I find it odd that the negative posts the author deputizes are pretty downvoted. The Reddit thread in particular has the reply calling the commenter out having significantly more upvotes. The twitter post in the screenshot has no engagement. I doubt these got surfaced in any meaningful way to other users.
That isn’t to say the author is wrong, exactly, but you can Chinese Robber Fallacy any kind of toxicity on social media these days. What I’ve found matters a lot more in communities is active moderation against bad behavior. Even the author acknowledges these posts got removed, but treats it like a bookend as though it’s an admission of failure.
However, talking about the importance of actively curating community isn’t as interesting, I guess. Mods continue to be the least appreciated job on the internet.
I supervised a Sierra rollout a while back. Their performance was impressive and the price was great. I suspect both will not be true in time.
Their implementation is rather cumbersome, requiring implementation fees and AI configuration that is rather bespoke to Sierra. Anyone rolling off of Sierra will find there is nothing they can take with them.
In general, I think CX ought to disappear as a vertical in an AI world. If I'm talking to a product AI and need support, why should I switch to another AI to do that? Even if that second AI is invoked by the first as a tool, how much am I gaining?
Interestingly, the first and best implementers of AI support so far have been at companies that roll their own.
There is nothing unique to CX about AI, as far as I can tell. Sierra is still just the same AI infra people are putting in products. Granted, you can make good money positioning yourself this way, but I expect on some time horizon they will need to reposition.
This is difficult to determine given how they implement. I would liken them to a professional services organization, where most of the magic is in their implementation for you, and you have to presume their implementation includes a lot of intenral building blocks. It isn't turnkey.
My roots are in Louisiana, and this makes me incredibly sad. It is such a unique place that has no like, and drives all tourism in the state. Where will tourists celebrate Mardi Gras after it's gone? Baton Rouge?
Sadder, still, to know that nothing will be done. No one will be relocated. Just one day a weather event like a hurricane will happen to destroy the area and it will be labeled derelict with no funds to rebuild. People will be left to fend for themselves.
actually, i think you have it exactly backward. anybody who lives in the areas expected to be affected can move now, starting tomorrow. make a 6 month plan to move. a year. make a three year plan to move. but they won't. then when a disaster does strike, there will be funds made available to help them, but they will complain that it's not enough, that they deserve more, why, look at all the hopes and dreams they poured into the neighborhood as evidenced by the savings, investments, and preparations they have made...
you are preaching helplessness and they're eager to learn it.
Generally I agree, and we’ve known this for a long time but people stay in denial. It’s the same thing in Miami.
Unfortunately though, the solution isn’t that easy.
For one, if you own property there, you’re basically either caught holding a bag with life changing amounts of money lost, or trying to pass it off to another sucker which just feels unethical.
For two, families and communities make it hard for people. Many rely on their friends and family as support systems. Elderly for example, may only have their family taking care of them and their poker night friends are the only ones they have left - if they go somewhere, that system becomes fragmented and people get left behind. Maybe you are the main caretaker of an elderly relative, so you can’t leave them behind, but if they follow you then they lose the rest of their network.
I’m sure there are tons of other reasons but just knowing there’s an imminent threat at some vague point in the future is sometimes not enough for people to willingly go through all of the suffering that I mentioned above, and more that I’m not metioning
Systemically, the problem is that there needs to be a last person, and yet people leaving expect market value for their homes which normally happens by selling to the next person. The last person can currently only get the money if a disaster strikes and insurance pays out. To do it ahead of schedule, insurance would have to pay out sooner, which means there would have to be some kind of government intervention to make it happen.
Maybe the state could make it so the last person is someone who has no plans to ever leave, such as an elderly retiree. It could work like this.
• The state identifies neighborhoods that will need to be abandoned in a few decades and puts them in a program to turn them into retirement communities. A person who owns a home in such an area can sell it normally if they want to anyone who will buy.
• If an elderly retired person is interested in a property in that area they have the option of instead of buying it themselves from the seller having the state buy the property, and they then pay the state. The state gets title to the property and the retiree gets the right to live in it until they die.
• If the retired person wants to leave before they die (or has to leave because they can no longer live on their own or the time has finally come that the property must be abandoned), they are offered free room and board for life at a state managed assisted living community.
• If they left for a reason other than that the property has to be abandoned the state opens it up to another retired elderly person on the same terms. The new person pays what a similar property in a place not under threat would sell for, and they are now set for housing for the rest of their life as long as they stay there or transfer to state managed assistant living.
• To further make these properties attractive to elderly retirees the residents should not have to pay property taxes and utility rates should be capped. Maybe also toss in a free shuttle service to minimize the need for cars so people don't have to leave just because they are no longer able to drive safely.
I think GP might be using "state" in the common international English definition, e.g. state in the sense of "sovereign state" or "city-state", not "US state". I would agree with you though that any US government actually implementing the idea today is hard to imagine, but I can easily imagine that after 2 other cities suffer a climate-related disaster first, then there will be the political will to bring a program like this to life. It's a creative policy idea, I love the thought that was put into this.
Louisiana is just the state with a major city closest to the point of it having to be abandoned. There will be more that follow in other states, such as Florida.
> The last person can currently only get the money if a disaster strikes and insurance pays out.
Usually there is no insurance.
The insurance industry, for all of its other faults, is one of the few left that still deals in reality instead of vibes so they aren't going to give you affordable insurance against floods/hurricanes/etc in these areas with any real coverage.
They aren't going to give you affordable insurance even in places that don't generally get hit by floods/hurricanes/etc.
I have a house in Louisiana (up "north") - outside of a couple tornados every few years, and the heavy rains of a hurricane every few years, it is a fairly "safe" place. Never been a claim against the property, or any immediate neighbors. We aren't in a floodplain of any sort, and are on top of a hill that is around 120 feet above the closest creek.
My premium has gone up 250% over the last 3 years (after being steady for a decade). Shopping around, they are even higher. I think they are finally starting to catch up with where they needed to be for years, but I can't help but feel I'm offsetting the people "down south" with their more expensive property that is literally underwater.
> I can't help but feel I'm offsetting the people "down south" with their more expensive property that is literally underwater.
I am not sure about Louisiana, but you very well may be.
State insurance commissions sometimes promulgate onerous regulations that effectively require cost shifting. For example, if it's profitable to keep operating in a state overall, but you can't raise premiums or drop policies for the riskiest properties, then you just raise premiums across the board and let the less-risky subsidize the unprofitable policies.
And rising reinsurance premiums mean that everybody pays more to account for increasing risks and costs in the insurers' portfolios, which may be concentrated in riskier areas far from your own property.
> For one, if you own property there, you’re basically either caught holding a bag with life changing amounts of money lost, or trying to pass it off to another sucker which just feels unethical.
every day you wait this gets worse and I am not sure what is unethical about selling a home. many people have to move (e.g. for work) but if it would put you mind at ease (ethically speaking) you can put a disclaimer on the listing. of course you also have an entire political party followers who believe all this is a hoax so you can put that on the listing too /s (last sentence)
>if you own property there, you’re basically either caught holding a bag with life changing amounts of money lost
but notice people can gain life changing amounts of money by lucking into real estate that soars, but there's no sense of injustice.
if you allow people to take risks and reap the benefits, but shield them from loss, you end up with a subprime mortgage crisis all over again.
if people wanted to be protected from loss they should have to sign up on the front end to risk pool with other people who want to be protected from loss, and together they can protect each other by limiting gains jointly
The people who gain money are mostly gamblers but the people who lose money are mostly people who just wanted a place to live without going bankrupt over it.
Yeah. There's a market. If there are enough buyers for the market to function normally, then there are enough people trying to get in that one more house won't make much difference.
I mean, yes, in your seller's disclosures you should tell the truth, including about the flood risk. If people want to take that, eyes wide open, I'm not sure what's unethical about selling to them.
Also why just flood risk? Is it unethical for me to sell my Condo which is in “up and coming area” which never upped and never came and has a very high crime rate (with/without disclaimer)? My friend lives in another area where schools are as bad as it gets, she is looking to move now, unethical to sell that too (with/without disclaimer)?
The difference is that schools, crime, etc., are all what they are right now. It's there, it's verifiable. Anybody buying in has access to the full information. They can walk around the neighborhood and see for themselves.
The flooding and inevitable destruction of the city is decades away. It's still abstract. Some people might even think it is preventable.
I don't think it's unethical to sell. People have their own motivations. Maybe a buyer just wants it for 5 years, who knows. Probably the risk will get baked into market price. What does need to happen though is the federal government needs to step up, because they're the only ones who can, and guarantee they will buy it for a certain percentage of appraised market value. I would imagine that percentage will decline over time until they declare the city a total loss, after which your property is declared worthless. If they do this now, they can make it possible for people to leave with some semblance of dignity and mitigate hardships.
I would not put this on my listing, what are you smoking mate?! (I own a condo in brightwood park in northwest dc, been sketchy since 2008 when I bought it, you need an address? lol)
> Is it unethical for me to sell my Condo which is in “up and coming area” which never upped and never came and has a very high crime rate (with/without disclaimer)?
That would be lying in order to sell something, and thus unethical.
You then expressed confusion over what exactly would be a lie here, despite you very clearly stating what the lie is in the above quote.
This is decent advice on an individual level. Despite the fact that you probably can't sell your doomed house for a lot due to the current situation, planning a move is probably a good idea for those who can afford it.
But it's not really a solution on a population level. For one, if everyone sold their house because it'll soon be underwater, who'd they sell their house to? Aquaman? For two, a lot of people just won't be able to afford an expense like that. A large portion of the US lives paycheck to paycheck, and it's not easy to "just save up" a few hundred thousand when that means giving up on basic necessities.
And how exactly will someone do that. Many of the people living in the impacted area are below the poverty line and living paycheck to paycheck at best. How are they supposed to put together funds to relocate. Especially if their property is worth nothing. The minority of people privileged enough to be able to relocate will do that. The majority are stuck.
> If you’re genuinely that poor, moving is cheap. Abandon the implied worthless property, catch a greyhound out of town.
When you're genuinely poor, your local community is a critical survival tool that can't be discarded. You've spent your whole life building a set of relationships through mutual help. When your car dies and you can't afford to go to a mechanic, you have a friend of a friend who can fix cars who owes you one since you helped replace his fence a few years back. That kind of thing, but every day, in a hundred ways.
Throwing that out to move to a city where you have nothing is a great way to end up homeless.
If you’re genuinely poor then moving is cheap when viewed by someone who isn’t poor.
Moving as a renter isn’t free. You’ll need to come up with a security deposit and coming up with two months of rent at once is not easy. Your slumlord landlord is going to keep your old one regardless of merit or law, so don’t think you can use that money. Convincing a new landlord that you’re a good risk is also not going to be easy when you’ve just moved and don’t have a job, so you’re looking at spending on a hotel for a while unless you’re lucky enough to know someone well enough to couch surf.
If the article is to be believed, nobody is getting their deposits back in the coming decades when everything is under water. But again, if you genuinely can't move with a decade or more of notice because of a security deposit, there's something deeply wrong with how you are managing money and making decisions.
If, with 10 years notice, you can’t pull together a deposit, first/last month’s rent, and the $50 for a U-haul to move out of a city that will literally end up underwater, yes - it is your fault.
"Catch a greyhound out of town" is the "Let them eat cake" for the poor and homeless (sorry "unhoused") of New Orleans. Empathy is for the weak, said the oppressor.
Billions have been spent rebuilding New Orleans once. Per the article, there's no realistic way to save New Orleans going forward. It's sad, it's unfortunate, it's reality.
The poor and homeless of Louisiana are already receiving massive benefits: 4th in the country for the share of households on welfare, 18% of the population on food stamps, $14B+ in FY23 of federal dollars went to welfare/TANF/Medicaid/etc.
Is the solution to further mortgage working and contributing citizens' futures via our exploding national debt, just to throw more cash at them? California spends $40K+ a year, per homeless person, but saw the homeless population grow and the problem get worse.
For welfare, consider that a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work ends up qualifying for $64,128 in cash, aid, and benefits.
The same family earning $64,128 by actually working wouldn’t be eligible for any of these welfare benefits in four-fifths of the states.
For $14B+ we could have solved poverty and homelessness for all of New Orleans. Where did the money go? Not to the poor, obviously. The system is broken by design.
A greyhound to Atlanta is $75. It’s not nothing to someone on a minimum wage/fixed income, but would be attainable within two months by saving about a dollar a day. Keep in mind, that’s the “extreme global poverty” standard for countries like South Sudan.
Sell to whomever - but again, what property do they have if they are so poor they can’t afford a $75 bus ticket with notice?
It’s always a Schrödinger’s poor person who simultaneously has a valuable property that’s also worthless, tied to a job but has 0 income, has a car but can’t travel, and is broke but can’t qualify for the plethora of government benefits they can receive anywhere.
He’s not inspiring me, and he won’t inspire their pitbulls. And by the way, I fulfill all of his Schrödinger’s poor person criteria, except for the first one about property. And I’m far from the only one here.
The “majority” of people aren’t so poor they can’t move over the multi-decade timescale this article is talking about. This country has a huge level of internal migration. 17 million Americans move every year.
Why do people have these blinders where they can’t view any issue except from the perspective of the minority of people who don’t have any resources? Why are so many people moving to places like Florida that are threatened by climate change?
>Why do people have these blinders where they can’t view any issue except from the perspective of the minority of people who don’t have any resources
I believe its because these people are young and repeating what they hear or they are old but have lived an insulated life and assume that people really cannot handle any upset in their life.
It’s not about being unable to view the issue except from that one perspective. It’s about having an aversion to mass suffering, and recognizing that this group will be subject to it.
You’re basically saying, why are you so worried about all of these people who will have their lives destroyed when there are a bunch of other people who will be totally fine? I hope that when it’s put that way, you can see how ridiculous it is.
No, it's an emotional obsession with small percentages of the population that makes it impossible to discuss realistic solutions to problems that affect everyone.
New Orleans is going to be underwater. That problem won't just affect poor people, it will affect everyone. So the first order of business is to encourage anyone who can do so to leave New Orleans to go somewhere that isn't underwater. That's the policy that's going to avoid the greatest amount of harm to the greatest number of people at the lowest cost.
What is there to discuss? If you have the ability to move away, then you move away, done.
We aren't discussing this particular group because we're a too emotional to think straight. We're discussing this group because it's the one that will bear the brunt of the suffering and it's the one where there isn't an obvious "just let them figure it out and it'll be fine" solution.
You’re both undervaluing and overvaluing collective action at the same time. We know from experience with people in disaster-prone areas that the majority aren’t going to do that. They’re going to stay, and when the disaster comes, it will be a huge problem and they’ll demand the Army Corps of Engineers performs some miracle to help them.
> it's an emotional obsession with small percentages of the population
Ah, right: it's a small percentage of the population, so we should just let them die, "and decrease the surplus population", right?
This kind of callousness is one of the biggest problem with the tech industry today. We learned to think in numbers, and some of us never learned to think about the people behind those numbers.
Yes, there are some kinds of problem where you really have to think about the numbers, and not the people, because if you try to save everyone you will end up saving no one.
This is not one of those.
The people who can move now, without financial hardship, get to make their own choices about when and whether to get out. The people we, as a society, should be thinking about are the people who cannot get out—either without financial ruination, or at all—because they are the ones we as a society must help.
Tragically, given the state of America today, we aren't likely to help them. And many of them are likely to die, whether by drowning when the next Hurricane Katrina inundates New Orleans, or by slow starvation and disease when they and everyone else in their community and support network are left homeless.
> The people who can move now, without financial hardship, get to make their own choices about when and whether to get out. The people we, as a society, should be thinking about are the people who cannot get out—either without financial ruination, or at all—because they are the ones we as a society must help.
This is exactly the problematic thinking I’m talking about. Your obsession with using society to help those whose problems are the most intractable leads you to conclude to majority should be left “to make their own choices.”
But the most effective use of social action is helping the majority. They can benefit from social organization and their problems are tractable. Here, leaving the majority to its own devices is going to cause the most damage in the long run. Society should push them to make good choices and relocate in an orderly manner while there’s time.
We don't need them to "leave now." We don't need them to move to California. We need them to move to Baton Rogue over a period of decades. Under a high emissions scenario, sea level is projected to rise 6 feet by 2100. New Orleans is on average 1-2 feet below sea level (up to 10 feet). Baton Rouge is 60 feet above sea level. The average elevation of the state is 100 feet.
In any given year, 15% of the population moves, and 40% of them move to a different county. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/why-people-mo.... It's insane to say that most people wouldn't be able to make a once-in-a-lifetime move just a couple of towns over sometime over the next few decades.
Baton Rouge is partially on a bluff. But didn't you see the 7m map? The coastline will be lapping at St. George, southern EBR Parish along Burbank Road and the south part of LSU campus at that point.
This is true. It is also true that waiting until things bottom out will make things even worse. It will be more expensive and options will be more limited.
There will need to be a federal bailout to relocate everyone who needs help. The government should also probably announce a policy that there will be no future disaster relief that involves rebuilding, only relocating.
New Orleans will be the first, but not the last American city to collapse. Miami is probably next. Salt Lake City could very well run out of water, nevermind the increasingly toxic lakebed. Phoenix too. In the next hundred years people are going to learn why environmentalists use the word "sustainability" so much.
Global warming increases evaporation and consequently increase global rainfall. Although it is true that it can shift the location of rainy spots and dry spots, unless you have some magic way to predict the locations they will shift to, I'm going to assume Phoenix's access to water is going to increase because it seems extremely unlikely to me that the entire watershed of the Colorado River (encompassing most of the American part of the Rockies probably) will become dryer on average.
You're demonstrating the point I'm afraid. Rather than think of anything which can help 90%, you obsess on calling the people who want to save 90% of the people evil instead of thinking of anything to reduce the 10% further.
But that ignores the mass suffering that pushing people to move will prevent?
It’s not
why are you so worried about all of these people who will have their lives destroyed when there are a bunch of other people who will be totally fine
It’s
Why aren’t you worried about everyone having their life destroyed, if we can encourage people to move it may be challenging for them but it will save their lives.
Because, friend, a lot of people believe climate change is a lib conspiracy theory.
And people bring it up because a lot of folks in New Orleans couldn't afford to flee Katrina and 700 people died. It was kind of an enormous humanitarian disaster. If we don't talk about it, nothing will happen to stop it.
We should have a one-time buyout for flood zones: pay someone enough to buy a median home somewhere similar and turn the land into a nature preserve (let mangroves return to protect Florida coast, etc.). Put a cap on it so we’re not buying new mansions for a few rich people with beach houses but otherwise keep it simple so people aren’t impoverished into becoming a drain on society.
I have no expectation that we’ll be willing to invest in our neighbors, though.
I thought the government should have done this for all the beach houses that were destroyed by hurricane Sandy. Buy people out and prevent a house from being built there ever again.
Agreed, building on a flood plain is incredibly stupid. The city of East Grand Forks demolished all of the buildings in the flood plain portion of town after the 1997 Red River floods and turned it into a park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Grand_Forks_Greenway
so, you're talking not about renters but about homeowners, and you're saying housing prices are up everywhere else except they are down in New Orleans? I'm not from NOLA so I'm not going to bone up on prices, but I do doubt what you are saying holds water.
For less and less, presumably? Or is the housing situation so bad that prices rise even when the area will soon be underwater?
It doesn't even matter, really.
Suppose one person follows the sage advice of the HN glibertarians, sells his house and moves out. Good for him. But does this solve the problem? No, because now there's someone else there. Possibly a more desperate, poorer person. They can't all follow your advice, no more than they can all be best in their high school class, run the fastest in the marathon, or being on the winning side of a prediction market bet.
Yes but I feel a lot less bad for the person who sells there house and moves now than the person moving in. Basically what I was trying to show is that the option is still available and people are choosing not to take it so can we really act like they're all trapped in this situation.
Either this is ragebait or you're arrogant. Congrats on being a super smart hard worker or whatever you're so proud of. More interested in shitting on people to feel superior than understanding where they're at.
What an incredibly out of touch post. This gives off "let them eat cakes" classic. Do you realize how expensive is it to move out of your home? I won't write a laundry list of items here, since you either know all of them already or will dismiss outright with the same attitude. I do want to say is that social darwinism is not something to be proud about.
If someone sells their house in an area soon to be underwater, will you buy it? If not you, who? Aquaman? (Apologies to HBomberMan).
The reason people don't move is that for the time being, they're much, much better off than if they move. Especially if they start moving in large numbers.
I don’t understand this formulation of “no one will be relocated.” People have agency to move themselves. Maybe not everyone, but if the majority of folks started moving out due to the risk of flooding then that would create a strong impetus for the government to assist poor people in relocating.
I would argue lost cities are a story in the margins of the story of the Netherlands. The main story would be a move from building towns on little hills that don't get flooded most of the times to building systems to actively manage water (wind- and steam-powered pumps) and flood defenses (Afsluitdijk, Deltaworks). Netherlands never had as much land as it has now so the balance is definitely on reclaiming rather than losing.
> Where will tourists celebrate Mardi Gras after it's gone?
Somewhere above sea level?
People should live wherever they want but is rude to expect others to be responsible for thei expectedly risky flooding, fires, earthquake, hurricane lifestyle.
Mardi Gras actually originated in Mobile, Alabama; and it is celebrated with big parades and "krewes" all along the Gulf Coast, at least as far as Pensacola, Florida.
If New Orleans is extremely blue, but can contribute nothing but political power to authoritarian assholes, then they need to leave or figure out someway to fight.
Sucks to suck, but the liberal Louisianians arent helping atm.
How can you fight when your power has been taken away from you? The reason I'm saying you're part of the problem is because you're blaming victims for the situation they're in without realizing that you're up next, and others like you are going to scream "why aren't you doing MORE TO HELP?" while you're screaming "Why isn't anyone helping ME?".
Southern states have been stripping people's rights away for decades.
> How can you fight when your power has been taken away from you?
In ways I can not articulate on US social media sites without being permabanned.
If you are giving power to the authoritarians and doing nothing to stop it, then you are effectively the gasoline in my enemies tanks. I wish it wasn't so, but that is how reality is.
Without going into too many details, I can tell you that the state laws of Louisiana have gotten a lot more preemptively fascist with regard to any sort of organization which you would describe
> Where will tourists celebrate Mardi Gras after it's gone?
Mardi Gras is celebrated all along the Gulf Coast, from New Orleans to Pensacola. Go to a parade in Alabama, for example, and every third or fourth person will be from New Orleans - looking to escape the tourist nightmare their city becomes.
This seems like a great time to mention C2PA, a specification for positively affirming image sources. OpenAI participates in this, and if I load an image I had AI generate in a C2PA Viewer it shows ChatGPT as the source.
Bad actors can strip sources out so it's a normal image (that's why it's positive affirmation), but eventually we should start flagging images with no source attribution as dangerous the way we flag non-https.
The standard itself being open is irrelevant. I'm not sure why this is always brought up for attestation standards. It is fundamentally impossible to trust the signature from open-source software or hardware, so a signature from open-source software is essentially the same as no signature.
So now, if we were to start marking all images that do not have a signature as "dangerous", you would have effectively created an enforcement mechanism in which the whole pipeline, from taking a photo to editing to publishing, can only be done with proprietary software and hardware.
We already have a centrally curated trust model in https. Browsers only treat connections as "secure" if they chain up to a root CA in their trust store. You can operate outside that system, but users will see warnings and friction. Some level of trust concentration isn’t new.
I'm curious if you think this is worse or not as bad as a best-case broad implementation c2pa...especially if there is a similar Let's Encrypt entity assisting with signatures.
I think the issue is that it's not just bad actors. It's every social platform that strips out metadata. If I post an image on Instagram, Facebook, or anywhere else, they're going to strip the metadata for my privacy. Sometimes the exif data has geo coordinates. Other times it's less private data like the file name, file create/access/modification times, and the kind of device it was taken on (like iPhone 16 Pro Max).
Usually, they strip out everything and that's likely to include C2PA unless they start whitelisting that to be kept or even using it to flag images on their site as AI.
But for now, it's not just bad actors stripping out metadata. It's most sites that images are posted on.
There’s actually a part of the NY state budget right now (TEDE part X, for my law nerds) that’d require social media companies to preserve non-PII provenance metadata and surface it to the user, if the uploaded image has it.
Yeah, OpenAI has been attaching C2PA manifests to all their generated images from the very beginning. Also, based on a small evaluation that I ran, modern ML based AI generated image detectors like OmniAID[1] seem to do quite well at detecting GPT-Image-2 generated images. I use both in an on-device AI generated image detector that I built.
The comments that aren't directly discussing the technical achievement here are bemoaning the destruction to society that AI generated images can cause, which is a fair criticism. I'm genuinely curious what you think the greater horror is. Or what a better solution might be.
Reddit blurs nsfw images by default. You can change that in settings. I don't see what it so terrible about the idea of doing this with untrusted image sources.
I hope so too, however cheap is relative. One's ordinary morning coffee is a full day wage for someone else. If we could have decent models fitting laptops of most students, that would be point where we could possibly treat AI as we treat calculator or computer today.
Just to put things in context, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8444gex65o shares income for a good number of people now a days. (note that many of those workers are taking care of a family of 2+ members, most of the time)
I remember a TI-89 being mandatory for my AP math classes (calculus and statistics). It was utterly essential for solving problems in a reasonable amount of time. There were programs available to assist families who couldn't afford one so their children wouldn't be left behind.
AI in it‘s current phase, definitely. However, we‘ve been seeing the transformer architecture plateauing in the last couple of years. There are still improvements, but open source models are catching up.
I feel like at this point it’s an inevitability that given enough time, capable models will be cheap enough for everyone.
If poor students have capable models but rich students have much better models that go the extra mile for a great mark and do everything in a single prompt, it would still be unfair.
For it to be fair, you would not only need good free models, but actual parity between free models and the highest subscription tier the big AI companies can offer. And I don't think that will happen in the short or mid term future.
When I was in AP classes in high school, you were required to have a TI-89 calculator. If you couldn't afford one, there were assistance programs.
You were not allowed to use a TI-92, which was the next step up. It had built-in solvers for many kinds of problems.
I'm not saying this isn't a concern, but addressing financially-based inequities in learning is not a new problem within certain bounds. There's established ways to deal with it. If we can get AI cheap enough that you can cover a year of education with $100 then we're in a good range.
The problem is that social platforms benefit from this behavior as long as it doesn't get too egregious. Bots contribute to metrics just as easily as real humans as long as investors and ad purchasers feel like it's kept to managable levels.
Nothing on social is organic anymore, and hasn't been long before AI came around, which is why I welcome the AI slop era. It will accelerate us to the endgame, which is acknowledging how bad the problem really is and to start cleaning it up.
I have thought exactly as you do for a long time. Recently a side project of my blew up and it was completely organic. I'm just a solo dev. No marketing budget at all. No PR team.
Made me realize that it's still possible for things to organically get big.
Ambient variety, you know, almost static drone, very niche style per se. Never did anything to promote it in any way. Just released it via my friend's digital label on a handful of platforms.
Never had more than ~100 listens a month, and never expected that to change and earn any substantial royalties.
One day, the friend calls and tells he's willing to pay me some pretty penny, and replies to my bewilderment that just a single track from the whole album blew up, glitched the Matrix and obtained some 10'000s of listens.
I investigated a little bit and found out that the track's title coincided with that of some other, much more popular and promoted band.
So I just happened to ride on those coattails.
Edit: removed extra zero in the number of listens :)
wait till you hear about how we standardized RF bands. We have gems such as "High frequency", "Very High Frequency", "Ultra High Frequency", "Super High Frequency", and the cherry on top, "Extremely High Frequency". Then they went with the boring" Teraherz Frequency", truly a disappointment.
These are all mirrored on the low side btw, so we also have "Extremely Low Frequency", and all the others.
There is something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission.
I've subsisted on photos from the Apollo missions and artistic renditions for so long that seeing the modern, high resolution real thing to be quite stirring in a way I didn't expect. It actually does make me believe that the future could be quite cool.
We haven't even seen the full quality images yet. They've commented that the live feed from the GoPro is a limited bandwidth because they have to share the bandwidth with running the capsule. The images from the Nikons onboard are just scaled down. My initial guess was from an export specifically to get an early dump to get everyone on the ground chomping at the bit something to see. They'll get the full images when the SD cards splash down. When those are released, I'm expecting quite a few OMG images
I wouldn't mind some raw files but I honestly don't think they'll be too strikingly different than these (make sure you're looking at the full 20 MP images which should be several MB, not the 2 MP previews at ~200 KB).
I don't know what the Lightroom* skillz of the astronauts are, but I would not be surprised if they were shooting RAW+JPEG and only processed the JPGs in Lightroom. They probably had presets to export to smaller images that was created months ago and loaded onto their PCDs. I'd imagine 4 humans in a tincan have more things to do than to be developing RAW images by digging out the details in the shadows, push the exposure and pull back the highlights, and then apply all of those settings to each sequence of images. They'll let the folks on the ground do that.
* The exif data has Adobe Lightroom Classic (Windows) metadata in it.
In that case with the metadata I wonder if the astronauts already sent the raw files over the laser link and the images were just processed by the ground staff for posting on the site.
> something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission
Back in 2019, Robert Zubrin suggested using rovers "to do detailed photography of the [Moon] base area and its surroundings" to "ultimately form the basis of a virtual reality experience that will allow millions of members of the public to participate vicariously in the missions" [1].
On the other hand, maybe don't get your hopes up--I've only tried a few, but even the large MPG files don't seem to be "super high quality," but maybe they will meet your expectations.
I think perhaps you mean the far side of the moon. The "backside" of the moon implies a large graben stretching almost from pole to pole, and I have seen no evidence of such a geological formation in any photos.
It really is surprising being able to see the Moon isn't spherical. (Are those abberations?) It makes sene, given the moon isn't in hydrostatic equilibrium.
I'm getting so exhausted of the "slop" accusation on new project launches. There are legit criticisms of EmDash in the parent comment that are overshadowed by the implication it was AI coded and, thus, unusable quality.
The problem is there's no beating the slop allegation. There's no "proof of work" that can be demonstrated in this comment section that satisfies, which you can see if you just keep following the entire chain. I'd rather read slop comments than this.
The main engineer of this project is in the comments and all he's being engaged with on is the definition of vibes.
They called the project EmDash and launched it on April 1st with a blog which brags about how little effort it took to write because of agents before even saying what it is.
If the product launch involves dressing the engineering team up in duck suits and releasing to a soundtrack of quacking, it's really not surprising people are asking the guy they hid behind the Daffy mask on why he's dressed as a duck rather than what he learned about headless CMS architecture from being on the Astro core team...
I know that it's discourteous to write-off a potentially valuable project because the release post showed a lack of self-awareness, but I think it's indicative of the larger struggle taking place: that trust is decaying.
It's decaying for a lot of the reasons displayed in the post, like you described, but the post also:
- is overlong (probably LLM assisted)
- is self-congratulatory
- boosts AI
- rewrites an existing project (vs contributing to the original)
- conjures long-term maintenance doubt/suspicions
- is functionally an advertisement (for CloudFlare)
So yeah, maybe EmDash is revolutionary with respect to Wordpress, but it hasn't signaled trust, and that's a difficult hurdle to get past.
There's plenty of other comments saying this. It isn't that I don't understand, and need a clever metaphor.
But to run with your metaphor, can we, maybe, just ignore the quacking since we all know that's just how you get attention these days and instead focus on that other stuff? Because it seems like asking about the duck mask will never produce a satisfactory answer and instead turn into a debate on the merits of ducks.
Dare I suggest that this debate has become boring and beside the point. Unless someone on HN has been living under a rock they've already made up their mind about ducks.
Obtuse and repetitive debates is what HN comments are for. :)
But in this case it feels less like somebody has launched a revolutionary new product and HN is debating the MIT licence and landing page weight, and more like somebody has announced they've a plug-in replacement for a popular repository with a troll post and HN chooses not to spend enough time on Github to discover the all-star team and excellent architectural decisions the blog didn't bother mentioning.
Plus Cloudflare deliberately signalling that at best they're not very invested in its success and it might well just be low-effort slop probably is more pertinent to whether a purported WordPress replacement actually gains any traction than its technical merit, and headless CMS with vendor lockin vs managing WordPress security isn't likely to be a more productive debate than one on "slop". The target audience for this product is much more 'HN crowd' than 'read about agentic solutions to workforce automation on Gartner crowd' too, so the quacking alienating HN is actually relevant.
I am not implying unusuablilty due to AI involvement.
I am implying that Cloudflare is publishing unusable one-off software without care because they have done it before and the blog post indicates that they are doing it again („look how CHEAP it is to pump out code now“).
I don’t need a proof of work, I need a proof of quality, and the blog post is the opposite of that.
That isn’t to say the author is wrong, exactly, but you can Chinese Robber Fallacy any kind of toxicity on social media these days. What I’ve found matters a lot more in communities is active moderation against bad behavior. Even the author acknowledges these posts got removed, but treats it like a bookend as though it’s an admission of failure.
However, talking about the importance of actively curating community isn’t as interesting, I guess. Mods continue to be the least appreciated job on the internet.
PS love you dang.
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