> Whereas if they have two separate $1 charges, that reduces the loss somehow
This is what is being questioned. I've spent several years working in merchant processing, and I've never heard of a billing structured offered by a processor in which it would be advantageous to split charges up. No one understands why Patreon would be losing money by bundling. It could be something with anti-fraud or anti-carding, but I'd have to chew on that a bit more.
> I think companies not prone to this are ones where their product is a technical one like cloud services where the business really is the engineering and engineering isn't a means to an end.
I currently work for a company providing "cloud services" to other software shops. Part of what drew me here was that the ethos around how we get stuff done does encapsulate this. The engineering culture is pervasive. Here's to hoping we can maintain that as we grow.
Yes, I get back only JSON. I found that providing a sample object is the best way to be consistent. I also have some basic validation on fields and have follow-up calls if needed. For example, dialog must be 1 character and at max 255. If I see empty dialog or too long dialog (or any other invalid fields), I pass back the JSON to GPT as well as the basic list of 'this property is wrong due to X' and make it provide a new JSON object.
GPT4 is much better than GPT3.5 at producing valid JSON and nothing else.
What I’ve found quite useful is to extract text from the first { and last }. This solves the problem of GPT adding some “helpful” explanations outside the JSON.
There are also some more lenient JSON parsers that will handle comments and other non-standard things. They can be a bit hard to add in to some frameworks as it’s kind of the opposite of what you are normally trying to do which is reject bad input.
I feel like I am and always have been a "day-to-day" optimist, but I struggle to apply that to larger, societal problems.
Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire. Income disparity seems to be increasing locally and globally. The military industrial complex of the largest nation-states feels eternal, as if it is a fundamental part of neoliberal capitalism.
I can "half-full" almost everything day to day. Financial issues, medical issues, family problems... never easy, but doable. I can handle it, smile on my face, and tough it out. But when I'm left alone with my thoughts, its hard for me not to draw the conclusion that the world my children (or their children) grow up in will be worse-off, and they will live harder lives than we have.
More people are concerned about climate change now, and the younger generations are more concerned than ever. Hopefully that leads to people in general making better choices, and more importantly, electing people who aren't deep in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.
We made it through a cold war. Previous generations had to live with the very real risk of a fast escalating total nuclear disaster. We still have nukes but I generally don't worry about a fast escalating "everyone launches everything they have and we are ill prepared to shoot them all out of the sky before they make contact" doomsday scenario. Not only did we make it through that, but we put humans on the moon during that window of time and humans made some pretty significant scientific advances with the backdrop of all that stress.
> Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire.
Humans are pretty resilient and have been pretty good at mitigating large scale problems. Yeah we are impacting our environment, but we aren't the only species that does this. Many species, left unchecked, go through natural boom+bust cycles where they blast past the carrying capacity of their ecosystem and then bust the next generation.
At no point do deer look around and go "hey, we are eating all the food, maybe we shouldn't do that?" - they just eat and reproduce and nature sorts it out. They aren't morally corrupt for causing a boom/bust cycle, they're just animals like us. However, when it comes to humans, we have blasted past our ecosystem's natural carrying capacity (we've been past it for a long time now). Not only do we look around and go "hey, this is a problem" - something that puts us in a league all our own - but we have repeatedly solved that problem. And now we get to tackle the next set of problems.
Simply being aware that we are responsible for climate change and the ending of the Holocene is a huge achievement for a species, let alone putting together plans to over come it.
That is pretty cool!
What's even cooler is that all of the growing pains we are going through are putting us on a trajectory to literally save all life on Earth. Folks like to kick around the can about how humans are destroying Earth's environment. That's true, and we need to work our butts off to keep everything balanced moving forward. There are very smart humans working very hard to keep our ecosystems from collapsing.
But, no matter what we do to save our ecosystems, we are over 75% through the window of time life can survive on this planet.
A world without humans is a world where Earth slowly moves out of the habitable zone and finds itself in a complete extinction event in ~500m years - with little to no hope of any life bouncing back.
Getting life off this planet is a noble cause. Doing that requires either:
* a biological pathway to interstellar travel beyond the micro-organism scale (maybe nature will produce this in 500m years? find that _exceptionally_ unlikely)
* a species to develop the technology to get itself off this rock and survive the extremely hostile environments in space
Humans are doing that latter, and I have no reason to believe any other species would do a better job than we have getting to "building rockets and settling planets." Not only is our species going to the stars, but we are going to bring life on Earth with us when we do.
Because we are in fact so disconnected from our military today, modern people have forgotten that human civilization itself has been a military industrial complex forever. Not much to do with capitalism in particular.
I think there is a crucial semantic disconnect here, that may be partially stemmed from how much heavy lifting the relatively new term "military industrial complex" is doing. I'm likely partially to blame.
I use the term to refer to the the status quo of the relationship between interest groups, legislative bodies, and the bureaucratic system. I don't think I've forgotten anything. Some degree of defense was, and still is, necessary. I'm not refuting that. But, I believe that current manifestations of this relationship has lead to a system that is largely driven by private interests that have little to do with the defense or security of the people.
Yep, the current Russian war in Ukraine exposed the fact that the western 'military complex' isn't that industrial anymore, as (for example) the total annual production of artillery shells is less than what we'd shoot in a single average day of WW2.
There's still a lot of money spent, but it's spent less on actual industrial capacity but rather mostly on various high-tech R&D things - probably because then you can convert a larger portion of the order to profits instead of hardware.
I'd say that, colloquially at least (and maybe in a literary sense as well), the "military industrial complex" broadly covers the flow of money from a government and its military to the defense industry at large. (terms again can be a bit strange here, but the "defense-industry" describes an area of economic activity not "the refinement of raw materials into products").
> the reason why content creators get paid is because people buy shit they don't need, and AI will amplify this much more easily than humans
Eh, I think this may be undervaluing the human part of content creation. People spend thousands of dollars for single seats at concerts because they've decided (or been told by taste-makers) that "this is what is good." I don't see that paradigm of consumption changing. I think it will vary by medium but some artistic mediums seem to really maintain a strong "creator connection." That is, a lot of the appreciation of the art seems to stem from some form of adoration for its creator. Sure, sure, "death of the artist" and all, but as you said, we need take into account the current form, not the "content creators inside a bubble."
Most of the musicians whose tickets go for thousands of dollars these days either were hugely successful by taking risks before the rise of algorithmic taste-making (and have older, wealthier audiences) or are basically meat puppets of the ad industry whose music, clothing style, branding, attitude, play frequency on streaming services, and even ticket prices are basically hydra heads of the same giant algorithmic psy-op that generates 40 songs per genre per year... pretty much the same as the latest machine-written sloppy ballad sung by the prole washerwoman in "1984". Pointing to the current hollow shell of creative void that is the music industry just shows how AI will use human faces to trick humans into feeling something and paying for the "experience". Yes, we still have Springsteen... but there's no new Springsteen. If e.g. Adam Levine were replaced by a humanoid robot or a deepfake, would any of his fans actually notice or care?
> If e.g. Adam Levine were replaced by a humanoid robot or a deepfake, would any of his fans actually notice or care?
As a Hatsune Miku fan... I can say... Yes?
People have been using AI generated vocals for well over a decade. The Hatsune Miku community differentiates songs and can tell who the composers or artists are even if they're all using the same voice.
There's a pretty big difference between say... "Karakuri Pierrot" and "Senbonzakura"
They give you really nice incremental builds out of the box, which are particularly easy to set up with gatsby cloud (the actual purchase here). Their abstractions are more opinionated, but a lot more "just works" off the shelf with configuration instead of coding.
This - what I wanted was the incremental builds. Also lots of nice starter templates. I have a custom framework I created for incrementally built docs sites for FastComments - but in the future I was looking into Gatsby for marketing/doc sites.
I am not really a NextJS fan. WordPress is an option but I like having the docs in version control.
I switched to "vscode-restclient" about a year ago and never looked back. It has variables, everything is saved as text, and I can commit my request suite to source control for collaboration's sake.
The only reason I use Postman still is the Authentication tab has really nice helpers for getting tokens (OAuth 1/2) and signing requests HMAC. It even works with Azure Active Directory.
I this true? Wouldn't the IRS have something to say about apartments being classified as a business expense when it is used as housing in addition to "office space?"
