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> The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT.

Wait...wh...why?!? Of all the things, actual pictures of the planet Saturn are readily available in the public domain. Why poison the internet with fake images of it?


"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html



How can planets be real if our eyes aren’t real?

More like, why have it regurgitate something likely to have been in its training data?

> > The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT.

> Wait...wh...why?!?

It has just begun. Wait until nobody bothers using Wikipedia, websites, or even one day forums.

This is going to eat everything.

And when it's immediate to say something like, "I need a high contrast image of Saturn of dimensions X by Y, focus on Saturn, oblique angle" -- that's going to be magic.

We'll look at the internet and Google like we look at going to the library and grabbing an encyclopedia off the shelves.

The use of calculators didn't kill ingenuity, nor did the switch to the internet. Despite teachers protesting both.

Humans will always use the lowest friction thing, and we will never stop reaching for the stars.


I’ve been having The Talk with my kids recently. They’ll say “I looked up this question and the answer was X.” And I’ll ask “was that answer on a credible website, or was it an AI summary?” And then explain, again, that LLMs are great at producing plausible sounding explanations for things, but that you have to ground-truth anything that they tell you if it’s important that it’s correct.

Some countries are banning social media for teenagers, but they really should be banning "AI" all teenagers. Most adults can't even be trusted with asking an "AI" about anything, so children are going to have a very warped world view the more they interact with "AI". The tech really is not ready for prime time.

I see plenty of people getting real work done with it.

Why on earth would we ban it?


I see plenty of people taking "hallucinations" as the truth, and teenagers above all do not have the mental capacity to tell truth from nonsense, so they are learning things that are completely false from "AI". Teenagers are not "people getting real work done with AI". I'm not sure how you could so completely misunderstand my comment.

I, for one, have been hoping that AI slop would cause people to be a LOT more cynical about the information they get (from the internet in particular, but from any source in general)

But it's not happened yet


What statistical measures of "people" are you doing to measure this? How can you be sure nothing has changed?

Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of "it looks like AI" comments on photos and videos now. That's the new "is it Photoshop?"

I'd hold off on judgment until we get population studies on this.


What statistical measures i use to measure is of what importance to you?

I haven't presented a measurement, just an expectation.


You said it hasn't happened yet and he's asking how you arrived at that conclusion.

In what sense will it be "Free" if it...isn't?


Same reaction here. I think the author certainly crossed a line by using a diffusion model to publish an image of a dead famous person doing something he never did.


Does that somehow invalidate the message of the article?


It weakens the message because knowing that the image is fake casts equal doubt on anything which the text says.


This is total nonsense. Every reader will understand that Jobs was never photographed like that while saying "stop" to anyone crossing his red lines. Even if the photo exists, it would have been out of context.

The only question here is if using that image is tasteful or not.

Also, suggesting that Jobs did not have these red lines is not making the situation any better.


Well, I'm another person who shares that opinion. When I see AI in an article, I think: If an author will use AI to fake one thing, what else is he willing to fake? It totally draws into question the credibility of the whole article.


No it does not. Give some real arguments against the article otherwise I'm going to assume bad faith.


While it may not be totally sensible, using AI imagery to depict something that never happened definitely does decrease trust. The exact same effect can be seen happening in sports as they added gambling on top. People are losing faith that the truth hasn’t been manipulated because there is ample opportunity to break trust and insert fiction.


What decreases trust is taking something innocent and blowing it out of proportion, then using it to attack people.


But what cause that decrease to happen is by presenting false things as accurate. There will always be someone snooping around and if it’s an obvious false thing then people will make lots of noise about it, the evidence is this post thread.

It doesn’t matter if they actually cheated at sports or if the image is real. The threat of it being untrustworthy is actively eroding trust.


We are at an impasse then. You can't prove an opinion. Have a great day.


> the OG tool `git`

This phrase immediately turned the rest of my hair gray. I'm old enough to still think of Git as the "new" version control system, having survived CVS and Subversion before it.


But did you survive rcs?


Or visual source safe


shudder I had almost forgot.


Worse: PVCS!


and sccs


:raises hand

At my mid 90s Unix shop, everyone had to use someone’s script which in turn called sccs. I don’t recall what it did, but I remember being annoyed that someone’s attempt to save keystrokes meant I had to debug alpha-quality script code before the sccs man page was relevant.

Adding -x to the shebang line was the only way to figure out what was really going on.


I still remember dragging my team kicking and screaming away from Subversion. Which, to be fair, was fine. I think GitHub’s rise was really what won it for git vs subversion. The others though, good riddance.


I'm sorry if it has that effect on you. Personally I've been on tirzepatide for about a year now and have not experienced anything like that.

It seems to reduce my impulsivity, but I still enjoy things very much. I am just able to stop when I "should," or wait for delayed gratification, when previously I had trouble doing so.

I'd say my mood has been higher overall. Feeling like I am in control is an everyday boost.


You made me curious. It looks like dithering is still an accepted name for this kind of technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering


Glad I snuck in that it's just my opinion! But the article you linked to sort of admits what I'm saying:

> The above thresholding matrix approach describes the Bayer family of ordered dithering algorithms. A number of other algorithms are also known; they generally involve changes in the threshold matrix, equivalent to the "noise" in general descriptions of dithering.

Basically, I'm leaning into "general descriptions of dithering" with my noise requirement, and the lack of noise in "ordered dithering" leads me to consider it not-quite-dithering.

The very first sentence of the general Dithering article [0] connects with my perspective as well:

> preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding

Aside: I probably misspoke with the word "halftone" earlier; apparently that's a specific thing as opposed to an umbrella term. I'm not sure there's a great word (other than "dither"...) for techniques to trade resolution for color.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither


Dithering is the right term. It was called this even as far back as the Win 3.1 era where program installers typically showed you a full screen window with a background gradient that went from dark blue to black and used ordered dithering to make it look semi-respectable.

The threshold map of ordered dithering is still a source of noise, it just happens to be carefully pre-baked so that (original image + noise)==output makes the output more legible than what you'd get from just mapping the original image pixels to the nearest available color.

The error diffusion is static and baked into the thresholds chosen, but it's still there and choosing the error diffusion properly still matters to getting a reasonable output.


I think that text is somewhat misleading because it leads people to believe that ordered dithering is not a kind of dithering, and also because the noise in general descriptions of dithering is not equivalent to changes in the threshold matrix. Rather, it is equivalent to differences between the input image and the output image. So I've fixed it.


This is fantastic, thank you. Recently when trying to sleep away from home, I went looking for a noise app and was grossed out by the state of the available apps, just like you said.

BTW One unfortunate feature that many noise apps/websites have (including Apple Music's official noise buttons) is that after a few minutes, they fade out and back in or have some other jarring transition when repeating. This is far from ideal for sleep, meditation, etc. So this is an enhancement request, if your app doesn't already solve this ;)

I'm also curious: do you think that the cost of maintaining the app (keeping it up to date with newer iOS versions, for instance) will eventually dissuade you from keeping it available in its pristine state? I've wondered why there seem to be ZERO free apps by hobbyists on the App Store in categories like this...


100% agree with you. Most of my time on this project actually went into making sure the loops play seamlessly—no gaps, glitches, or fades—since even the tiniest hiccup can throw off light sleepers. I’ve also tested the app across different headphones and speakers, with and without noise cancellation, but if you try it and notice anything off, please tell me. I’d really love to make it as smooth as possible.

For the app maintenance side, I’m intentionally keeping both the UI and backend super simple so updates are easy to manage. And honestly, I just enjoy iOS development, so even the maintenance part feels more like fun than work.


I built a free calculator for iOS because I found the free calculators (for iPad) were super spammy and ugly. There was (and still is?) literally video ads that play between calculations. And since Apple didn't (doesn't?) offer a calculator app that came bundled with iPad, it was a huge market.

But I was naive and thought I could just create an obviously superior app and it would find some users. Why hadn't anyone thought of this before? But the app market is so saturated and poorly managed that there's practically no chance you can find users. Or at least I didn't care enough because.. you know.. its a free app. How much can I invest to get you to have a decent experience.

And the other point which was really the death blow to my app, is the ridiculous $100+ a year fee to app store to even host a free app. So after a few years and very few users, I decided to kill it.

1. The search sucks and prioritizes "popular" spammy apps.


Native calculator is available on iPad now. I think starting last year.


Having never owned a tablet, finding out now that iPad didn’t have a native calculator until 2024 is shocking!


yeah but can't you use the ipads built in ssh to just use bc on a linux that you remote to?


Is this a parody of the Dropbox comment or is this sincere? I don’t think iPads have built in ssh… and even if they do, this is a far cry from an app. It assumes you have a Linux machine on your local network and are willing and able to set up ssh to connect to it as well as learn command line tooling for making calculations.


Try MyNoise. I used to build their app, if you can spot a single loop you have superhuman hearing.


You used to build it? It's wonderful, thank you for your work.


> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.

lol if this is the perfect example, "AI" in general is in a sad place. I've tried to use it a handful of times and each time it confidently produced wrong results in a way that derailed my quest for an answer. In my experience it's an anti-feature in that it seems to make things worse.


Some people experience major side effects. Neither my wife (semaglutide) nor I (tirzepatide) have had any negative effects apart from minor upper GI disturbances when moving up to a higher dose. These dissipate within a week or so.

That said, these are definitely serious drugs and I wouldn't be taking one if my quality and length of life weren't threatened by metabolic syndrome, and if I hadn't been trying for decades to solve the problem without medication.


Please reconsider citing Gwyneth Paltrow's scammy goop.com.


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