What about the pleasure of learning something new? Of accomplishing something for yourself? Solving a problem, or making a new thing? Or making yourself a better friend, partner, spouse, friend? Enjoying time with people you care about? Those things can give you a feeling of purpose and meaning.
I think the problem comes from expecting to find a larger purpose or meaning. Few of us will change the world significantly. Rid yourself of the idea that your life must have a greater purpose than satisfying yourself and the people you care about.
For example, too many people put a lot of effort into social media status in the form "likes" or "karma." What actual meaning does that have? What purpose does it serve, aside from attention-seeking and narcissism? When people spend their time on getting attention and status display their ego gets crushed when that attention doesn't come, or goes away. Wouldn't enjoying a walk on the beach give more pleasure, even if it serves no purpose beyond relaxation and contemplation?
You have to start with yourself, to find meaning and purpose for yourself in how you treat yourself, and then how you interact with other people. You can't start by hoping to find a greater purpose or meaning in life and feeling down and useless until that happens.
Hospitals are not storing the data on a harddrive in their basement so clearly this is a solvable problem. Here's a list of AWS services which can be used to store HIPAA data:
The biglaw firms I’m familiar with still store matter data exclusively on-prem. There’s a significant chunk of floor space in my office tower dedicated to running a law firm server farm for a satellite office.
Or legal order. If you're on-site or on-cloud and in the US then it might not matter since they can get your data anyway, but if you're in another country uploading data across borders can be a problem.
Some of the anecdotes seem completely fabricated to provide a convenient example (i.e. the guy’s wife was very observantly watching him play a round of golf with a colleague and caught him cheating?)
It's not unreasonable to think that the wife was playing with them, was waiting for the cheater (fictional or not) to swing, and happened to notice them move the ball.
I’ve spent time in New Haven and NYC and… not even close. Sure there’s good slices in New Haven, but there are also pizza deserts, and a lot of them. New Haven does compete with NYC on restaurant-style pizza though.
Yeah this is how this conversation typically goes "but we've got good pizza from X, Y, Z restaurant" — is not the same as just walking to the corner and paying $2 for a big cheese slice — the NY slice is essentially a street food, like street tacos are in some states along the mexican border
I really don’t understand why we as a society have found it acceptable to experiment like this on other sentient beings for our own advancement.
Why are these animal lives worth less than ours? Just because we are more “advanced”?
Killing animals for food is at least in line with the natural order (leaving aside factory farming). Running experiments like this is far beyond natural, and to me is quite bizarre and unethical.
A society that creates people who feel entitled to say they don't owe anything to those who made immense sacrifices for them (even though nobody chooses their relatives), is quite sad.
It's a society so individualistic that deprives one of the main pleasures of human life: making a difference in the lives of those you love.
Parents choose to have children; in my mind the responsibility flows in that direction, from parent to child. A child has no choice in the matter, why should they be saddled with responsibility?
I'll happily care for my mother as she ages - she's been a wonderful parent all my life. But I have friend whose parents basically just kept them alive to adulthood, kicked them out, and are now expecting years of "payback". No thanks.
True video capability would entail describing a scene as a prompt and getting a video in return. Not interpolating between a handful of images as is being done now (not to discredit those).
This will be a huge game changer when it occurs. Whether it be for deep fake videos, creating custom content, or making a new season of your favorite tv show that was cancelled too early. The possibilities are endless.
This is probably not in the near future (i.e. this year), but I doubt it is very far off.
I am much more interested in an intermediary step. I would love to be able to use a tool like this to create a comic book. This is after all just static artwork which the tool already creates quite beautifully.
What it would need to be able to do to get from here to there is understand some concepts. The first being "characters". On reddit there was beautiful image that recently won first place in an art contest and its quite frustrated some of the art community. When I was looking at it I thought it was awesome, but wondered at the ability to create another hundred or so images in that same 'world' that the created image was showing. I would want to do something like give it the prompt "tired old medieval knight with a mace and shield" and have it create the character then be able to name it "Tom" or something and feed it more prompts for that characters like "Tom is sitting in a forest brooding" and have it create the same exact character but in a different context.
That would be pretty game changing for opening up amature web comics to a large body of people who have ideas and tell stories but have no art skills to speak of - my stick characters are crooked :(
The result is bad though, for the same reason you can't generate video with it. Comic panels need to relate to each other; you can't simply make them out of random images. There aren't sufficient style controls to do that with current technology, even if Midjourney added in "textual inversion".
There is some work exploring that with Textual Inversion[1].
Another trick to approach this problems is specifying the random seed, this will cause the same image being generated by the same prompt without any randomness. When you now change the prompt you get an image that is very similar to the first one, but with the variation included. Somebody used that to age a woman across 100 years[2] with quite stunning results. Even works with gender or style changes.
I recently saw a Twitter thread from last year where someone made a comic book with AI generated backgrounds. The characters were added in later, but it stuck with me as a very cool future use case
Imagine how fun sitting at a terminal in vim editing a 100 line 'script' for a short movie and getting rapid feedback back. I'm so excited about the future.
The possibilities are endless. "Insert Willie Wonka, as Froto's love interest, and Willie should joint the major battles with UZI machine guns, and his dialog should be as if he is an inner-city gang member."
I thought we'd never get image generation this fast. Last year it was 30 minutes per image. The stable diffusion folks are planning for a 100mb release of the image generator in Q1 which for sure would be real time. I actually suspect you can get something like that incredibly fast (even though all intuition says otherwise).
What is referred to/defined as "interpolation" because as an outsider... isn't "Stable Diffusion interpolating text into images/frames/video" in a "literal" (maybe not technical) sense?
It's to be interpreted in the quasi-mathematical sense where you have images for frame A and frame B representing your data points. To interpolate between those frames, a flow of plausible images simulating the transition from A to B is generated.
Interpolation here meaning one smooth motion transition is all that is depicted. An entire episode of television requires things like cuts between scenes, possibly discontinuities like flashbacks, scenes that take place days, months, or even decades later, and characters should still look the same, but might be wearing different clothing, or grow a beard, or get really old but still have similar facial features and the same skin color. If one ages, they should all age about the same, unless it's a story with time travel or humanoid immortal characters that don't age.
I'm sure these types of capabilities will come at some point, but no current model can do it. It requires more than just projecting motion into a scene.
You could "hack it" by using a couple of other models as part of your pipeline. Similarly to how you have to use GAN after SD to "fix" faces sometimes.
You also could put a language model on top of your prompting system. So "gandolff kicking ass" gets translated into " Page XXX, Paragraph XX from LOTR "
I have come to realize that I am very self centered, but I can’t quite figure out why.
I tend to get very caught up and focused on what is going on in my life and never stop to think about others. It is more that the thought never occurs to me, as opposed to me consciously prioritizing myself over others.
My wife on the other hand is very thoughtful, always checking in on others to see how they are doing. I wish I could be more like that, but would require some external override (eg setting a reminder on my phone) instead of me organically deciding to do so.
Our situation is very much the same. In fact, it was constantly seeing my wife check-in with her family that encouraged me to do the same. About a month ago I called my grandmother and had a two-hour convo and I learned that my mother never wanted her to have my number, for whatever reason. I regret not thinking of reaching out to her sooner but we're both glad I did.
My parents divorced when I was 13 or so but dual-parented. My dad was very focused on trying to get me to be more "macho" and my mom didn't seem to care much about whatever I had going on. So, I kept to myself; reading books, dreaming up inventions, sketching, &c. When college came, I found out via campus security that I did NOT have a college fund and was subsequently removed from campus. For some reason, my mom seemed angry at me for being home even though she's the one who bragged to everyone for YEARS that her kids had a college fund and never had to worry about working while focusing on education.
I'm starting to feel resentment as I recall things so I'll just say this: my feeling weren't considered when I was a child/teen, I didn't have help in early adulthood, and I was setup to fail (credit/identity theft victim, per mother). As a result, I had to learn how to live in the "real world" without a safety net and try to figure out how to forgive people because these people would never apologize (or even remember their actions).
Doing all this got me through all right. I'm self-taught, have a pretty cool job, and live relatively stress-free in a safe community with a great school district. Nearly ever day is sunny but having someone you trust that can tell you objective things about yourself is a must.
Thinking of others when you've only thought of yourself for two decades is hella difficult but not impossible. I make sure to call my grandmother at least every two weeks. I look for ways to make my wife's life easier around the house. I'm more productive in my downtime so I can make progress on my personal projects so I can be present when the family's doing something. It's a lot of work but my life has demonstrably improved.
"I did NOT have a college fund and was subsequently removed from campus" -- wait, what? This is a thing in the US?
We don't even have "college funds" in Australia but if you don't pay your uni fees you just won't get a degree, nobody's going to physically remove you from anywhere, that seems nuts...
Yeah so for us in the States, the concept of a college fund is just a bank account that parents deposit money into over the course of a child's life so when they reach college age there isn't anxiety about the cost of college.
It's not that I didn't have one, it's that my mom lied to me about having one and was instead writing bad checks to the college. They didn't like checks bouncing so I had a few days to get off campus or else.
Believe it or not there was an outcry here when fees were introduced for tertiary education. But you pay them using a government-backed interest-free loan - I think it took me 6 or 7 years to pay off two degrees? Still, as I said, even if for whatever reason you attended lectures etc. without having paid for enrolment, nobody would care.
My therapist mentioned the same thing to me recently so I suppose it is worth investigating further.
I had never considered it before that, probably due to lack of understanding of what ADD/ADHD is (when I was growing up the stereotype was high energy kids bouncing off the walls and unable to sit still and focus in class, whereas I was low energy, introverted, and had always done well in school and work so it was never a thought).
i can recognize myself in what you just wrote. and in my case i am pretty sure that it comes from my parents divorce and the lack of role models. there was nobody in my life growing up who would show care for me or for others in the way that your wife (and also mine) was doing it. i have the same issue with generosity. i haven't experienced people being generous as i grew up and as a result i don't know how to do it. it's just not something that i'd think about, and i have to consciously remind myself to share more things with others.
on the other hand, despite being somewhat introvert, i have no problem inviting some of those regilious types, when they come knocking at my door and having a serious conversation with them, while critically inspecting their claims. why? because that i did learn from my dad who was welcoming, open minded yet serious about his own beliefs.
I desperately yearn for a meaning/purpose to serve as a source of internal motivation…
Up until now, the only thing that has been a “motivation” for me is a fear of failure, so that’s what I rely on to get anything done.