It'll partly depend on what internal housecleaning—or perhaps fumigation—and reform happens in the US.
While it is unlikely to occur, imagine the international effect if the US resoundingly impeached and removed of a lawless president, and Congress formalized a lot of international agreements into statute rather than delegating too much to the executive branch.
Nah, this problem is systemic, and much older than the current administration. Or has everyone forgotten the "anthrax" in a test tube? The invisible WMDs? The fake news about soldiers tossing babies out of incubators? Setting up a web of lies and attacking is a foundational value of the United States.
I'm not around a lot of foxes, but I imagine so: They both burrow and hunt burrowing prey, so "lift and scrape this obstacle of the way" is in their skillet.
When it comes to theorizing/storytelling about humanity meeting a larger galactic society, there are a lot of concepts about different species-character or specializations. I've always been interested in unusual answers to "what might distinguish us."
For a while now, "brains can think of knots" has been on that list. Imagine some aliens who are generally much smarter than us, but they need computers to indirectly create or solve knots, and textiles were a late- rather than early-invention.
Granted, this seems unlikely, but it's still amusing to consider.
Same. I enjoy thinking how different an alien could be, and how I'd discover things that were so constant in my life that I wasn't even aware of them, until someone completely different appeared.
"War is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means." — Carl von Clausewitz
I think it says something about human nature that we've been putting political slogans on deadly projectiles for a very long time. Even if the goal is more to speak than to be heard, there's something instinctual going on.
> These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities...
> "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?"
> "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are."
> [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?"
The situation makes more sense when you realize the actual geopolitical needs of America simply aren't part of the equation. Trump and his Republican enablers only care about gambling for a pre-midterm "victory" and salving the presidential ego.
If they cared about taxpayer dollars or the US' long-term strategic position, we wouldn't be in this mess. There wouldn't be an illegal/unconstitutional war fueling consequences that everyone (else) saw coming.
> generating a 10-second AI video costs roughly 160 times more than generating an equivalent amount of text
Hold up, "equivalent" how? It can't be based on "cost" of generation, or else it would be a 1x factor, by definition. Perhaps "costs" in this case refer to the unprofitable gap between revenues and expenses?
> Table 2
Weird, so it looks like some person just arbitrarily decided that 1K GPT-4 text tokens "is equivalent to" 10s of Sora 2 video?
I've often used this in silly pseudo-proofs demonstrating that words have little to no value.
Given that a picture is worth 1000 words, a film (being a string of pictures) at 24fps is 129600 pictures in 90 minutes, and viewing a film might cost $15: a word can be rented for $0.000116 or at a rate of roughly 86 words per penny.
This also tracks well with paperback novels as 70k words would be a little over $8 and 100k words would be just under $12.
That said, I have nothing but the vaguest sense of what an average movie or book costs these days. Are movies $15? Does walmart still have the $5 bin?
What about books? I know that the last time I was in a book store I was somewhat shocked by the prices but that was years ago.
Although, the local used good probably still sells both media for $1/ea. If that's the case, there's an easy frugality argument in the 90 minute movie being worth ~130k words against most novels topping out under 100k.
(I put it in Gemini for English translation)
The 1080p and most expensive tier is 0.70 USD per second. Since Sora 2 runs at 30 FPS, each second of video costs roughly 2.3c per frame.
While a single 1920x1080 static image is 765 tokens, video models use spacetime compression. Instead of a raw 22,950 tokens per second (765 tokens x 30 frames), a second of 1080p video equates to roughly 10,000 'latent tokens' due to temporal redundancy. Adding 20 tokens per second of audio, we get roughly 10,020 tokens per second of output.
At $0.70 per second for ~10,020 tokens, the cost is approximately $0.00007 per token for Sora 2.
10 seconds of Sora 2 video would cost $7.00 for roughly 100,200 tokens.
In comparison, GPT-5.4-pro at 15 USD per 1M output tokens costs $0.000015 per token. To generate 100,200 tokens of text, it would cost only $1.50.
This puts Sora 2 at roughly 4.6x more expensive than GPT-5.4-pro per token generated. However, if we ignore video compression and treat every frame as a unique 1080p image (765 tokens each), Sora 2 becomes roughly 30x more expensive in terms of raw computational effort per frame
Well I guess you could say there is some amount of text that entertains you as much as a 10s Sora video. Judged in terms of time a fast reader might read 50 words in 10s and that is what, 100 tokens? If somebody wants to fudge that up by a factor of 10 (picture is worth a thousand words or something) you get where they are.
Now personally I am not entertained by motion-for-the-sake-of-motion Instagram reels, they actually make me queasy despite having a cast iron stomach and having taught myself to not get sick in VR. So if that's 10s of entertainment, leave me out. I don't care if Tom Cruise is whaling on Brad Pitt or the other way around for that matter, but boy do I want to see the body thetans burst ouf of Cruise's body when OTIII goes horribly wrong.
My reaction to the article was funny. I mean, I saw that 160x thing and thought it was bogus, and of course it is all AI generated and poorly formatted to boot but I did like the overall message. It does remind me of the early 2010s when a lot of sites with photo-based content (including mine) were going out of business because the revenue wasn't enough to pay the hosting costs and a few newcomers like Instagram were survivors and Google was obviously cleaning up with video on YouTube. From the viewpoint of business models for AI video I think there are two questions:
(i) how many times can you get people to watch the same video, i mean, no matter how expensive it is, if you get enough views/ad impressions/other revenue you are OK
(ii) how does it compete with some other way to generate the video?
The picture that the $20 subscription costs $65 to serve doesn't sound too crazy to me. I mean, there might be somebody who can get 3x the value out of a 10s Sora video than somebody else or they could get the cost down by a factor of 1/3.
Oh helllll no. Let's imagine an analogy for Adobe leadership:
1. You hired a night janitor to clean and vacuum your executive offices.
2. That janitor secretly stops at every desk-phone to alter the settings of voicemail accounts.
3. After the change, any external caller can dial a certain sequence to get a message of "Yes, this office was serviced by Adobe Janitorial!"
What's your reaction when you discover it? Do you chuckle and say something like "boys will be boys"? No! You have a panic-call, Facilities revokes access, IT starts checking for other unauthorized surprises, HR looks into terminating contracts, and Legal advises whether you need to pursue data-breach notifications or lawsuits or criminal charges.
* Is it acceptable because they had some permission to touch objects in the rooms? No.
* Is it acceptable because the final effect is innocuous? No.
* Is it acceptable because the employment contract had some vague sentence about "enhancing office communication experiences"? No.
* Is it acceptable if they were just dumb instead of malicious? No.
No person that would blithely cross those lines can be trusted near your stuff, full-stop.
While it is unlikely to occur, imagine the international effect if the US resoundingly impeached and removed of a lawless president, and Congress formalized a lot of international agreements into statute rather than delegating too much to the executive branch.
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