What a terrible article.

I think my favorite example of their ridiculousness is the "eye movie posters". Yeah, eyes look like eyes. And yet each of those posters is still distinct and, further, is extremely different from most other movie posters!

The only things that they've discovered here:

* When you get hundreds of thousands of instances of Thing, it's easy to find some that will be very similar.

* Some kinds of Things have functional reasons to look very similar - like skylines (there are only so many ways to build a skyscraper!)

GoodRx is specifically subject to a very recent FTC order requiring them to provide guarantees of data security and privacy. They have paid a fine for not doing so previously.

Whether you believe GoodRx will be more private/secure now that they have an explicit order and the eye of the FTC on them is up to you. Both "they fucked up once they'll do it again" and "they fucked up and now they'll have to clean up their act" are reasonable possible positions.

The answer to the title is "yes, obviously." Because you're asking just "can", which is easy. You have to ask a more precise question.

Can you fool some of the people some of the time? Absolutely.

Will you fool all of the people all of the time? No, and that will likely never happen (at minimum, because some people have access to deepfake-detection systems).

What you probably want to know is "what percentage of people can you fool, what percentage of the time?" And there's an additional potentially relevant detail - "how much does it cost to do this"?

Pretending to be someone else has been possible, and successfully accomplished, for centuries. Makeup - in the professional theater sense - can completely transform someone's appearance. The addition of technology to the "I look different" toolbox simply gives more options for speed and efficiency.

We've also had, from the very first days of photography, the ability to fake photos. And to do it well. Same thing for film; by spending enough resources, you can always fake something extremely convincingly.

The trick is not in whether it can be achieved, but in how much it costs. In particular, when and where we cross the "inflection point" that "identifying a fake of quality X" becomes more expensive than "creating a fake of quality X" - which may arrive at different times for different values of X.

The technological details are neat.

Turning live action into anime, however, doesn't really seem like a "killer app". Certainly I could be mistaken, but a cursory examination suggests that live action is more expensive than animation - at the high end, significantly more expensive. They handwave savings from "using fewer people", but it's unclear that this would actually bring the costs down to where it just equals the cost of animation, much less below it.

Developing new animation based on existing animation is a separate and much more clearly "cost-efficient" course.

ISIS is not just a group that has "speech that others object to", and claiming it's an issue of just "speech that others object to" is disingenuous.

Yes, there's a difficult grey area somewhere between "common carrier" (the phone company isn't liable if you happen to talk about terrorism over the phone) and "active participant" (someone starting a newspaper specifically and solely to publish ISIS messages). The difficulties are not what you're presenting.

We've been modifying our brains since we discovered alcohol. We have a very large number of ways to modify brains right now - from various psychoactive drugs to surgeries to even directed therapy (which can, over time, cause changes in neural pathways).

It's not a matter of "can/can't", it's a gradient of capability. Over time we will be able to do it more easily; in more complex, targeted ways; and with fewer side effects.

https://www.livescience.com/how-many-moon-meteorites

According to ballpark figures from this article, any given square kilometer of Moon-surface is hit by a small meteor about once every thousand years. Each of those small meteors delivers energy comparable to a ballpark of 3 kg of dynamite.

Over a million years, that comes out to a given square kilometer getting hit with a thousand impacts of 3kg of dynamite each.

The Great Pyramid is about 250m x 250m, so it's about 1/16 of a square kilometer, so let's say it gets about 50 impacts in a million years.

Here is a video of what happens to a fairly large concrete cube when you detonate "just" 2kg of dynamite on top of it (not inside or under, which would be more damaging; this is a decent simulation of how a meteor impact would work). It does not go well for the cube.

However, the Great Pyramid is much larger than said cube. It seems clear that any single one of those strikes would do significant visible damage but would not destroy the structure. 50 strikes shouldn't be enough to do that either - not if they're randomly distributed (as opposed to what we would do in, say, a controlled demolition). 500 (10 million years) seems like it would certainly be enough, however.

Caveat: these are ballpark estimates, and depend in large part on the estimate of meteor impacts and the effect of an impact on the material. I used concrete as an example, but solid stone would be more resilient, and something like a hardened, reinforced bunker with modern building materials would be even more resilient. This also doesn't take into account larger meteors, simply because we don't have a reliable estimate of their rate-per-year.

"Professional criminals" as you're describing them virtually don't exist. They're a vanishingly small percentage.

Every criminal empire or organization of the kind you've described is heavily reliant on the rank-and-file, who barely get paid anything. You can't build a criminal organization that pays well; it simply does not work as a financial structure.

For every one high-rolling "mafioso" who can afford sports cars and penthouses, there are a hundred or a thousand street dealers and low-level thieves who probably make less than minimum wage.

The high-roller can maybe afford to go to space. The thousand street dealers cannot. And the high-roller, separated from the thousand street dealers supporting him, is just a guy in a fancy coat with a nice watch.

The kind of criminal enterprise you might get in space is white-collar criminality. Yakuza in space isn't likely, but Enron in space is.

The kind of crime you're talking about is not really reduced by police. It's reduced by economic opportunities, social safety nets, and healthcare.

Based on what you've described in your comments, it seems you have a specific set of experiences with a low-support, high-crime subset of human society. We can certainly sympathize with that, but it is incorrect to presume that all human experience matches yours.

My first reaction - why slow down AI development and not just speed up the "integrate into us" development?

My second reaction - we already did. What you're seeing is the "slowed down" version of AI development. There are very many factors that have reduced AI development rate from its theoretical maximum. One of the big ones was risk aversion - AI investment, for a long time, came only from entities willing to dump a lot of time-money-effort into something with uncertain "payoff".

My third reaction - we also already did integrate with AI. Integration just sometimes looks different than what you're expecting.

My search engine, my email, etc. are already functionally a part of my consciousness. I don't need a physical wire-to-meat link for that. And I'm not just talking metaphorically; we have research that suggests that the human brain adapts to treat available information tools as part of its processing systems. AI systems that are similarly useful will be / are integrated in the same way.

I'm not sure how meaningful that statement is. You could say that humans perceive reality through hydrogen, oxygen and carbon (the building blocks of organic life); but that is not actually relevant to the human experience. We weren't even aware of "hydrogen", "oxygen" and "carbon" as elements for the vast majority of human existence.

At a surface level: No. If you're imagining, say, a firework and the trail it leaves, with "sun-stuff" behind it - there's nothing like that. This has been covered in detail by other posts.

At a more detailed level: Yes-ish. The Sun is constantly emitting particles - not just massless light but also massive particles, the "solar wind". As the Sun (and the entire solar system) move through space, this creates a "wake" or elongated "bubble" called the heliosphere. Notably, this is much larger than just the Sun - all the solar system's planets are well inside the heliosphere. This diagram demonstrates the effect.

The heliosphere is invisible and undetectable to the naked eye or any "human-level" interaction; you need special equipment to detect the differences between it and the surrounding interstellar medium. From a human perspective they would both "feel" just like empty space.

That is not what "theory" means in science. Science does not deal with 100% correctness in any circumstance, so there's no need for a separate word to describe that. "Theory" in this context roughly means "model". For example, the "theory of gravity" doesn't mean "we're not sure that gravity is real", it means "here's our model for how gravity works".

JWST is not producing anything that would dispute the basic premise of the Big Bang model - the idea that everything was hot and dense. It is fine-tuning various details of it.

No, they won't. "Use in court" is not a common use case for security camera recordings.

Further, even the "court" use case doesn't actually go away. Plenty of things can be faked today; that doesn't mean they commonly are faked.

A printed contract can be faked just by printing up a different contract and claiming it's the original. That doesn't stop contracts from being used in court. Falsifying evidence, after all, is its own separate serious crime - and getting caught makes you look incredibly guilty for the original crime (if defending) or makes your case collapse (if prosecuting).

As a more general statement, laypeople commonly overestimate the value of "hard evidence" in court. Sure, it's important, but it's neither as common nor as necessary as people seem to think. Many cases are decided on nothing more than witness testimony.

The vast majority of CGI that you're used to seeing is 3d modeled stuff. That approaches "make a moving image" by simulating an environment, physics, and motion.

"Deepfake"-style CGI is fundamentally different in approach. It does not have a physics engine or anything like that. It is relatively very new to the scene; 3d-model CGI is nearly 50 years old.

This makes it difficult to extrapolate from one to the other.

Human no-name actors are cheap; but physical camera work of any kind is not cheap, and human celebrities are very expensive. A team working on full-CGI scenes isn't just replacing the actors for those scenes - it's replacing the makeup, costume, camera, stunt, set preparation, prop, lighting, safety, animal handling, etc. teams.

Well, the good news is that this process is underway - there are people actively working on it, with much greater expertise than myself. The bad news is that it takes a lot of effort and time, and the people involved have to fight the existing propaganda machine.

One of the key elements of the success of the existing propaganda machine was the takeover of huge swaths of attention-share in mass media; the Murdoch empire and its satellites & affiliates.

Trying to buy a cable news channel now is not actually a way forward, for many reasons. However, there is a relatively new media battleground in social media. The old machine is certainly sinking its hooks into those new areas, primarily via "youthwashed" vectors ranging from Peterson to Tate, but it has not yet been as successful, and its hold isn't as strong, as in the "old media" world - leaving greater room to overcome those efforts and gain control on that battleground.

>Weight loss happens when you burn more calories than you consume. It's not any more complicated than that.

Well, it is somewhat more complicated than that; the devil is in the details of "burn" and "consume" (and, to a small extent, "weight").

What you've said is certainly true as a broad and general statement; this isn't a disagreement, but a point of additional detail. That extra detail is to be careful about numbers "burned" or "consumed" in practice. Because, for example, a treadmill's "calories" readout is just an estimate. A packaged food item's "calories" count is an estimate. You may actually be burning more or less than the machine says when you work out, depending on your body (muscles, heart, etc). You may actually be gaining more or less when you eat the food, depending on your body (digestion efficiency, etc).

And there's also some amount of weight fluctuation for non-calorie reasons - mostly water weight going up and down. This last part is one of the big traps for people just starting a nutrition and/or exercise path, as those fluctuations will initially be bigger than the long-term trend caused by calories.

It is impossible to implement any significant long-term change without changing the distribution of opinions. You can't build something around a structure that actively resists the thing you are building.

>It's the result of decades of anti-socialist indoctrination driven by the largest propaganda machine history has seen.

Yes, it is. That's why a necessary step for any large-scale change must be to build our own propaganda machine.

The exact shape of it will be different - messages are medium-dependent, and that specific existing machine is optimized for particular conservative messages. Just building the exact same thing wouldn't work. But we do need active, intentional, well-funded, coordinated messaging.

Change is not a requirement of that. Are you under the impression that "event" means "change"?

It would be if it were true. It's not. That's not what entanglement means. If you change the spin of one, nothing will happen to the other. Changing spin breaks entanglement.

That is not how it's defined in information theory.

Quantum entanglement does not allow for the transmission of information, according to all experiments we've run.

Information is not "defined as the change of states." That's simply not true.

Maybe that's what you understand it as, but it's not a standard scientific definition in any field.

Don't overestimate causal relationships with any actual events. The sub started showing up on the default front page. That leads to a bunch of new users for any sub regardless of anything else.

As usual "art" is an overloaded term here.

Some people who pay for "art" want to acquire "images that look good". Other people who pay for "art" want to acquire "stuff that carries a meaningful message". (With some overlap, as usual).

The "market" for the latter will be largely unaffected. The "market" for the former definitely will be (and already is).

I've found discussions & arguments about "AI art" to be heavily muddled by the conflation of different definitions and meanings.