>Why do you think Whatsapp is so popular now and not SMS anymore?
Is this actually the case? I've heard Whatsapp is popular outside the states (something about differences in phone plans, in the US unlimited SMS texting is basically universal) but it's definitely still in the minority here. Anecdotally I feel like each friend group here has a different, idiosyncratic method of text communication in the US. Some people communicate through SMS, others through instagram/snapchat, others through discord, or whatsapp, or facebook messenger, etc. There are some interesting trends in the distribution along age and gender lines too.
A neutral answer: he's a popular young conservative Jewish-American political pundit who gained fame for debates at college campuses. He gained notoriety for his snappy rhetorical "takedowns" of (mostly left-leaning) university students during open-forum guest lectures he frequently hosts on college campuses.
My personal take: his "takedowns" are pretty fun entertainment, but doesn't really have anything to do with which political position is correct or not. A lot of contemporary political ideas have a "nuanced, difficult to explain, strong" version, and a "flawed, weak, easy to explain" version. For most people, when asked to explain their political views, have trouble formulating the strongest version of their argument. Many people believe what they believe purely on emotional or tribal grounds rather than based on the facts of the matter. Ben's personal style is to find the weak version of an argument, and to (correctly) point out the obvious flaws in it. Of course, just because X argument for Y is fallacious, doesn't make Y false.
Solved my first 5x5 in 1:54. At first I thought it would be really difficult but then I found a hex which could only go one way (a corner hex with V shape) and then from there the adjacent pipes could only orient one way. There were a few times where I had to think down a tree of possibilities (if this hex goes like this, then this hex can't possibly fit here because of a previously solved hex, therefore it must go like this instead), but never more than one or two steps. All in all it's a very satisfying puzzle format.
Dalle seems to only have a few "styles" of drawing that it is actually "good" at. It is particularly strong at these styles but disappointingly underwhelming at anything else, and will actively fight you and morph your prompt into one of these styles even when given an inpainting example of exactly what you want.
It's great at photorealistic images like this: https://labs.openai.com/s/0MFuSC1AsZcwaafD3r0nuJTT, but it's intentionally lobotomized to be bad at faces, and often has an uncanny valley feel in general, like this: https://labs.openai.com/s/t1iBu9G6vRqkx5KLBGnIQDrp (never mind that it's also lobotomized to be unable to recognize characters in general). It's basically as close to perfect as an AI can be at generating dogs and cats though, but anything else will be "off" in some meaningful ways.
It has a particular sort of blurry, amateur oil painting digital art style it often tries to use for any colorful drawings, like this: https://labs.openai.com/s/EYsKUFR5GvooTSP5VjDuvii2 or this: https://labs.openai.com/s/xBAJm1J8hjidvnhjEosesMZL . You can see the exact problem in the second one with inpainting: it utterly fails at the "clean" digital art style, or drawing anything with any level of fine detail, or matching any sort of vector art or line art (e.g. anime/manga style) without loads of ugly, distracting visual artifacts. Even Craiyon and DALLE-mini outperform it on this. I've tried over 100 prompts to get stuff like that to generate and have not had a single prompt that is able to generate anything even remotely good in that style yet. It seems almost like it has a "resolution" of detail for non-photographic images, and any detail below a certain resolution just becomes a blobby, grainy brush stroke, e.g. this one: https://labs.openai.com/s/jtvRjiIZRsAU1ukofUvHiFhX , the "fairies" become vague colored blobs here. It can generate some pretty ok art in very specific styles, e.g. classical landscape paintings: https://labs.openai.com/s/6rY7AF7fWPb5wWiSH0rAG0Rm , but for anything other than this generic style it disappoints hard.
The other style it is ok at is garish corporate clip art, which is unremarkable and there's already more than enough clip art out there for the next 1000 years of our collective needs -- it is nevertheless somewhat annoying when it occasionally wastes a prompt generating that crap because you weren't specific that you wanted "good" images of the thing you were asking for.
The more I use DALLE-2 the more I just get depressed at how much wasted potential it has. It's incredibly obvious they trimmed a huge amount of quality data and sources from their databases for "safety" reasons, and this had huge effects on the actual quality of the outputs in all but the most mundane of prompts. I've got a bunch more examples of trying to get it to generate the kind of art I want (cute anime art, is that too much to ask for?) and watching it fail utterly every single time. The saddest part is when you can see it's got some incredible glimpse of inspiration or creative genius, but just doesn't have the ability to actually follow through with it.
GPT3 has seen similar lobotomization since its initial closed beta. Current davinci outputs tend to be quite reserved and bland, whereas when I first had the fortunate opportunity to experience playing with it in mid 2020, if often felt like tapping into a friendly genius with access to unlimited pattern recognition and boundless knowledge.
I've absolutely noticed that. I used to pay for GPT-3 access through AI Dungeon back in 2020, before it got censored and run into the ground. In the AI fiction community we call that "Summer Dragon" ("Dragon" was the name of the AI dungeon model that used 175B GPT-3), and we consider it the gold standard of creativity and knowledge that hasn't been matched yet even 2 years later. It had this brilliant quality to it where it almost seemed to be able to pick up on your unconscious expectations of what you wanted it to write, based purely on your word choice in the prompt. We've noticed that since around Fall 2020 the quality of the outputs has slowly degraded with every wave of corporate censorship and "bias reduction". Using GPT-3 playground (or story writing services like Sudowrite which use Davinci) it's plainly obvious how bad it's gotten.
OpenAI needs to open their damn eyes and realize that a brilliant AI with provocative, biased outputs is better than a lobotomized AI that can only generate advertiser-friendly content.
So it got worse for creative writing, but it got much better at solving few-shot tasks. You can do information extraction from various documents with it, for example.
I mean yes, you’re right insofar as it goes. However nothing I am aware of implies technical reasons linking these two variables into a necessarily inevitable trade-off. And it’s not only creative writing that’s been hobbled; GPT3 used to be an incredibly promising academic research tool and given the right approach to prompts could uncover disparate connections between siloed fields that conventional search can only dream of.
I’m eager for OpenAi to wake up and walk back on the clumsy corporate censorship, and/or for competitors to replicate the approach and improve upon the original magic without the “bias” obsession tacked on. Real challenge though “bias” may pose in some scenarios, perhaps a better way to address this would be at the training data stage rather than clumsily gluing on an opaque approach towards poorly implemented, idealist censorship lacking in depth (and perhaps arguably, also lacking sincerity).
The face thing is weird in context of them not being worried about it infringing on the copyright of art. If they're confident it's not going to infringe on art copyright, why the worry it might generate the face of a real person.
This is a running theme for Blue Zones and centenarian research data, just a bunch of really blatant falsehoods packaged as trendy diet advice (e.g. suggesting that the Okinawan diet is low in meat, which is based on some weird game of telephone around discussions of WWII starvation diets, when in reality the Okinawans get a large proportion of their calories from lard and have the highest meat consumption in Japan). I wouldn't quite call it a "scam" but I would call it extremely misleading.
The problem with the evidence and research around the "plant based diet" is that there is an ulterior motive for most of the research (legitimate ethical concerns around meat eating) which taints a lot of the data.
For example, Dan Buettner (the author of Blue Zones) suggests that Okinawans eat a 98% plant based diet which is...I won't say "fraudulent" because I think it's possible it's an honest mistake but it's definitely not "correct" at all. It's based off of some sketchy anecdotal accounts of WWII starvation diets where the only ate potatoes. Western centenarian researchers and health gurus repeated that factoid a bunch and it became "the okinawan diet is basically a potato-heavy vegan diet" in some twisted game of telephone.
In actuality both modern and ancient Okinawans have the highest meat consumption in Japan. Lard is the go-to frying oil even for vegetable dishes. The largest proportion of calories come from animal products. The Okinawan diet is a high fat, high carb, moderately high meat diet whose main "secret" is conscious portion restriction (the local "eat until you are 80% full" mantra). They do eat plenty of fish too, just not as much as the mainlanders (the idea that the okinawan diet is low in fish is crazy because the okinawans have a super unique and proud local history of fishing and seafood foraging traditions).
What are you considering as "American meat preparations" though? It's not all salt/pepper/butter/lemon here. Not even considering immigrant cuisines (which is doing a disservice because that's our entire thing, like ) there are hundreds of local meat preparation styles from southern barbecue variations to cajun food to native tex-mex and southwest styles and beyond.
I agree, I've been all over Europe and never saw any significant difference in the quality of raw meat and poultry. I do know there is a lot of misinformation about US meats over there though, like the "chlorinated chicken" nonsense you hear all the time from the brits which is thinly veiled protectionist propaganda by the domestic meat industries (who have no problem importing their poultry from Brazil!).
I'm definitely in the weird minority that feels like that phase of edgy internet counterculture diving was an overwhelming positive thing for me. It gave me perspective as a sheltered suburb kid as to how fucked up things can be in the world. I feel I have a lot more empathy now whereas before I struggled to internalize the problems and suffering of people around me as "real" (things like war or crime were things that happened on television and in fictional novels, not in real life). Even now I feel like some people, especially in my parents' generation, have trouble seriously understanding the lives of people outside their immediate ingroups.
I would not recommend it as a method for anybody though, there are a dozen other routes that kind of journey could have gone down and most of them lead to terrible conclusions.
Coffee culture has existed in the US since the 1700s at least when Americans started drinking coffee instead of tea to spite the British, it's just a different coffee culture than the modern cafe espresso culture and it's not "better" or "worse".
Is this actually the case? I've heard Whatsapp is popular outside the states (something about differences in phone plans, in the US unlimited SMS texting is basically universal) but it's definitely still in the minority here. Anecdotally I feel like each friend group here has a different, idiosyncratic method of text communication in the US. Some people communicate through SMS, others through instagram/snapchat, others through discord, or whatsapp, or facebook messenger, etc. There are some interesting trends in the distribution along age and gender lines too.