*$900, and no, the average person can’t afford $900 for bespoke art (or more likely, has no interest in paying $900 for one). Heck, I don’t see how you can look at the explosion of AI art online and not come to the conclusion the average person would much rather have the same for near free than paying hundreds of dollars. To me, that’s a pretty obvious revealed preference.
The overwhelming majority of people of any income level will never pay to commission any kind of art or even be familiar with the possibility to consider as a practical option.
It's just not a typical thing to do pre or post AI. "Revealed preference" doesn't seem like a useful lens without some basic degree of awareness that a choice even exists.
And on the flip side, I have a friend who commissioned some kind of avatar for social media from an artist friend of friend for the first time in their life. They loved the result a lot and since then have commissioned a bunch of little random things once they realized it was a thing anyone could easily do with a few bucks. For stuff like their WoW character/guild, D&D, social media, etc.
They make less than six figures, each request was <$100 IIRC. Budgeted basically like any other gaming/hobby purchase for personal entertainment.
But i mean, i dont think he thought of this as an "art-object" more like a ... house-control-kiosk-whatever. And people spend tons of money on those things. Eink-screens for thousands. Control4 for whatever amount. Homey-hub for..300usd? Hue-lights for hundreds etc.
So, sure 900usd or a part of that system is a lot of money and I wouldn't do it. But I've spent 900usd on techthings with a very diminishing amount of return :)
>generally don't want to say that because it contradicts their ideology or it just plain looks bad, so they resort to an alternative argument: "stupid people should be allowed to vote but the information that they have access to should be controlled by us instead of by the Bad People"
Its objectively true that people are voting based off false information. It makes sense that people would want that to stop.
Meanwhile housing, health care,
food, energy, and things like college all get more expensive while wages are stagnant (and falling when inflation adjusted). Now on top of that we toss a new jobs disrupting technology into the mix.
You’re making a lot of things objectively better, but none of them are the essentials that people need.
I’m not saying it’s bad to make AI bots or video games or network apps. I’m saying that the blanket statement “we make things better” is oblivious to a lot of realities.
Yes, this is why no one really feels sorry about the LLM code situation other than other coders. Believe it or not, before the current iteration of LLMs(around 2015-2020), coders were still gloating about how they were going to replace other professional jobs (law, medicine, dentists, finance, etc.) in due time, and they and researchers were going to be the only people with white-collar jobs. There is a delicious irony of how it all ended up shaking out.
They dont understand the fix so sharing a vibe coded patch is upstream spam. They should submit a bug report and their findings. (Written by them not AI)
Its really depressing watching Ukraine get ragged by a larger nation while all its neighbors sit on the sidelines and watch. Deploy troops to Ukraine it wont trigger nuclear war.
Not a good strategy. The drones are cheaper 1:5 than AIM-9 missiles. They need some cheap low payload IR based interceptor if those engines run hot. Probably another fixed wing drone.
Putin isnt going to nuke over a defensive deployment of troops. As long as they dont cross over into russia its not an escalation. He has already broken this line by bringing in NK troops and EU spec ops have broken this line by operating in ukraine the past 4 years.
Is not the whole plan to put troops as meat shields and hope that Russia will be afraid to attack them? So yeah, Putin won't nuke countries that deployed troops but those troops are going to become targets as same as Ukrainian troops and mercenaries are now. And then what? Send more troops? More of the same result. Retaliatory strike on Russia? Nuke.
The more people on a front the harder it is to push. Currently ukraine is covering the entire front on their own. Having NATO troops to reinforce their lines would allow them to rotate more often and would change the calculation for russia. Currently russia knows that there isnt many people on a front and it can be broken. If they knew that NATO was there adding another 500k active troops the calculation of attrition would be in ukraines favor.
If Ukraine and russia can bare the losses there is no reason why NATO cant.
There's no way western militaries would just add troops to the front. If we're fighting a war with Russia - regardless of where it is - it would be no holds barred. And just adding more troops to the front is not the way an advanced tech-heavy loss-averse western military would do it.
The only way western troops are deployed en-mass inside Ukraine is as a peace guarantee with some level of Russian agreement. The moment there's footage of British/French/German troops getting hunted down by drones, the public will be crying for direct strikes into Russia and it'll be WW3.
You'd need the US and Turkey to send troops to get anywhere close to 500k. EU and UK might get 200k if they sent everyone capable.
> the calculation of attrition would be in ukraines favor.
I thought it already is, has not Zelensky recently said that Russia lost 1.6M vs Ukraine's 450k (and 700k vs 50k dead)?
>If Ukraine and russia can bare the losses there is no reason why NATO cant.
Very profound. I wonder if you can find not 500k but 5k NATO troops who could draw the borders of Ukraine or Russia on a map. Yet they will find no reason not to die over it? Okay.
France, Germany, UK alone have 500k + another 200k from poland. 500k doesnt mean you have to deploy 500k to ukraine. Just make it known that ukraine has that pool available to draw from. Even a deployment of 50k and equipment would change the tides significantly.
On the matter of attrition its not in ukraines favor at all. I follow it very closely and its closer to 1m to 1.5m. Russia can sustain far greater losses. They have a much deeper pool to draw from where as ukraine has already called up and drafted a lot of their able bodied men.
The propaganda makes it look closer than it is because we want to see ukraine winning but dont take that as thinking they dont need help.
That is a count of active military for 3 nations. A deployment would never consist of only "combat troops" so you are nitpicking to try and save your point.
Oh, I see. Hundreds of thousands of various bureaucrats, secretaries, and other kinds of "active troops", who "serve" 9 to 5 in an air conditioned office is what going to change the balance on the front. Go for it, I hope you succeed in persuading your government to send those.
You have no other option, really. If you play chicken, you open yourself up to endless blackmail. If you're going to take a stand eventually, it's better to do it sooner than later, because if your adversary knows that you will eventually draw a line, allowing them to discover that line gradually encourages further pressure on you. Establishing the boundary early makes the threat more credible and reduces the incentive to test it.
It's like standing up to a bully the first time he pushes you, instead of giving in and calming yourself that one day you'll stand up to him. The Putins and Trumps of this world are simple creatures; such middle-school analogies describe them well.
And when the power lines fall down in rural areas, how will people heat and power their homes? I guess they could buy some batteries, but then they'd sit idle most of the time. Maybe they could find some other profitable use and share the capital cost?
> The people buying the batteries and the government's capital.
The former should be allowed to make their own decisions. I agree that the latter should probably be kept out of this: government is usually not very good at making these decisions. But alas, in many places they play a huge role in the electricity supply and distribution.
> The former should be allowed to make their own decisions.
Yes, but that's how we arrive to local economical maxima that are much, much closer to the global minimum that to the global maximum. The personal decisions aggregate, after all.
People are buying the batteries with their OWN capital, not Govts capital.
You say Govt capital which only benefits private utlities and ALSO say govt/utility should to build out the storage. Not sure what you are trying to say. You sound pretty confused.
In a lot of places the power companies are government owned and the private companies get massive amounts of captial from the government for buildouts.
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