One has to wonder: why even bother writing a post like this? I’m guessing insecurity.
For what it’s worth, I’m fine with “falling behind.” I didn’t want to be a manager when I was at FAANG, and I don’t want to be an AI puppetmaster now. I got into this field because I actually love programming, and I’ll just keep on doing that while the world gets driven mad by their newfound corporate oracle, thanks. Feel free to lap me with your inscrutable 10,000-line PRs and enjoy your technical debt.
What do you mean by “exceptions”? Who are we, in our own infinitesimal slice of human history, to judge historic taste in art? And is naturalism the be-all, end-all of good taste? If so, we need to throw out the majority of art in the 20th century.
This is a question for an art historian, not some anon on a tech forum. (For what it’s worth, I find Medieval and Renaissance art to be about equally tepid despite the difference in execution. And plenty of people non-ironically enjoy Medieval art despite its supposed deficiencies.)
Like I said, I find the majority of European art before 1800 or so to be fairly dull, so I can't really answer this question. The prevailing technique improved remarkably post-Renaissance, and that's enjoyable to an extent, but the same themes get repeated over and over and over again.
If you're looking for art with an impact, the iconography of Andrei Rublev (and other icon painters during this period) is still massively influential in the Russian Orthodox Church today. 600+ years of direct use and inspiration! The lack of naturalism is not a deficiency.
The problem is not a lack of naturalism, it's obvious mistakes in the way the naturalistic poses are attempted. Many of Rublev's icons have obvious mistakes in the way joints are painted, for example - but not all of them or the exact same thing; it's not a style, it's simply a limitation of his skills. Many later painters who were inspired by him have corrected this mistake, not sought to reproduce it.
Not to mention, Rublev lived at the end of the Medieval period, and well into the Renaissance - the period where painterly skill in Europe was revitalized.
Again, I’m not sure why it matters. Henri Rousseau couldn’t draw for shit and yet people adore his art. The represented idea and its aesthetic execution are what people mostly respond to, not how realistic a figure’s joints happen to be. (And FWIW, a large number of Renaissance painters clearly have no idea what a female body looks like.)
Yeah he's good, that's obvious. Klimt cribbed from Rublev I bet. Naturalism was never the topic. But note that Rublev didn't do much work between AD500 and AD1300. Because not born yet. This is precisely why I wrote down dates, and why I am insisting on counterexamples instead of vague generalities.
No, why would it have to be a dichotomy? That doesn't make any sense.
For example, the Catholic Church is neither (solely) defined by a set of 2,000 year old writings, nor is it under strict authoritarian rule by the elected Pope. The Church has been gradually sculpted and steered by centuries of councils, disagreements and reconciliations, power struggles, competing institutions, and much more. It is its own thing, defined by precedent and history and nearly unrecognizable when compared across centuries.
The approach of the Catholic church is internally consistent, because it is premised on the existence of divine law which the church as an institution is specially entrusted with conveying to the laity.
That approach makes no sense in a secular democracy. There is no divine law to interpret, and there is no body like the Catholic church charged with mediating between divine law and the laity. The only source of authority is the consent of the governed. The constitution and amendments reflects the consent of a supermajority that can bind subsequent majorities. But any intermediate majority can be overruled by a subsequent majority. In that framework, the only sources of authority that can overrule the present majority are the edicts previously sanctioned by supermajorities. And the only relevant meaning of those edicts is what they would have meant to the people who consented to them.
If you dispense with the idea that the intent of the framers matters, then you’re dispensing with the authority of the supermajority that consented to what the framers wrote. That leaves only the present majority as the only source of authority.
The idea that you can “steal” knowledge and ideas is farcical. One reason why China is so good at iterating rapidly on technology is that this notion of intellectual “property” doesn’t really exist there. Any cool new invention is immediately iterated on by a hundred different makers.
And the reason to release a standard is to make your own products better. TVs would be awful if every manufacturer brought their own proprietary video connector to the table, and those manufacturers who grouped together to create a standard would accordingly dominate the market.
China quite literally and unambiguously stole trillions of dollars in IP, trade secrets, and data from research labs in the West by explicitly and systematically embedding spies, hacking, and blackmailing/threatening employees/students wherever economically beneficial information existed for nearly 20 years. And this is on top of the practice of CCP sanctioned theft from and screwing over of nearly every company that outsourced manufacturing there from 1990 onward. The fact that they finally have enough domestic knowledge to actually innovate as a result of that isn’t some testament to what you think it is.
If someone spends a billion dollars researching some new technology and you have someone exfiltrate the blueprints, improve on it slightly, and then undercut who you stole from in the market because you had no investment to recoup… you’re not some enlightened morally righteous free thinker. You’re just a parasite.
No. It's parasitic to horde human knowledge and seek rent for it.
If one is obsessed with the idea of maximizing profit above all other considerations including one's brotherhood to man, there's still other ways to do it that don't involve hoarding knowledge.
You are morally righteous to liberate human knowledge, it just annoys rent seekers. Honestly, annoying rent seekers should just be an immediate marker that whatever you're doing is probably ethical.
Weird to call it entitlement when the natural state of information is to be free. What's entitled is asking the government to enforce arbitrary restrictions on other people making use of some information that you somehow intangibly "own."
(Of course, it's fucked up that corporations can siphon up all this content and then try to twist the law to carve out an exception for their extra special use case. Information still isn't free unless you're an AI company, I guess.)
That's hoarding. The content is downloaded and then used to train proprietary models at no benefit to greater humanity. Thus some few corporations are robbing the commons and trying to rent it back to us.
There's a difference between "infringing IP[1]", "stealing IP", and whatever we should call AI training. And it turns out the worse the behavior gets, the less likely the law is going to recognize it as bad.
IP infringement is what we're used to talking about. This is when I go and give a stranger a copy of some music I don't own. Or when some sketchy ass guy resells IPTV services to an entire island in Greece or whatever. They're not saying it's their work, they're just refusing to pay the appropriate licensing fee for it. And sometimes we might even agree that a license fee shouldn't have to be paid. What the Linux video driver people want is for the HDMI people to say "yes, you can tell people how to light up this video card in such a way that it successfully negotiates a connection at HDMI 2.1 bitrates", which shouldn't even be infringement at all, but here we are.
What China does is wholesale IP theft. They don't just make their own version of someone else's thing, or just do industrial espionage, they actively make an attempt to deny the original creator of their own work. This can include things like forcing foreign entities to go through a JV, or playing games with trademark law to allow domestic companies to actually take legal ownership over foreign works. This is why a lot of American companies spent time and money carrying water for Xi Jinping, despite it going against everything they claimed to stand for.
AI training doesn't fit in either mold. It's more like rugpulling human labor by turning know-how and creativity into ownable capital distinct from that of traditional copyright and patents. Copyright gives you ownership over your own work, but says nothing about having your entire craft being automated away by a robot that can turn your work into legally distinct knockoffs of it[0]. So we have an entirely new form of enclosure of the commons, where if you ever do a thing, someone else can turn that thing into their own property that everyone else can pay to rent. Like, to be clear: AI is not Napster. AI is the opposite of Napster. AI is the apotheosis of "you will own nothing and be happy".
[0] The only way that copyright claims on AI even sort of fit into recognizable harms is the fact that at some point a Facebook engineer pointed LLaMA's crawler at a torrent site. In fact, I kinda hate how this is sort of saying "well actually fair use only applies if you bought the book first". Which is a problem, because the condition of sale can be "don't make a fair use of it", and the only way to avoid that was to pirate the work and then make your fair use.
[1] As Cory Doctorow said, paraphrasing: Intellectual property is the laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors.
What's the reason you rank Australia below the US? As a San Franciscan, I recently visited Sydney and Melbourne for the first time and thought they were incredible. Food-wise, I don't think I had a single bad meal in Melbourne, and I wasn't even trying particularly hard to find the good stuff. I think I'd love the opportunity to live there someday.
Europe is wonderful, but to quote Joni Mitchell, "it's too old and cold and settled in its ways here." (Not to mention the looming spectre of war...)
From my personal point of view, and based on my personal history as a victim of Australia's heinously racist White Stolen Generation (and who was eventually returned to my birth mother because of her strong will), Australia is a totalitarian-authoritarian fascist hell hole that got away with genocide, and will bend over backwards to function as a lackey for the US' military-industrial complex. There's not a single racist war that Australians won't follow the USA into fighting. See also: Pine Gap.
My personal reason for leaving Australia is that I don't want to participate in a racist society. Read its constitution, its an utter embarrassment.
Tourists don't often get through this bubble, seeing only the shiny bits, but for those WSG's of us who grew up in the countryside, also with Aboriginal friends and family members, the dark underbelly of Australian society rubs us a bit raw - or at least it does in my case. Casual racism in Australia is like none other in the world, and I find it detestable, personally, so I have no desire to participate in its economy. I left as soon as I could, to follow my own American dream - which reality quickly revealed was little more than a Disney fantasy.
Europe has its own problems - sure, the Ukraine war is a catastrophe of uniquely European origins - but I'd much rather live in a country that isn't involving itself in the worlds wars at the moment. Austria has been an absolutely great place to raise kids with a cosmopolitan, international attitude that will stand the test of time - of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, but in my personal case, its just been a better place to live, period. Only issue I have is the weather can be hard for someone who grew up on the beaches and in the outback, but the spring and summer always makes up for it.
The thing that truly disturbed me about life in the US was its nationalist groupthink, which seeks to justify the atrocities the American people enact on those cultures its ruling classes have deemed inferior. Same is the case with Australia. I guess I freely admit, that as a foreign ex-pat living in a non-native bubble, its a lot easier to avoid the groupthink by just moving to Europe - where of course it also exists in spades - but I'd rather live the life of a refugee or interlocutor than participate in the Wests' heinously racist wars.
My kids have been raised multi-lingual, speak German/English very fluently, and are also learning Russian and Ukrainian in school to prepare themselves for a future where Austria is, once again, a safe place for citizens of both countries to co-mingle, as they once did. That is a forward-focused quality of life issue that simply doesn't exist in either the USA or Australia: the kids in this part of the world actually want to learn each others languages. Just like it was the norm in Aboriginal cultures, incidentally. (You were considered defective if you only spoke one language...)
That’s really insightful, thank you for writing that up. You’re right, this was not something I encountered at all while visiting Australia. And I recognize many of these same detestable elements in US culture: something I want to get as far away from as possible.
At the same time, I have to note that Sydney and Melbourne, at least, are some of the most international cities in the world, with around 40% of the population born abroad. In Europe, very few cities are as diverse as this (though I recall Vienna may be an exception). Even if Australia is overall a hell hole built on genocide, that aspect feels remarkable to me. Maybe a positive sign for future generations?
And it’s not like Europe is a stranger to white supremacy, right? There may be no genocide against Aboriginals in the history books, but ask your average European what they think about African immigrants or the Romani…
How many Aborigines did you meet? How many did you work with?
There is undoubtedly racism in Europe. The issue for me is that my motherland got away with it - others didn't - and it continues to fight fundamentally racist wars whenever tasked with it by its imperial masters.
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