“Gross profit” is a meaningless number in this context. Their net income was $15.5B. If you do the same math to try to determine profit per location, ($15.5B/10500) it’s about $1.48M. Not bad, but still about 90% lower than your estimate.

Since I was already estimating seemingly random profit ratios, I also looked at their profit per employee, which came out to $7380/person ($15.5B/2.1M employees).

Unfortunately these numbers are also inclusive of, for example, Walmart’s e-commerce program, so calculating the profit per location doesn’t indicate anything meaningful to me, though I’m morbidly curious about what insights you are hoping to get from it?

I didn’t realize DEFCON was this weekend already, but this is a solid point 😂

I disagree, these children are minors and the their behavior, while abhorrent, belies a fundamental lack of perspective and empathy.

I’ve been a teenage boy before and I did some bone-headed things. Maybe not this bad, but still, I agree with the judge in this instance that it would be inappropriate to impose permanent consequences on these kids before their life even gets started because they were stupid, horny, teenage boys.

Even if we assume that these kids don’t all have well-meaning parents who who will impose their own punishments, having a probation officer in high school is not going to help with popularity. Then, mandatory classes that will force these boys to evaluate the situation from another perspective seems like a great add-on.

I know it doesn’t feel like justice, but our goal as a society shouldn’t be to dole out maximum punishment in every instance. The goal is to allow all of us to peacefully coexist and contribute to society - throwing children in a dark hole somewhere to be forgotten isn’t going to help with that.

Having said all of the above, it feels like a good time to emphasize that we still don’t have any good ideas for solving the core problem here, which is the malicious use of this technology that was dumped on society without any regard for the types of problems that it would create, and entirely without a plan to add guard rails. While I’m far from the only one considering this problem, it should be clear enough by now that dragging our feet on creating regulation isn’t getting us any closer to a solution.

At a minimum it feels like we need to implement a mandatory class on the responsible use of technology, but the obvious question there is how to keep the material relevant. Maybe it’s something that tech companies could be mandated to provide to all users under 18 - a brief, recurring training (could be a video, idc) and assessment that minors would have to complete quarterly to demonstrate that they understand their responsibilities.

They were never really hiding it, we just all assumed they were insane fringe ideas and nothing would come of it. Things have changed…

Is there any chance you’re at a kbbq or hotpot restaurant? Because then you get to cook the meal yourself, which is arguably chef-like.

Jokes aside, I see the comparison you’re making and it’s not a bad one. I’d counter by giving the example of a menu - when you get to a restaurant you’re given a menu with text descriptions of the food you can receive from the kitchen. Since this is an analogy and not an exact comparison, let’s say that a meal on the menu is like the starting point of the workflow I described.

Based on that you have an idea of what the output will be when you order - but let’s say you don’t like mushrooms and you prefer your sauce on the side. When you make your order you provide those modifications - this is like inpainting.

Certainly you’re not a ‘chef’, but if the dish you design is both bespoke and previously unimaginable, I’d argue that at the very least you contributed to the creative process and participated in creating something new that matches your internal vision.

Not exactly the same but I don’t think it’s entirely different.

Not OP but familiar enough with open source diffusion image generators to be able to chime in.

Now I’d argue that being an artist comes down to being able to envision something in your mind’s eye and then reproduce it in the real world using some medium, whether it’s a graphite pencil, oil paint, a block of marble, Wacom tablet on a pc, or even through a negotiation with an AI model. Your definition might be different, but for the sake of conversation this is how I’m thinking about it.

The work flow for an AI generated image can have a few steps before feeling like it sufficiently aligns with your vision. Prompting for specific details can be tricky, so usually step 1 is to generate the basic outline of the image you’re after. Depending on your GPU or cloud service, this could take several minutes or hours before you get a basis that you can work with. Once you have the basic image, you can then use inpainting tools to mask specific areas of the image and change specific details, colors, etc. This again can take many many generations before you land on something that sufficiently matches your vision.

This is all also after you go through the process of reviewing and selecting one of the hundreds of models that have been trained specifically for different types of output. Want to generate anime-style art? There’s a model for that, want something great at landscapes? There’s a different one for that. Surely you can use an all-purpose model for everything, but some models simply don’t have the training to align to your vision, so you either choose to live with ‘close enough’ or you start downloading new options, comparing them with your existing work flow, etc.

There’s certainly skill associated with the current state of image generation. Perhaps not the same level of practice you need to perfectly represent a transparent veil in graphite, but as with other formats I have a hard time suggesting that when someone represents their vision in the real world that it’s automatically “not art”.

I have one of these, and while the switch tech is certainly neat, I haven’t really come up with many good ways to use it.

Their implementation doesn’t seem to support changing resistance or being sensitive to multiple levels of pressure on the key, but one way I do use it is by changing the activation distance for certain keys that I tend to press by mistake when gaming, like caps lock, so that you really need to bottom out the key to activate it. This seems to help a bit but I suspect that if I wanted to get the most out of it, I would probably need to be a much more intense gamer.