Note: All of these governments are currently experiencing the biggest flaw in capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
You can expect health and education spending to go up as a percentage... Forever.
Most everything else benefits from economies or scale or consistently has non-trivial gains from automation (anything that improves productivity, really).
Well, if you're going to be misled by bullshit, ending up near the Brooklyn Bridge—where nothing at all happened—isn't so bad.
Obviously, these gullible fools have learned their lesson and won't be so easily duped in the future.
Hahaha yeah right.
Officer: "I got better!"
I'm ok with rich people getting charged more. But anyone who isn't making like $1 million/year should get the normal price.
Shit. I just realized I went straight to the comments!
This will definitely encourage more people to have kids.
Like I said initially, how do we legally define "cloning"? I don't think it's possible to write a law that prevents it without also creating vastly more unintended consequences (and problems).
Let's take a step back for a moment to think about a more fundamental question: Do people even have the right to NOT have their voice cloned? To me, that is impersonation; which is perfectly legal (in the US). As long as you don't make claims that it's the actual person. That is, if you impersonate someone, you can't claim it's actually that person. Because that would be fraud.
In the US—as far as I know—it's perfectly legal to clone someone's voice and use it however TF you want. What you can't do is claim that it's actually that person because that would be akin to a false endorsement.
Realistically—from what I know about human voices—this is probably fine. Voice clones aren't that good. The most effective method is to clone a voice and use it in a voice changer, using a voice actor that can mimick the original person's accent and inflection. But even that has flaws that a trained ear will pick up.
Ethically speaking, there's really nothing wrong with cloning a voice. Because—from an ethics standpoint—it is N/A: There's no impact. It's meaningless; just a different way of speaking or singing.
It feels like it might be bad to sing a song using something like Taylor Swift's voice but in reality it'll have no impact on her or her music-related business.
wouldn't we expect countries with strong social programs like Norway to have much higher birth rates? I suppose those social programs would tend to correlate with birth control
I was unfamiliar with Norway's program so I looked it up...
49 weeks of maternity leave? FUCK YEAH!
$160/month (USD equivalent) for kids under 6? Not nearly enough! That is of negligibe impact and doesn't come close to offsetting the costs of raising a child.
My two takeaways from this, learning about Norway's programs:
Also, "when everyone gets a subsidy, no one gets a subsidy" (my own saying). It seems inevitable that daycare costs would increase by the subsidy amount in order to capture it as profit. Basically, long-term subsidies like that ultimately fail because of basic economics. They can work fine in the short term, though.
I still stand by what I said: Having kids makes you less economically stable and until we fix that, fertility rates will continue to decline.
Seems like the biggest thing that needs to be fixed though is housing costs.
~~Reunify~~ Conquer.
If Taiwan loses its independence, it will immediately lose its status as a special place for cheap manufacturing of high tech chips. It will just be another island. I don't understand how China doesn't get this.
If I were in Xi's shoes I would cease the blustering and focus more on partnering. Guarantee their independence. Protect it, in fact. Let them know that China is not a threat to their freedoms and give them special protection when visiting China so Taiwanese citizens can participate in both economies simultaneously.
Simple things like NOT treating their criticisms of the Chinese government as crimes would go a long way towards peaceful cooperation.
Of course, China considers criticism of China to be extremely anti-China and must not be allowed. It apparently never occurs to them that this lack of freedom is the very thing that gets in the way of their technological development.
It's cultural from the ground up, too: If the boss was appointed by the Chinese government (or just close with the one ruling party), criticism of the boss is considered criticism of China. You can't get much innovation out of a workplace where critical feedback can result in your arrest.
Even the bosses at employers can have their decisions overruled by the government and there's nothing they can do about it. This lack of freedom is what leads to situations like this:
"OK... I guess we're putting melamine in the baby formula."
especially the ones made over the injections of workers
Well there's the problem! As good as it sounds, you actually lose a lot of the nutrition when employees are processed into injectable paste. Ultra processed workers are bad for you.
Eat them raw as capitalism intended!
"Oh, if only I had children I wouldn't be able to afford this hospital visit and could've cried in squalor, knowing I contributed something other than minor economic output!"
This is incorrect. Generative image models don't contain databases of artwork. If they did, they would be the most amazing fucking compression technology, ever.
As an example model, FLUX.dev is 23.8GB:
https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev/tree/main
It's a general-use model that can generate basically anything you want. It's not perfect and it's not the latest & greatest AI image generation model, but it's a great example because anyone can download it and run it locally on their own PC (and get vastly superior results than ChatGPT's DALL-E model).
If you examine the data inside the model, you'll see a bunch of metadata headers and then an enormous array of arrays of floating point values. Stuff like,
[0.01645, 0.67235, ...]. That is what a generative image AI model uses to make images. There's no database to speak of.When training an image model, you need to download millions upon millions of public images from the Internet and run them through their paces against an actual database like ImageNET. ImageNET contains lots of metadata about millions of images such as their URL, bounding boxes around parts of the image, and keywords associated with those bounding boxes.
The training is mostly a linear process. So the images never really get loaded into an database, they just get read along with their metadata into a GPU where it performs some Machine Learning stuff to generate some arrays of floating point values. Those values ultimately will end up in the model file.
It's actually a lot more complicated than that (there's pretraining steps and classifiers and verification/safety stuff and more) but that's the gist of it.
I see soooo many people who think image AI generation is literally pulling pixels out of existing images but that's not how it works at all. It's not even remotely how it works.
When an image model is being trained, any given image might modify one of those floating point values by like ±0.01. That's it. That's all it does when it trains on a specific image.
I often rant about where this process goes wrong and how it can result in images that look way too much like some specific images in training data but that's a flaw, not a feature. It's something that every image model has to deal with and will improve over time.
At the heart of every AI image generation is a random number generator. Sometimes you'll get something similar to an original work. Especially if you generate thousands and thousands of images. That doesn't mean the model itself was engineered to do that. Also: A lot of that kind of problem happens in the inference step but that's a really complicated topic...