I too think AI is a bubble, and besides the way this recklessness could crash the US economy, there's many other points of criticism to what and how AI is being developed.
But I also understand this is a design and web development company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts; advertising websites, essentially.
This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision, sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges an average US-resident for paying them.
>They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons.
They very well might be. Websites can be made to promote a variety of activity.
>This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them
That's not what "marketing" is. This is OpenAI coming to your firm and saying "I need you to make a poster saying AI is the best thing since Jesus Christ". That very much will reflect on you and the industry at large as you create something you don't believe in.
> They very well might be. Websites can be made to promote a variety of activity.
This is disingenuous and inflamatory, and a manichaeist attitude I very much see in rich western nations for some reason. I wrote about this in another comment: it's sets people off on a moral crusade that is always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in these countries would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI as one of many examples.
The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where profits, regardless of industry, matter more than sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way around the law— in this case copyright law for example. AI is just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters, etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.
IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing themselves.
I fail to see how. Why would I not hold some personal responsibility for what I built?
Its actually pretty anti-western to have that mindset since that's usually something that pops up in collectivist societies.
>it's sets people off on a moral crusade that is always against the players but rarely against the system.
If you contribute to the system you are part of the system. You may not be "the problem" but you don't get guilt absolved for fanning the flames of a fire you didn't start.
I'm not suggesting any punishment for enablers. But guilt is inevitable in some people over this, especially those proud of their work.
>I wish more people in these countries would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims,
I can and do.
>The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty.
Sure. Doesn't mean AI isn't also a problem. We're not a singlethreaded being. We can criticize the symptoms and attack the source.
>over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment
I don't disagree. But the topic at hand is about AI, and talking about politics here is the only thing that gets nastier. I have other forums to cover that (since HN loves to flag politics here) and other IRL outlets to contribute to the community here.
Doesn't mean I also can't chastise how utterly sold out this community can be on AI.
It's unfair to place all the blame on the individual.
By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
>everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world.
Yeah we kind of are. So many chances to learn and push to reverse policy. Yet look how we voted.
>sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
If it's between being homeless and joining ICE... I'd rather inflict the pain on myself than others. There are stances I will take, even of AI isn't the "line" for me personally. (But in not gonna optimize my portfolio towards that either).
>By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
I mean, the Iraq War polled very well. Bush even won an election because of it, which allowed it to continue. Insofar as they have a semblance of democracy, yes, Americans are responsible. (And if their government is pathological, they're responsible for not stopping it.)
>But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
Two things. One, you don't have to pay taxes if you're rich. Two, tax protests are definitely a thing. You actually don't have to pay them. If enough people coordinated this, maybe we'd get somewhere.
I understand this stance, but I'd personally differentiate between taking the moral stand as a consumer, where you actively become part of the growth in demmand that fuels further investment, and as a contractor, where you're a temporary cost, especially if you and people who depend on you necessitate it to survive.
A studio taking on temporary projects isn't investing into AI— they're not getting paid in stock. This is effectively no different from a construction company building an office building, or a bakery baking a cake.
As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral crusade very interesting, because it's very common in the rich western world, and it's always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in the rich world would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI, for example.
The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where profits, regardless of industry, matter more than sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way around the law— in this case copyright law for example. AI is just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters, etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.
IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing themselves.
> This is effectively no different from a construction company building an office building, or a bakery baking a cake.
A construction company would still be justified to say no based on moral standards. A clearer example would be refusing to build a bridge if you know the blueprints/materials are bad, but you could also make a case for agreeing or not to build a detention center for immigrants. But the bakery example feels even more relevant, seeing as a bakery refusing to bake a cake base on the owner's religious beliefs ended up in the US Supreme Court [1].
I don't fault those who, when forced to choose between their morals and food, choose food. But I generally applaud those that stick to their beliefs at their own expense. Yes, the game is rigged and yes, the system is the problem. But sometimes all one can do is refuse to play.
> As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral crusade very interesting, because it's very common in the rich western world, and it's always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in the rich world would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI, for example.
I totally agree. I still think opposing AI makes sense in the moment we're in, because it's the biggest, baddest example of the system you're describing. But the AI situation is a symptom of that system in that it's arisen because we already had overconsolidation and undue concentration of wealth. If our economy had been more egalitarian before AI, then even the same scientific/technological developments wouldn't be hitting us the same way now.
That said, I do get the sense from the article that the author is trying to do the right thing overall in this sense too, because they talk about being a small company and are marketing themselves based on good old-fashioned values like "we do a good job".
<< over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole
Fucking this. What I tend to see is petty 'my guy good, not my guy bad' approach. All I want is even enforcement of existing rules on everyone. As it stands, to your point, only the least moral ship, because they don't even consider hesitating.
> Additionally, the other thing I think OpenAI leads in is Product. Google is amazing at creating technologies and awful at creating products. I think OpenAI can be positioned to win based off of that alone.
I agree that Google isn't great at creating products anymore, but I'm not sure that OpenAI is. We've seen relatively simple products by them (a chat app, a short-form video app, various web interfaces) but we haven't seen anything as complex as some of Google's bigger products (Gmail, Docs, Maps, etc).
If OpenAI hits jackpot with a "simple" product, it could be easily replicated by a bigger company in the way Meta quickly copied Stories from Snapchat or TikTok to make Reels. It's already happened with Chat; the LLM is hard to compete against but the actual product, a web/app chat interface, was quickly copied by other companies with LLMs.
OpenAI would need to make something very complex and hard to copy to give it a solid head start they could really build a moat around— something like Google Maps, which took Apple years to replicate (and other companies won't even try to) or the iPhone, which was years ahead at launch. I just don't think we've seen OpenAI prove it has the capacity to build a product like that yet.
>If OpenAI hits jackpot with a "simple" product, it could be easily replicated by a bigger company in the way Meta quickly copied Stories from Snapchat or TikTok to make Reels. It's already happened with Chat; the LLM is hard to compete against but the actual product, a web/app chat interface, was quickly copied by other companies with LLMs.
IG reels never became as popular as Tiktok and did basically nothing nothing to peel users away from Tiktok. For a long time, it was a meme that IG reels were just copy pasted tiktok content. Similarly, Meta's LLMs are used so little they honestly don't even register, despite being stuffed into everything they own, apps with billions and billions of users. Gemini is doing well but it's still a very very distant 2nd, despite being automatically downloaded and nudged in android phones, a platform with billions of users. Microsoft is by far the biggest player in consumer laptops, with edge and bing being the default options. So why can't they come even close to chrome and google ?
Time and time again, we've been shown. You can copy all you want, you can even shove it into the faces of your billions of users and find use for it. Doesn't mean you'll beat the market leader. You'll rarely beat market leaders just by copying them.
ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site on the planet. No other Consumer LLM service is remotely close, regardless of how many billions of users the entrenched players are shoving their copies into.
> Time and time again, we've been shown. You can copy all you want, you can even shove it into the faces of your billions of users and find use for it. Doesn't mean you'll beat the market leader.
Except this is not true.
Microsoft became the biggest company in the world with this strategy. Most famoulsy, Windows was a copy of MacOS, and Internet Explorer (which became so dominant it took Microsoft to court) of Netscape. Android copied iOS and became bigger than it. Again, Instagram famously copied Stories from Snapchat, and quickly took over [2]. There's many examples of a bigger company copying smaller ones and using their distribution or ecosystems to win.
> Microsoft is by far the biggest player in consumer laptops, with edge and bing being the default options. So why can't they come even close to chrome and google?
I don't know if you're perhaps too young or too new to the industry to know about the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust case, but if Microsoft pulled all the stops it once upon a time did, it would. It so happens Google is has an infinite money machine too though, and can pour many millions in the courts if Microsoft were to try.
> You'll rarely beat market leaders just by copying them.
Let me correct this sentence for you. You'll rarely beat the big companies by copying them, but the big companies can easily beat you by copying you. OpenAI might seem big, but it hasn't found its infinite money machine yet.
Most people don't get to pick how much money they have, their employer does. Most people don't choose and how much the car they want costs, a company does. Most people have very little say on laws and regulations, but billionaires have friends and family in government.
If billionaires were less greedy and paid more, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires were less greedy and sold environmental options for cheaper, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires cared about the planet, they could use their influence to pass laws for the good of the planet.
Instead you have corporations holding salaries down and squeezing margins from their customers. How's someone making the median salary in Bolivia ($3,631/yr) supposed to buy anything but the cheapest gas-burning car?
You got corporations going full cartoon villain too with disinformation campaigns, lies and bribes/lobbying to impede anything regulation that would cut into their profits. Exxon wants to keep selling gas, and the's a lot they can do (and have done) to keep you without any options but gas [1].
If billionaires gave their money to poor people, they're not going to spend it on electric cars because of the environment. They're going to spend it on stuff that benefits them personally because most people are basically more selfish than environmentalist.
The way I see it, it takes a very selfish person to be a billionaire in the first place— one that not only doesn't care about people today, but also doesn't care about future generations of humans, let alone other living beings.
Any billionaire pointing at space exploration as humanity's salvation is, IMO, either really just craving the attention and glory of conquest (much like Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander, etc) or seeking the conditions of the age of exploration (XV to XIX centuries), when companies were as powerful as governments and expansionism was unfettered.
175 years isn't a lot of time when we speak in humanity's time scale. We've been around 200,000 - 300,000 years.
That alignment will happen many more times in the history of humanity. That is to say, I don't know if a spacecraft to overtake Voyager will be launched on the next alignment or one 10,000 years from now, but it doesn't seem unlikely to happen.
If humans survive 1000 years I can’t see any way we haven’t populated the solar system and can build probes which travel far faster than voyager, including self sufficient asteroids
Once we leave the solar system in a self sufficient way I can’t see any event which would cause a species level extinction
I admire the confidence but a bunch of meat bags prone to bacterial and viral infection, impact damage and with limited use by dates would need some serious luck to survive a simple impact on earth let alone living in cans around the solar system. If we don’t mess our nest so much that we make it uninhabitable. We’re stuck here with short term horizon psychopaths pulling the strings remember.
A single colony would be a huge investment… it’s doubtful there would be thousands of attempts if success rate is low
And we would have to establish the reason for the colony … I’m not talking about a research base, but a place where people would settle, do useful ecomonic activity, raise families and live out most of their lives … I cannot 5hink of a reason why people would want to do 5hat anywhere but Earth.
There is no "thousand colonies". There might be one colony, and that might not ever be self sufficient.
Interstellar travel is a physics problem, not an engineering one. Even make believe nuclear propulsion is still aggressively limited by the rocket equation and still wont get you anywhere in a meaningful time frame.
There will never be an interstellar empire. It will never make sense to do trade between two planets that are otherwise capable of producing things, because the energy cost of doing anything in space absolutely dwarfs any possible industrial process. It doesn't matter how low quality your local iron ore is, importing ore from a different planet will never be a better option because transportation costs are effectively infinite.
Human trade is almost entirely based on the fun quirk that sea based transportation is ludicrously efficient, such that you can ship a single pound of product all over the globe and it can still be cheap. The physics of space are essentially the opposite of the physics of sea travel, in that it is dramatically harder and more energetically expensive than almost anything else you can do, and the energy regime it operates in will dwarf any other consideration.
If there was a magical way to turn joules directly into a change in kinetic energy, as in a machine that could magically extract every joule of "energy" from matter in an E=mc^2 way and directly reduce an object's kinetic energy by that much, taking a 100 kilogram human up to half the speed of light and eventually slowing them down again would take 31 kilograms of matter to "burn", and you have to accelerate all that matter too. That matter would require another like 10kg of matter to "burn" and then you have to accelerate that matter too and so on and so on.
And we do not come even remotely close to any mechanism, real or theoretical, that could convert mass to a change in kinetic energy. Even if you had like a magic antimatter machine that could come very close to turning a gram of matter into it's entire "energy" content, ways of turning thermal or electrical energy into thrust have their own inefficiencies, difficulties, and do not even come close to mapping to "Each joule of energy equals a joule of kinetic energy change".
And even with our magic spacecraft machine that cheats physics, that's still an 8 year round trip to Alpha Centauri and back, with something like a 50%-65% payload fraction.
The scale of things in space combined with the nature of that space makes interstellar anything nonsensical. Even interstellar travel of just information is fairly mediocre. SciFi will never exist in our world, and at this point should probably just be called "Fantasy with more plastic"
> We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.
IMO this is simply because the tech industry isn't what it was 20+ years ago. We didn't have the monopolistic mammoths we have today, such ruthless focus on profiteering, or key figures so disconnected from the layperson.
People hated on Microsoft and they were taken to court for practices that nowadays seem to be commonplace with any of the other big tech companies. A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial; but with time these "futures" the tech industry wants us to imagine have just gotten either less credible, or more dystopic.
A future where everyone is on Facebook for example sounds dystopic, knowing the power that lays on personal data collection, the company's track record, or just what the product actually gives us: an endless feed of low-quality content. Even things that don't seem dystopic like VR seem kinda unnecessary when compared to the very tanginble benefit the personal computer or the internet brought about.
There are more tangible reasons to not be optimistic nowadays.
> A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial
I like to frame it in terms of capital goods, even if I didn't think of it at that time: The personal computer's promise was that everyone would own their own digital foundry and factory, creating value for them, controlled by them, and operating according to their own best interests.
Nowadays, you're just renting whatever-it-is from BigCorp, with massive lock-in. A tool for enacting other people's decisions at you.
Made some updates to this open-source library I wrote to render audio waveforms using the GPU on the browser (WebGPU).
Example on the site. Works without enabling flags on Chromium browsers. There's an example to scrub and zoom in real time on some audio. Feedback welcome!
IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen.
When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot when looked at from slightly different distances. This is depth information our brains automatically interpret, and it makes easy to tell what is "the glass" vs what is "on the glass".
On a 2D screen both eyes see the same refraction pattern— your eyes are receiving no depth information. It's just up to color contrast and semantics to figure out what's part of the glass vs laid on top of it, so things that might look legible or easy to tell apart on physical glass will look messy on the screen.
The other problem is that the effect is so subtle everywhere until it gets in your way. Even on a system with actual binocular screens, the Liquid Glass effect is barely noticeable and has been since visionOS 1.0.
It's like a horrible compromise between the indulgences of early 10.2-era Aqua and the worst flat boring low contrast bullshit "mimimmumunlism" crap from iOS 7-18 and macOS from Big Sur onwards.
I would gladly take the indulgences of the 10.2 era where clickable things looked like clickable things instead of hobs and gobs of indistinguishable text.
What’s misunderstood about aqua was how most of the visual flair was for usability. Things looked like what they did. Windows XP famously ripped off how MS thought they looked without considering how they worked.
Totally agree. I have 10.2 on a G4 Cube on my workbench and it's just so wonderful to boot it up. Especially on the Studio Display CRT at 1600x1200@75. Just gorgeous, friendly, enticing, with just a few rough spots where they maybe overcooked some transparency or flair.
In addition to this, glass also reflects light from around you, thus there is not the slightest chance of realistically recreating a glass effect on any device without having some sort of ambient vision which is incorporated into a real time rendering.
This is wrong on so many levels and I sincerely hope there will be an option for not just choosing less transparency but an entire UI-skin that is mature, clean and above all: legible.
I'd love to see 3DS-style lenticular 3D display with the power of modern Apple hardware + FaceID hardware eye tracking. I bet they'd be able to do it seamlessly.
It was very tricky to get the effect on the 3DS but already way better on the New 3DS, so i can definitely think it would work flawlessly on such a powerful device as iPhone.
> When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles
But if you close one eye, you can still make out the depth. Brain is still able to tell what is glass, what is on top of glass or below it.
Only across time via parallax motion and depth refocusing, neither of which are available on the screen. And both of those signals are extremely secondary to binocular sight. There's a reason that people with strabismus lose depth perception. Their point stands.
(Though Apple could technically do a parallax effect by face tracking if they wanted)
> There's a reason that people with strabismus lose depth perception.
Still we don't stumble onto things nor do we fail recognise what is on a glass vs inside. Even if we do not have binocular depth perception, we actually perceive depth irl just fine.
And people with binocular vision also fall for depth illusions just fine, too. The brain does a lot of predictive processing. It would be too inefficient to be constantly relying on such details for basic tasks.
> Even if we do not have binocular depth perception, we actually perceive depth irl just fine.
I don't think it's everyone of us because I struggle somewhat with pouring things into small openings (eg refilling a small bottle from a bigger one) and most ball games (tennis, table tennis) are difficult.
I don't think it makes depth perception a problem, but I think it's unarguable mine isn't as good as the people I know with binocular vision.
I don't know about your experience or situation, but a confound is that usually people with strabismus have bad eyesight in other aspects in general too. Usually, developing strabismus is the result of other issues with eyesight. The obvious confound is basically having only one good eye to use at a time, and thus also less neural pathways developed and utilised than those who use 2 eyes. This could make visual perception tasks like tracking a fast moving ball harder regardless of the actual role of depth perception in it. There could be tasks where reliance on perceptual cues for depth perception is less effective, but I wouldn't think a moving ball is that kind of task.
You might well be right. My eyes are definitely not great on top of the strabismus and lack of binocular vision.
One of the main issues with tracking things is focus switching from one eye to another based on where it's moving.
That said I do think the issues with pouring things is more of a depth perception issue. I basically have to switch focus from one eye to another to be satisfied I'm aligned where I want to be.
Pouring things sounds more like sth that could be a depth perception issue, true, though I never actually noticed that for myself. I believe I find it harder than usual passing a thread through a needle though because of depth perception issues.
It's good that you don't have trouble getting through life, but "just fine" is not a measurement. Lacking binocular convergence inarguably diminishes perception even if not 100% gone completely.
Measurements actually support that [0]. I am pretty sure you could devise some scenarios where individuals with strabismus do not perform as well, but for most irl scenarios there is no difference. Compensatory mechanisms do the job just fine, and even those with normal eyesight do not rely solely on binocular convergence either. Our brains don't usually rely on a single signal to make sense of the world, and predictive processing plays a huge role for constructing the image of the world around us, which is also why depth illusions work. Even for those with normal binocular convergence, its contribution for making sense of depth is prob smaller compared to other perceptual cues.
[0] Zlatkute et al 2020, Unimpaired perception of relative depth from perspective cues in strabismus. R. Soc. Open Sci. 7: 200955. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200955
That article does not seem to support your point. They're not measuring depth perception, they're measuring whether people with strabismus have managed to learn perspective cues in 2D images, and, in fact, the article explicitly states agreement with the point you're arguing against.
> Strabismus disrupts sensory fusion, the cortical process of combining the images from the two eyes into a single binocular image [3–6]. The main perceptual consequences of lack of fused binocular images is diplopia (double vision) and a lack of binocular depth perception.
Just because those with strabismus can use monocular cues to inform them of relative depth does not mean that they have the same level of depth perception as those with normal binocular convergence.
The best example of this is sports, but as another example I'm legally disallowed from driving an articulated vehicle -- for what I personally think is a pretty good reason. Anecdotally, compared to friends and family my depth perception is dogshit.
> Strabismus disrupts sensory fusion, the cortical process of combining the images from the two eyes into a single binocular image [3–6]. The main perceptual consequences of lack of fused binocular images is diplopia (double vision) and a lack of binocular depth perception.
I am speaking specifically about whether people with strabismus have issues with depth perception or not. Obviously "strabismus disrupts sensory fusion" as you do not combine the input of the 2 eyes, and obviously this is a problem outside of depth perception. Moreover, most people with strabismus have bad eyesight more generally, as a common path to develop strabismus is having one eye much worse than the other. I am not saying strabismus is not an issue, I am saying that people with strabismus can still develop normal levels of depth perception in most irl situations by compensating with perceptual cues.
The article specifically tests whether people with strabismus had problems developing depth perception. If binocular depth perception was necessary for developing depth perception, they would have found that people with strabismus have impaired depth perception with 2d images. They didn't.
Again as I wrote to the other commenter before, I do not know about your situation, but I am curious about how you compare depth perception specifically with your friends and family. Having problems wrt visual perception does not mean that "lack of depth perception" is the issue. Using only one eye at the time is a huge issue by itself that makes vision harder, and a huge confound to control for in such comparisons.
Honestly, the effect I don’t really mind. I don’t really get it in the way I understood the idea behind skeuomorphism or the initial material design but then again I’m not sure I really got the grand concept behind the previous flat interface either.
What I do mind is some of the puzzling UX choice they made like the new Safari UX on iOS. It’s somehow even less discoverable than before and iOS was already doing pretty poorly.
I was planning to part way with Apple products for separate reasons but that surely doesn’t make me regret the decision.
But I also understand this is a design and web development company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts; advertising websites, essentially.
This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision, sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges an average US-resident for paying them.
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