Image generation is nothing like AI code generation in this regard. Copying artist style is one of the things that is explicitly quite easy to do for open-weight models. Go to civitai and there are a million LORAs trained specifically on recreating artist style. Earlier on in the Stable Diffusion days it even got fairly meanspirited - someone would make a lora for an artist (or there would be enough in the training data for the base model to not need it) and an artist would complain about people using it to copy their style, and then there would be an influx of people making more and better LORAs for that artist. Sam Yang put out what was initially a relatively tame tweet complaining about it, and people instantly started trying to train them just to replicate his style even more closely.
Note, the original artist whose style Stable Diffusion was supposedly copying (Greg someone, a "concept art matte painting" artist) was in fact never in the training data.
Style is in the eye of the beholder and it seems that the text encoder just interpreted his name closely enough for it to seemingly work.
BattleTech is somewhat of a competitor, and a variety of smaller games have some niches.
Plenty of people use proxies, too. There's places that do monthly packs of new STLs that could be an entire faction army, and there's long been places that sold "definitely not Space Marines and Sisters of Battle" minis too.
They don't have a threat of anyone overtaking them at current, but AI making alternatives in this vein even cheaper could eat away at portions of their bottom line.
As a Battletech lover, the phrase "somewhat of a competitor" is a bit vague. I see Battletech as a 3%er - one of a few 3%ers - compared to the near-monopoly of WH40K (and fantasy WH).
As an aside, I am somewhat disappointed that Battletech's appeal to the mainstream is largely down to the Mechwarrior games which have minimal lore.
There is so much more that could be done. But the current owners seem to be pretty poor at translating all their paperwork stories for the modern crowd.
> One thing I've found when talking to non-technical board gamers about AI is that while they’re 100% against using AI to generate art or game design, when you ask them about using AI tools to build software or websites the response is almost always something like "Programmers are expensive, I can't afford that. If I can use AI to cut programmers out of the process I'm going to do it."
I had a conversation with an artist friend some time back. He uses Squarespace for his portfolio website. He was a few drinks in, and ranting about how even if it's primarily artists using these tools professionally at the moment, it'll still lead to a consolidation of jobs, how it's built on the skillset and learning of a broader community than those that will profit, etc. How the little guy was going to get screwed over and over by this sort of thing.
I started out doing webdesign work before I moved more to the operations and infrastructure management side of things, but I saw the writing on the wall with CMS systems, WYSIWYG editors, etc. At the time building anything decent still took someone doing design and dev work, but I knew that they would get better over time, and figured I should make the change.
So I asked him about this. I spoke about how yeah, the people behind Squarespace had the expertise - just like the artists using AI now - but every website built with it or similar is a job that formerly would have gone to the same sort of little guy he was talking about. How it's a consolidation of all the learnings and practices built out by that larger community, where the financial benefits are heavily consolidated. I told him it doesn't much matter to the end web designer whether or not the job got eliminated by non-AI automation and software or an LLM, the work is still gone and the career less and less viable.
I've had similar conversations with artists before. They invariably maintain that it's different, somehow. I don't relish jobs disappearing, but it's nothing new. Someday, maybe enough careers will vanish that we'll need to figure out some sort of system that doesn't involve nearly every adult human working.
I didn't fear reprisal from Scott Adams when he was alive, either.
And there are plenty of people willing to step in for Scott and defend him, as evidenced by the contents here.
Someone dying doesn't mean the consequences of their words and actions disappear and acting like we should pretend that death washes away those consequences is silly.
As much as I dislike Adams and disagree with a lot of the attempts to paper over a lot of reprehensible stuff, he gave it a try, abandoned it, and publicly denounced it after it didn't work, and even spoke out against the pressuring campaigns done by ivermectin/etc. quacks to push people to waste time, money, and hope on quack treatments.
There's much better examples of areas where he was off the rails than him spending a month on a relatively safe treatment trying to stay alive before giving up when faced with reality.
The man spend a tremendous amount of time trying to discredit the entire medical industry. In the past he has claimed to avoid cancer through prayer. This is part of a pattern.
he gave it a try, abandoned it, and publicly denounced it after it didn't work
I'm not sure why that should be lauded. A sample size of 1 (and a trial length of merely 1 month, according to other posts) does not make a convincing study to warrant any public statements.
When there is no science behind it and you've been convinced by a bunch of charlatans hoping to make a quick buck off of taking advantage of the fear of their victims, there's not really a need to turn your experience into a study.
It's a matter of realizing you're being taken advantage of and speaking out about the experience.
I don't know that I would call en vitro studies promising. Cancer would be long be a solved problem if even a tenth of the stuff that kills cancer cells in a petri dish was viable in humans.
Sure, there's a few. But 3 rodent studies isn't exactly enough evidence for a layperson to worry about, either. It's not even much of a signal for scientists in that area of research.
Ivermectin is pretty safe for people to use regardless of whether or not they have parasites, so sure, do the human RCTs. Maybe we'll get lucky and have another tool in our anti-cancer toolbox.
But trying to extrapolate out that it's reasonable for people to take it for cancer based on the current evidence is premature, at best.
They are a required step along the way to human trials.
But over 90% of drugs that show promise in rodents flunk out in human trials.
Something working in rodents is an indicator that it might be worth doing testing to see if it works and is safe for humans. But if you bet against it panning out, you'd still be right the overwhelming majority of the time.
The only thing you can project from rodent trial success is that it is worth continuing to study. It should not guide any human usage at that point.
No. It's still absurd to project human outcomes from rodent studies.
90-95% of them don't pan out! And that's of the ones that progress from rodent studies to human trials. The actual number is even higher, but more difficult to track.
Surely you can see how it would be absurd to extrapolate success from something with, at best, a 5-10% chance of panning out? And panning out as in being approved - lots of things that are approved have less than 100% success rate, particularly in this area.
During peak covid-19 I read a lot of ivermectin studies posted in HN. Most were just horrible, with obvious mistakes. If you pick one, I can give a try to roast it.
My personal quick rubric for determining if an ivermectin study showing improvement for cv19 outcomes is likely to be trustworthy:
Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?
Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid
No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.
I remember a preprint. I think it was comparing the recorery rate of
a) Ivermectin in the best hospital in the capital city of one of our most poor provinces in Argentina
b) The average in the same poor province
I don't expect too many problems with parasites there. They implicitly decided that the difference was ivermectin, not that the hospital is probably x10 better than the average of the province.
Doble blind randomized controlled group or it didn't happen.
> Complete tumor regression was observed in 6/15 mice on the combination treatment, 1/20 on ivermectin alone, 1/10 on anti-PD1 antibody alone, and 0/25 on no treatment.
As I mentioned above (another comment), pharma tends to avoid developing applications for generic/cheap drugs so we may not see more research on this front. Who knows.
If there is a x5 improvement they will get a method to package both drugs together and sell them for x10 the price. You surely want a profesional mix in the high tech lab instead of a random guy mixing tubes in the back room. Another trick is to add something to the molecule like a methyl -CH3, show that the new version is 10% even better and charge x20 for it.
So my guess is that there is some problem to use this mix, but as I said I can't find any obvious error and it's really interesting. I'd love to read a better analysis from someone that is an expert in the area.
When my everyday life is no longer impacted by politics, I'll be able to put it aside for a day, because I'll be able to ignore the impact politics has on me for that day.
But that's not the world we live in. It won't ever be the world we live in.
The entire purpose of your brand-new account seems to be complaining about HN and comparing it to Reddit. Is this how you are going to raise the level of discourse here?
Scott Adams said that Republicans would be hunted down and that there would be a good chance they would all be dead if Biden was elected and that the police would do nothing to stop it.
Dilbert was brilliant. Adams' political discourse after that became his primary schtick was quite frequently insane.
BMI still isn't great for fat people. An active fat person is going to have a significant amount of muscle compared to a sedentary fat person at the same body weight - just doing things carrying around that weight will build muscle. Some health markers, this won't matter for - your heart doesn't like pumping blood to a 300lb body, whether that's at 50% BF or 8% - but for a lot it does. Lipids, insulin resistance, etc. are going to be quite different in someone at 40% BF vs. 20% BF at similar weights with similar genetics.
Unfortunately it's not so easy to get a good BF%. BIA scales are probably what most people have access to, either at home or at their local gym, or calipers, but both are very inaccurate at getting totals and at best can help you understand trend directions. There are places to get cheap DEXAs in a lot of cities these days, but not everywhere, and $30 each time you go is still expensive for some people.
BF% and FFMI are both a lot more useful for everyone than BMI.
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