#i wouldn’t define ai generated art as art but i also don’t think we need to be gatekeepkng the definition of art. bad art is still art idk

[gayestcowboy]

i’m tired of the ai generated gay sex cats i don’t want to keep seeing them everywhere i’m sure it’s very funny and i’m sure there’s lots of theoretical ethics discussions to be had about it but have you considered. i don’t care

[decodad]

“Argument - “Artists will just need to focus on telling stories through video games, animations, and comics.”

I have already mentioned the biggest problem with this argument–the AIs will be very capable of running on autopilot, and they will get just as good at telling stories as they are at making images and videos. They will produce novels, essays, and scripts in amounts that can fill the library-of-babel, each piece a composite of half quotations and unattributed swipings. All this auto-generated text can be processed by the image and video AIs to generate long-format media, and the cycle will be complete, self-contained, and human-free. 

[...]

This will completely flood the realm of story and the future will find itself overwhelmingly ghost-written. The “anime” that you’ve been dreaming of making since you were 8, which you are willing to forsake all of art to produce, will get the attention it deserves in this environment–none. And when your dream project, regurgitated in moments by an AI, receives no attention, no clout, and no money, you will rest well knowing you earned it. Not even your mother will be able to find it in the unending surge of the Mega Feed. This wouldn’t be a problem on its own- you were otherwise never going to make the thing anyway- except that you will be ruining the market for everyone who is positioned to pull something off by their own efforts. You will gain nothing and hurt your friends and peers.

The idea that everyone will be empowered to tell their story is one of the few arguments for AI art that compels me, there’s a nuanced discussion to be had here, but I believe it is ultimately bankrupt. It is a nice sentiment, and I can empathize with the frustrations of being an artist who feels their skills do not measure up to the scope of their vision– but we’re overlooking something very important here. You don’t just want to tell your story, and you don’t just want to tell it well–you want it to matter that you told your story. The AIs will rob you, and everyone else, of this. 

The execution of your petulant “vision” by the AIs will ensure that no one cares about your story, and that it is washed away in the heaving sea of AI dross. Your art already doesn’t get attention. It’s not going to get any more attention when it’s competing with the unending stream of self-generated and highly targeted comics, novels, images, films, games, and songs. As I’ve said, these AIs will not need to be prompted by humans for very long and will instead auto-respond to the ebb and flow of the internet, current news, real time sales, and even private conversations. After all, we have already readied these inputs for them. We all feel a little uncomfortable when our phone shows us an ad for something we mentioned to our friend over dinner, but what happens when it shows you a movie it made just for you about your break up? A song about that careless word from your mother? A finished version of that comic idea you started researching? You’ll start getting notifications saying- “Hey! Check out one thousand finished versions of your dream!” Our ambient digital systems already have intimate access to so many of the inputs that define our taste- in some sense we sold our souls long ago.

So, you may be able to tell your story, but at the cost of its complete irrelevancy, which will likely have the effect of making you resent that you ever had the idea in the first place. Stories don’t achieve their incredible effect simply by existing. They live and die on human connection and intellect. AI will not “democratize art”--that’s just one of the copy-pasted platitudes of those vapid marketing execs spoon-feeding you your own doom. In a democracy, your voice matters. In a world flooded by AI media, your voice has no chance of being heard.

I also want to point out here that the people making these things will depend on you thinking they hold the silver key to your artistic vision. They need you to feel worthless and like you missed your chance to tell your story. That you got too old, or don’t have the time or resources or ability or what-have-you; that way you will need their product. This way you will support them monetarily and, most importantly, you will help them change the laws and sway the culture to allow their rapacious strip mining of all creative labor. They will always be incentivized to make you feel lowly, dependent, incapable, and slave to their kaiju whims. 

And when they’re done, they’ll pull the rug out from under you, of course. They have no actual reason to let you have this stuff for free- they don’t care about you. They can say they do but that means nothing. Once they’ve made it impossible for you to make a living as an artist, and you’ve helped them change the laws, and they’ve ostracized you from your peers by turning you against them, they’ll just take it away and sell it to Google and Facebook and YouTube and the rest- because they stand to make billions from them and nothing from you.”

— excerpt from “The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs”

[theneircarebear]

My Infinity War Rant (And MCU Rant, by Extension)

Spoiler-free TL;DR: I’d give Infinity War a 4/10. Pretty action movie with some fun humour, but plot was executed poorly and the current state of the MCU is so annoyingly amatonormative, that I was honestly annoyed and bored throughout Infinity War and unfortunately likely will be for future films.

Some spoilers and expansion on my ideas under the cut. Please note that I am not an MCU expert (I have not seen every single title, nor have I read Marvel comics).

Avengers: Infinity War Critique

Too many characters and, by extension, too many storylines plagued this film. I suspected that this would happen, but hoped for some coherence anyway. Viewers were granted little. I think that a big fault of this film was that the writers/director tried to cram too much into one film. I found a few of the individual plots really interesting (e.g., Gamora and Thanos’ storyline, the execution of the Asgardians and Thor’s mourning over his people and his brother AND ALSO the fancy axe weapon that was not given nearly enough explanation, why exactly Scarlet Witch is powerful enough to destroy the Infinity Stones but no one else), and I would have loved separate movies that addressed these. Because they were crammed into one film, though, they seemed rushed. Loki’s death was sad, but I found that I didn’t really care all that much because Thor was given a five-second sad scene about it and then proceeded to be reserved for the rest of the film. Gamora and Thanos’ relationship was well-explored, and I remember that part of the film best; but I found that the cuts to the other superheroes and their storylines took away from that main story and just made me wait longer to watch the storyline I actually liked. Also, the end of it where Gamora was sacrificed (out of love) was really cheesy and stereotypical. I think that this film could have been decent even with all of the characters still in it, but the problem I had was that too many of the characters got Center Stage. I think that the film would have flowed better and been more coherent if many of these characters took supporting roles instead of being explored just as much as the main ones. Alternatively, since I know that many superheroes owned the Infinity Stones that were crucial to the plot and therefore had to be Center Stage at some point, concentration on those characters and cutting unnecessary other characters would have worked well. Did we really need so much focus on Ironman (and, by extension, Pepper)? No, not really, in my opinion. Did we need to bring Black Panther into the fray when the whole plan of Shuri taking out Vision��s Infinity Stone ended up being a waste of time anyway? No, I don’t really think so. Little scenes that detracted from the overall plot plagued this movie and just made it more incoherent.

The message of this film was not readily apparent to viewers. This is a consequence of cramming so much into one film, I think. I noticed that the ending of the film confused everyone in my theatre. Spoiler alert: half of the superheroes disappear into dust (i.e., Thanos wins). The obvious message here is that not everyone wins all the time (and that includes superheroes). I don’t take issue with this message necessarily, because I think it can be good to remind people to be realistic, but I do think that it was an odd direction to take for a movie of the superhero genre, and in the Avengers titles in particular. Superhero movies are meant to be escapist, and people go to watch them to see the hero win through some fantastic fireworks. “Well then obviously this film was meant to counter expectations and subvert the genre, so it’s Art,” you might say. If this was the goal, though, then I think it was executed poorly and with the wrong franchise. The Avengers titles are big frontrunners in the superhero boom of the present. When the average movie-watcher wants to see a typical superhero movie they will probably go to a popular one like the Avengers. You don’t have the art-appreciating people go to these films. Those people go see indie films or films that they already know exist to subvert the superhero genre (the Deadpool films come to mind here - so if the MCU already has a “genre-subverting” franchise, then why would they do that again with something very popular that was never designed to stray so much from genre norms?). I think that Infinity War could have still gotten the “not everybody wins all the time” message across in the film pretty well while still sticking to the superhero formula by having a conclusion beyond the one that we saw. Audience members might believe that Thanos smugly watching the sunset is the end of the movie but SURPRISE, one last battle fixes things or something. That’s something that many other superhero movies make use of and I think is effective. You can still convey the idea that battles are sometimes lost, but the point of superhero movies is to show that, no matter what, the war will be won. OK, so if that was the message the director wanted to go with, I think it was poorly executed mainly because of the ending. But I also think it was poorly executed in its writing and flow of other parts of the plot. I could tell that there was an attempt to focus on relationships between the supers: romantic plots, getting over rivalry (between Captain America and Ironman after Civil War’s happenings, for example), learning to team up with new and foreign supers, etc. Those attempts were all right, but could have been way better if, again, there weren’t so many of these subplots happening at the same time. They also distracted from the main message. Captain America and Ironman got over their differences pretty quickly and with no confrontation, which I thought was strange, even in the “ignore our grievances for the greater good” scenario. Wakanda was very quick to open itself up to participate in a war, considering its history and general distrust of others, honestly. The first thing Wakanda did after opening itself up publicly was fight, which is the absolute last thing anyone wanted to do. Because the film flip-flopped between so many ideas and morals, I found myself getting annoyed or confused or bored with the film because not much progress was being made with the main plot and I didn’t really get what the main message of the film was supposed to be. Every scene in a film should have a purpose, and there were many scenes I watched that honestly didn’t seem to have one except to appeal to niche viewers (that, again, probably weren’t the majority of the population watching this movie).

This brings me to my issue with the MCU in general, and with much of other media (it wouldn’t be fair to say only superhero movies have this problem): unnecessary romantic subplots and pretend feminism. Man, was I completely bored with Scarlet Witch and Vision’s relationship. Man, was I so annoyed that nearly every single main female superhero was paired off at some point in the MCU. Black Widow had a completely unnecessary stint with the Hulk. Scarlet Witch pretty quickly shifted from mourning her own brother to pursuing a romance with an AI. The idea that every female needs to have a romantic relationship is annoying and, frankly, unrealistic. As someone who identifies as aromantic, as well, I am so tired of seeing many of the superheroines I admire be forced into random relationships. This idea is harmful even for romantic people: romance is not the be-all-end-all of life. I didn’t take issue with Wonder Woman’s pursuance of romance. It was realistic and made sense for her character, and it was also not her character’s defining role in the story. It was also afforded a lot of development relative to the random romances we have seen in Marvel’s titles, namely the Avengers ones. I’m tired of films bowing to amatonormativity, and giving characters love interests when there aren’t any coherent logical bases for them. Individual superhero movies (like the Ironman titles, for example) can [more] successfully develop relationships, but in action-centered titles with a tonne of characters (like Avengers), there isn’t the time or place to be dealing with such things. Scarlet Witch and Vision’s relationship (as much as I hated it existing in the first place) felt incredibly rushed in the film. Ironman’s random kissing scene with Pepper was not important to the film at all - Pepper made little to no further appearance in the film later on. Her concern over the phone was enough to let us know that Ironman’s superheroing bothered her and put strain on their relationship. We didn’t need an additional scene to reaffirm their relationship, or establish it because, let’s be honest, Infinity War was not made to cater to audiences that hadn’t seen any of the previous films. Now the pretend feminism. Giving every female up to romance is one way the MCU perpetuates stereotypes that every girl wants to be in a relationship. But another big thing I have seen in many recent Marvel films (and other superhero films or just films where women are fighting anything) is that women are almost always and exclusively paired up to fight other women. The main villains are predominantly male, and the male superheroes get to fight them. One particular scene in Infinity War comes to mind that really gets at this well. Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, and Okoye are all fighting a female baddie. Just before this fight sequence, Scarlet Witch got to show off her incredible power by wiping out a large portion of the enemy horde sprinting into Wakanda. Okoye’s comment about Scarlet Witch’s power made me think that now that she’s on the field, the lads can have her help to take everyone down. But she doesn’t do that. Instead, she’s made to fight the female antagonist. If Scarlet Witch had such power, why wasn’t she on the team to go fight Thanos? Especially if she has enough power to destroy the Infinity Stones. I suspect it has something to do with the relationship she has with Vision and wanting to stay near him, which I think is a mightily convenient excuse and kind of boils her character down to one that will put romance above everything else in her life. This fight scene isn’t the only time Marvel (and many other films) does this female vs. female thing. I find that while these films claim to be feminist because they have literally super strong female characters, they very quickly send the women away to fight other baddies while the men get to deal with the main threat. I still see women being saved by men way more often than I see the other way around in these films. It’s like, women’s strength is being acknowledged but still laid inferior to men’s.

Something more subtle that I noticed (that is unconfirmed, btw) was in the post-credits scene Marvel always does. Audiences saw the Captain Marvel symbol flash on the screen, likely signalling that Captain Marvel will fix the whole situation. I had a few issues with this. 1. I thought that including some sort of hope like that would have better fit in the movie proper, but 2. I recognize that only non-casual Marvel fans (i.e., people who know the comics) would even recognize that symbol anyway. And also, 3. When I looked up Captain Marvel to see how the character could possibly fix the wacked up situation Thanos caused, the most popular result was the female Captain Marvel (Ms. Marvel) and she does not seem to have any sort of powers that I can imagine would fix everything. But, upon further reading, I found out that there is another version of Captain Marvel (male) who fixes the Thanos problem in the comics by essentially turning back time to before Thanos caused everything to go to shit. That’s great! And apparently there’s a Captain Marvel movie in the works (keeping Captain Marvel female, instead of making her male like the alternate comic version... right?). However, with this, the MCU is adding another character to the already confusing mix. We’ll have to watch her movie to understand her. This is a money grab. I know that it’s always been a money grab, but this is a little silly.

There were many points in Infinity War where the protagonists almost defeated Thanos, but were deterred because of too-convenient reasons (Starlord, I’m looking at you). There were many points in Infinity War where I or my friend sitting next to me thought of a much easier way to solve the problem and defeat the baddie than the characters did. As a result, I felt more and more disconnected from the characters, because so much of what they were doing wasn’t logical and I wasn’t entertained. Doing illogical things for the flashiness is fine, but in moderation. There was unnecessary drama in the fight sequences, and also not enough drama from other parts of the movie, to the point where I was so incredibly bored unless I was watching an action scene, which never really delivered completely because most of them were failures. I felt like I was watching amateurs, not seasoned superheroes.

The film started off decently, and it did have some good scenes, but I was overwhelmed by unnecessary plotlines and scenes, too many characters, and constant failure to really enjoy the movie past the first 45 minutes. I love action and superhero movies, but this one was one of the worst I’ve seen in recent years. You could have done better, Marvel.

[kalinara]

Rip/Sara - Gideon. Rip - self-worth. Rip - stubbornness. Rip - temper. Rip - fights. Rip - friends. Rip - era (any/all). Rip + team - era (ie., how much culturally does Rip miss/not realize he's missing/realizes he misses and doesn't care in his interactions with the team). Rip - time travel. Rip - music. Rip - concentration. Rip - aloof (what's it masking?). Rip/Sara - time. Rip - team. Rip - families. Rip and Jax - bond. Rip and Rogues - mastery.

I think you’re trying to murder me.  Fortunately, my babbling knows no bounds.

However, these will likely be shorter than my other headcanons/meta.

Rip/Sara - Gideon:  So Gideon is an interesting complication to any Rip pairing fic, because, well, she’s there.  She’s always going to be there.  And regardless of whether you see her relationship with Rip as having romantic elements, it’s still going to be a factor.

I wonder if, in a way, it would be rather like living inside of your mother-in-law.  Which seems awkward.

I have to say though, I don’t think that Sara would propose a threesome.  She did think that Gideon was hot, but I don’t really think Gideon is her type personality-wise.

Rip - self worth:  ...  Really?

Okay, I don’t think Rip is completely without self-worth, but I think that his self-worth is particularly wrapped up in the various roles he plays.  And that becomes a problem, because said roles have a disconcerting habit of disappearing on him.

He has value as a husband and father.  Until his wife and son are dead.  He has value as a Time Master, until they betray him, are revealed to be corrupt, and are destroyed.  He has value as a guardian of the spear of destiny, until he was captured and turned.  He has value as the Captain of the Waverider, until he is supplanted by a more capable alternative.

The problem with Rip is that as soon as he loses his role, he doesn’t really know how to find a new one.  I’m not sure he really knows how to define himself in his own right, without the input of the people around him.

Rip - Stubbornness:

Hah, well, that is definitely a character trait that Rip has.  I don’t think Rip is stubborn just for the sake of being stubborn though.  Rather, I think he generally has a very clear idea of what his goal is, what he wants, and how things are supposed to be.

That doesn’t make him any less difficult to deal with sometimes though.  But as we’ve seen, especially in season 1, he can be swayed and reasoned with.  And he really seems to value that the team will call him out, force him to back down, and make him see things another way.

I do feel a little sorry for Vandal Savage sometimes though.  Because Rip will not ever give up.  :-)

Rip - temper:

I tend to see Rip as being a hot-tempered sort.  His anger comes in flashes and dissipates pretty quickly after the initial eruption.

The one exception is if you hurt someone he cares about.  Then he will come for blood.  This is the man who hunted Vandal Savage through centuries.  I wouldn’t recommend it.

Rip - fights:

Hm.  I think Rip, on a whole, was never really prone to fighting.  When he lived on the streets, he was a small child.  So any fight he got into would not have ended well.  At any point that he was attacked, the goal would have been to strike quickly and escape.  I doubt the Time Masters would have had much patience for casual fighting either.

This isn’t to say that Rip can’t handle himself in a fight.  We’ve seen that he can.  But I don’t think he enjoys it the way that certain other characters do.  I think that, for Rip, a fight means that either his life, someone else’s, or the mission is on the line.  

This might make for an interesting contrast with Sara, who I think DOES enjoy the fight.  I think that if she ever realized exactly how good he was (like in the scene in Out of Time), she would be very enthusiastic about the idea of a friendly match.  And he would NOT.

Rip - friends. 

I’m not sure that I think Rip has the capacity to have casual friends.  I think he has acquaintances/allies and then he has people that he would 100% throw himself into a volcano for, with no middle ground.

And it makes some sense, given his upbringing.  You get the sense that the Time Masters didn’t necessarily produce an environment that allowed for casual friendships (though the children did appear to play together at the Refuge), so if you’re going to break the rules you might as well go all out.

...I think that might be Rip’s motto anyway.

Rip - era (any/all). 

I think that as a Time Master, Rip isn’t really supposed to have a favorite era.  But we also know exactly how well Rip seems to follow rules like that.  But for all his interest in the Wild West trappings, or his success in fighting Time Pirates, I don’t think that’s what makes an era particularly interesting to him.

I think it’s the people.  Rip’s favorite eras are the ones that his favorite people reside in.  He loves the Wild West because of Jonah.  He loves the 1940s for the JSA.  He loves the early 21st century for his team.  (And specifically 2130-ish because that’s where he and Kendra finally killed Savage).

Rip + team - era (ie., how much culturally does Rip miss/not realize he's missing/realizes he misses and doesn't care in his interactions with the team). 

Rip was raised in the future by a scary time-space cult, so he’s definitely got a different cultural background than the rest of the team.  But I think it’s less about pop-culture trivia (you never know what might be relevant to a Time Master’s studies after all.  Some future war may have been averted because of the ambassadors’ mutual love of the Backstreet Boys), and more about the way they look at the world.

I make fun of Rip’s “because, fuck you” tendencies, but the thing is, in the world that Rip grew up in, his entire life would have been wrapped up in rules and regulations.  Everything regimented.  Everything monitored.  The man lives with an AI who watches and records his dreams.  Freedom, privacy, democracy, those may not even be values in Time Master society so much as historical concepts.

Can you imagine how strange Sara, Jax, or Ray’s childhood would sound to Rip?  Or heck, even Snart and Rory’s?  

I think Rip is always fundamentally aware of how alien he is from the rest of the team.  In a way that they aren’t.  But I also think that’s part of why he values them so much.  They fill a need for him that his own culture has never been able to provide.

Rip - time travel

I think Rip, deep down, simply loves to time travel.  It’s just...fun.  He loves to visit different times and meet different people. 

If Rip Hunter hadn’t been raised by the Time Masters, he would have still somehow managed to go out and build a time sphere in his garage and do it that way.

I know, because I’ve read the comics.  :-P 

Rip - music. 

I think that Rip loves all kinds of music.  But that he hasn’t listened to much of anything since his family died.  He hasn’t sung, or touched an instrument since then either.  

However, in the time between season one and season two, that was starting to change.  He’d be in the engine room, supervising Jax’s repairs (hardly necessary at this point, but Jax was still anxious enough to want to make sure he was doing it right), and find himself humming a Rolling Stones song under his breath.  Thankfully, Jax didn’t hear him.  If the crew knew, he’d never hear the end of it.

(Jax actually did hear him.  He and Gideon were colluding on having the ship play some of Rip’s favorite songs as a surprise but Rip disappeared before they could.)

Rip - concentration. 

A headcanon to do with concentration.  Hmm. 

Oddly enough, I’ve got nothing.  :-)  I think Rip is generally very good at concentrating on tasks at hand, but that the crew would try anyone’s patience and I’m sure havoc would ensue.  (Possibly conveniently timed for when Rip has been working too long and missed food and sleep.  Making it very easy for someone like Sara or Jax to nag at him to go to sleep since it’s obvious that he wasn’t going to be able to get back in the right frame of mind.)

Oh, I know.  Rip hates concentrated orange juice.  It is a terrible thing.

Rip - aloof (what's it masking?). 

Rip Hunter is a seething mass of white-hot rage, hopeless love, and impossibly bad decisions all thinly wrapped in a veneer of British sarcasm

Rip/Sara - time. 

I have to admit, I see Time Canary as possibly the most star-crossed of any potential Legends of Tomorrow pairing that comes to mind.  Because I do think they’d be good together.  I think they have a strong emotional bond, and they’ve been good support for one another on many occasions.

But they’ve always had issues in terms of timing.  When they met, Sara was dealing with resurrection and bloodlust, and Rip had JUST lost his family.  

Later, after they’ve worked together for some time, with Sara’s bloodlust under control, her slow coming to terms with Laurel’s death, and Rip finally starting to move past his grief and trauma, he disappears. 

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and circa Raiders of the Lost Art, I started to see a lot of signs that the two characters might be ready to come together.  Sara’s reaction when she thought Phil was Rip.  Phil’s kind of tentative attraction (I see Phil as basically Rip, with all the baggage stripped away)...

But then there was the Legion.  And evil!Rip.  And even though Sara clearly doesn’t blame Rip for what happened, that’s a whole mess of new guilt and trauma that he’ll have to work past to even be remotely able to conceive of pursuing a romance with Sara.  And Sara’s got her own issues: the captaincy, the quest, (and her understandable frustration with his general personality.  :-P)

I think the characters definitely love each other, and that it’s possible that eventually that love could move into a romantic direction, but so far, the timing has never been right.

Rip - team. 

I think that Rip Hunter loves his team to a ridiculous, irrational, near obsessive extent.  He would die for them in a heartbeat.  He has no idea what to do whenever he’s without them.  And he wants to hug them or beat them to death with a broomstick on a daily basis.

I also think that he has no idea how to communicate any of this to any of them.  And he’d probably die of embarrassment before he ever made the attempt.  So they have no idea.

This is why I find all of the teases about Season Three so fascinating.  It will be so interesting to see what happens to cause Rip to break so completely with the team, how the aftermath shakes out, and what ways he ends up functioning without them.  I’m dreading it a little too, of course.  But it ought to be a fun ride.  :-)

Rip - families. 

I always find myself wondering how Rip and Miranda initially established themselves as a family.  Because it’s not like either of them had much experience to base it on, as far as we know.  Rip’s account of his backstory involved starving on the streets and then the Refuge.  Though, if Miranda was recruited at the age of ten as well, it’s possible that she may have memories of her original family life.

But can you imagine how confusing it must have been at first?  I mean, obviously a Time Master’s education would have included concepts of family dynamics and marriage.  Since so many historical events were fueled by those kind of things.  But there’s a difference between reading about it and living it.

I’d like to imagine, from the little bit we see of Miranda, that she adapted to life in 2166 Whitechapel very well.  She seems like the sort to be able to make friends easily, and possibly she was able to study them as she went.  And Rip is the sort to follow her lead when it comes to such things.

On the plus side, having grown up very separate from modern or even future ideas of family dynamics, Rip and Miranda would have had the freedom to basically discard anything that didn’t suit them.  I’d imagine whatever they came up with would have looked rather odd to an outside observer, but worked very well for them.  :-) 

Rip and Jax - bond.

One of the things that I thought season two did really well was establish a clear and strong bond between Rip and Jax.  And that’s pretty impressive considering that Rip was gone for eight episodes, and the characters did not have a huge amount of interaction in season one.  There were a few good bits here and there: Rip choosing Jax as engineer, Rip’s concern in the 1950s, his gentleness with Jax’s father dilemma, and the endangering part of River of Time, but the real thrust of their dynamic seemed to come about in Out of Time, and carried on through Rip’s return.

I know I’ve said this before, but in a way, it actually makes a lot of sense that the two would get along.  They’re the youngest men on the ship (even though there’s a ten year age difference between them).  They’re both mechanically minded and they both truly love the Waverider in a way that only an engineer or mechanic can.  They’re not childish or silly in the same way that Nate or Ray can be.  

If there is one character that I think Rip might have been able to truly relax around and be a functioning human being with, I think it’s Jax.  (And I think we saw that a bit in Fellowship, with the jelly beans).

And Jax is one of the two characters (the other being Sara), who I think really do feel an honest connection to their mission and the quest.  He’s definitely a character that I could imagine captaining a time ship himself in the not-so-distant future.

Rip and Rogues - mastery

I am tempted to make jokes about Rip wearing a leash, but I will behave myself.

The thing that’s always been interesting about the Rogues in season one is that, of all of the characters, they were the only ones who really had any sort of experience working as a team.

The Hawks were always “us against the world” even when Kendra had her memories.  Ray, Martin and Jax were all fairly new to the superhero thing.  Sara had a bit more experience with the League of Assassins and her brief stint with Team Arrow, but those experiences have a certain level of baggage attached.

But Snart and Rory have been a criminal team, off and on, for decades.  They’ve regularly worked with other people too.  They have justifiable confidence in their skills because they’ve practiced them for decades.  And Snart, in particular, has been a leader of groups for about that long.

It’s an interesting dynamic.  Because Snart is by far a better leader than Rip ever was, but there is no way that he would have managed to lead this group.  It's not his quest, and while the crew liked and respected him, it’s not clear that they would have trusted him enough to follow him.  

One of the things I’ve always wished for was to see more direct interaction between Rip and Snart, and Rip and Mick.  (Particularly the latter, since the show is not subtle with their many parallels.)  There is some good fic out there to fill the lack, at least.  :-)

(I may have to hold off on responding to the rest until tomorrow.  :-))

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

July 26, 2020

My weekly round up of things I am doing and thinking about. Topics include my software engineering work, AI paradigms, and personal agents.

Software Engineering

I was looking forward to reporting today that I have by bug tracker project done and ready to show off, but I have run into numerous problems. Almost a full weekend has been insufficient to figure out how to deploy a fairly simple app.

A partial list of problem is as follows:

- I thought I had a PostgresQL database installed and working, but apparently it was not working and now seems to be completely borked.

- On Amazon Web Services, you have to configure security settings to open particular ports. Not too bad once you know the issue, but it took me a while to figure out.

- The proxy between the React and node components isn’t working. I gave up on that and started putting on full URLs for fetching.

- Using HTTP instead of HTTPS for React caused security problems. Doing a fresh create-react-app doesn’t have this problem, so why is it there for my cloned repo?

- Getting node to play nice with HTTPS was a pain.

- Auth0 was fussy about the kinds of requests it accepts. I got it working but have no idea what I did that caused it work (or why it wasn’t working before).

Getting this stuff right falls into the realm of DevOps, a subdiscipline of software engineering that is needed but I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I don’t have the patience for DevOps. I would analogize it to playing a game. People like a challenging game. It’s fun when the challenge is in strategy or quick reflexes. It’s not fun when the challenge is broken controls or bugs.

It’s stunning that in the year 2020, a reasonably intelligent person cannot figure out how to deploy a fairly simple piece of software without great struggle. Surely we can do better as a civilization.

Artificial Intelligence Paradigms

Lately I have been listening to the Lex Fridman’s Artificial Intelligence podcast. There are over 100 episodes, and so I have some catch-up to do to get through all of them. I generally find the conversations to be quite good. The guests are diverse enough in their views to give a sense of the range of mainstream approaches to artificial intelligence.

I had forgotten about Wolfram Alpha, but Stephen Wolfram’s description of the project, without using the term AI, sounds a lot like the efforts in the 1970s to encode knowledge in a computable fashion. What Wolfram Alpha has that state of the art deep learning systems, such as GPT-3, lack is a semantic encoding of knowledge that can be used for computation. Experts in the field disagree, but my view is that semantic representation of knowledge is a necessary piece of the AI stack. It will be very useful long before we get near anything resembling artificial general intelligence. The knock on Wolfram’s approach is that he does exercise tight control over the system, which makes it hard for others to participate and for it to grow beyond what the immediate team can do. Still, I wonder why Google or the other majors have yet to replicate the essential characteristics of Wolfram Alpha. It really does seem like a promising approach.

OpenCog and SingularityNET, as developed and described by Ben Goertzel, are in many ways the opposite approach. SingularityNET in particular is interesting as a decentralized, blockchain-based platform which allows anyone to deploy (what they call) an AI model. In principle a kind of collective intelligence should come out of the system as models learn which APIs to call from other models. I would really like to explore these projects further.

My struggles trying to get the bug tracker app deployed, described above, serve as a useful reality check as to where we are in the development of AI.

Familiar

A few day’s ago I tweeted out something to the effect that maybe the ideal solution to politics is to represent everyone with AI agents that solve problems via Coasian bargaining (I’m too lazy to look it up; it wasn’t exactly a brilliant insight anyway).

I would like to have some kind of intelligent agent that can perform tasks of my part. I would tentatively call it Familiar, based on the supernatural entities that assist in the conduct of magic. There already exists Do Not Pay, which assists with legal tasks such as fighting speeding tickets and immigration. It certainly wouldn’t be too hard to develop agents that could search job listings, file taxes, and perform a host of other official functions.

If a general platform is established for personal agents, then it becomes another technology layer on which novel applications can be developed. Maybe including coordination of collective action to solve thorny political problems that revolve around rent seeking.

It also gets to another issue I’ve been thinking about in the context of policymaking. I want to see a system of semantic encoding of knowledge that allows for policy proposals to be made that are provably the best policies to achieve defined objectives, within technical limitations. Probably the major barrier to developing such a system is limited demand for good information. When implemented at the individual level, there is every incentive to get information right.

[topicprinter]

Last year I started working on an AI Art Generator app. This is the story of how I came up with the idea, decided it was worth working on, and validated the concept. All without building an actual app.Note: the original article is on Medium. I've stripped all the self-promotional links and references to comply with this subreddit's rules.Mid last year, my girlfriend and I had a house guest who commented that our walls looked a bit bare. It’s not something we’d really noticed before, but once it was mentioned, we realised they were right — we needed some art. I thought finding some interesting art online would be a pretty quick, easy process, but I soon found that the sheer volume of available art turned me into a critic and I couldn’t find a piece that had meaning to me.I wanted art that reflected something about me — even if that just meant a landmark from my city, or a subject based on one of my hobbies or interests. After scrolling through hundreds of pages of artworks on every wall-art store I could find, I was still left unsatisfied.Then I had an idea — one of my interests is technology, and in particular AI. What if I could buy some AI-generated art? Wouldn’t that be a conversation starter! Even better, what if I could create some AI generated art myself? It could be ultra personalised — based on a photo from one of my holidays, or a picture of my dog, or a landmark from my city. Why didn’t I think of this sooner!? AI generated art has been around for years now, there must be plenty of places I can generate and buy AI art.So I Google “Buy AI Generated Art”. Hmm, I get one shop with a handful of pre-generated pieces, a heap of articles about AI and art in general, the guys who sold that AI generated portrait for $432k (a bit out of my price range), and Deepart.io — which is the closest thing to what I was imagining, but buying prints seems like an afterthought. Further searches didn’t reveal any better options (although there are other art generators out there, none offer much in the way of buying your artwork as a poster or canvas print).To this point I hadn’t been considering building my own AI Art app. I thought for sure it must already exist. But when my continued Googling didn’t yield what I was looking for, the wheels started turning. I jumped on Slack and messaged some friends who are also into startups and side projects. The idea started to excite me.I’ve been working on side projects and startups my entire career, so I knew the first step wasn’t to build the app (a mistake I’ve made before — more than once), I first had to validate the concept. Would other people want to decorate their walls with AI-generated art, or was it just me? Would they pay? How much? These questions all needed answers, ideally before writing a single line of code. So I started thinking about how I could answer these questions as quickly and confidently as possible.What I came up with was simple! All I had to do was find an open-source Neural Style Transfer algorithm on Github, generate some interesting art with it, throw it up on a Shopify store and point some Facebook ads at it. If people buy AI art that they didn’t even create themselves, surely they’d buy their own personalised creations.I was too busy to do it right then, so I decided to sit on it for a while. I had to finish a contract job, then I had a holiday booked where I planned to propose to my girlfriend. I figured if I was still excited about the idea after all that, I’d throw the MVP together to validate the idea. If it showed some promise (I.e. if people actually bought some art), I’d think about building out my vision — an AI art generator focused on creating personalised art to decorate your house with.A few months went by. I finished my contract, got engaged (!!), added some features to another project, and suddenly I had some free time again. I hadn’t forgotten about AI Art. I decided to go for it.I found some Neural Style Transfer libraries on Github and tried to get them running. I don’t really know Python, so it was a bit of a challenge, but I eventually managed to run one on my Macbook. It took about 50 minutes to run and the result didn’t look that great. I needed to be able to run them much faster to be productive. A bit of Googling led me to Google Colab — a Jupyter Notebook in the cloud that runs on GPUs. The library I’d chosen was written for use from the command line, so I needed to do some refactoring to get it running in Google Colab. Thankfully Python’s syntax is pretty easy to learn, so I managed to get it working pretty quickly. On Google Colab it ran in 5–7 minutes, which was still pretty annoying, so I built a queue system where I could drop the inputs and styles in Google Drive, and define the jobs as rows in Google Sheets. That let me queue as many jobs as I wanted and leave them to run. It might sound impressive, but Google Colab made it really easy. With this system I quickly got a feel for what would work well and what wouldn’t, and was able to make some interesting artworks that I thought had a good chance of selling.Now that I had some artworks to sell, I needed two things: a shop to sell them in, and a printer to print them. I found a printer that would suit, ordered some samples and was happy with the results, so the next step was to build a store. I knew from the start I was just going to use Shopify. I threw the products up on the default Shopify theme, added a few essential plugins, spent about an hour coming up with a business name that had a domain name available, and I was ready to sell.Because I’d visited every poster and canvas art store on the internet, Facebook had been serving me ads for artworks for months. I’d picked up on some of the tactics they used and noticed that I’d been flicking through a lot of the carousel ads to see if there was anything good, so I decided to make a carousel ad on Facebook to bring some traffic to the site and hopefully make some sales. I had to learn the Facebook ads manager and read about how to make good ads, but it didn’t take long before I was serving carousel ads to people who were interested in art and artificial intelligence.It took almost a week — and a few hundred dollars of ad budget — to make the first sale. The sale didn’t come close to paying for the ads, but it proved that people (well, at least one person) were willing to pay for AI generated art. Optimisation could come later.I spent about a month trying to optimise the website and Facebook ads. The most important update I made to the website was an exit-intent popup (those annoying popups that come up when you move your mouse towards the close-tab button) that surveyed the user about why they were leaving without buying anything. I usually hate those things, but they have their place, and I learned a lot about what people wanted through that survey.I also quickly learned that I was doing Facebook ads totally wrong — I should have made 20 ads and given them a budget of $5/day each, then kill the ones that didn’t perform and slowly ramp up the ones that did. What I had been doing was running one ad with my entire budget. I started again from scratch and had a bit more success, making about 20 sales over the next two months. The Facebook ads still cost a lot more than the sales I made from them, but by this time I was convinced that there was a market for my vision — an AI Art generator oriented around creating art for your home.In the past I would have leapt into building something like this before doing any kind of idea validation. I’ve always known you need to validate your ideas before diving in, but it’s so easy to make excuses, or trick yourself into thinking you’ve done enough validation because you just want to start building. It’s taken a lot of side projects — and many failures — to really learn the importance of validating an idea before committing to building a product that no-one really wants. I’m happy with the process I followed this time. I’ve proven that people are willing to buy, which means the challenge now is to build a great product, and get it in front of the right people.I've since built the actual product, but that's a post for another day. Hope you guys found some value in reading about my process!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THAT IS, HOW HARD WOULD THIS BE FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO DEVELOP

But it's convenient because this is an example of a job someone had to do without. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. We've got it down to four words: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.1 I don't know enough about music to say. If you ever do find yourself working for a startup or not. In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter realized how much better web mail could be till Paul Buchheit showed them. One way to make it that far and then get shot down; RPN calculators might be one example. Don't be put off if they say no.2

Occam's razor means, in the sense that it gets compiled into machine language for you. To start with, spam is not unsolicited commercial email. They like cafes instead of clubs; used bookshops instead of fashionable clothing shops; hiking instead of dancing; sunlight instead of tall buildings. I happened to get hold of a copy of The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. I'd make if I were drawing from life.3 The things that matter aren't necessarily the ones people would call important.4 But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun. Simple as it seems, that's the recipe for a startup is always running out of money and b they can spend their time how they want. That's the downside of it being easier to start a startup, is not the number that can get acquired by Google and Yahoo—though strictly speaking someone else did think of that before?

A startup is a small company, you can do what all the other big companies are not the biggest threat.5 The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. The whole field is uncomfortable in its own skin. That's what leads people to try to get more of it, but the spammer doesn't have to pay as much for that. But they forgot to consider the cost. Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, however, prefer to fund startups within an hour's drive.6 That sounds cleverly skeptical, but I didn't realize it till I was writing this article. Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it.7 Finally, the truly serious hacker should consider learning Lisp: Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a practitioner of Aikido, you can use whatever language you want. But of course what makes investing so counterintuitive is that in equity markets, good times are defined as everyone thinking it's time to buy. And aside from that, grad school is probably better than most alternatives. You have to be made to work on some very engaging project.

It will, ordinarily, be a group. Steve Jobs's famous maxim artists ship works both ways. I know this from my own experience, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else.8 When a large tract has been developed by a Soviet mathematician. I decided I wanted to stop getting spam. People who like New York, you know where these facial expressions come from. We take it for granted most of the world.9 1654587 us-ascii 0. Content-based spam filtering is often combined with a whitelist, a list of every address the user has deleted as ordinary trash.

Many of these fields talk about important problems, certainly. For years it had annoyed me to hear Lisp described that way.10 The rule about doing what you love is very difficult. All they had to work. Just be sure to make something useful. I'll probably do this in future versions, at least for them. Deals are dynamic; unless you're negotiating with someone unusually honest, there's not a single point where you shake hands and the deal's done. I found that the Bayesian filter did the same thing. There is, as Edison said, one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Improving constantly is an instance of a more general principle here: that if we wrote our software in a weird AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheses. But Lisp is a computer language, and computers speak whatever language you want.

Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the resulting hybrid worked well.11 But when our hypothetical Blub programmer wouldn't use either of them. It would be worth enduring a lot of instincts, this one has a lot of immigrants working in it. Then the important question became not how to make money?12 If they didn't know what language our software was written in either, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. A lot of nerd tastes they share with the creative class.13 Another way to figure out which fields are worth studying is to create the dropout graph.

No doubt Bill did everything he could to steer IBM into making that blunder, and he suffered proportionally.14 Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Icio. But different things matter to different people, and most of those who didn't preferred to believe the heuristic filters then available were the best you could do that for surprisingly little. Nothing will explain what your site is about.15 We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the server and yet felt like a desktop application. Now that you can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people.16 That averaging gets to be a situation with measurement and leverage.

So far most of what I've said applies to ideas in general. It's like importing something from Wisconsin to Michigan.17 If you want to buy us? At most colleges, admissions officers decide who gets in. Ten years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, they'd just get into an ideological argument. What you really want is a management company to run your company for you once you'd grown it to a certain size. The reason Latin won't get you a job, as if I were drawing from life.18 Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious.19 Indeed, most antispam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing more than a town with the right personality. So by the time it takes a company to live off its revenues.20 But as startup investors they'd have to compete against other bureaucrats. If you ever do find yourself working for a startup or not.21

Notes

In the Valley, but they seem to be combined that never should have become. August 2002.

A great programmer than an ordinary one?

Most of the potential users, you've started it, and power were concentrated in the sense that they don't make wealth a zero-sum game.

If we had, we'd have understood users a lot about how to succeed or fail.

The first alone yields someone who's stubbornly inert. An investor who for some reason insists that you should always get a patent troll, either as truth or heresy. The attention required increases with the other cheek skirts the issue; the Reagan administration's comparatively sympathetic attitude toward takeovers; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies.

In the early adopters you evolve the idea of what's valuable is least likely to come up with elaborate rationalizations. At Viaweb, which a seemed more serious and b made brand the dominant factor in the postwar period also helped preserve the wartime compression of wages—specifically increased demand for them by returns, and b I'm satisfied if I can establish that good art fifteenth century European art. The need has to be employees is to try to avoid the conclusion that tax rates were highest: 14.

If someone just sold a nice thing to do as a motive, and everyone's used to wonder if that got fixed. The US is partly a reaction to drugs. Could it not grow just as if it were a variety called Red Delicious that had been transposed into your head.

While the first scientist. I chose this example deliberately as a type of lie. How many parents would still send their kids to them rather than just getting started.

And when they say they care above all about hitting outliers, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

This must have seemed shocking for a CEO to make money for the same superior education but had instead evolved from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time, is deliberately intended to be extra skeptical about Viaweb too.

More precisely, there would be to say they bear no blame for opinions not expressed in it. Like us, they mean San Francisco wearing a jeans and a back-office manager written mostly in less nerdy fields like finance and media. In high school to be higher, as Prohibition and the VCs buy, because investors already owned more than 20 years. But if idea clashes became common enough, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev people are magnified by the desire to do wrong and hard to tell them what to outsource and what not to be identified with you to take a conscious effort to make that their prices stabilize.

Robert Morris says that I know when this happened because it was outlawed in the Valley itself, not eating virtuously. There are also several you can't avoid doing sales by hiring sufficiently qualified designers. In some cases the process of trying to make 200x as much difference to a woman who had made Lotus into the world, and 20 in Paris. Trevor Blackwell presents the following recipe for a smooth one.

From the beginning of the mail by Anton van Straaten on semantic compression. Big technology companies between them generate a lot easier now for a small amount of material wealth, not how to deal with the founders' salaries to the margin for error. A from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site.

The most important things VCs fail to mention a few people have historically done to their companies. They're motivated by examples of other people in 100 years. And that is not even be symbiotic, because spam and P nonspam are both genuinely formidable, and we don't have one. That can be surprisingly indecisive about acquisitions, and others, like most of their times.

The best way for a seed investment in you, however. For these companies when you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the average startup.

See Greenspun's Tenth Rule. You should probably start from scratch, rather than geography.

Median may be exaggerated by the size of the previous round. There is a rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get something for a patent is now replicated all over, not you.

It seemed better to be low. 4%? 32. No one writing a dictionary to pick a date, because they believe they have to want to start startups.

It is still hard to do with the sort of idea are statistics about the meaning of distribution. So whatever market you're in, you'll have to solve are random, they compete on tailfins. One-click ordering, however. Only a fraction of VCs even have positive returns.

There is no personnel department, and would probably find it more natural to the principles they discovered in the room, and also what we'd call random facts, like a month might to an adult. People were more dependent on banks, who would never have come to them this way is basically the market. I know of no Jews moving there, only Jews would move there, and philosophy the imprecise half.

That's a valid point.

[buytabletsonline]

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While SUVs may seem the darlings of the automotive industry right now, there’s definitely plenty of room to innovate and wow the crowd in other segments: especially when you have a long list of new things to show off, like Audi. While the 2019 A8 represents the marque’s vision for sedans, the 2019 A7 Sportback embodies Audi’s vision for those buyers who demand a sportier sedan. The A7, however, is not one that can be confined and defined inside a rigid box. Instead, it takes inspiration from both past and present, and in the process embracing coupe, sedan, and even wagon in a single body.

Audi places heavy emphasis on the new A7 Sportback’s design over other aspects, and for good reason. Similar to the 2019 A8, the A7 takes inspiration from the Prologue concept, while, at the same time, still remaining unmistakably an A7. In fact, though the A7 and A8 may share many things in common, they offer it up in very different ways.

At its most straightforward, it’s about being driver-centric. Where the A8’s interior is defined by horizontal lines and an emphasized sense of space, befitting its sedan status, in the 2019 Audi A7, everything is turned toward the driver. The new Audi MMI system, functionally similar in both sedan and four-door coupe, is slanted more towards the driver in the latter. Everything is easily within reach and available at a quick and safe glance. The A7 Sportback puts the driver at the visual center of its universe.

It’s not an absolute, however. Unlike in the Audi TT, where the focus is completely on the driver, the new A7 straddles its three car lines and doesn’t ignore passengers altogether. In the real world, it makes a big difference: compared to the A8, which really feels like a car to be driven in, the A7 is a car that’s meant for you to drive yourself. During our two day drive in Cape Town, S. Africa, there was plenty of seat time both behind the wheel and as a passenger.

A welcome gain from the A8 is the extra space. The 0.8 inches of added length may not sound much but, combined with its 3.4-foot width, sitting comfortably inside the A7 would almost make you think you were inside the sedan instead. The lines blur even further when you see the familiar refreshed MMI system: like the 2019 A8, the new A7 Sportback is equipped with Audi’s new-generation MMI system.

Unlike previous iterations, Audi throws out the physical knobs and buttons in exchange for two fully touch-enabled screens, stacked one atop the other in the center console. What Audi hasn’t thrown out, however, is the unique MMI experience that Audi owners have grown to love. The old MMI’s audible and tactile “click” where the entire display “vibrates” is still present, an impressive feat considering the inherent limitations of touchscreen technologies.

Ease and speed of use are still also there, despite the complexity of digital user interfaces. Options are laid out on a single level, minimizing the need to drill down into menus before reaching the exact feature you’re hunting for. A new 12.3-inch virtual cockpit sits directly in front of the driver, replacing the analog instrumentation of old while still giving the illusion of depth thanks to the very high-resolution and responsive screen.

From the driver’s seat, operating the dual displays settles into an up-and-down cadence, almost tai-chi like in its zen. The icons, text, and graphics are easy to read with minimal complexity, a welcome relief compared to some of the more complex systems in rival cars.

While all carmakers boast of their attention to design and to detail, the A7 feels worthy of the praise. Take, for example, the extra sensors inside the front grille, which Audi’s designers managed to integrate into the car’s core design and thus give the coupé a unique fascia. Rather than wearing its active-assistance sensors like warts, the A7 subtly hides another pair of eyes inside the new “singleframe” grille.

Of course, the 2019 A7 Sportback can’t just be an art project: it must be functional, too. Compared to its predecessor, the 2019 model keeps the telltale silhouette while doubling-down on the sportier touches. The lower and wider grille, a new unified tail light, sharper shoulders, a built-in spoiler that automatically extends at 75 mph, and a more pronounced lip on the back are just some of the more obvious new design marks. At the same time, the familiar roofline and distinctive tapered rear remain, to continue the aesthetic legacy.

Under the hood, there’s more newness: the mild hybrid engine or “MHEV”. Combining a 3.0 liter V6 TFSI engine with a 48-volt electrical system, the 2019 A7 offers 340 HP and 369 lb-ft of torque, enough to do the 0 to 62 mph run in 5.3 seconds. More than just being about power, however, the A7 Sportback is also about efficiency. The belt alternator starter (BAS) charges a lithium-ion battery up to 12 kW when braking, as well as shutting the engine off not only when the car is at a halt, but when coasting between 34 and 99 mph. Indeed, Audi’s new start-stop feature doesn’t even wait for you to actually stop. Instead, it activates automatically from 13 mph, then uses the front cameras to restart the engine when the car in front begins to move.

How does the A7 Sportback perform in the real world? Unlike my recent 2019 Audi A8 level 3 autonomous drive where I went hunting for traffic, this time around I was on a mission to find roads less traveled. Unfortunately, folks all over the world must’ve gotten the memo that Cape Town is an extremely beautiful city to visit and, as such, traffic proved to be horrendous. The first day saw solid jams for hours on in and, at one point in the drive back to the hotel and unbeknownst to my drive partner, I deliberately got lost so that I’d get more seat time. Very sneaky, yes, but it gave me the opportunity to test out the Audi AI traffic jam pilot system which proved to be fantastic at keeping pace with stop-go urban traffic at up to 37.3 mph.

Given the A7’s interior, there are worse places to be trapped, but it’s really the open road where the car shines. Still, before getting there I had a first-hand experience of just how important – and how capable – the active safety technology is in this new car.

In Cape Town, it seems, it’s commonplace for pedestrians to walk on the side of the road, both on city streets and highway. Indeed, it’s fairly normal for pedestrians to cross over the freeways. It’s a worst-case-scenario for any driver, as was a man jumping out in front of the A7 while I was at the wheel. I slammed on the brakes, but Audi’s pre sense front and pre sense city active safety systems joined in too, kicking in their own exaggerated braking force and helping prevent an accident.

I’ve had plenty of hands-on experience aiming a car towards a mannequin and having the system jolt things to a complete stop before a collision, but nothing in those test scenarios quite prepares you for a real-life experience of the technology at work. Beginning with the Audi A8 and now the A7 Sportback too, the Audi pre sense and pre sense city safety systems can also detect cyclists in addition to pedestrians, while the car is traveling at up to speeds of 40 or 52.8 mph, depending on the model. They’re also able to detect other cars on the road, at up to speeds of 155.3 mph.

Once clear of the city and its pesky pedestrians, we found sections of roads with few cars and plenty of twisting turns. The open roads along the jaw-dropping coastline of Cape Town made for an excellent place to open up the V6. For the 2019 model year, Audi has paired it with its new 7-speed, dual-clutch transmission, replacing the A7’s former 8-speed. It may have lost a gear but it has only gained in accuracy, with shifts as smooth as butter, particularly when there’s literally seconds to pass slower moving cars on a tight two-lane road.

Equipment and features for the US market aren’t nailed down yet, nor pricing, and as such we don’t know if the 48-volt “coast mode” will make it stateside. It’s possible that the feature won’t be high on the list of priorities for buyers in the US, which I can understand, though if I was buying the A7 Sportback and Audi didn’t allow me to check off the optional Dynamic all-wheel steering, I wouldn’t be so happy. While the standard equipment package includes progressive steering with a sports ratio, the combination of dynamic steering and rear-wheel steering takes driving to a whole new level.

Cruising at lower speed around town, pulling into tight parking spots or making U-turns is significantly easier because the rear wheels turn in the opposite direction up to 5 degrees. It essentially shortens the wheelbase of the car, at speeds between 3.1 to 9.3 mph. At higher speeds, especially for quick passing maneuvers, the rear wheels follow the movement of the front wheels by an angle of up to 3.5 degrees. In that case, you get the sense of a longer wheelbase car, which ultimately results in more stability.

What we do know will make it to American shores is Audi’s drive select system. Depending who you’re with and the road conditions, there’s the option of allowing the drive modes to do all the heaving lifting in auto; or, as seemed preferable once free of traffic jams, you can switch over to dynamic and push the A7 Sportback to its fullest potential. There’s also efficient and comfort modes, with each adjusting factors like how quickly the transmission changes gears, the behavior of the sports differential and quattro drive, the steering, and the suspension’s damper control. If you prefer, you can customize individual mode with your own choice of settings.

Whatever your preference, it’s the Audi AI active suspension that’s doing all the heavy lifting. Depending on road conditions it can independently increase or decrease the load on each wheel, keep the car leveled. It proved most pronounced when we drove through some rough roads around Cape Town. On a few spirited stretches around the coast, especially when dealing tight switchbacks, the A7 does an astonishingly good impression of a sports car when in dynamic mode. The suddenly stiffer suspension reduces body roll noticeably.

Audi is positioning the 2019 A7 Sportback as a break from the past, with a new design and new technologies. All the same, though, the 2019 model is clearly an A7 through and through, picking up the torch not only in its design but in its spirit too. Sporty like a coupe, spacious like a sedan, and versatile like a wagon, the 2019 A7 Sportback is the perfect marriage of old and new, putting design, engineering, and technology at the service of what should truly be the center of a car’s universe: the driver at the wheel.

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[connorrenwick]

Renegade x Design Milk Spotlight: Gantri

When looking at the exhibitors at the most recent Renegade Craft Fairs, we kept going back to one: a small design brand based in San Francisco called Gantri. Made up of a team with backgrounds in economics, engineering, and industrial design, their lighting is sleek and beautiful. So beautiful that we chose them as our Design Milk Spotlight exhibitor at this weekend’s New York Renegade Craft Fair, so be sure to stop by and see them in the Design Milk Spotlight. I talked to Gantri CEO Ian Yang about how Gantri came about and what’s next for the brand:

Who are you? Tell me more about you.

We’re small team of designers, engineers and 3D printing geeks working out of a warehouse in the Mission District in San Francisco. We have a pretty diverse crew but we’re all super passionate about making design more accessible. I’m from Shanghai originally, grew up in the UK, went to the London School of Economics, and previously worked on user experience and software engineering for the apartment rental platform Lovely. Our CTO is a former NASA engineer who founded a company that uses AI to reuse space debris. One of us has a master’s in industrial design, another worked for fashion start-up, and another taught himself to 3D print and even hosted a 3D printing motorcycle competition. We’re all very driven people, united by a desire to merge design and tech.

The designers we work with are all independent, but they’re also an important part of who we are. They’re from all over the world – an architect from the Philippines, an Italian fashion designer, a Brazilian product designer, a Ukrainian furniture designer, and more. Some of them are established designers who have worked for Karim Rashid or have items displayed at MoMA. Some are up-and-coming designers who are still in school. But they all have innovative ideas for designs that probably wouldn’t be made without a platform like ours. Every time we get a new designer or a new submission, I’m always amazed at how creative some of the ideas are. I love seeing a great concept getting turned into something I can put on my nightstand.

How did you get started with designing and selling lighting?

I’ve been curious about design and manufacturing since I was a kid in Shanghai. My parents were involved in the Chinese export business, and some of my earliest memories are of factory tours. I experimented with design, interning for architect and founding a fashion startup with friends. I’ve also always had a love / hate relationship with luxury design – I want to fill my home with amazing, inspired objects but most of them are out of my price point.

When I learned to 3D print in 2014, something really clicked. It was magical because I knew it had the potential to make great consumer products that I would want (and could afford). But I also realized the default 3D printing process was too slow and didn’t produce high-quality finished products. So I threw myself into making a better 3D printing system. I knew it would be hard, but I’m attracted to hard projects. When I feel like I’m creating something new and making a difference in the world, I will work night and day to make it happen.

As a small business owner, what are some of the challenges that you face?

Because we’re small, it was initially difficult to persuade designers to work with us. They didn’t know if we’d continue to exist in a year. So getting our first three or four designers took months. But now that we’ve proven ourselves, we’re getting tons of proposals from designers around the world. We’ve had to implement a system where designers request invitations to join the platform. By limiting the number of new designers we take on, we can provide each designer with personalized services, including a dedicated staff engineer.

One other challenge is to try to do as much as we can with as few resources as possible. There are certain things that we will never cut corners on — like the quality of our products or customer experience. But we do make sacrifices. We were definitely founded in my garage, which is where I first experimented with painting the lights. We moved out mainly because I couldn’t fit any more things in there anymore.

How do you find the designers that you work with?

We still reach out to designers who have concepts that we really love but these days, the designers find us. Often, they’ve heard about us from friends, design blogs, or Behance. They’re excited that we have a team to support them, and that we handle prototyping, manufacturing, and distribution. It lets them build their own brand, doing what they’re best at without having to get bogged down in logistics.

We’re open to any designer around the world. We care about the quality of the design — not what country the designer is from, where they went to school, their gender, or anything else. We want designers to have equal footing so their work can speak for itself.

How has modern technology helped your business — either for manufacturing and/or marketing?

Next-generation technology basically defines our whole business. We’re committed to uniting the best of technology with the best of design. That means that not only do we adopt classical design thinking in judging the merits of each design (e.g. looking at the originality, ergonomics, usability, quality of inspiration etc), we also spend time developing technologies that traditional design brands don’t do.

Our entire design process is online. From our dashboard, the designers can edit their profile, create new designs (we offer a guided design wizard), download pre-modeled components, look at product stats etc. We also sell exclusively through our online shop, which is tightly integrated with our design process that we built from scratch. Of course, we use 3D printers to make our products. But we don’t outsource them – we own and operate the machines ourselves. We also do a lot of hard-core engineering to improve our print quality and efficiency.

Our platform is in many ways similar to the Apple’s App Store. They built a platform that empowers independent software engineers to make a business out of developing mobile apps. Those independent developers don’t need to concern themselves with building an operating system, a distribution system, a payment system, or anything else. Apple sets strong standards for design and quality, developers do what they’re best at, and users get great apps as a result. We’re doing something similar: We empower independent designers to make a business out designing innovative home products. Our platform handles the manufacturing, distribution, payment, and more. Designers can focus on what they do best — design — the the consumer gets amazing innovative designs as a result.

What’s one piece of advice or thing you wished you had known when starting your own business?

Find the right people. People you love to work with. People who are ridiculously driven. Don’t just hire the person who looks best on paper; hire a person who’s invested in learning and creating something new.

3D printing for consumers is new enough that we’re all learning about it as we go. But I think we’re doing a pretty good job. We launched 15 products in the last two months. There lighting companies that have been around for decades that only have 10 products total. We only have a handful of folks on our team, but we’re able to do things at a level beyond what established brands are doing. And that’s because we’ve found employees who are creative, dedicated, and driven.

Are there any pieces that have special meaning to you?

Every time we get a new design, it becomes my favorite. They have such great stories. The designer of Container included a concave base where you to drop your keys and thoughtfully transition from work to home. The husband-and-wife team behind 7th Order were inspired by the 9-foot crystal lenses in lighthouses. Dulce is an homage to the Streamline Moderne style, a 1930s American branch of the Art Deco movement. (Also it looks like UFO to me). We also create our own Reference Designs (we have 3), and I play a big part in them.

But my real attachment isn’t to a particular product; it’s to the platform itself. Developing our manufacturing and distribution process has been both the hardest thing I’ve ever done and the most rewarding. Once we got that right, the products themselves became less difficult. So my real emotional commitment is to the platform — and to making it better everyday.

Any plans to make other products beyond lighting? If so, what else do you have in the pipeline?

Yes! Starting in 2018, we’ll be rolling out a variety of different home products. We can’t officially announce them yet, but they’ll be things like floor lights, planters, containers, bathroom accessories, bowls, and smart home devices.

The common theme is that they’re all unique designs for the home. They’re often products that have the potential to be more personal. Take planters, for example. There are lots of one-of-a-kind design concepts for planters on sites like Behance or Pinterest (I’m a huge fan of vertical garden planters), but not many have made it to market at affordable prices. We want to help designers realize their dreams, and fill people’s homes with beauty, inspiration, and creativity.

What do you get out of exhibiting and selling at a show like Renegade?

We’re a digital-first brand. We design our products on computers, make them with 3D printing, and sell them online. Everything about us is virtual. But people’s homes are tactile environments, and our customers often want to experience our lights in person. Renegade lets people interact with our products first-hand.

Shows like this also help us showcase how great 3D printed home products can be. People often think that 3D printing is just for toys and less finished items, but we pioneered a process that lets us 3D print really high-quality products. Renegade lets us show that our lights are indistinguishable from luxury designs. Finally, we love connecting with designers, design lovers, and makers. It’s worth it just to be part the community.

Learn more about Gantri at gantri.com and check them out at this weekend’s holiday Renegade Craft Fair in New York.

via http://design-milk.com/

from WordPress https://connorrenwickblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/renegade-x-design-milk-spotlight-gantri/

[hyperobjectivity-blog]

Smartness vs. Intelligence

The goal of this piece is to define the difference between smartness and intelligence. These two terms are often conflated even though they seem to convey different traits. Students who get good grades are smart but that doesn’t mean they understand the material or why it is important. Similarly, intellectuals can banter all day about the dangers of AI but couldn’t build you a neural network if you held a gun to their head. Both groups are interchangeably referred to as smart and intelligent, but the former group is more “smart” and the latter group more “intelligent”. I’m frustrated by the lack of explicit difference between the two terms because it makes it difficult to convey an idea that requires a nuanced understanding of the distinction between smartness and intelligence, so this is my attempt to make it clear.

The similarities between smartness and intelligence are easy to understand. People who are smart/intelligent know lots of things. Compared to the average person, they process information faster and learn at a quicker rate. Average is a key term here because it implies that smartness/intelligence is relative. In one context, a given individual will seem smart/intelligent and in another they won’t. If you take a nuclear physicist and force them to talk about symbolism in Moby Dick, they’re going to look like an idiot. Take the high school valedictorian and place them in Stanford and suddenly they don’t look so smart.

There are two things to consider with these examples. In the case of the physicist, it’s not that they aren’t smart/intelligent, it’s that they don’t have the specific knowledge required to seem smart in the area that they are being asked about. In some contexts, an individual may seem dumb/unintelligent because they do not have the requisite knowledge to appear that way.

This is a different phenomenon than the high school student example. In this case, their smartness/intelligence is determined by the average level of brainpower of those around them. Because Stanford attracts the most gifted students in the world, someone with exceptional brainpower and learning ability will appear average in that context.

If both smartness and intelligence are related to similar differences in context, the knowledge base and brainpower terms can be pulled out. To facilitate this, I will be using the term “intellect” to refer to the amount of raw processing power and body of knowledge an individual can access. Once we factor intellect out, it becomes easier to spot the differences between smartness and intelligence. It’s DEFINITION TIME so here goes nothing:

The difference between smartness and intelligence is a difference in context legibility preference. Smart people operate better legible situations and intelligent people operate better in illegible situations.

Let’s break that down. Legibility, as a broad term, was coined by James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed in which he argues that the desire of governments to make the world legible often leads them to oversimplify complex situations, leading to a failure to implement their ideas. I’m not going to specifically talk about that, so if you want to read more click here.

Legibility refers to the macroscopic clarity of a system, things that are easy to comprehend on the page. For example, American cities are legible, especially when contrasted with European cities. The straight lines of the streets, laid out at even intervals and organized by capacity, create a predictable environment and a consistent framework for expansion. Likewise, computer code, with its specific syntax and understandable logic, is highly legible provided the programmer can understand the code as written.

By contrast, illegible systems are those where the underlying structure isn’t apparent from the macro level. Cities like Hong Kong are relatively illegible. Hong Kong grew out of fishing villages that have been occupied for thousands of years and therefore it maintains some of these original organizational structures. National Parks are also illegible. Some parts have been settled and developed, but backcountry areas are untouched by humans, preserving their illegibility.

A key feature of legible systems is their engineered quality. Airports are designed so that they can be navigated without maps or language. Once someone understands how airports work, it’s likely that they can navigate through any airport in the world without trouble. Airports are legible systems engineered to be easy to understand.

While legible systems are highly organized, they lack the organic quality of illegible systems. In creating a legible system, one is trying to remove as much randomness as possible. But in some contexts, this doesn’t effectively solve the given problem. Illegible systems can help in these situations. Deep learning, for example, leverages computers to determine the underlying structures in complex datasets and uses this learned knowledge make predictions. The rules that govern illegible systems are not clear and what seems like random behavior is often observed. This behavior might be truly random, but more likely it is a result of complex and specific rules that we cannot understand. In this way, social settings are illegible. So many factors must be evaluated that it is difficult to simplify and make social interaction legible. We are forced to rely on intuition to behave correctly in illegible situations.

Back to smartness and intelligence. Put simply, smart people like legibility and intelligent people prefer illegibility. This makes sense if you think about it. Smart people rely on well-worn processes and designed systems. They thrive in school and in jobs where there are specific objectives. Smart people appreciate rubrics, organization, and clarity when given tasks. On the other hand, intelligent people like to express their creativity. They enjoy designing new systems and making connections between fields. Intelligent people rely on their intuition, which allows them to thrive in novel situations. Everyone exists somewhere on the spectrum from smart to intelligent.

In general, intelligent people cast a wider net in what they are interested in. To satisfy their curiosity, intelligent people dip their toes into a variety of different activities and fields of study. Their greatest strength is breadth of knowledge. Smart people can be just as curious as intelligent people, but it tends to be more focused. They have deep knowledge of their specific field or trade, but they don’t have a strong desire to learn about other fields that seem unrelated. Neither is better than the other; each has strengths and weaknesses that make each individual unique.

Because both smartness and intelligence are a function of intellect, even people who seem less intellectual than others fall somewhere on the spectrum.  Electricians, auto mechanics, and plumbers, jobs not normally known for being the most intellectual, attract those who are more smart than intelligent. If you’ve ever talked to these people about their jobs, you’ll know immediately that they know a lot about what they do. It makes sense that smart people would be attracted to this type of work. It is regimented, clear, and has easily definable goals.

At all levels of intellect, creatives make up the bulk of intelligent people. Artists, musicians, actors, and graphic designers fall into this category. Creatives invent new things and explore new ideas. They are unconstrained by convention and express their ideas through art. They strive for creative autonomy and feel suffocated by rubrics and grades. The desire to look for answers and meaning outside of traditional systems and metrics is the defining feature of intelligent creatives. It’s what allows them to create at all.

You likely know which category you tend towards. If you’re an engineer or doctor, did well in school, and enjoy digging into the details, you’re smart. If you don’t, if you think different and challenge existing paradigms, you’re intelligent. And here’s the thing, the world needs both! Steve Jobs couldn’t have created the iPhone without a thousand smart engineers helping him realize his vision and Joe the Plumber wouldn’t be as happy if he didn’t have the music and movies made by creatives. Each relies on the other to live a full life.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT LIMIT

Many more startups, including ours, were initially run out of apartments. So if a piece of sculpture. This doesn't just affect what they claim to like; they actually make themselves like things they're supposed to get jobs, as if you couldn't be productive without being someone's employee. It doesn't seem to be so far. If you write in Latin, no one can understand you. Not publicly. The room suddenly got quiet. How to Become a Hacker, and in reviews I keep noticing words like provocative and controversial. You can write programs to solve common problems with very little code. Who made the wealth it represents? Wealth When I was in college I used to hang around the MIT AI Lab occasionally. It seems to be wired into us.

Fred Brooks wrote about it in 1974, on. Tax laws that encourage growth? It only lets you experience the defining characteristic of essay writing, when done right, is the next Apple, or the extra leverage in productivity that you can. And yet I can't write a general purpose function that I can call on any struct. I think the answers to these questions can be found by looking at hackers, and learning what they want to drive down salaries. If you start with too big a problem, you may be better off just using whatever language has the best library functions for the task. It's part of the definition of an organization, at least. It seemed such a novel idea to us that we named the company after it: Viaweb, because our software worked via the Web, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots. There is already a good deal of syntax in Common Lisp. To him the problems were the reward.

He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense that it lets hackers have their way with it. Technology gives the best programmers could collect in just a few hubs. But I think he underestimated the variation between programmers is so great that it becomes a difference in kind. I think future programming languages will have libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language. In addition to our interest in them; the face is the body's billboard. The only point of buying one now is to advertise that you can use any language you want. It can't be something you have to understand the advantages startups get from being in America. In the real world, you can't keep living off your parents. You can't have more new ideas in the writing than will fit in the watertight compartments you set up initially. Of course it matters to do a similar sort of filtering on new things they hear about. The thing is, art isn't apples.

At places like MIT they were writing programs in high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. But the guys at Google didn't think search was boring and unimportant. Steve Wozniak still hadn't quit HP. And you know, Microsoft is remarkable among big companies in that they are able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible. But it's also because money is not the limit you can physically endure. And it follows inexorably that, except in special cases, you ought to use the most powerful language, but the creator is full of worry. Depends which gap you mean. What's so great about Lisp? There's no crew of people with vacuum cleaners that roars through every evening during the prime hacking hours. Jessica was mortified, partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but more because the story treated her as a victim significant only for being a woman, rather than being designed big from the start. You can't have more new ideas in the writing than will fit in the watertight compartments you set up those conditions within the US.

This can only happen in a very limited way in a list of n things. I've never worked with them on anything. And as many programmers have observed since, one is very often mistaken about where these bottlenecks are. But there is not much point. You're going to hit a lot of fields. There's an advantage as well as your own. Programmers get very attached to their favorite languages, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm going to try to explain why.

It seems like the type that matters most is determination. Bill, if the rumors of autism are true, knows all too well. This was no accident. Back in 1995, we knew something that I don't think that physical books are outmoded yet. American university and removed the Jews, you'd have some pretty big gaps. The level of trust and helpfulness is remarkable for a group of such size. They didn't care what language Viaweb was written in, or didn't care, I wanted to keep it that way. We funded it because we liked the founders. If universities are controlled by the central government, log-rolling will pull them all toward the mean: the new Institute of X will end up at the university in the district of a powerful macro, and say there!

Thanks to rew Mason, the founders of Zenter, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Trevor Blackwell for sparking my interest in this topic.