I see restaurants post AI flyers and ads to random local Facebook groups and most of the replies are about them being AI slop. I think it’s an uncanny valley problem: People don’t mind if you post a real photo of your food or a cartoon drawing of a pizza or a pig on a spit, but when it’s a weird fake photo with texture issues, it looks gross, especially when it’s food.
I think a lot of people who open restaurants probably aren’t extremely online, partly because it would be physically impossible with the amount of work they have to do, but they definitely pay attention -sometimes too much attention — to public online feedback.
I get why restaurants use the cartoon-looking slop. If you don't particularly care that it signals that you put no effort into your menu or ad or that your restaurant's menu has the same shitty aesthetic as all other slop, fine. It's a cartoon and I could understand someone thinking it looks ok.
I absolutely do not get the uncanny-valley images. Those all look gross. Besides not actually being representative of the dish, the images have all sorts of weird texture issues, look too glossy, and are just unappetizing. I cannot understand why a restaurant owner would want to put up an ad that has food that looks straight up gross.
Professional food photography is expensive. This is a case of the free mediocre offer crowding out the much better but expensive option. Same way that free mail with ads crowded out email without ads.
The thing with those "AI Slop" comments are generally from people whom are opinionated about the image. However it's abundantly clear that the target demographic which is the customers generally don't mind. If you think about it, We have been conditioned by the "for illustrative purposes only" label on most food images that at this point most people just want a reference so they can decide what to eat. I'd take an AI image over just words any day.
I've been seeing "AI slop" stickers posted on things
> I see just everywhere including food menus
The places I have seen it in use are the places that would have a handwritten scribble that was misspelt and would be something mocked by people because it was written by ESOL (or vice versa, English speakers trying, but failing, to write in a different language)
Honestly, I think the AI slop is a step up - I can read the signs clearly, and they are only mildly offensive
Edit: I guess I take the view that - like a pirated movie filmed in a cinema - the only people that use/watch it are people that were never going to pay for the real thing anyway
I don’t think “human beings should burn themselves to learn.” Yes, we learn from mistakes and failures, and I think we have already seen how technology developments have their risks pegged to them.
I also think that in the grand scheme of things, we have “burned our hands” plenty of times and we still don’t seem to care because “the benefits outweigh the risks.”
Also, I like David Friedberg’s argument where he says that you can do as much as you can to slow it down, but it’s already too late because of the amount of open source models available. I think a fair comparison could be the black market. You can do as much as you want against it: regulate it, slow it down, etc… it will be there and there will be demand for it.
I admire Jeffrey, but saying that we’d be better off without having invented the technology is an easy and clickbait thing to say. Just like saying we’d be better off without drugs, factory farming, cars, etc… you can say this about many many things.
I think that what’s important is seeing the writing on the wall, acknowledge that both really good things can happen as much as really bad things and ensure humanity as a whole does not suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, history has demonstrated that’s never the case and us mere mortals are the ones that will suffer the consequences.
> I also think that in the grand scheme of things, we have “burned our hands” plenty of times and we still don’t seem to care because “the benefits outweigh the risks.”
Not really. Most of the wealthy, who make the decisions, have not been burned. With climate change, the rich insulate themselves by moving or with AC. I also never suggested we burn ourselves. I suggest that it would be better if we were burned, rather than continue down the current path of reckless innovation.
>I also think that in the grand scheme of things, we have “burned our hands” plenty of times and we still don’t seem to care because “the benefits outweigh the risks.”
I think in general it’s because we’re basically born the most inept animal on the planet. Everything has to be taught/learnt again, so we do eventually learn from the burnt hand but we all have to burn our hands first. And there’s always going to be a fresh set of hands next year that haven’t been burnt.
It just feels like not even getting too close to the sun helps.
I think of COVID and gain of function research. We got pretty close to the sun there but I’m sure we’re just going to continue fucking around and finding out.
Because at the end, there’s going to be profit to be made out of it.
It can be turned off. You get a pop-up as soon as you open the site.
I’m on the other side of this and I think this is a great social feature for websites.
One thing the web currently lacks is multiplayer mode, and this is one way of doing it.
It does make more sense to have something like this in sites where you can move things, and canvases, but I do think it would be nice to have this + a chatroom in websites. Some sort of “good old internet” feeling.
But isn’t that kicking the can down the road? Isn’t that the reason housing is incredibly over valued and wealth inequality is a huge problem here and around the world?
Yes, but "kicking the can down the road" has been the defining policy in most of the West for the last 60 years as it's what benefits the oligarchs. See, that metaphorical "can" here being kicked doesn't exist for them. It used to, but they rightly believed it wouldn't happen in their lifetime, and now it's locked in thanks to private drone armies if even the shadow of a "can" appears to be forming.
As the target audience for this white paper, I’d appreciate HN’s take on the accuracy of this. Whether it misses something, deserves praise or any resources you can point out to make this advice even more actionable.
What’s your advice to a non-technical / non-tech savvy small business owner? Say, for example, people used to buy anti virus as a solution. What could they do now that resembles that?
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I work with lots of non-technical / non-tech savvy small business owners and many of them are showing concern. So, I’d love to share as much as possible with the people who are not Palo Alto networks clients.
IMHO NIST advice is highly reliable but it's often too complicated to be useful, which seems to be the case here (that's up to you, of course).
Otherwise, you need to start with an idea of what valuables you have and what threats - hackers? lawsuits? competitors? how well-resourced? - you're protecting against. No security will be perfect. You need to make it more expensive to steal your data than it's worth to the attacker.
A few general tips off the top of my head:
* As much as possible, don't store anything on a computer that you don't want to read in the news or hear read to you in court. The safest data doesn't exist. For any communications, set a retention period (e.g., delete messages in 30 days), and just save separately anything you need to keep.
* Store confidential data (passwords, credit card numbers, anything that can cost money or reputation) only in a secure database; the only exception is when the data is actually requird. Password databases, if they have long-enough fields, can work here. Do not keep it in emails - don't email around passwords, credit card numbers, etc.; otherwise when the hacker accesses your email, all is lost. This especially applies to confidential client data - you don't want to have to explain to all your clients, 'you're confidential data might have been stolen - I don't really know if they hacker found it or will use it.' With a secure database, you have peace of mind.
* Use Apple products. They prioritize security and have the resources to deliver on it; they are the fastest route to security. Windows' value is to larger organizations managing large numbers of computers. Linux is too complicated to secure for non-technical users (and probably isn't as secure as Apple). It does require trusting Apple, but you need to trust someone.
* Use Signal for communication, as much as possible.
* Security is much too hard to do yourself. Depending on need, use products that a vendor remotely manages (but then you need to trust the vendor). Use your firewall to filter viruses, though that's imperfect and you need to be careful about it slowing down throughput.
I was in Colombia a couple of months ago and I got my phone stolen (iPhone 16). I rushed home to mark it as stolen using the find my feature using my Mac. It went through and I felt incredibly relieved. Then, a couple of minutes after, I receive a bunch of emails from many of my online accounts sending auth codes and making sure it was me changing the password. I then spent several hours in a back and forth trying to get a hold of the situation which thankfully was solved. I just know that my grandma would’ve had a different story to tell…
I’ve heard the same story from friends that have had their phones stolen also.
So, how secure is Apple? I think it is and feels like it’s transforming to an it used to be.
It feels like anything that’s now connected to the internet holds a back door waiting to be discovered sooner or later.
So, from what I’m learning, it’s not really about stopping the breaches because it’s hard to say you’re ever going to be free from breaches, but creating a system of data storage that takes potential breaches in mind.
I have no idea what happened. I expect any experienced attacker knows about remote lock and remote wipe, and their first step would be extract everything they can ASAP.
Then they can load the extracted bits onto something else and go forward from there.
> it’s not really about stopping the breaches because it’s hard to say you’re ever going to be free from breaches, but creating a system of data storage that takes potential breaches in mind.
It's all of the above; generally it's called 'defense in depth': you don't just want a hard shell, you also want to secure the internal components - data and code.
Again, you want to start with a census of what is valuable and focus on protecting those things. You don't have resources to secure everything.
makes me wonder how many super markets would have thoughts to include the food in their freezers as part of their securables before the recent cyber attacks that spoiled food by taking control of the cooling systems. it’s a good framework but hard to apply…
For the ones thinking this is great, have you actually tried to talk without making sounds?
I don't think it is an intuitive action at all and I became self-conscious about not making a sound rather than talking like I normally would.
I suppose it would require some "getting used to."
Regardless, I think it is a cool idea and a real problem. Sometimes I don't want to type nor talk out loud so I find myself whispering at my phone like I'm telling it a dirty secret.
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As I'm writing this, I think this kind of product might not hit the market for consumers, but I'm seeing this used by Flock like companies to spy on people's speech, so kudos on making machine lip reading a thing!
There's already open-source stuff [1][2] out there that can lipread video to transcribe text, but the word error rate is pretty high (and it may not be physically possible to get this down without doing something like subvocal and having other sensors near your face).
Have you never talked / mouthed without making sounds? Never even as a kid when something made you mad and you paced around the room think-saying shower thoughts to get back at that person? Even as an adult I probably mouth a sentence or two e.g. "What the fuck is this" when looking at AI output 3-5 times a week
It does feel a little weird to do it voluntarily when not emotional, but that'll be solved as soon as Claude fucks something up :)
As a solopreneur of a boring SMB.
I still do coding and build my own tools but I don’t see the need for agent swarms or Muse or Grok Bot or any of that.
The reason why I stay away is because I like to do QA on the slop these things generate. Having them run amok just makes me nervous.
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