1270 stories
·
1 follower

For Whom The Ring Tones

1 Share

Untitled

This is a true story: in 2007, Ringtones were a billion dollar business.

The history of this industry is full of technological advances that – at least first – include a few (seemingly) inherently difficult things at the margins, and those rough edges give rise in turn to a sometimes large-ish service industry of companies that want to make that difficult thing simpler or easier, and make a few bucks doing it.

Sometimes – for a while, at least – there’s real money to be made in businesses like this. But soon those edges get sanded off; devices get a more powerful, their interfaces and designs settle out or standardize as user needs are better understood. The tools get easier to use and all the things that were difficult before become easier, sometimes trivial, for the uninitiated to navigate; pretty soon the market starts shrinking, and soon after that the market vanishes.

Earlier this week, a company called DeepSeek released new language model, in large and small sizes, that’s as good as either the big players’ and is claimed to have cost just six million dollars to make.

OpenAI’s current best model reportedly cost north of a hundred million dollars to train. Google’s Gemini, at least half that again.

Earlier this week, a company called DeepSeek released new language model in large and small sizes, that’s as good as either the big players’ and is claimed to have cost just six million dollars to make. If you’ve got a newish computer you can play with the DeepSeek model right now for free. The download is about the size of a DVD. Remember those?

Then, just a day later, a new – and this time fully-open-source model, open as in curated and consentfully-obtained training data, auditable and openly-licensed code, model weights, all of it – called Sky-T1 has hit the scene, with training costs claimed to be under five hundred dollars. You can run it on anything you’d call a decent gaming rig; even one of the higher-spec Mac Minis looks like plenty.

I say again: in 2007, ringtones – ringtones! Not even a whole song, just a few second of tinny audio carved out of a song! – were a one point one billion dollar business. They were ten percent of the entire music industry! And five years later that business model didn’t exist. Today you’d have a hard time convincing anyone under thirty that it had ever existed, the whole idea sounds ridiculous. I mean, does this chart make any sense at all to you?

Untitled

One distinction in this whole exercise, obviously, is that people actually wanted custom ringtones. It was a market that existed because a technology was meeting a demand. Humans who wanted their interactions with a device to be a bit more pleasant paid money for something and received it. Artists got paid, if (as usual) likely not enough. The AI market doesn’t look anything like that, mostly because there isn’t an obvious way to use a ringtone as a weapon against the working class. But it’s a pleasant change of pace to see efforts to weaponize commodification against the working class and the forces of commodification themselves fighting each other for once.

Ringtones still have a place in the world; we don’t all always have our phones on silent. But that place isn’t a business, much less the industry it briefly was; the technology matured, the market evaporated and today custom ringtones are one bullet point on a long list of boring standard features, so universal they’re not even mentioned on the boxes of the cheapest phones you can buy.

There’s a place in the world for automatic pattern recognition and repetition, and mechanical translation, too. But that place also isn’t going to be an industry or a business; the technology is maturing fast, the market is evaporating just as quickly, and I think I know where the AI/ML space is going. These tools will be one bullet point on a list of features soon, one you build for a few hundred bucks with some carefully selected training data and a few dozen of last year’s graphics cards, because that’s all it takes.

Hiring really good librarians to curate your training data is going to be the hard part, good curators are expensive.

Read the whole story
Spoyl
10 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Axial

6 Shares


Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Have you noticed how effective San Francisco is at producing ways to drop out of reality through technology?


Today's News:
Read the whole story
Spoyl
11 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

leebrontide: coral-skeleton:i-just-like-commenting:cricketcat9:biggest-gaudiest-patronuses: mediocr...

4 Shares

leebrontide:

coral-skeleton:

i-just-like-commenting:

cricketcat9:

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:

mediocrity-uwu:

kuttithevangu:

Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato

For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!

I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.

There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼‍♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼

It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:

And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:

These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.

And it’s such a shame too, cause this was probably the most impotrant scientific effort in human history, it bought us the time to do everything else we do, to go from just trying to get enough calories every day to everything we do now, it game people the freedom to do other things with their lives, human society would not have existed as it is today without this


We need to appreciate our ancient food scientists

Everybody say thank you ancient food scientists!

Read the whole story
Spoyl
26 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

CONTEXT: I wrote/drew this in 2020. Lol. Happy New Year!

1 Share

CONTEXT: I wrote/drew this in 2020. Lol. Happy New Year!

Read the whole story
Spoyl
37 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

This screenshot from a gardening Facebook group has been on my phone for several years and I’m not…

4 Shares

shoku-and-awe:

This screenshot from a gardening Facebook group has been on my phone for several years and I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to delete it. Apparently it comes from a British gardening book from the 80s. I know we all joke that the English are afraid of flavor, but I assure you, you are not prepared for this.

Keep reading

Read the whole story
Spoyl
46 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

Temporal Intersection

1 Share

Nintendo was, famously, founded in 1889 as a playing card company.

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887. The Island Of Dr. Moreau was published in 1896, and 1897 – a remarkable year for fiction – saw the introduction of Dracula, Cyrano De Bergerac, and The Invisible Man.

So, if you were to paint a picture of these characters sitting around a table playing cards and toasting the turn of the century, not only would it period-accurate for them to all be there using Nintendo-branded cards, it would look like an homage to Cassius Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker, first created in 1894.

Read the whole story
Spoyl
51 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories