• 5 Posts
  • 91 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • I have had a plex instance but when they started adding their own movies and crapola into it, and requiring logins and etc etc etc I started keeping a Jellyfin instance live as a hedge. I still use Plex primarily, but use Jellyfin and keep it patched just in case. If there’s any kind of ugly action with Plex, I feel like my bets are pretty well hedged. Plex definitely has a lot more polish than Jellyfin, but I wouldn’t doubt if there is a rug-pull in some way or another. After all, Plex sold a bunch of lifetime subscriptions ONCE but they still end up paying to support those. Sooner or later they are going to want more money again.









  • My last job was at a video game studio and it was kinda eyeopening the amount of generic story boarding / art work they would send over to Eastern Europe / Asia to be done for cheap.

    Sure, but don’t you have to like work with those guys, give them a brief on what to do, provide feedback do revisions and all that. By the time there is an AI as good as those Eastern Europe fellows, it’ll be smart enough to do a lot more than storyboards. I see a lot of people reducing a field to one of its activities.

    Let me put it this way, if I gave a business a magic box that all you had to do was explain your problem and it generates perfect code, they’d still have problems. Because we have those boxes today, they’re called software engineers, and there’s a lot more work that has to be done besides just typing in the code. Business people aren’t sure what to ask for, how to ask for it, how to get it done, etc. All that mushy soft stuff in the middle is why you have developers making a decent payday, because it’s a lot of work and not at all easy to just hand to ChatGPT.


  • Asking what AI is going to do for the average person in 1-3 years is like asking what is the PC going to do for the average person in 1980.

    If you were a PC startup in 1980, this was very a relevant question, since PCs at home really didn’t take off in a big way until the web which was almost 20 years later. Look at how many PC manufacturers went out of business between 1980-2000. This is kind of my point, AI is so over-invested right now that if there are not HUGE returns in a short timeframe, there’s going to be some serious blood out there.



  • Tech workers, artists and other industries have long had to compete with work being sent overseas. Now it’s even cheaper and faster.

    This is the part I don’t entirely see eye-to-eye with you on. Right now, AI is eating the extreme low end of the work… for example, if someone needs a picture for their article, they might generate it with AI instead of buy stock illustrations from a real person.

    If someone is making a site on WIX for their new business, that leverages AI too, but just for simple stuff.

    By the time AI is able to do those jobs full stop, then I’ll have a worry. “Serious” artists do a heck of a lot more than just sit down with a pen. They go visit clients, figure out what to do, research, negotiate with other people at the business, etc. Same thing with developers. They aren’t just typing in code all day, they are meeting with other departments, figuring out requirements, etc. None of that is easy or quick. By the time you have an AI smart enough to either do 95% of a developer’s job or 95% of an artists’ job, it will be smart enough to do nearly every other job in America. If the same AI also comes with humanoid robots that can reason about their environment and move things around, then you’re also risking a lot of labor jobs, like picking in a warehouse. However, unlike proponents of AI I think all of the above is decades away, not years away. If it’s really decades away, you can kiss the current round of AI startups goodbye because they won’t exist by that point.

    For many, many, many of the AI startups today, if they don’t start showing a profit within 1-3 years they are GONE. Part of showing a profit is being useful, and I think outside of little niches here and there, the amount of money getting poured into it does not in any way resemble the money coming out of it.



  • A lot will fail yes, but I think there’s actually a lot of value in AI and many will succeed. Blockchain has always been a solution in search of a problem, but AI actually can help in a lot of ways.

    Well, what are those ways and when can we expect to see them? I keep hearing that “oh yeah, the very NEXT version of AI will do your job for you” but it always seems to be on the way. In the same way I can use blockchain tech for a few things here and there, I can use AI in the same way today. However, with all these billions and billions of dollars getting invested into AI right now, how will it change the average person’s life in 1 - 3 years? I use that scale of time because that’s pretty much how long startup runways last. If they don’t turn a profit in that time frame, they go to the big AI graveyard in the sky.