How does GIMP compare to Photopea. On occasion I open a file in GIMP by accident and end up waiting 20m for it to load and am almost always disappointed. Meanwhile Photopea always just works super fast and supports a lot more. What the hell is it doing?
The load time of GIMP is one of my biggest complaints. It's fine once it finally opens, but that start up time is punishing. The last version of photoshop I used wasn't all that much better though. photopea is a browser app so it's not really a valid comparison. I much prefer open source local applications that leave my web browser out of it.
Prob burning through 200% of revenue which I've seen elsewhere. But they also probably spend a fair amount training their own model. I don't think it's foundation model. But it's pretty fair to assume that $1bn revenue is about $2bn to Anthropic/GPT/Grok
This article claimed they had single-digit monthly cash burn in August, when they had over $500M ARR (so let's say $41M monthly) and 150 employees. If that is true, they are spending way less than 200% of revenue.
"Anysphere runs pretty lean with around 150 employees and has a single digit monthly cash burn, a source tells me."
Doubt it. Especially when you realize the cost to the company for an employee is much more than just take-home salary. Healthcare, employer payroll taxes & such all add up. You could also argue wether deferred comp like stock options & RSUs are calculated as the cost. The employee's "comp package" often comes in at 2x or more of their base salary.
> Think of being a billionaire as a rare disease, though far less rare than it was a few decades ago—except that it’s a disease that’s self-inflicted, deserves no sympathy, and is easily cured by dispersal of the huge bolus of money choking their empathic awareness.
I don't think people are a disease. I think of billionaires as people who mostly started businesses that were very successful. The fact that they started a successful business suggests they know something about the world that others don't (some insight). Millionaires can be lucky (happen to invest in Manhattan real estate or crypto) but to accumulate a billion is a different thing all together and a high signal that the person is extraordinary in some regard.
This line of thinking is why I think the tech industry has become so morally bankrupt.
I don’t mean to judge because I think many people come to similar conclusions but I believe there has been a concerted effort to equate accumulation of wealth with genius, and to portray this anti-social behavior of endlessly accumulating wealth in a positive light.
I really think this phenomenon should be studied because it will likely lead to some catastrophic outcomes for the country.
Where did I say genius? They did something impressive so a useful model is to say "they know something about this world" or "there is something unique about them".
Not sure what you're referring to as anti-social behavior, but yeah I imagine extreme wealth generation means the person is likely to have some personal characteristic that could manifest as anti social. The smartest people I know are all ADHD or some other abnormality.
How exhausting must it be to think that anyone with success got so through illicit means or luck. It's much healthier to come in with the assumption that there's something to learn from that person.
I think the crux of this is that wealth is equated with success at the expense of all other qualities or accomplishments.
As a result of this perspective, hoarding of wealth has become the norm and even the goal for many.
If wealth means success, then make number go up = success, even if that incentivizes bad behavior. If wealth means success, our role models become degenerates.
I am not making a moral judgement that wealth is success or should be pursued.
I am simply saying some people pursue wealth, like others pursue raising a family, excelling in a sport, starting a YouTube channel, whatever.
If they're successful at it, I assume they know something about the world.
Successful marriage and raising good kids: I assume you know something about psychology, the human condition, relationships
Sports: I assume you know something about training and hard work
YouTube: Marketing, trends, production
Starting a business and becoming a billionaire is another pursuit and if you're successful I assume you know something about the world. You're successful in the sense that you set out to start a business that made a lot of money and you succeeded. That is all.
I don't think pursuing one is greater than the other. I'm glad people in the world pursue all these things. Personally I don't want my children to try to become billionaires (or athletes, YT stars for that matter). If they have talents in this space, it may be worth pursuing but it's a great sacrifice in all other aspects of life. But chasing it without the talent or unique insight into the world would almost certainly fail.
> They did something impressive so a useful model is to say "they know something about this world" or "there is something unique about them".
It may be tempting to say "they must know something others don't" or "there's something unique about them." But that's exactly the kind of thinking GP is pushing back against. Whether or not you say "genius" or not is semantics. But it's true that in some cultures, being rich is seen as a sign of wisdom or superiority. I see it sometimes on HN and I've definitely seen in public discourse. But I can't relate very much to it.
This may be a cultural gap but where I come from, wealth doesn't carry that kind of moral weight. It's like, sure Alex might be super rich. But are they honest, humble, and kind? Those qualities matter far more than how much money and assets they have.
Yes, there are billionaires where I'm from too, but no one treats them as inherently special. What people truly admire are virtues like groundedness and community service. When someone uses their skills with sincerity and a spirit of giving, that's when people say, "there's something unique about them." And this is going to be true as much for a rich bloke as it'd be for a poor bloke. Wealth has nothing to do with it.
No one is talking about moral weight. You keep bringing morality into it.
A lot of people want a lot of money (for their family, personal or vanity purposes)
Some people accumulate a lot of wealth in their lifetime.
We can look to those people to gather insights as to how to accumulate wealth. We do that in literally every other field. People read about how Michael Felps or Lebron James trains, or how Magnus studies chess.
No one thinks James or Felps or Magnus are somehow morally superior, they're just good at their craft and work hard. If you want to get good at swimming, basketball or chess, it's worth considering insights they have into the craft. No one should treat any of these people special, but there is something unique about them and you can learn from people. That is all.
Some people have been indoctrinated into looking at others and feeling envy (cultural gap?) but don't be delusional into thinking its all random and there's nothing to learn.
I could agree with most of your comment except for this:
> Some people have been indoctrinated into looking at others and feeling envy (cultural gap?) but don't be delusional into thinking its all random and there's nothing to learn.
Envy is a natural human emotion. What do you feel envy about? Rhetorical question. Not expecting an answer unless you want to volunteer this information. I'm no psychologist nor a philosopher but I'd hazard a guess that whatever you feel envy about says something about what you or your culture thinks are desirable virtues.
It looks like you are somehow projecting your type of envy onto me and my culture. I don't think I've ever felt envy about someone being rich. Someone is super rich? Very good for them. I am not super rich but I earn well to live a comfortable life. Good for me too.
But I feel envy too when I meet someone who is an absolute gentleperson who is not only doing very well for their family but also for the community around them. I admire them. At the same time I feel envy.
Now, I'm not saying one envy is better than other. Not at all. I'm just saying cultural differences can be big and it's sometimes very hard to imagine or visualize each other's culture because our own culture seems so natural to us that the other culture seems unnatural.
So to your rhetorical:
> cultural gap?
Yes, absolutely!
> but don't be delusional into thinking its all random and there's nothing to learn.
Absolutely! A person who wants to become super-rich has a lot to learn from someone who is super-rich. I don't want to be super-rich. I want to be excellent in other virtues which I think were mostly indoctrinated by my culture. So I look up to people with those virtues and learn from them. That's kinda why we don't really look at a super-rich person and immediately think "there is something unique about them" (which is where this thread began above) even if it's true. But we do see a person with great community spirit and think "there is something unique about them".
Can you point to a billionaire who didn't achieve that fortune without some nefarious skullduggery going on? You don't earn a billion dollars, you take a billion dollars. They're all sociopaths.
It depends on from where, and while JK Rowling, Notch, Rhianna, Jim Simmons, and Taylor Swift's money isn't 100% absolutely clean, because that money comes from somewhere, they also aren't Saudi princes having people eat poop. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg might count. Dolly Parton isn't quite a billionaire in terms of dollars, but is proof that you don't have to be a shitbag to have a lot of money.
It's strange to me that you conclude that accumulating six zeros indicates luck, but accumulating nine zeros indicates skill. Why doesn't it indicate just more extraordinary luck?
Because great wealth is accumulated through a series of bets. Moderate wealth (6 zeros) could be single or few transactions.
For instance, you could have bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin in 2010 much like people bet $1,000 on a sports game. You got lucky and became a millionaire.
To become a billionaire I guess you could have bought $100k on Bitcoin as a gamble but that requires much higher conviction and discipline. If you're the type of guy to gamble $100k on random crap you're likely not going to be rich for long.
But realistically people become billionaires by building businesses. And this requires a series of decisions. Picking the field, raising money, picking co-founders, hiring, product development, sales, etc.
In other words its like flipping a coin to determine if there is bias. One flip doesn't tell you anything. Multiple flips tells you more. And the more flips, the more confident you are on bias. Getting to a billion usually requires a huge number of decisions so that the outcome tells you a lot more about bias (in this case real skill or insight of the individual)
It seems like the key to your argument is having more money to gamble with, like would come from family money. Like if your father owned an emerald mine, or your parents gave you a quarter million to start a business, or you started a hedge fund with a million dollars raised from “family and friends.”
Alternatively, there are a lot of people out there. Flip enough coins and some will come up heads 10 times in a row. You don't need some special talent, you need to start with money and connections and hit the right number of coinflips.
That argument makes sense if your question is what are the odds a specific person becomes a billionaire through sheer luck, but the real question is would a population of billions of people worldwide produce billionaires even if the process of becoming a billionaire involved randomly succeeding a number of times in a row.
The answer is yes for surprisingly unlikely outcomes for any particular individual. Using your coin flipping example, assume everyone in the US was flipping a coin a number of times in a row and the billionaire winners were those who got all heads. It would take ~20 coin flips per person to produce the actual number of American billionaires. Clearly the chance of any specific individual flipping a coin 20 times and getting heads all 20 times is ridiculously small, but there are a lot of people in the US and math is math. Should we ask what special qualities those all heads people possess? Allow them outsized influence in how our country runs and how we live our lives?
You jump to political labels awfully fast, based on a mere two sentences.
> pretending not to understand things
I'm not pretending anything. I also don't think I'm misunderstanding here.
> thus making discourse impossible.
You replied to me, so apparently discourse is possible.
Let me add to the discourse: I think our fundamental difference is that you view massive wealth accumulation as success, whereas I view it as failure.
It's reasonable for any person to want material goods, e.g., food, clothing, shelter, even entertainment, as well as some measure of security. However, at some point, a normal person is satisfied with their personal wealth. If you're never satisfied, always need more, more, more without limit, that's a psychological problem, and possibly a social problem too.
You have a strong emotional connection to the idea that rich people are rich because they're strong and wise. All the arguments you're making in this thread are post hoc justifications for this belief, which simply isn't supported by reality.
To me it only suggests they are sociopaths. The common folk should generally just understand that billionaires are inherently evil, and everything they say and want will cause harm to society as a whole.
It also suggests, typically, that they just inherited generatinal wealth from their sociopath ancestors.
Sure, that could be what results in billionaires. But I guess you would have to identify what opportunities you would have to take to become a billionaire that you don't take because it would be too mean.
What's the model here? I hear billionaires "exploit" people, but anyone that's ever had to manage people, especially low wage employees, quickly realizes you can't just treat people like crap. Not for moral reasons, but it doesn't work. People will just quit on you on the spot.
I've never heard any business owner espouse this theory because they're faced with the reality that building a business is hard and just being a dick doesn't work.
Yes you should watch for yourself. But you forgot to include a link to the edited video, rather you appeal to authority and link how some other org says that theyre not biased.
The offense is pretty egregious and serious. This was a huge issue w dire consequences, and BBC wilfully spread doctored evidence. Watch the clip yourself
It’s interesting how any news organization even slightly left of center needs to be accountable for their actions while Fox News rage baits their viewers 24/7 and no one bats an eyelash.
This is a good point. The major issue I see is the BBC is funded by taxpayers through government-mandated contributions, whereas Fox News is a private company.
Here are some examples of how serious the problem is:
Dan Rather, a leading anchor for 60 Minutes, tried to shame George W Bush by airing forged documents. When revealed, Rather was fired.
When Hunter Bidens damning laptop was discovered late in the election cycle, nearly all mainstream news sources ignored it. A shared letter signed by 50 ‘experts’ called it ‘Russian disinformation’. Today it is quietly acknowledged that the story was true. This was especially egregious given the proximity to the 2020 elections.
Earlier this year, ABCs anchor George Stephanopolous was sued by Trump after he repeatedly called Trump a rapist, a false charge. ABC settled, paying $16m.
Likewise, Trump sued 60 Minutes for editing a Kamala Harris interview to improve her responses to a question. CBS settled by paying Trump.
Those are direct political hits. They’re worse than examples like the Covington High vs Native American hoax, Katie Courics second amendment edit, Anderson Cooper standing in a flooded hole, etc.
Please give me a single example of a news source telling such outrageous lies against a Democrat. Note that the above examples are not second hand lies repeated— they are lies coming straight from the news source.
(This is a reply to RickJWagner's reply to the above comment [1], which got killed while I was writing this)
> When Hunter Bidens damning laptop was discovered late in the election cycle, nearly all mainstream news sources ignored it [...] Today it is quietly acknowledged that the story was true
To be clear, it turned out to be true that it was Hunter Biden's laptop. It did not turn out to be true that it contained anything damning concerning Joe Biden.
> Earlier this year, ABCs anchor George Stephanopolous was sued by Trump after he repeatedly called Trump a rapist, a false charge. ABC settled, paying $16m.
To be clear, the problem wasn't that Stephanopolous said that Trump was a rapist. It was that he said that Trump had been found liable for the rape E Jean Carroll in her lawsuit against him. In fact Trump was found by the jury to be liable for sexually abusing her but not for raping her.
However, in Trump's counterclaim against Carroll for defamation because she repeatedly claimed he raped her the judge dismissed the claim saying that her words were "substantially true". He said "The only issue on which the jury did not find in Ms Carroll’s favor was whether she proved that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of that term in the New York penal law".
The jury had been instructed that it could only find the Trump "raped" her if he forcibly penetrated her vagina with his penis. Forcible penetration by fingers is not rape under the New York penal code.
The judge noted that in contexts outside of New York penal law that would commonly be called "rape". BTW, that's also the case in the law of most other US states.
> Likewise, Trump sued 60 Minutes for editing a Kamala Harris interview to improve her responses to a question. CBS settled by paying Trump.
The overwhelming majority of legal experts considered that to be a frivolous lawsuit. Paramount (CBS' parent company) settled because they needed government approval for a merger they were involved in. The government approved the merger 3 weeks after the settlement.
> The problem is exactly that Stephanapolous used the word rapist. His producer warned him several times. It is a lie. Words have meanings. You can’t call someone something they are not, hence the $16m paid by ABC.
The jury found that Trump committed acts that meet the common definition of rape and the definition of rape under the laws of most US states, but not the narrower definition of rape under New York's penal code, so it is not really a lie to say that Trump is a rapist as long as you are not saying that he was found liable in court for rape.
That's why E Jean Carroll can say Trump raped her and he has not been able to make her stop. She's speaking using the common usage of the word.
> You have to wonder why a ‘news’ source would make an edit like the Harris edit, don’t you?
Not really. As with most interviews they shot more material than would fit in the airtime available, so edited it down to fit. For one answer that they used in a preview clip during "Face the Nation" they used a longer version than they used for the interview segment on "60 Minutes".
Comparing both of these to the raw transcript of the full interview shows that the editing for neither the "60 Minutes" segment nor the "Face the Nation" preview changed the message or was deceitful or manipulative.
> The problem is exactly that Stephanapolous used the word rapist. His producer warned him several times. It is a lie. Words have meanings. You can’t call someone something they are not, hence the $16m paid by ABC
Trump lost the defamation case that actually went to trial making that exactly claim about E Jean Caroll's own use of the same language describing the result, the money he got from ABC wasn't because they were likely to lose at trial, it was because kowtowing to Trump was expected to have produce results for the corporate ownership when the Trump Administration considered licensing and other regulatory requests.
The equally obvious answer is because Trump doesn't like that word, and the producer knew that opening a crack for Trump to get his undersized mitts into is a bad idea
Smartmatic defamation suit (ongoing) — New York appeals court let Smartmatic’s multibillion-dollar case proceed against Fox Corp in 2025; Smartmatic says Fox spread false claims about rigging the 2020 election.
- https://www.reuters.com/legal/fox-must-face-smartmatic-27-bi...
Misleading edit of Biden’s Satchel Paige remark — “Fox & Friends” aired a clipped video that removed context and made Biden’s Veterans Day comments seem racially insensitive; AP flagged the edit.
- https://apnews.com/general-news-453bd99f1301f76b68368f0a5b2f...
In that laundry list, I see one similar issue, the Biden video edit.
It looks like Fox edited a video to make it seem as if Biden made a racially insensitive statement. Fox says they made the edit for time constraints.
Seems weak compared to forging documents ( Dan Rather ), telling outright lies ( Stephanopoulos ), and failing to report a salient election issue ( Biden laptop ). I will grant that it seems similar to what the BBC did today, though.
The rest seem like slimy news tricks, but are not attacks of the same nature.
BBC is government funded and running misinformation and fraudulent editing to affect a foreign regime
There is no pretense that fox news is somehow objective. At best people say it balances out the bias of nearly every other mainstream publication. For instance check 2016 newspaper endorsements
Trump had 28 compared to over 600 for not trump
While the BBC does receive government money, that money is used exclusively for the BBC World Service. It is misleading to say the BBC is "government funded", when the majority of their output is funded by the license fee.
I never understood the concept of newspapers endorsing a candidate.
Don't newspapers have to at-least pretend to be neutral in a democracy i.e. on the side of people. Is there some dynamic here due to America being effectively a two party democracy that I'm missing.
I feel like endorsing one candidate over the other is a public declaration/acknowledgement that their future reporting on failures of their endorsed candidate will be soft and reporting on the other party will be aggressive.
Someone who regularly follows news on both sides may be able to tell whether this has been true so far or not.
I note that the complaint about clips taken out of context is supported by a clip taken out of context ( ie a very short segment of the entire programmme ).
Now I'm quite willing to accept that that particular Panaroma episode had a slant - they are not 'news' per se but an in depth perspective type programme - and so they reflect the views of the authors.
But that's just one episode by one set of programme makers - it's not such evidence of clear and consistent bias - it's just evidence that some programmes take a view - whether that balances out over time requires you to look at the output at a whole, not just a single clip of a single programme.
The documentary went out about a year ago with no direct airing in the US ( and to watch via iplayer you'd need to circumvent geographic controls ). I don't believe the documentary was an issue in the US at the time and I note Trump still won.
I watched the video a few times. I don’t think Trump himself would object to the edit. But I’m sure that, if he had to explain that speech or Jan 6, it would be damaging.
So this is really about what he wants with the lawsuit.
I thought the number of tokens per second doesn't matter until I used Grok Code Fast. I realized that it makes a huge difference. If it take more than 30s to run, I lose focus, and look at something else. I end up being a lot less productive. It also opens up the possibility to automate a lot more simple tasks. I would def recommend people try fast models
If you are single tasking, speed matters to an extent. You need to still be able to read/skim the output and evaluate its quality.
The productive people I know use git worktrees and are multi-tasking.
The optimal workflow is when you can supply it one or more commands[1] that the model can run to validate/get feedback on its own. Think of it like RLHF for the LLM, they are getting feedback albeit not from you, which can be laborious.
As long as the model gets feedback it can run fairly autonomously with less supervision it does not have to testing driven feedback, if all it gets is you as the feedback, the bottleneck will be always be the human time to read, understand and evaluate the response not token speed.
With current leading models doing 3-4 workflows in parallel is not that hard, when fully concentrating, of course it is somewhat less when browsing HN :)
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[1] The command could be a unit test runner, or a build/compile step, or e2e workflows like for UI it could be Chrome MCP/CDP, playwright/cypress, or storybook-js and so on. There are even converts toversion of TDD to benefit from this gain.
You could have one built for your use case if no existing ones fit, with model help of course.
Hmm. I run maybe 3 work streams max in parallel and struggle to keep up with the context switching. I have some level of skepticism that your colleagues are amazingly better and do 4 and produce quality code at a faster rate than 1 or 2 work streams in wall clock time. I consider a workstream to be disparate features or bugs that are unrelated and require attention. Running 8 agents in parallel that are all doing the same thing is of course trivial nowadays but that in of itself is what I would consider a single threaded workstream.
We have similar definition of streams, but It depends on a lot of things from your tooling/ language , stack etc.
if your builds take a fair bit of time (incremental builds may not work in worktree first time) or you are working on a item that has high latency feedback like e2e suite that runs on a actual browser etc.
Prompt styles also influences this. I like to make fairly detailed prompt that cover a lot of the nuances upfront and spend 10-15 or more writing it. I find that when I do that it takes longer, but I only give simple feedback during the run itself freeing me to go next item. Some people prefer chat style approach, you cannot keep lot of threads in mind if chatting.
Model and cli client choice matters , on average codex is slower than sonnet 4.5 . Within each family if you enable thinking or use the high reasoning model it can be slower as well.
Finally not all tasks are equal, I like to mix some complex and simpler ones or add some dev ex or a refactor that requires lower attention budget with features that require more.
Having said that, while I don’t know 10x type developers. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are were such people and they can be truly that productive .
The analogy I think of is chess. Maybe I can play 2-3 games in parallel reasonably well, but there are professional players who can play dozens of games blindfolded and win all of them.
Nice answer - all of the above aligns with my experience.
I use sonnet a lot more than openai models and its speed means I do have to babysit it more and get chattier which does make a difference, probably you are right that if I was using codex which is on average 4-6 times slower than claude code that I would have more mental bandwidth to handle more workstreams.
I completely agree. Grok’s impressive speed is a huge improvement. Never before have I gotten the wrong answer faster than with Grok. All the other LLMs take a little longer and produce a somewhat right answer. Nobody has time to wait for that.
Woke to me in the simplest sense if a form of extreme egalitarianism, collectivism with some blank-slatism.
Let's take your example: poor and Black people don't live on LI with equal representations based on other groups. Let's unpack that:
1. You have some definition of "Black" that's very broad. What does someone from Sub-Saharan Africa whose ancestors came here on a slave boat have to do with a 0 generation Nigerian immigrant who is significantly better off than the median American? Then you have the whole "Brown" category which is equally ham-fisted.
2. Ignoring any differences in group preference and autonomy. There could be no reason that the proportion of said group would be unequal in that area if not for some force outside of their control. You ask why aren't there enough of [group] in some extremely competitive professional field, but you don't work backwards. For instance, federal judges -> prestigious law school graduates -> prestigious undergrad graduates -> high school graduates -> parents in home. Woke ignores the chain and usually just jumps to the end result. Of course this is ignored in some domains. No one argues that prisons are overly harsh (lenient) on men (women) when it comes to criminal punishments relative to each other. Or why are there so many central / South Americans in MLB. It's uncritical.
3. Groups are the organizing force (collective guilt). [Oppressor] group did this to [oppressed group] so we need to change the balance of power of [oppressed group] in relation to [oppressed group], when in reality there are only individuals.
Overall, things are simplified to oppressed vs oppressor. It's an oversimplification and leads to bad things like shutting down accelerated math programs because we don't like the makeup of the student body
OK, so you reject the claim that systemic racism had any effect that can be meaningfully attributed (I guess sort of like how you cant blame climate change for the exact nature of a specific hurricaine). I see you carefully sidestep the instantly-disqualifying claims of "genetic inferiority" as the cause of racial disparity and instead claim..... "group preference"? or "what does Black really mean, anyway?" (what was the Civil Rights movement about, exactly? What does "Colored" mean in this sign? https://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/22/opinion/greene-racial-sig... who really knows, right? ) Black people "preferred" to live in poorer neighborhoods and to not buy houses in Levittown back when everyone was doing so?
> so you reject the claim that systemic racism had any effect that can be meaningfully attributed
I claimed that it's not the sole contributor. I don't think we have laws anymore that target one group over another. There are some that disproportionally impact certain groups, but that's my entire point. You can't look at the end result.
> genetic inferiority
I'm not very interested in genetic differences among groups, because I reject the whole "groups" thing all together. So why would I talk about it? But I guess if you do look at groups, cultural similarities are more obvious than genetic differences. And those are driving most of the differences IMO
> what was the Civil Rights movement about, exactly? What does "Colored" mean in this sign?
Correct, it was equally wrong to group people based on "Colored" back then as it is now. I'll also add that back then there was a lot less immigration so the group made slightly more sense (uniform), but it was still wrong.
so now that jim crow is over, redlining is over, and legalized discrmination is...."over", so to speak, generation upon generation of Black people (the people who were referred to as "colored" in that photo) have been denied generational wealth and prosperity, we now deem that whatever problems the Black community has, are disconnected from any of that. Impossible to pin down factors like "group preference" are why Black communities continue to be so segregated, why the community has a dramatically higher rate of incarceration, poorer academic outcomes, poorer health outcomes...we can never know how much 400 years of institutional oppression had to do with that vs. simple "group preference". Attempts to observe any of these factors as potential causes are deemed as "Wokeness" and giant multinational corporations are run by zealots who seek to eradicate any such "wokeness" who are also cheered on by Hacker News readers similarly tired of this bothersome "wokeness". 400 years of institutional oppression simply can't be separated from random group preference, and that's why it should be illegal to even question this conundrum.
I’m always impressed how you get a wall of text trying to break down an argument …. They always feel like the same kind of reductivism, and they always have a very, very similar political direction.
You missed some causes here: federal judges -> prestigious law school graduates -> prestigious undergrad graduates -> high school graduates -> parents in home -> blacks and black neighborhoods far more often to be policed and jailed -> private jails allow legal slavery etc etc
Also, missed - federal judges -> prestigious law school graduates -> prestigious undergrad graduates -> parents rich -> etc etc.
You work backwards until you get an answer you like, it seems.
I think its entirely reasonable that an algorithm shows you things that you engaged with. It would be weird if it didn't promoted stuff I didn't engage w/.
garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not engage with the content. And for some people it is quite difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is trending so might be i should show this to more people. So this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is loosing battle in the sea of bots :)
A better term might be antagonism. X seemed to switch to a system of rewarding views as a method of engagement far above all else, which led to people (generally and deliberately) ramping up the extremeness of their hot takes in a bid to get as much attention as possible.
A parallel term is "hate click", where there's a headline that's so stupid or off that you click it just to see what the hell they were talking about.
An example of this vile genre was someone tweeting about how:
"Teachers make plenty of money, and I think they should provide school supplies to their students out of their own pocket instead of making hard-working parents pay for them."
It was a message _designed_ to get people to yell at them, and for all of that, it wasn't any of the really hot-button stuff around politics, race, or any of the other divisive things that drive antagonistic engagement.
Twitter could have (and previously did) reward all sorts of other types of engagement, but the shift to rewarding divisiveness was just at another level.
Advertising is a negative sum game[0]. Helping smaller businesses without budget compete with larger companies on advertising is just contributing to making life worse for everyone.
There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better
--
[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.
There's an argument to be made that if everyone is doing it then it will stop being effective and brands will have to start reaching for more honest forms of marketing/advertising their product. I think we've already gone through a cycle of this with influencer marketing where a decade ago, if a Youtuber recommended a product it had a lot more weight (eg. I could actually imagine a lot of creators using Audible/Squarespace) than today where most people realize it's just a way for them to make money and doesn't really hold much weight.
Not just labor and resources, but attention and time as well. It's literally burning up the brains of our youth. Of course, so is the "content" between the ads but you can make an argument that without the ad incentive these things wouldn't have gotten so bad in the first place
Obviously both parties will have access to the tech, but I don't see giant brands just using something like this to hack an ad campaign. Either way it doesn't really matter. It just levels the playing field
Giant companies don't use do ad campaigns anyway. They hire ad agencies, which themselves may hire smaller ad agencies or consultants, and those are more than happy to innovate and improvise using whatever trick can come across.
Note, I said companies, because brands at this point are merely labels, most of them throwaway; big companies use them the same way small companies do, including to run fly-by-night scams on burner brands. They're more than happy to delegate it to smaller agencies, too.
Point being: there's not much correlation between branding, ownership structure, and what advertising techniques can be applied by what organizations.
That’s where I stay to see some benefits. Will AI ads (or media) be better than an expert human made ad campaign? Not at the moment.
But can a small business use AI tools to make a better ad for their smaller budget? Probably.
I was thinking about this in the context of some videos posted here a few weeks back. They were AI generated video shorts. They weren’t fabulous, but they were funny and entertaining. There was a small writing team behind it that was able to produce solid video content that would have been way out of their budget just a few years ago. But with AI tools they were able to get their ideas made and content available.
That’s where I start to struggle… I’m not a fan of pure AI content, but if it helps smaller teams on smaller budgets compete a little more, or helps individual creators get to tell their story when they otherwise couldn’t, is AI content completely wrong?
I tried this out, and the stuff it produces is just simple text overlaid nicely on images you supply. If you have a designer, it'd take 60 seconds to knock one of these out, plus you'd already have a style guide that this app wouldn't follow closely enough to use. This is definitely for small businesses.
I think you might be seeing guys who do that well so it's a bit survivorship bias. For most, if you just record yourself talking for 1m and watch it back as a video it's incredibly painful and awkward. The filler words, tangents, weird pauses. It really made me have respect for great speakers
No, I have seen plenty of awkward people talking about their new business. The awkwardness is inferior to charismatic speakers, for sure, but it's still better than generic AI slop marketing content.
All of those people have already pass through a filter of self-selection
There's a person out there that's 1) knows how to bake amazing cookies 2) has no desire to record tik toks
Why is that you need both of those things combined to have a successful cookie business? Can't we desire a world where just being good at baking cookies is good enough? You don't ALSO have to record a bunch of tik toks?
Some products are so good they don't need marketing. Some marketing is so good the product doesn't matter. But most of the time you need both.
Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis had a great product (idea): if doctors wash their hands, fewer of their patients will die. But his marketing (personality) was off-putting, and his ideas weren't accepted until after his death.
I did this with youtube for a while but I have to swallow my pride, (AI thumbnail, engagement bait title, AI voice narration) is better than pure loom-like organic video for ads
It's better that the alternative which is humans. Unless you think enforcing laws or ever having the need to establish identity should never take place
As a computer vision engineer, I wouldn’t trust any vision system for important decisions. We have plenty of established process for verification via personal documents such as ID, birth certificate, etc and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
he didn't say he didn't want to have photos on licenses and passports, indeed it seems to me as the support is for standard ids that he would want these things as they are part of the standard id set.
He said he was against computer vision identifying people, and gave as a reason that they are a computer vision engineer implying that they know what they are talking about. Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.
Then you say they trust a piece of paper you hand them, which they never claimed to do either, they discussed established processes, which a process may or may not be more involved than being handed a piece of paper, depending on context and security needs.
>You can't be serious.
I sort of feel you have difficulties with this as well.
> Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.
Good point. Computer vision systems are very fickle wrt pixel changes and from my experience trying to make them robust to changes in lighting, shadows or adversarial inputs, very hard to deploy in production systems. Essentially, you need tight control over the environment so that you can minimize out of distribution images and even then it’s good to have a supervising human.
If you’re interesting in reading more about this, I recommend looking up: domain adaptation, open set recognition, adversarial machine learning.
The discussion is missing the point of the original snarky comment
So you don't trust the computer vision algorithm...
But you do trust the meatbags?
Reminds me of the whole discussion around self driving cars. About how people wanted perfection, both in executing how cars move and ethics. While they drove around humans every day just fine
somehow it seems not as magic as setting the mathematically verifiable acceptance criteria that fails 99% of the time. (percentage chosen to show absurdity of claiming that mathematically verifiable acceptance criteria is inherently superior)
no I don't think humans are trustworthy, I think the procedures discussed are more secure than the alternative on offer which an expert in that technology described as being untrustworthy, implying that it was less trustworthy than the processes it was offered as an alternative to, and then gave technical reasons why which basically boiled down to the reasons why I expected that alternative would be untrustworthy
I love how you're contrasting the credibility of demonstrably-proven-to-be-unreliable face recognition tech against MERELY government-issued documents that have been the basis for establishing identity for more than a century.
Perfect? Of course not, nothing we make ever is. A damn bit better than racist security cameras though.
> So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and you just take it on face value? Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports?
We have photos on licenses and passports so that if you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and you present an ID with a photo of a black man in his 70s, we can be confident that this is not you.
If you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and there is another ethnic Russian in their 20s on some kind of list, that is very much not conclusive proof that you're them, because there could be any number of people who look similar enough to each other to cause a false positive for both a person looking at an ID and a computer vision system.
That is, generally, how it works in most contexts, yes.
> Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports
To protect against trivial theft-and-use, mostly. Your mention of licenses, in particular, was interesting given how straightforward it is for a relatively-dedicated actor to forge the photo on them (it's tougher to forge the security content in the license; the photo is one of the weakest pieces of security protection in the document).
We'll still need a layer for replacement and revocation though. It'd be nice if nobody ever had their private key lost/destroyed/stolen but it's going to happen.
> allows users to regain access to their funds without a traditional seed phrase by leveraging trusted contacts (guardians) and a predefined recovery protocol. If a user loses access, they coordinate with a quorum of these guardians, who each provide a piece of the necessary information to restore
It’s possible to lose one’s irises. Most identical twins have almost identical DNA. Then there’s the “right to be forgotten”, people on witness protection, refugees and immigrants who enter the system as adults, etc. I don’t think there’s an easy technical solution.
Blind twins* will need to carry an alternative. /s
Of course the technical solution isn’t easy, (or necessarily all good),
but that doesn’t make it any less likely, or intriguing to discuss the roadmap.
(You combine the scanned data together from both of those scans, regardless of value, as your recovery mechanism, by the way - accounting for abnormal anatomy in a defined, reproducible way is a challenge, not a barrier)
Having worked in this space (ID verification of live-humans to ID documents), yes, I absolutely think people are better at the 1:1 person:document yes/no question than I think an AI model is at saying which of 200M people this face is. Just having a prior of a physical document with their name and likeness on it already makes up 1 factor of the N-factor authentication.
>So the model is verifying faces against ... A database of zero faces? Surely there's 200M faces in there, or else how does it work?
No. The model is, "Hey! this guy is being a pain in the ass. He even claimed that The President wasn't blessed with superintelligence and doesn't actually smell really good!
We need to get this terrorist off the streets! He sure looks a whole lot like that illegal on the FBI most wanted list, doesn't he? Off to CECOT with him!
What's that? He's a twelfth generation citizen? No way! Look, the app I used to claim this guy matches an illegal who's also a child rapist!
Your papers are all fake (if, as a citizen he's even carrying them). Onto the plane with you Senor.
That's the model. Feel free to disagree, but come back and reread this comment in 18 months. I hope you read it then and think "what a paranoid guy! Nothing like that could ever happen here!" But I'm not holding my breath. :(
In 18 months the discussion will have moved on to make excuses for the conentration camps. Alligator Auschwitz and such camps must be much larger to hold everyone.
Are you saying that a computer should be trusted without human intervention? If so, I have a computer right now that says you should be banned on the Internet.
Please don't spread unscientific misinformation. You can say ICE bad, or you don't believe in borders, but saying computer facial recognition is inaccurate compared to humans is just factually incorrect.
Looks like GP is using ChatGPT (see the utm_source in their link) to find the first result that supports their viewpoint rather than doing a broad discovery and analysis
The horror! Someone using an LLM for basic information gathering like "is AI facial recognition accurate compared to humans?" rather than going off vibes or one off sensationalized articles.
People are exceptionally good at facial recognition because of the Fusiform face area, which is a specialized portion of the temporal lobe optimized for it.
Your subsequent comments like 'If you deny the need to know anything about anyone at any time, you're just so far gone that there is no discussion that could be had' indicate that you're sarcastically trolling people, and I suggest you do that somewhere else in future.
This sort of thinking is kind of a retcon, no? The people who wrote the line you’re referencing also decided that none of the people ICE is involved with were even eligible for citizenship. If their rules held out, this wouldn’t even be a thing. I’m not arguing that their rules were correct, just that picking and choosing things they said feels intellectually dishonest.
It’s more complex than that- initial drafts of the declaration of independence were more explicit about literally covering all people, and even had a rant about how slavery was unethical, and they compromised by cutting these in order to get enough consensus to make it happen at all. Thomas Jefferson himself was a hypocrite- he wrote a lot about how slavery was wrong and should be ended, all the while owning slaves himself.
Anyways, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to nowadays take that philosophy and apply it universally. Just because it was done unfairly and hypocritically in the past is no excuse for us to also be hypocrites nowadays.
Sorry is ICE going around enslaving Africans? I thought the topic was people being targeted for removal based on looking like a Native American. What does Jefferson’s view on slavery have to do with anything?
Those are your personal abstraction boundaries. It is a perfectly coherent set of positions to oppose enslaving humans while at the same time being selective about which humans you allow into your nation. The “founding fathers” factually prohibited non-whites from being citizens of America. So what if they were opposed to slavery or not? Those are entirely different matters, and a position on slavery does not imply anything about a position on “any person on earth can be an American”.
This is not an issue of who is allowed into the country. It is an issue of who has the right to due process to determine whether they are allowed in the country or not.
The first point should not apply to everyone, but the second absolutely must. Trusting an un-auditable black box over all other evidence to determine who is allowed in the country is a violation of everyone's human rights.
What due process is being skipped? People are arrested all the time when they are innocent, and that is not widely considered to be skipping due process. If they are jailed for a crime without appearing before a judge for example then due process has been skipped, but whether someone has committed a crime requires a judge to check, whereas I imagine whether someone is in the country legally just requires checking some databases. Have citizens been deported by accident? I haven’t seen any reports of that.
You seem to be unaware of what is happening right now on the streets- there are thousands of videos all over social media you should spend a few hours watching. Peaceful citizens minding their own business are being terrorized and beaten by unprofessional and violent masked goons at a massive scale. The perpetrators are hiding their identities and often refusing to even look at documents proving someone is a citizen. In the detention centers people are being brutalized- left to sit for days in human shit, diabetics denied insulin, bright lights on 24/7, and food and water provided only as rewards for desires behaviors. Congress is denied their legal right and responsibility to tour the facilities, allowing them to hide human rights abuses. The cruelty and sadism of the tactics used is ratcheting up every week, and any agents that try to act lawfully are purged. Victims have no recourse- the DOJ and legal system are blocking victims from being able to even press charges, allowing these abuses to continue with no recourse.
I'm not sure about citizens being deported other than children of non-citizens together with their parents, but they are deporting huge numbers of people here legally on visas, green cards, and valid asylum claims. They revoked visas of some 6,000 college students - mostly for political "wrongthink" and then sent ICE agents after them, when it's actually legal in the USA for them to remain with a revoked student visa as long as they arrived legally, and illegal to detain or deport. They've also arrested and detained hundreds of citizens, that they absolutely knew were citizens, for peaceful protesting and video taping their illegal activities.
I’ve seen some videos, but I haven’t noticed anything beyond what I’ve previously seen in standard USA law enforcement bodycam footage. Resisting, fleeing, obstructing arrest are met with force, and sometimes too much force. Too much force is bad, but it doesn’t seem new or qualitatively different to me in the way many are acting like it is. I do see the media going hysterical about it, but I’ve seen them do that about a lot of things and I can’t say it really affects me at this point other than making me extremely skeptical that whatever they’re going hysterical about is actually like they say it is.
Are you saying you’ve seen videos where ICE is like going to bus stops and just beating up random people? Everything I’ve seen is like, ICE rolls up, guys start running, ICE gets rough with them. Or ICE rolls up, people are heckling them, ICE gets rough with them. I think that would happen with any drug bust, for example. If people start heckling a swat team, does the swat team respond with kindness? Well, we don’t see many videos of that, because nobody heckles swat teams. Why are people fleeing, resisting or obstructing? They are law enforcement officers, and if you do that to them, you are going to have a bad time. Law enforcement in America has been like that for my entire life, at least.
Am I in some kind of filter bubble where I’ve only seen ICE videos of the sort I’ve described, and you’ve seen videos of ICE tackling a grandma getting the mail? I’m seriously asking, I just gave up watching videos like this because they were all like I described.
ICE refusing to look at documents seems not unreasonable, have all of those club bouncer tier men had training on how to spot fake government documents? Like can they know what every birth certificate from every state looks like from every year and then verify it on the spot? That doesn’t seem reasonable to expect once I thought about what it would entail.
> and any agents that try to act lawfully are purged
I was replying in a serious manner but comon this is flat earth tier foaming at the mouth stuff. You are seriously telling me that they are firing people who don’t break the law? That is like comic book tier villainy. How would we possibly even know that, did their policy book leak?
My theory is that this is triggering the mental programming everyone had as children about WW2 despite being a completely different situation. If you tell literally all children that X is the most evil thing ever, you might end up with adults who are so sensitive to recognizing X that they see it when it isn’t there.
"Heckling" ICE is protected first amendment speech. It is absolutely unacceptable for them to take any negative action whatsoever against someone for that. Law enforcement officers need to have some fucking professionalism and not be thin-skinned babies. Anyone who can't handle that needs to be fired immediately.
Distinguishing who is legally allowed to be in the country from who isn't is literally ICE's entire job. If they aren't capable of recognizing official government documentation that definitively proves someone is allowed to be in the country, get them some fucking training before they go around arresting people.
The people who are entrusted with the enormous power of enacting violence on behalf of the state must be held to a higher standard than the people who are entrusted with protecting nightclubs from 20 year olds trying to get booze.
I personally don’t agree with the interpretation of the first amendment that places heckling, i.e. intentionally making it difficult for a person to perform a task using verbal distraction tactics, as free speech.
To me, free speech protections prevent rulers from closing off regions of ideology space, because they usually do so in their own self interest so we can’t trust them to do it even in cases when it is clearly for the true long term benefit of the group, which is why it is forbidden for them to forbid “speech”.
I also don’t believe in pornography as protected speech. I’m an atheist, I’m not a conservative, and I’m not against pornography. I don’t support pornography being made illegal. The protected speech argument for it is just stupid. And when you base reasonable practices on stupid legal arguments, you end up having… well, for example, abortion rights getting randomly rolled back by the court.
Yes, in a perfect utopia world, I agree with you that the hiding-foreigner purge guys would also be good at clerical type work. However, from what I’ve seen of humans, they can usually do one kind of thing or the other, not both. Like, guys who like to chase people and knock them down usually don’t like to perform detailed forgery analysis. To expect this is to expect ICE to be staffed by people with an uncommon trait combination. Have you had different experiences? If we had the FBI doing this, then yes the FBI can hire guys who can do both. If a massive org is spun up rapidly, then there is no way to apply the same kinds of hiring practices. I just don’t get the outrage here? Picture that happening in a movie, they hire a ton of guys who are beefy and like to throw people around, and then they rapidly train every one of them to spot fake passports and birth certificates from every state/year. That could make for an entertaining comedy plot, but would you find it realistic in a gritty drama?
Tangentially, I wonder why we haven’t seen more comparisons between ICE and the Spanish Inquisition, it feels much more accurate than the comparisons we do see (e.g. the other N word).
You need to look deeper, what is actually happening is much more egregious than what you are labeling "comic book tier villainy." Ideological purges of competent people following the law, being replaced with incompetent sycophants willing to follow illegal orders have been completed at almost every level of government. Check out this podcast on the purge of immigration judges that were still willing to hear valid asylum cases from brown skinned people, as they are required to by law: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/868/the-hand-that-rocks-the...
In the last week there were massive purges of regional ICE leadership all around the country, replacing them with more militarized border patrol people, because they have been reluctant to use excessive force. In a 60 minutes interview in the last week, Trump openly stated that he thinks ICE still isn't being violent enough. These purges are not just happening in the government- private universities and companies have been extorted, or attempted to be extorted into performing ideological purges. Take a look at the outrageous letter Trump sent Harvard, demanding that they replace half of their faculty with those in personal political ideological alignment with him, subject to external review by someone he appoints.
Yes, ICE is entering communities and just violently beating up people unprovoked- there are literally hundreds of videos of it that I have seen, on Instagram in particular- including from the ACLU. Look at what happened in Wilder Idaho, where they detained every man, women, and child at a massive public horse racing event, and shot rubber bullets, zip tied, and handcuffed children while sadistically beating their parents in front of them- long high res videos of it are all over.
People absolutely have a legal right to 'heckle' or protest government sponsored violence in their communities, and are being brutalized or detained for exercising their 1st amendment rights, by masked agents refusing to identify so they cannot be held accountable, regardless of their crimes. No, it is not unreasonable to expect federal agents tasked with enforcing immigration law to be mentally capable of reading passports or birth certificates proving citizenship- border agents do this for a million people entering the USA legally every single day.
People are arrested all the time when they have official government paperwork stating that they definitively did not do the thing they are being arrested for?
Thank you for prefixing your comment with the quality we should expect.
HN would appreciate you not making low quality comments in the first place though. The broader view of your comments on this post seem to be ideologically instead of curiosity driven
Humans are great at identifying each other. As the internet matures (and ease of long-distance communication obviates the need for massive nation states), we can constrain state authority to geographic batches small enough that people are known to one another.
Bullshit! The alternative is mentioned in the article, trust the official documents presented by the 'suspect', as that's the purpose of the documents. As in OP's quote:
“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”
"Trust the word of the black box" is pure technocratic dystopian nonsense.
https://www.photopea.com/
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