> Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
I remember when this article came out, my mom called me and said "you'll be okay, you're east of I-5, right?"
Ha… it’s not like the earthquake will stop at I-5 like it’s a magic shield. If the quake knocks out utilities and services everywhere west of the cascades, this I-5 ‘line’ is meaningless.
At least in Oregon, I-5 is 50 miles away from the coast and separated from it by a small mountain range. I don't think we're too worried about tsunamis getting all the way to I-5. Definitely will get to Highway 101 in some spots, however. But a lot of the coastline is tall enough that you can usually find a safe place nearby if a tsunami warning sounds.
Yep. I only recall seeing them in Oregon though - not California or Washington (Washington has warning signs for everything else though - including no warning signs - https://i.imgur.com/T868pkg.jpg )
Washington has them, it was one of the first things I noticed when I got the motorcycle out for a coastal ride when I first moved here 20-some years ago. Couldn't tell you exactly where, but they're there and within an easy Saturday ride from Redmond. (Westport or Grayland, maybe?)
It's been a few years, but I don't recall them in Kalaloch, La Push, or Ozette... but then that was '09. The picture of the no warning signs warning was on the road to Ozette. It does appear that they are there now, so it might have been me misremembering ( https://goo.gl/maps/ofY3GGHDnuG5GWaZ6 )
They've changed them, though. They used to have a person climbing a hill as the wave comes chasing after them. Can't find a good example on image search. I found the old signs to be morbidly amusing. Like my spindly little legs are going to save me.
> But a lot of the coastline is tall enough that you can usually find a safe place nearby if a tsunami warning sounds.
On the bright side, you won't need a siren, If the ground drops by 10 meters over the course of 5 minutes and you can't stand up because of the shaking, you can be sure a tsunamui up to 30 meters high will be there in an hour or two.
While some sections of I-5 are probably within the tsunami zone, I think much of it is beyond it. IIRC (I have not read the article since its original publication) this rule-of-thumb encompasses all the posited earthquake's structural and infrastructural damage at a level calling for FEMA-level assistance.
The remark is clearly only intended to give an impression of the magnitude of the worst-case scenario.
separately, there’s risk from lahars from mt. Baker and mt. Rainier. Catastrophic Baker lahars could potentially bury even Renton based on some estimates.
> The Sandy River was originally named the Quicksand River by Lewis and Clark in 1805 (Moulton and Dunlay, 1990). Expedition members noted that the river (a) was ~275 m wide at its mouth and for several kilometers upstream on the delta (30-150 m wide there today); (b) had a number of mid Channel Islands; and (c) had flow which was turbid and very shallow (resembling the Platte River in Nebraska, they noted). It was given its name because "the bed of this stream is formed entirely of quick sand."
> What happened? The answer lay 50 miles away at Mount Hood. An eruption in the 1790's caused a tremendous amount of volcanic rock and sand to enter the Sandy River drainage. That sediment was still being flushed downstream when Lewis and Clark saw and named the river. Since 1806, the river has removed the excess sediment from its channel.
True in some ways...but looking at a map of "% of population surviving the initial tsunami" would probably reveal a fuzzy north-south line. That'll be kinda important to FEMA.
(From the tone of "About 6 blocks east. Plenty of cushion.", I'll guess that actual topographic maps don't give adamhi much cause for optimism.)
I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not.
One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good".
There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks".
There's also this fundamental limitation that the model can give you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the relationships between elements in a composition, or why things are the way they are. It's never exactly right.
It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%.
But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don't get me wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me, will) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren't on it anymore.
If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.
> It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%.
Call me a doomer, but I think this makes the possible consequences even worse.
Remember the 80/20 rule.
A lot of modern product innovation is not really about improving quality - rather, its about introducing lower-quality versions of existing products which are significantly cheaper than the original but still "good enough".
Dalle2 and friends could fall into the same bucket. If they produce artwork that is objectively worse than a human-painted version would be, but still "good enough" for many mundane usecases - stock photos, concept art, etc - we might still see a wide adoption and displacement of human artists from those usecases - along with an overall drop in quality of artworks.
Ugh... I somehow hadn't yet even considered the part where we all have to tolerate almost every single image we see during the day being generated by some creepy AI model; but OF COURSE that's how this is going to play out :( :(. I mean, mant of the products I purchase on Amazon don't even spell check their product marketing images as it stands...
>but still "good enough" for many mundane usecases - stock photos, concept art, etc - we might still see a wide adoption and displacement of human artists
you're not afraid of DALL-E, you're afraid of an army of fiverr workers stealing your job. Stock photos and low quality art have already been commodified. Very few people go and commission bespoke stock art from the individual working artist, they get a subscription from one of the gazillion content stock photo factories for a few cents.
> If they produce artwork that is objectively worse than a human-painted version would be, but still "good enough" for many mundane usecases - stock photos, concept art, etc - we might still see a wide adoption and displacement of human artists from those usecases - along with an overall drop in quality of artworks.
If people are happy with "good enough" they generally don't hire a digital artist in the first place (the whole reason DALL-E can exist is because there's a lot of digital imagery on relevant subjects/objects available to it to train, and there's even more an internet search away) or if they do, they get one off Fiverr.
For mocking up quick concepts, that might be different, but that's a workflow improvement.
> If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.
That is absolutely not what the OP is complaining about. They're not saying that because AI is good, they won't find work. They are complaining that in training AI for art generation, builders took works from living artists, without consent from them, and that in so doing allowed generators to make new art in the style of said artists.
The example given is that Stable Diffusion even tries to reproduce logos/signatures of living artists.
If I produced a rubbish search engine that bore a malformed "gigggle" logo using Google colors, how long do you thing I would survive before being sued out of existence by an army of Google lawyers?
But that's exactly what many AI generators are doing here.
Edit: the first version of this comment confused Stable Diffusion with OpenAI, and stated that OpenAI was owned by Google. OpenAI has a strong partnership with Microsoft. Stable Diffusion is not OpenAI. Sorry for the errors.
This is frankly what humans have always done, learning and taking inspiration from other artists. Now we have made a machine that can do the same thing.
In the case of exact reproductions, we have copyright and IP laws.
You're right, AI generated pictures should not be copyrighted, as is the case today. People should be free to mix and remix pictures via AI as much as they desire.
This is where I imagine things are going to get into trouble because how are you going to determine what is AI and what isn't? Especially when Stable Diffusion is directly classifying artist and cloning their signatures and watermarks. What about things that are started with AI and refined by human?
Exactly. The relevant law is with regard to the use of artwork on the part of the people who feed the index. Artists should have a say on whether their work gets included in a training set, if their works are not public domain.
It feels like a big stretch to consider an algorithm to be 'inspired'.
Where are the bits that correspond to 'inspiration'? Seems like that would answer a lot of big questions in philosophy.
I claim that claiming computer algorithms are inspired is a big stretch.
I claim humans can be inspired.
I don't claim to know how human inspiration happens, or if neurons have anything to do with it. (They may, but I make no claim). Not being able to describe the process by which human inspiration happens doesn't invalidate either of my claims.
If there is a satisfactory non-bit based explanation to how computer algorithms achieve inspiration, I would accept that to. We have the advantage with computers, that their activity is conveniently summarized by their programs which are represented in bits, so expecting an explanation in that form I think is reasonable.
The defense if the claim of human inspiration is (1) we have that word for the concept (2) we have thousands of years of thought, philosophy and literature giving support and definition to the concept.
Not only is your rant about Google misplaced considering Dall-E is OpenAI, not Google, but the thread is also not complaining about Dall-E. It's about Stable Diffusion (https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement) which is explicitly trained on working artists. That's why it tries to reproduce the logo.
Oh, that just drives the point home. Any flaw you can find in these models to build your hope on will just get corrected in the next iteration, only a couple months down the line.
The shadow was wrong in the man-tree-beach-sea image. I guess it might be artistically wrong, but I'm sceptical of what that even means in this context.
Considering the staggering speed that image generation is improving, that 10% gap will only continue to close.
Starting e.g. an art education right now seems likely to be extremely nerve-wracking as your talents may very well be woefully obsolete by the time you graduate; the exception perhaps being those top-0.1% talents that will feed the models of the future with new material.
So an art training will become more like pro sports training where “success” means to be top 100 or so in the world. Note it does not prevent one to do arts (or sports) as a hobby. People didn’t stop playing chess after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.
Given how quickly AI image generation, and creativity generally, has progressed, I think it's perfectly plausible that within ten years we will be able to tell an AI "create a work of art that is unique, highly meaningful and that would be very difficult or impossible for most humans to create with their hands," and will get a work of art that is, in blinded assessments, competitive with the work of any master.
If that happens, I agree that the top 100 human artists in the world will likely have jobs, but they won't be successful in the sense that their work is uniquely valued by society. We pay to see the very most talented humans perform tasks that have been successfully automated, such as chess and lifting heavy objects, not because we need the service they provide but because we get an emotional kick out of seeing other humans perform way outside the normal range of human abilities.
I’m willing to bet money it will never happen. People said the same about self-driving cars, but the initial razzle-dazzle blinds people to the actual dullness of the algorithms, and obscures their limitations. AI can only recombine what has already been created. It has no ability to imbue art with meaning or to push the medium forward.
What you describe can only happen with general intelligence, not these fancy neural nets. If anything, they will become powerful tools to help artists augment their creativity.
Over COVID I wrote a novel-length... thing. I hesitate to call it a text adventure, or a game, even though that's what it looks like on the surface. I'm not sure what to call it.
The joke at the beginning was that it's a "travel simulator" for a period in time when you couldn't travel. I worked on it every day for about eight months, and I think I showed it to maybe six people. It was mostly a writing exercise, and an excuse to do research.
It's "abandoned" in the sense that I'm not driven to do more work on it, but it is "content complete" at about 300 pages, and it can be played.
The aspect of text adventures or MUDs [0] that attracts me the most is the fact that you can actually move through a "textual landscape". Sorry, I have no better words to express it. Ditch all the quests and puzzles and fighting. Just immerse myself in a landscape evoked by words, that maybe adds some surreal elements, or other stuff that you couldn't express in a graphical way.
Some of the very first scripting I did was for a MUD, back in the day! I really like that feeling of painting a very subjective map of a place in my head, just based on text.
Part of the joke of this project, for me, was treating an entire country like a room in a MUD (e.g. "You are in the United States. Exits are Canada, Mexico...")
Not Leetcode, but I did do Codewars for quite a while just for fun. This was after I'd switched tracks away from development to design, and, for the first time in about 12 years, was not burned out on programming, and wanted to just do more of it in my spare time. I didn't have a side project to work on at the time, just wanted to scratch an itch.
I learned a lot, and found it really enjoyable. Don't know why I eventually stopped; just kinda wandered away and did something else.
I'm not sure how much of Patreon is tied to Youtube. Anecdotally, of the ~15 creators I support on that platform, 3 of them are Youtube channels. The rest are podcasts, web comics, and blogs. Non-YT streamers and game developers are also a big segment, I believe.
Looking at the top 5 creators on Patreon[1], it seems like two of them are primarily Youtube channels. I could be wrong about that, but that's what a quick search implies to me.
In other words, it doesn't look like Patreon is exclusively or even mainly reliant on Youtube. On the other hand, if Youtube was only (let's say) 20% of their revenue, and Youtube went away, it could hurt or kill Patreon. So, maybe?
I know two different engineers who quit their engineering jobs to be professional woodworkers (or finish carpenters, is that close enough?). The first one started taking classes in traditional woodworking, then those classes turned into 2-week retreats, then finally he just quit and started making fine furniture and little pieces he sold online. He said he liked it for more or less the same reasons listed in this article: planning, execution, control, satisfaction.
I told the second engineer about the first one, after he told me he'd started getting into woodworking. I was laughing, like: "be careful, you're next!" and sure enough he was.
Keep in mind that they're really measuring pageviews to Stackoverflow, not actual data about movement. My intuition is that it's probably right, but this is suggestive at best.
Slightly maybe but split tunnel would avoid that. If it was full I'd expect to see an increase from popular cloud hosting regions (if it was a prod vpn) or if corporate VPN's their home offices (which would show as a net zero change)
This data could also signal that people in less traditional areas for software development now have access to remote jobs and are starting to learn more about programming (thus visiting Stackoverflow) to try to get those jobs. The fall in traffic in the traditional places is a signal about movement, but I wonder how much the upticks in other places are a combination of multiple things.
This is the correct (and massive) caveat for everything StackOverflow posts from their own data. It tells you a lot about some developers and absolutely nothing about others.
I use it a lot for my secondary languages, but when writing a well-documented language/framework like C# .NET, I never use it. The Microsoft docs cover everything.
Also, a decent amount of SO traffic is stolen by SO-copy SEO spam sites, too. I used to frequent it, but haven't needed to in years (it seems to more rarely show up in searches for the problems I have, even though I avoid the spam sites, too).
As far as I understand, there is no criminal penalty associated with patent infringement.
With copyright violations you can in theory get prison time (as the warning on a DVD informs us), but it's very rare — on the order of a couple hundred people a year, and mostly for selling bootlegs, not for downloading movies off The Pirate Bay. I don't believe that the extra prison capacity required to house that many people is really much of an argument (even in small part) for removing all copyright and patent protections for everyone.
Keep in mind that the work of every independent artist — writer, musician, game developer, whatever — is enabled by being able to sell their work, rather than have a perfect knockoff sold on Amazon for $.99 the day after it's released.
This is good advice. You should almost always be talking more slowly and taking more breaks than you want to, if you're nervous. Pause between sentences, and even just try to pronounce words more slowly. You'll seem less nervous, and you'll be less nervous, and as a result of this you will think more clearly as well as have more time to consider what you're saying.
I bought a smartphone pretty late, only 5-6 years ago. Mainly I wanted an easier way to subscribe to podcasts (I'd been using an MP3 player for this for 10 years, and just using a feature phone for calls). I never actually got hooked on social media stuff or phone games. I'm not on any social media except Letterboxd, and that app is easy not to use because it's pretty terrible. The only game I've ever played on my phone is 80 Days. I mention this so that you can decide whether I am the exact wrong person to give you advice or not.
* Redfin at the moment, because I'm buying a house.
That's all the non 1st-party apps I have. I just don't download anything else.
I think that instead of browsing social media, my equivalent focus-drain is probably listening to podcasts and audiobooks. If you think that's healthier, switch to that. It may be, or I may be fooling myself.
If you have time to kill and want to use an app, how about Duolingo?
I remember when this article came out, my mom called me and said "you'll be okay, you're east of I-5, right?"
"Yeah mom."
About 6 blocks east. Plenty of cushion.