FWIW: a single car crash killing 21 people would still be newsworthy in America. And I think if you math it out with something per capita equivalent, this would actually be an exceptionally bad day/incident for the US.
But of course you're not wrong, trains are vastly safer than private cars. If anyone uses this as evidence against having a proper rail system, they're ignorant.
But - until someone does that, there's no reason to make this about the US or cars vs. trains. It's borderline offensive to reflexively politicize this before anyone else had; it almost feels like you're intentionally trying to sow conflict, here.
Right, so, mathing it out, the US has a population of around 340 million but Spain has a population of around 49 million. 340/49 is roughly 7, so the per capita equivalent in the US would be a single incident killing 21*7=147 people. So that'd be one incident killing 1.5x the average number of people usually killed across the rest of the country combined.
A completely unremarkable day, more like it. Given stochasticity there's bound to be at least a dozen days per year with 50% more than the average, especially since car deaths depend a lot on weekday, holidays, weather and so on - much moreso than train deaths. No one would look up from it, wouldn't make the news.
> And I think if you math it out with something per capita equivalent, this would actually be an exceptionally bad day/incident for the US.
This is now how I interpreted "bad day", think it would be clearer to remove "day" if that's what you meant. Of course you're right in that it would be awful as a car accident, they simply don't happen that many as a time. Which is why our monkey brain's lack of emotional response to "many small cuts" vs "one big cut" incorrectly causes the belief that cars and e.g. coal/gas are much safer than they are.
I was born in the mid-late 80's, and I remember the 90's being an era where everyone knew in the remotest tiny village about youngsters dying in-road (usually because of being drunk). Dark ages.
You would find car related fatalities for granted every Summer in the news.
But why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down?
You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.
In British English you'd be wrong for using an em-dash in those places, with most grammar recommendations being for an en-dash, often with spaces.
It's be just as wrong as using an apostrophe instead of a comma.
Grammar is often wooly in a widely used language with no single centralised authority. Many of the "Hard Rules" some people thing are fundamental truths are often more local style guides, and often a lot more recent than some people seem to believe.
Interesting, I’m an American English speaker but that’s how it feels natural to me to use dashes. Em-dashes with no spaces feels wrong for reasons I can’t articulate. This first usage—in this meandering sentence—feels bossy, like I can’t have a moment to read each word individually. But this second one — which feels more natural — lets the words and the punctuation breathe. I don’t actually know where I picked up this habit. Probably from the web.
It can also depend on the medium. Typically, newspapers (e.g. the AP style guide) use spaces around em-dashes, but books / Chicago style guide does not.
> while they 100% against using AI to generate art or game design, when you ask them about using AI tools to build software or websites the response is almost always something like "Programmers are expensive, I can't afford that. If I can use AI to cut programmers out of the process I'm going to do it."
Three things:
1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.
2. Somewhat informed people might know that for coding tasks, LLMs are broadly trained on code that was publicly shared to help people out on Reddit or SO or as part of open-source projects (the nuance of, say, the GPL will be lost). Whereas the art is was trained on is, broadly speaking, copywritten.
3. And, related to two: people feel great sympathy for artists, since artists generally struggle quite a bit to make a living. Whereas engineers have solid, high paying white collar jobs; thus, they're not considered entitled to any kind of sympathy or support.
I've been a professional artist, designer, and developer. Mostly a developer, and working in academia throughout the late teens meant being privy to the development of neural networks into what they've become. When I pointed out the vulnerability of developers to this technology, the "well maybe for some developers but I'm special" stance was nearly ubiquitous.
When the tech world realized their neato new invention inadvertently dropped a giant portion of the world's working artists into the toilet, they smashed that flusher before they could even say "oops." Endless justification, people saying artists were untalented and greedy and deserved to be financially ruined, with a heaping helping of "well, just 'pivot'."
And I did-- into manufacturing because I didn't see much of a future for tech industry careers. I'm lucky-- I came from a working class background so getting into a trade wasn't a total culture and environment shock. I think what this technology is going to do to job markets is a tragedy, but after all the shit I took as a working artist during this transition, I'm going to have to say "well, just pivot!" Better get in shape and toughen up-- your years of office work mean absolutely nothing when you've got to physically do something for a living. Most of the soft, maladroit, arrogant tech workers get absolutely spanked in that environment.
... although it's a bit unfair to the many tech people who never wanted to throw artists down the loo or indeed anyone else. E.g. when I was fiddling with language generation during my MSc it never occurred to me that someone would want to use it to replace writing, let alone coding. What would be the point in that?
> Whereas the art is was trained on is, broadly speaking, copywritten
The overwhelmingly vast majority of the code you're talking about (basically, anything that doesn't explicitly disavow its copyright by being placed in the public domain, and there's some legal debate if that is even something that you can do proactively) is just as copyright protected as the art is.
Open Source does not mean copyright free.
"Free Software" certainly doesn't mean copyright free (the GPL only has any meaning at all because of copyright law).
> 1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.
It is about scarcity: art is a passion; there is a perpetual oversupply of talented game designers, visual graphic artists, sculptors, magna artists, music composers, guitarists, etc...you can hire one and you usually can hire talent for cheap because...there is a lot of talent.
Programmers are (or were?) expensive because, at least in recent times, talented ones are expensive because they are rare enough.
A good artist is just as expensive as a good programmer. Commissioning art is expensive. Outsourcing to third world countries is cheaper (just like programming!).
> A good artist is just as expensive as a good programmer.
Let's look at industry, and just go look at what video game artists make compared to programmers with a similar amount of experience. Now, are you just claiming that they just aren't very good artists, so they aren't paid well? Because I've seen their work, and its not shabby at all.
Video game companies are a special case (even for programmers). They work people to the bone for lower pay because people are passionate about video games, but the common denominator there is gamers wanting to get into the industry—not being an artist or programmer.
>> Programmers are (or were?) expensive because, at least in recent times, talented ones are expensive because they are rare enough.
In all the years I worked in the industry, I never knew anyone trying to hire "talented" programmers. Only trying to hire people, usually inexperienced juniors, willing to work twice the time they're paid for if you tell them how smart they are.
Ya, there is that also. But sane orgs will want to hire programmers with some level of talent, at least. Not just some kid out of bootcamp, they will have to show that they can actually program something first.
Most of the code that was publicly available to be trained on is written by people in their spare time, not directly making any money off of it though. Personally I think if you are fine with AI used to generate code you should also be fine with it being used to generate art. That doesn't mean that I think that big companies just scraping the entire internet and training on large amount of portfolio pieces from ArtStation or people making open source projects is good either.
> Most of the code that was publicly available to be trained on is written by people in their spare time, not directly making any money off of it though.
So what? The code is offered under specific licensing terms. Not adhering to those terms is just as wrong as training on a paid product.
There is the nuance that much code that is available publicly (which includes a GIGANTIC amount of that "written by people in their spare time" stuff) is put there for the explicit goal of showing other people all the details so they can read, reuse, and modify it. Open-source licenses in some form are incredibly popular, though the details vary, and seeing your side project in a product that 100k people use is usually just neat, not "you stole from me".
Artworks have their relatively-popular creative-commons stuff, and some of those follow a similar "do whatever" vibe, but I far more frequently see "attribution required" which generally requires it at the point of use, i.e. immediately along-side the art-piece. And if it's something where someone saw your work once and made something different separately, the license generally does not apply. LLMs have no way to do that kind of attribution though, and hammer out stuff that looks eerily familiar but isn't pixel-precise to the original, so it feels like and probably is an unapproved use of their work.
The code equivalent of this is usually "if you have source releases, include it there" or a very few have the equivalent of "please shove a mention somewhere deep in a settings screen that nobody will tap on". Using that code for training is I think relatively justifiable. The licenses matter (and have clearly been broadly ignored, which should not be allowed) but if it wasn't prohibited, it's generally allowed, and if you didn't want that you would need to choose a restrictive license or not publish it.
Plus, like, artists generally are their style, in practical terms. So copying their style is effectively impersonation. Coders on the other hand often intentionally lean heavily on style erasing tools like auto-formatters and common design patterns and whatnot, so their code blends cleanly in more places rather than sounding like exclusively "them".
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I'm generally okay with permissive open source licensed code being ingested and spat back out in a useful product. That's kinda the point of those licenses. If it requires attribution, it gets murky and probably leans towards "no" - it's clearly not a black-box re-implementation, the LLMs are observing the internals and sometimes regurgitate it verbatim and that is generally not approved when humans do it.
Do I think the biggest LLM companies are staying within the more-obviously-acceptable licenses? Hell no. So I avoid them.
Do I trust any LLM business to actually stick to those licenses? ... probably not right now. But one could exist. Hopefully it'd still have enough training data to be useful.
> 1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.
Very reminiscent of the "software factory" bullshit peddled by grifters 15 or 20 years ago.
And I think, frankly, a lot of agile practice as I've seen it in industry doesn't respect software development as a creative endeavour either.
But fundamentally I, like a lot of programmers/developers/engineers, got into software because I wanted to make things, and I suspect the way I use AI to help with software development reflects that (tight leash, creative decision-making sits with me, not the machine, etc.).
> People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour.
Because it's not? Programmers' ethos is having low attachment to code. People work on code together, often with complete strangers, see it modified, sliced, merged and whatever. If you rename a variable in software or refactor a module, it's still the same software.
Meanwhile for art authorship, authenticity and detail are of utter importance.
That's no different from any art. It's like saying that woodworkers' ethos is having low attachment to screws, or guitarists' ethos is having low attachment to picks. Code is a tool; the creative, human endeavor is making an artifact that people can perceive and interact with.
People don't respect the salary premium software developers have received and expect relative to other creative, human endeavors.
You lay it out perfectly in your answer, and I'll add that the entire non-tech world generally feels that if tech jobs lose their shine due to AI, its actually a welcome reversion to the mean. Software has likely depressed wage growth in many other jobs.
Which is unfortunate, because the thinking people should be having is that we should bring everyone else up to our level, and not trying to bring down the lucky few that are well compensated in this world full of leeches in the form of CEOs and middle managers.
See, I’m with you, but in my day to day work I almost never could almost never get into a flow state while coding, because very little of my work involves creating things or solving real problems; it typically involves just trying to mentally untangle huge rat nests, Jenna-ing bug fixes and the occasional feature in, and then spending a bunch of time testing to make sure I didn’t break anything, no flow involved. I’ve been grudgingly using Cursor heavily for the past few weeks and it’s been helping make all of this significantly more bearable.
LLMs aren’t replacing the joy of coding for me, but they do seem to be helping me deal with the misery of being a professional coder.
Yeah, OS X was definitely the nicest native development experience at the time. Apple's documentation was considerably better and more searchable back then than it is now (especially as it is now for desktop). And even though they've introduced lots of niceties (including Swift), as Apple's piled additional features and APIs into Cocoa/Xcode I find the overall experience quite a bit less coherent or intuitive or ergonomic than it used to be.
Engineers (hopefully) come to learn the value of Chesterton's Fence young, because engineering failures tend to make themselves known quickly and loudly.
Designers probably have perverse incentives. Showy new designs get promotions. Even when they hurt usability, it's often only in insidious ways.
Yes, this. I've worked with designers who only see the product as a personal art project for their portfolio. Business and user problems are secondary to them.
Do not hire visual designers as UX designers - unless you know what you're doing.
The best UX designers design to solve business and user problems and work within constraints.
It should be your first resource when looking something up, it's usually quite clear and often helpful, but I find it somewhat confusingly organized and rather incomplete. It's more of a reference than a tutorial or guidebook, per se.
Everyone is different, so I say this not to tell you how to feel but just to offer a different perspective:
Walking in urban environments can be its own sort of joy. Cities (well, good ones anyway) are full of life and energy and humanity, have unexpected nooks and crannies, and a rich sense of dynamism and excitement. Even late at night (as long as you're safe), a quiet city can be a source of serenity and melancholic beauty. Writers like Baudelaire and Benjamin described at great lengths the pleasures of flânerie.
Nature is wonderful too, of course! I love a good hike through the forests and mountains...but I also love a good stroll downtown.
No. Urban environments suck to walk around. What you wrote is utter drivel.
If one needs to justify it by quoting authors, that suggests it isn't self evident and they are just trying to justify something that they know isn't good.
What an unnecessarily hostile comment. "Utter drivel"? I was talking about how I personally feel. Am I just imagining enjoying the things that I enjoy?
Writers have, obviously, written about how walking in nature is nice. Does me saying that now mean that walking in nature is awful?
Maybe you're doing other people a favour by staying away from them, sheesh.
> What an unnecessarily hostile comment. "Utter drivel"? I was talking about how I personally feel. Am I just imagining enjoying the things that I enjoy?
No it isn't. Anytime you make an fairly straight forward statement on any website you get some unnecessary contrarian response.
There are a bunch of downsides to doing any sort of outdoor activity in an urban environment. That is just a fact. It is noisier, often there it nothing to look at, repetitive (in a bad way) etc. etc.
Therefore I would not recommend walking as a form of exercise in that environment as the vast majority of people wouldn't enjoy it.
Whimsical writings by 19th century French poets aren't relevant to those facts.
> Maybe you're doing other people a favour by staying away from them, sheesh.
What an unnecessary comment to make. I never said anything about what you are like.
Walking in an urban environment is generally not very pleasant. It is often repetitive (in the bad way), noisy and there is little to look at. It the reason they often carve out space for parks and commons.
The two tend to go hand-in-hand because communism - in its most popular formulations anyway - encourages consolidation of power in the state, "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" and all.
To clarify what I meant, Marxism and its descendants (Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Juche, etc.) are the most “popular” forms of communism. By which I mean: they’re what was implemented in most (all?) countries that had communists seize power - the USSR, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and so on. In university we read Marx, not Bakunin; in Canada we have a Marxism-Leninism party, not an anarcho-communist party. Etc.
If you’re asking the latter question in good faith, I’d encourage you to consult Wikipedia; it has good articles on both the term “proletariat” and Marx’s phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Marx argued the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was an essential part of the transition to "true communism". I think it's fair to say that if X is an essential part of actualizing Y, X "goes hand-in-hand" with Y, regardless of whether or not Y itself when fully actualized (if that's possible) means to incorporate X.
Let’s be clear, I am not advocating for this. Just stating that communism doesn’t recognize a state, not even of the proletariat.
I’m not advocating for this transition. I’m on the side of peace and pacifism. I see no man as above me, or below me. Marx may be right but who really wants to try and test it? History has shown that regimes who try, fail. Those who stop short and just be all dictatorships, end up destroying their own. So, I guess cheers (champagne glasses) to the sinking ship.
But of course you're not wrong, trains are vastly safer than private cars. If anyone uses this as evidence against having a proper rail system, they're ignorant.
But - until someone does that, there's no reason to make this about the US or cars vs. trains. It's borderline offensive to reflexively politicize this before anyone else had; it almost feels like you're intentionally trying to sow conflict, here.
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