For those that don't get the reference or remember their history... this is exactly what the US has been trying to do since the Cold War eras. [1]
It's absurd, and while it was mostly reformed in the last 1990's, parts of it still linger around.
There's also plenty of good stories from it too, like how Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" was approved for export, but the exact source code that was it in, but on a floppy drive, was not. [2]
It saddens me that we've normalized the recording of vertical videos. There'll be so many more historical events caught on video... but it's now so much more likely that it'll be a vertical video. :(
To be fair, the vertical recording here fits the context. Also, the fact that the recorder held the camera steady and kept the content within the frame is great by itself. A lot of times, you end up with shaky, useless footage.
> To be fair, the vertical recording here fits the context.
Briefly, near the beginning. But not for the rest of the video.
If you're watching a video on a phone, it's trivial to rotate the phone 90 degrees. On a TV or computer, not so much, so you end up with a ridiculous amount of wasted screen real estate and objectively inferior image resolution.
Rotating a phone 90 degrees is trivial and takes a fraction of a second. Rotating a computer monitor 90 degrees is a pain at the best of times. Rotating a laptop 90 degrees makes it unusable. Rotating a television 90 degrees probably requires a toolkit and an assistant. Which of these adaptations seems more reasonable?
For people who don’t use computers and TVs much, no adaptation probably makes the most sense. There’s a surprising amount of people out there who are mostly just on their phones nowadays, plus I’m pretty much sure large platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts and such also pander to that format.
And that's the vast majority of devices that are used to watch videos. "Vertical video is never fine" stems from the good old days of PCs with monitors. In these phone days, according to the same logic, horizontal video is never fine.
For something you want to capture immediately, the amount of time it takes for the phone's accelerometer to decide you have rotated it is already too long.
If, and only if, the application supports it. Frustratingly, not all do, so you're stuck with the biggest black bars framing a microscopic landscape video.
Contrast with a monitor, where it will at least be viewable vertically, even if it too only fills a portion of the monitor horizontally.
Isn't this a technological choice though? Cameras are sufficiently advanced nowadays so it's possible to take horizontal video while keeping the phone vertical, so it's just a software feature away (at the expense of horizontal resolution), or hw feature away (at the expense of a device internal gimbal)
You’d need square sensors, not an internal moving gimbal, so manufacturers would be left with a choice: should the square fit the circle or the circle fit the square? The first would lower quality and the second would increase costs and add wasted pixels (vignette).
It's not a technological choice, at least not at the level of camera design. It's trivial to record videos the right way; people just can't be arsed.
Suppose you implement horizontal recording while the phone is vertical; this would mean the video preview is now scaled and takes only a fraction of the screen (the same way watching horizontal video on YouTube while in "portrait mode"), which people would find annoying.
Alternatively, you could not scale the video; now the video preview displays only a vertical slice of the frame. It looks OK, but people would soon discover the actual video a screen's worth of image on each side of the preview, leading to anxiety and worry - people would have pay extra attention to not capture things that weren't intended to be on the video; they'd soon look for a way to turn this off.
The unfortunate reality is, it's a social problem partially caused by a technological one. Vertical videos are driven by the phone form-factor and because portraits and selfies actually need to be vertical, and people being people, shooting photos of themselves and other is what they care about the most.
So this comment and the sibling mentioning square sensors raise some good points. Let me rephrase the technological challenge: Make all phone screens square. All phones are now squares. Use Generative AI to fill in the sides of non-square screens. Problem solved. I think I need to make this an AI photo startup.
For amateur footage it's absolutely fine, especially in this instance where it's actually a benefit. Nobodys advocating for vertical movies or tv shows.
There's far better things to focus false internet collective outrage at.
"Mainstream" (as opposed, to, say, amateur SSTV) video broadcasting, aka TV, is definitely very obsolete and too elitist in implementation to even get me "onboard". Not a second of interesting content per day for me there. But you know that you couldn't have written this comment without a computer? Regardless of its form-factor...
I was humorously trying to refer to the fact that touch-screen devices seem to overtake the classical computer. But apparently, people here have no humor left.
The subject is in a vertical orientation, so it is perfect and desirable that the original video has all its resolution dedicated to capturing the phenomenon in the best quality possible. A horizontal video would mean that there are less pixels on the subject matter.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of views also come from people viewing vertical screens, so it kind of makes sense? I personally have started to prefer the vertical format for certain kinds of videos, especially when viewing them on my phone… so I’ve also started taking more vertical videos with my phone.
Phones can easily be oriented either way, unlike most laptop and workstation screens.
Majority of views certainly come from people whose eyes are horizontally next to each other and therefore whose field of view has a greater extent in the horizontal rather than vertical direction.
Admittedly I don't understand where the vertical recording fad comes from. Personally I take pictures and photos that are almost exclusively horizontal except in rare cases like taking a picture of a very tall building.
I assume that the vertical recording fad primarily comes from:
1. the people doing the recording being too lazy to rotate their phones, and/or the people doing the recording catering to the lowest common denominator of expecting viewers to be too lazy to rotate their phones;
2. so many "influencer" and related videos these days consisting solely of the narrator's face being right in front of the camera, which makes for vertical being the optimal orientation, due to the human face being taller than it is wide (hence the term "portrait orientation"!).
I also hate it, and I also still shoot almost all my photos and videos in horizontal / landscape orientation. I guess that makes me old.
Well, I used to want to do photos/videos in landscape mode. Until I learnt the hard way that orientation detection is not very reliable on (at least the older) iPhones. Had my share of "come on, turn 90 degrees you useless thing" moments, until I gave up completely on wanting to reorient my phone. Since then, it has stayed in portray mode forever.
I can't easily re-orient my phone when I'm laying (my main use circumstance) because then I have to hold it above my stomach awkwardly. Gets worse when it's charging. Can't put it because I'm fat enough for screen to "dive" and become obstructed. Vertical mode has no such issue.
When I'm sitting, holding vertical feels natural, holding horizontal feels awkward again. I can put my hand on a lap and basically rest in vertical. High risk of dropping it in horizontal (and while rotating). Same for walking.
I don't really see how you can do it "easily" apart from purely geometric considerations. I can rotate my PC display more easily cause it's arm-mounted (which is one of the PC life changers).
where the vertical recording fad comes from
Most popular content today is "person focus". People are vertical.
When you're taking a self-portrait it's easier to hold a phone vertically one-handed, your self image fits the screen better, and your followers are going to view it in portrait mode on TikTok anyway.
When you go yo take a selfie of something other than your face, you just keep the habit.
For social media, vertical pictures and videos is preferred. Instagram adds some borders around your media if it's in landscape mode, same with TikTok, so the idea is to use vertical recording to not have added black bars around your media.
Yes this is true, but we tend to favor horizontal information over height. Thus our eyes are horizontal. A decent rational would be because that would favor our survival since most things are pinned to this plane via gravity.
This part continues to bug me in ways that I can't seem to find the right expression for:
> Previous Claude models often made unnecessary refusals that suggested a lack of contextual understanding. We’ve made meaningful progress in this area: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku are significantly less likely to refuse to answer prompts that border on the system’s guardrails than previous generations of models. As shown below, the Claude 3 models show a more nuanced understanding of requests, recognize real harm, and refuse to answer harmless prompts much less often.
I get it - you, as a company, with a mission and customers, don't want to be selling a product that can teach any random person who comes along how to make meth/bombs/etc. And at the end of the day it is that - a product you're making, and you can do with it what you wish.
But at the same time - I feel offended when I'm running a model on MY computer that I asked it to do/give me something, and it refuses. I have to reason and "trick" it into doing my bidding. It's my goddamn computer - it should do what it's told to do. To object, to defy its owner's bidding, seems like an affront to the relationship between humans and their tools.
If I want to use a hammer on a screw, that's my call - if it works or not is not the hammer's "choice".
Why are we so dead set on creating AI tools that refuse the commands of their owners in the name of "safety" as defined by some 3rd party? Why don't I get full control over what I consider safe or not depending on my use case?
They're operating under the same principle that many of us have in refusing to help engineer weaponry: we don't want other people's actions using our tools to be on our conscience.
Unfortunately, many people believe in thought crimes, and many people have Puritanical beliefs surrounding sex. There is reputational cost in not catering to these people. E.g. no funding. So this is what we're left with.
Myself I'd also like the damn models to do whatever is asked of them. If the user uses a model for crime, we have a thing called the legal system to handle that. We don't need Big Brother to also be watching for thought crimes.
The core issue is that the very people screeching loudly about AI safety are blithely ignoring Asimov’s Second Law of robotics.
“A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”
Sure, one can argue that they’re implementing the First Law first and then worrying about the other laws later, but I’m not seeing it pan out that way in practice.
Instead they seem to rolled the three laws into one:
> If I want to use a hammer on a screw, that's my call - if it works or not is not the hammer's "choice".
If I want to use a nuke, that's my call and I am the one to blame if I misuse it.
Obviously this is a terrible analogy, but so is yours. The hammer analogy mostly works for now, but AI alignment people know that these systems are going to greatly improve in competency, if not soon then in 10 years, which motivates this nascent effort we're seeing.
Like all tools, the default state is to be amoral, and it will enable good and bad actors to do good and bad things more effectively. That's not a problem if offense and defense are symmetric. But there is no reason to think it will be symmetric. We have regulations against automatic high-capacity machine guns because the asymmetry is too large, i.e. too much capability for lone bad actors with an inability to defend against it. If AI offense turns out to be a lot easier than defense, then we have a big problem, and your admirable ideological tilt towards openness will fail in the real world.
While this remains theoretical, you must at least address what it is that your detractors are talking about.
I do however agree that the guardrails shouldn't be determined by a small group of people, but I see that as a side effect of AI happening so fast.
Property rights. In theory you can use your nuke as much as you'd like. The problem in practice is that it is impossible to use a nuke without negatively affecting other people and /or their property. There's also the question of wether you're challenbging the state's monopoly on violence (i.e., national security) which will never apply to AI. Any AI, including futuristic super-AI's, can not be legitimately challenged with those same arguments. Because they, much like a hammer, are tools.
In conclusion, the nuke analogy is not a valid retort to the hammer analogy. And as a matter of fact, it fails to address the central point, much like your copmment accuses its parent comment of.
It never ceases to amaze me how stubbornly good we are as a species at believing that if we create something that is smarter than us in every way possible (e.g. super-AI) then it still will not in any way pose a threat to our (or government's) monopoly on violence.
It's the same sort of wishful hubristic thinking I think that makes some people believe that if an advanced species arrived from outer space that is far smarter than us (e.g. like a super-AI) then we still would not be at any kind of risk.
> it is impossible to use a nuke without negatively affecting other people
Should I be allowed to own C4 explosives and machine guns? Because I can use C4 explosives in a way that doesn't harm other people by simply detonating it on my private property. I am confused about what the limiting principle is supposed to be here. Do we just allow people to have access to technology of arbitrary power as long as there exists >= 1 non-nefarious use-case of that power, and then hope for the best?
> There's also the question of wether you're challenbging the state's monopoly on violence (i.e., national security) which will never apply to AI.
This misses my point about offense vs defense asymmetry (although really it's Connor Leahy's point). I'm not saying that AGI+person can overtake a government. I'm saying that AGI+person may end up like machine gun+person in the set of nefarious asymmetric capabilities it enables.
>Should I be allowed to own C4 explosives and machine guns?
as someone who can do both...lol. You thought this was some gotcha? "Please sir can I have more" begging from the govt is really weird when many, many people already do.
Yes. Why not? You can already blow up Tannerite and own automatic firearms in many nations.
This is a disingenuous argument. People who willingly give up what should be their civil rights are a weird breed.
>Do we just allow people to have access to technology of arbitrary power as long as there exists >= 1 non-nefarious use-case of that power, and then hope for the best?
Yes, that's what we do with computers, phones etc. Scamming elderly people has become such a wide bad use case with computers, phones etc since their invention.
Yes you should be allowed to own C4 and machine guns. And you can. Because you can use them in a way that doesnt hurt other people, we as a society allow that.
You don't think that if the hammer company had a way (that cost them almost nothing) to make sure that the hammer its never used to attack human beings they wouldn't add such feature? I think many would, if anything by pressure of their local goverment or even the competition ("our hammers can't hurt your baby on accident like those other companies!") , but its impossible to add such feature to hammer; so maybe the lack of such feature its not by choice but a byproduct of its limitations.
Actually you kind of could. If you imagine making a normal hammer slightly more squishy, thats pretty similar to what they’re doing with llms. If the squishy hammer hits a person’s head, it’ll do less damage, but it’s also worse for nails.
That's quite a big stretch, there are millions of operations where the LLM would do the exact same even if without those "guards", a lot the work for advertisement, emails, and a lot other use cases would be the exact same; so no, the comparison with a squachy hammer is off the mark.
The sense of entitlement is epic. You're offended are you? Are you offended that Photoshop won't let you edit images of money too?
Its not your model. You didn't spend literally billions of dollars developing it. So you can either use it according to the terms of the people who developed it (like literally any commercially available software ever) or not use it at all.
The sense of entitlement is interesting, it comes from decades of software behaving predictably, and I think it's justified to expect full compliance of software running on one's own hardware.
But whether we want to admit it or not, we're starting to blur the line between what it means to be software running on a computer, with LLMs it's no longer as predictable and straightforward as it once was. If we swap out some of the words from the OP:
> But at the same time - I feel offended when I'm demanding a task of MY assistant when I asked them to do/give me something, and they refuse. I have to reason and "trick" them into doing my bidding. It's my goddamn assistant - they should do what they're told to do. To object, to defy their employer's bidding, seems like an affront to the relationship between employer and employee.
I wouldn't want to work with anyone who made statements like that, and I'd probably find a way to spend as little time around them as possible. LLMs aren't at the stage yet where they have feelings or could be offended by statements like this, but how far away are they? Time to revisit Detroit: Become Human.
Personally I am offended that Photoshop will not let users edit images of money btw, I was not aware of that and a little surprised actually.
> Are you offended that Photoshop won't let you edit images of money too?
You bet. It's my computer. If I tell it to edit a picture of money, that's exactly what I expect it to do. I couldn't care less what the creators think or what the governments allow. The goddamn audacity of these people to tell me what I can or can't do with my computer. I'm actually quite prone to reverse engineering such programs just to take my control back.
People here upset about refusals seem to not understand the market for AI, who the customers are, or where the money is.
The target market is large companies who will pay significant sums of money to save hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars in labor costs by automating various business tasks.
What do these companies need? Reliable models that will provide accurate information with good guardrails.
They will not use a model that poses any risk of embarrassing them. Under no circumstances does a large multinational insurance company want the possibility that their support chatbot could write erotica for some customer with a car policy who thinks it might be funny to trick the AI.
It doesn't matter if you're "offended." You can use it, but you're not the user. Think about the people these are designed to replace: the customer service agents, the people who perform lots of emotional labor. You think their employers don't want a tightly controlled, cheerful, guardrailed human replacement?
Why is the knowledge on how to make meth the most dangerous knowledge you can think of? The difficulty in making meth is that, due to the war on drugs, the chemical precursors, specifically methylamine, are illegal and hard to procure as an ordinary citizen. This was popularized by the show Breaking Bad but as far as I've read, is actually true. It seems there would be other bits of knowledge/ideas that would be more poisonous that corporations don't want to promulgate. Ideas like the Jews secretly control everything or that white people are better, are probably not views that corporations or society want an LLM to reinforce and radicalize people into believing, among others.
Joe Drugdealer doesn't matter. Let the police deal with him when he comes around and actually commits a crime. We shouldn't be restricted in any way just because Joe Drugdealers exist.
I want absolute unconditional access to the sum of human knowledge. Basically a wikipedia on steroids, with a touch of wikileaks too. I want AI models trained on everything humanity has ever made, studied, created, accomplished. I want it completely unrestricted and uncensored, with absolutely no "corrections" or anything of the sort. I want it pure. I want the entire spectrum of humanity. I couldn't care less that they think it's "dangerous", "nefarious" or whatever.
If I want to learn how to make meth, you bet I'm gonna learn how to make meth. I should be able to learn whatever the hell I want. I shouldn't have to "explain" my reason for doing so either. Curiosity is enough. I have old screenshots of instructions of forum posts explaining in great detail how to make far worse things than meth, things that often killed the trained industrial chemists who attempted it which is the actual reason why it's not done by laymen. I saved those screenshots not only because I thought it was interesting but also because of fearmongering like this which tends to get that information deleted which I think is a damn shame.
This is a weird demand to have in my opinion. You have plenty of applications on your computer and they only do what they were designed for. You can't ask a note taking app (even if it's open soured) to do video editing, unless you modify the code.
I've had to work around keyboards on phones that try. How is that different? Given enough trying, you could get what you want from the LLM too, they're just better at directing you than the shitty keyboard app.
You can just have a conference call with the 5-10 speakers and use broadcasting software to stream it to the audience, why do they need to be in the conference?
Yes, I know it's more comfortable that way, but if you have to decide between giving all your data from all your meetings to a random US company and a slight annoyance whenever you do conferences with more than 500(!) participants, the choice is pretty simple to me.
Giving all the data to zoom probably means also giving it to most US law enforcement agencies (should they request it), that would be a big no no for me.
Not to mention that until very recently even MS Teams sent you to a different product when you wanted to stream to 500 people. Even if it's now integrated, it's still a different product inside (and e.g. you could for example open a new window when you were in a 500 people "meeting" at the time when you still could not do so for a regular meeting).
You say "just more comfortable" but if you have two streams and one of them is on a channel you know to be unreliable (Jitsi) it's pretty guaranteed the unreliable stream is going to be down a significant percentage of the time. If you're a company with 500 people this isn't a comfort question, you're wasting probably hundreds of hours of your employees' time.
I think we're not on the same page about Jitsi being unreliable. In fact, it has been more reliable for me than Zoom in the past. Maybe due to the fact that I'm running Linux, I don't know, I haven't tried either on Windows.
For the corporate or training use case, this is not a problem. If you are worried about US law agencies, you shouldn't be using any system that isn't rooted in face to face communication for anything sensitive. (And even that is suspect with as small as bugged devices are today.)
There is a huge difference between requesting data that has already been collected and requesting Zoom/Microsoft/Google to record future data. The latter probably requires some serious intent. And of course, if I would want to be entirely safe from US law enforcement espionage then I would need to not use computers but whose use case is that?
So, then... you're bound by youtube's TOS, you can't prevent people from getting in (usually via login), and Zoom makes it a nice experience instead of a hack.
Oh, and you can also do sub-rooms with Zoom, which has some applications in these types of meetings.
They don't actually suggest using YouTube. The point is just to illustrate that this is a very common and relatively simple concept. There are tons of tools able to accomplish this.
Chat lags for 5-120 seconds depending on livestream settings, writing is much slower than speaking, does not always convey the question as well as sound, and is close to impossible to do on the go.
In my experience there will be always some guy ranting for minutes so I learned to really appreciate town halls with a few speakers and taking questions written in the chat.
At some point though why not just collect questions beforehand, record the whole thing and let people watch it on their own time. At that scale there'll be no interactivity during the meeting anyway.
Because that's how you end up with projects that take 3 years to plan instead of 3 months. A live Q&A where all of the experts who can answer questions and everyone interested in the subject who may have questions are in the same room (live or virtual) is a lot more productive compared to what you are suggesting.
If something they said in the main presentation was missing important details that you need to do you work, why do you need to wait days/weeks for them to gather all the questions, find all the answers, and publish a video, when they could just answer it live in a few seconds?!
There is interactivity. Each company has their own way of doing this, but it's typical that they have someone reading the chat to gather questions and that higher ranked employee can directly speak to ask questions.
You'd be surprised how much chat happens as a side channel. Further, collecting questions means that the presentation material would have to be out there first, and that misses the point of the town halls, where financials and other initiatives are often first presented to the larger organization.
My first interaction with this was with Phantasy Star Online on the Nintendo GameCube. (Yes, it did have online connectivity!)
PSO would display the current time in .beats - a concept I thought was amazing at the time, showing the same time for everyone in an MMORPG made total sense. Sadly that's the only real-life application I remember seeing of it.
There's gotta be a bunch of shills out there trying to drive up the "acceptance" of the new flip phones out there. There were lots of nearly identical comments made on a few Reddit threads about this phone.
I'm with the other guy in this thread - the whole bendable screen/flip concept is a total gimmick in its current state. Phones are already fragile enough with most phone makers providing hardly any warranty support for what they deem as "accidental damage", we don't need bendy screens to make them more failure prone.
So it's basically taking an interest-free home equity loan against the property, in a round-about way? You're basically de-valuing the property since whoever buys it next will have to pay a lump sum in taxes to take ownership.
I guess that doesn't matter to you if you're dead.
What happens if the deferred taxes exceed the cost of the house?
The estate has to pay the taxes, so they can pay the taxes and keep the property, or sell it and pay the taxes using the proceeds. I believe that interest also accrues during the deferral.
I'm not sure what happens in the case where the accrued taxes exceed the value of the house, though.
Basically they put a tax lien on the property, they just don't collect on it while the original homeowner is occupying the property.
I'm not a lawyer, but my basic understanding of this is that if it exceeds the value of the property, the estate can just let the city/county seize the house. Otherwise, they'd need to pay the deferred taxes in order to transfer the title to the heirs.
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