Software can be distributed almost for free. Once it’s written, sending another customer a copy costs practically nothing. Profit margins improve as software companies grow.

AI doesn’t work that way. Every answer requires expensive chips, electricity, and data-center capacity. The next unit of software is nearly free; the next unit of intelligence is not.

Software runs on fairy wishes, apparently. No chips or electricity involved.

Local models run on your own CPU and GPU - like a video game. This fearmongering bullshit article keeps yapping China China China as if the American models and companies aren’t orders of magnitude worse. Worse about training, worse about inference, worse about money set on fire. Business fucking Insider is not taking a grand stand for software freedom. They’re just doing that one Tom Gauld comic for ‘our magnificent technical infrastructure’ versus ‘their hardware-devouring server farms.’

Ultima ratio astrochicken.

if not coined by conservative propagandists, then eagerly exploited.

Conveniently has The Idiot’s signature right on it.

Does dumping even work, as an accusation? The shocking cheapness of Chinese models is in their training. Unless they’re just straight-up lying, and by orders of magnitude, that cost is not a factor in adoption.

Tokens are not commodities. The cutting edge is all broadly similar, but people getting any real work out of these things have justified opinions about which ones are better and how. It is not an industry where you could half-ass your results and compete on subsidized price. Especially when half-assed results are possible with local models that run on your laptop.

Nor do open models provide any serious retention. These companies emit an avalanche of whitepapers. If China tried to close the gate now, the horse is fuckin’ gone. Anyone can see how to produce a from-scratch competitor using institutional quantities of money instead of nation-state quantities of money. Plus you still have the old models. They’re behind, but they’ve narrowed the gap at an alarming clip. Increased pressure toward lower training cost and strictly local inference wouldn’t slow that down. Headline accomplishments from a few years back are already within reach of hobbyist budgets.

As the London subway illustrator said, “It’s not a map, it’s a diagram.” The technique conveys fine detail in a way that feels okay to your brain.

Also, scrolling through this for the first time in a decade… all of these graphs show darkening toward the corner. Every single one of them is a shallow V. At best, one side / one face is uniformly flat. Ambient occlusion works because light really is less common in convex spaces. For any point near a wall… there’s a wall in the way. The closer you get, the more it’s in the way.

Video games exaggerate the hell out of this effect (especially from Crysis through to this 2012 article), but heightened reality is kinda their schtick. Real people’s eyes aren’t that big, either. SSAO techniques advanced soon into wider low-frequency impact. I still have some dated PDFs with smooth-shaded church interiors.

It’s possible he means “copyrighting” and is also an idiot.

Return-with-a-v for Yahoo! Directories.

Basically the locals with flashy suits in fuckoff-nowhere central Africa, flexing for strangers who might believe they own two of anything.

Thanks to the internet, they don’t even need gas in their clapped-out third-hand Bentley. It can sit in their garage that for some reason is also their living room.

And yet it uses the neologism “busification” that you can for sure see plastered on pro-Russia communities.

Exactly the sort of emotionally evocative word game that is, if not coined by conservative propagandists, then eagerly exploited. For example when those feel-don’t-think phrases appear in the BBC.

And now, at last, we may consider open-source DVD decoding. Just in the nick of time.

Feel like ML’s been pushing this ‘Ukraine is doing evil conscription!’ all through tonight.

Yeah, war fucking sucks. So Russia should stop doing it upon Ukraine.

Well There’s Your Problem is basically two of each.

Proudly solving the wrong problem.

Many have tried. Same shit with preventing right-clicking to save images. It never fucking works, because you can’t give someone a scant quantity of data, and then also keep it from them.

Feels like linking to some article titled “And so it came to pass…”

Right - you can’t sell something to a million people and still own it completely.

Seeing cursors is instantly gross. Is mine transmitted by default? Is there an option to not do that? Is it distinct from seeing other people’s?

Mario game forcibly moved to cutting-edge software standards in open defiance of copyright law

Lemmy: “Oh, neat.”

using AI

Lemmy: “That’s theft!”

Cutting-edge JS is for boring stuff anyway. We’ve gone from formalizing the best bits of jQuery to ‘click thing to make box appear.’ So you’re only avoiding tutorial-ass boilerplate, and quite frankly, boo hoo.

Meanwhile CSS is still in the “Jesus Christ why wasn’t it like this to begin with” phase of feature adoption.