generating photo-quality skin, despite otherwise being good at producing photographic-seeming outputs. (Even some of that might be exaggerated, because it was what I saw before fixes to the Comfy templates.)

But a lot of people on Reddit (and some here, I would guess—none are explicit about it but that's the only thing I can think if that would make the “worse than Flux 2” comments remotelt understandable) have decided that they don’t like that BFL’s approach to generality in prompt handling for the model was to train it with a particular style of detailed prompt and provide a LLM-based prompt rewriter (they call it the “prompt upsampler”) to process raw user prompts into the style of prompts the model accepts, and despite BFL flat out saying the model should bot be used without either the provided upsampler or some alternative one (e.g., the published system prompt used with a different LLM), and that that will produce poor results, have decided that the correct way to judge the model is by not upsampling prompts, and pretending that the upsampler isn't part of the stack. This makes generations far worse (it especially increases body horror, probably—from trying it and watching latent previews with and without—because it makes prompts more ambiguous making it harder for the diffusion process to resolve where new elements should be drawn or extra drafted elements should be pruned early in the generation process.

The problems being complained about aren't mostly what you'd expect from NSFW avoidance; it does have some of that, too, even though it is not particularly shy (or low quality) about nudity so long as the genitals specifically aren’t visible. It’s not great with women’s nipples/areolae, but it doesn't avoid them. Its clearly undertrained on NSFW material, but it doesn't look particularly moreso than most corporate base models; its usual for community LoRAs and finetunes to close that gap.

Bounding box support is nice, though the way it is aonewhat soft guidance makes it tricky to use reliably for straight t2i (it looks like it may be atronger for tying references tobit) and, while the Comfy workflow has a tool to help draft it, I think there are some wrinkles with upsampler interaction with it that the workflow doesn't account for.

That said, and despite being great and creative as a first pass composition model at high res that I will definitely keep in my t2i toolbox, it is definitely generally underwhelming for straight t2i, especially given that MOSS Image 5B just dropped, which despite its claim that its strength is in text generation and structured layout (a popular focus for recent models), is one of the best all-round base models I’ve seen in breadth of content knowledge, prompting flexibility, output quality in its strongest resolution range (seems to be 1-2MP for general purpose—full-frame “artistic”, not its structured layout text heavy focus—work), creativity, lack of censorship or undertraining, etc.

I can think of an established industry whose major players each have lots of relevant data that they own to use for that purpose and which would have a ready way to profit from use of those models without particularly significant additional legal exposure compared to those in their normal operations.

Oh, and major players from that industry have been publicly reaching out for people with AI image/video generation and training experience on public forums.

Does it though? It arguably illustrates how the economics of building custom specialized small sub-frontier LLMs and building an service around them that can easily be replicated by open tools wrapping either frontier LLMs for equal or better quality or personally-controlled open LLMs for privacy doesn't work, especially in a market where privacy is a selling point.

But I think that it is dubious whether that is a good proxy for “the economics of AI” broadly.

Which I am not saying are good—I just don't think Character.ai has much probative value on the broad question on way or the other.

> Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.

> Especially not when you're getting older

Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.

Why are we replaying the dishonest “think of the retirees” now? It was bullshit in California in 1978 to sell Prop 13, and its even bigger (and more transparent) bullshit now when, especially when it is used to sell the same basic idea.

> But it's pushing her into poverty.

No, its pushing her into a cash flow problem. Its not poverty; she has substantial wealth, but its all in the house.

There are mechanisms, of course, to access that wealth without moving, including ones specifically geared toward income-limited house-rich retirees.

Now, those end up creating a debt that must be resolved before transferring the house, including via estate, so living on the value of the home reduces its utility as a vehicle for generational wealth, but...unless you want to reproduce California’s system which makes it much harder for people to become homeowners while rewarding those who already have, eapecially the wealthiest, making the rich richer and what would be the comfirtable middle class anywhere else in the country poor, that’s the way it works (and your exact scenario was the major sales pitch that was used to sell the California system; its maybe understadable how people without 50 years of California’s example fell for it then, but...)

> Once the subsidization ends and cost becomes significant I will take a serious look around for the best value models and switch off the expensive providers, but that time hasn't come yet.

There's a reason the labs in the US frontier oligopoly are using “safety” to lobby for antitrust exemptions for mutual coordination as well as anticompetitive regulation.

> but creating multiple accounts, even if they're fake, is usually just a TOS violation, or maybe a civil matter, not criminal.

Yes, in and of itself, creating multiple accounts in violation of TOS is probably not a criminal fraud under either state or federal law.

But when you do it as the mechanism to conceal streaming manipulation in violation of the agreement that governs the terms of payment, and thereby to secure large amounts of money from the streaming service under false pretenses (and, given the structure of streaming payments, to deny payment to other song owners which they would have received without the deception) on the other hand is a different story.

Like yeah, flexing your index finger isn’t a crime, either, but if you are holding a gun with that finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at someone's head...

The law very often is focussed more than anything about the purpose and effect of an action, and that you can ignore that and describe the action in terms that aren't criminal without considering purpose and effect really doesn't matter.

Careful, promoting thoughtcrime by malquoting Miniluv based on old documents that have not been rectified by Minitrue with the latest updates to newspeak could land you in a joycamp.

> You just have to verify multiple times to ensure you have averaged out any sampling errors.

This is... logically equivalent to the claim it is offered to contradict.

LLMs are unpredictably complex with potentially sigbificnaly different reaults based on random seed and seemingly insignificant prompt details) in the ideal case and nondeterministic in practice, so someone finding an error with a given LLM is not strong evidence that the result was not checked with an LLM, even with the very same LLM, previously.