zmitri

For what it's worth, I can confirm this comment works if you need to speak to someone: https://www.reddit.com/r/IRS/comments/1b6bisk/comment/ktarmz...

I think anything you decide to be call art, can be called art, but the issue of good vs bad art is much more open to interpretation :)

I take generative art semi-seriously and have some cube like sketches https://www.instagram.com/p/B_Ix1yOH_2S/ and other simple line based sketches https://www.instagram.com/p/B9VsDrgHBQE/ but I think they are aesthetically nice either way and treat them as art.

For some context here is my "artist statement" as a generative artist:

From the outside, art is regarded as highbrow, intellectual, and “human”. Automation, however, is often perceived as rote, boring, and “robotic” by those who are non-technical.

As an engineer by trade, I see the act of automation as a much more creative process than the public gives it credit for.

In my artistic practice I try to bridge that gap by using software to automate the generation of unique art pieces in less than a fraction of a second. My hope is to elicit the same kind of emotions and reactions that viewers feel when viewing art that has been “generated” by hand, and help them consider automation as an art form and an act of creativity.

Whether acting as an artist, or engineer, I like to think of automation as my artistic medium.

What happened to working on AI for the good of humanity, including AGI, and making sure it didn’t fall into the hands of bad actors? Wasn’t that the original aspiration? Now this reads like next generation Intercom/Olark tools.

I was commenting based on my experience that 1) VC firms actually do ask you for permission to run background checks on you, look you up online, and know a fair bit about you 2) We run background checks on everyone we hire, and its fairly easy to do, because I believe it would be irresponsible not to.

I don't think there is one real error here as you put it, but it's been made public he was warned about him before and people he worked with would refuse to go to his properties when invited and told him why (citation: https://medium.com/@EthanZ/on-me-and-the-media-lab-715bfc707...).

It's pretty common. VC funds will run these checks on you, and most companies do as well when they even hire you. It's table stakes for any company committed to data security and safety.

Hey there, founder of Chargehound here, it's a slider so you can adjust it to 5 mins if you want.

Many companies do take up to 30 minutes especially if they are compiling a comprehensive portfolio (if the dispute is for thousands of dollars) and are outsourcing the representment.

Yes, there are lots. I would say Mike Bostock of d3 fame is an example of someone who does that well, as so is Yi Shen (https://twitter.com/pissang1).

I do some generative art [1] and I think a lot of the concerns in this article have to do with it being accepted by the art world vs consumers.

In my experience consumers enjoy generative art, and are happy to buy generative work so long as its in a medium they are used to - such a as a print or plot - and are not interested in moving/digital screens.

Instead of picking a render and placing it for sale, show the buyers the software, show them the parameters and give them an option between a few renders to choose from. It makes it way more personal. People and popular culture are also much more tech savvy now and appreciative of elements of digital/internet culture.

This is just my opinion, but I believe many generative artists seem to put the algorithmic focus ahead of the aesthetic. From my experience if you treat the aesthetic as the primary objective and the technology as a tool it resonates better. Jared Tarbell and Manoloide both seem to do this, but have very different styles, and are by far my favorites in the space.

[1] http://instagram.com/dmitricherniak

How did you maintain compliance and security before you could have someone full time on it? How did you deal with audits? Did you hire an engineer full-time dedicated to this, outsource it, or do it yourself? (I ask because I do this now but at 8 people it's starting to take up too much of my time as CTO)

How does it work at your size now?

You were down voted, but this is actually an internal talking point that FB uses to rally their current employees behind the company with.

Some of the points an FB employee said about the situation around a week ago: "Well the ISPs are worse" "Imagine if it was them instead of us, we do a better job" "Net Neutrality is the real problem".

They think of everything as a PR problem unfortunately, and would rather go this route than dealing with the problems they have.

Bloomberg makes all of their money from terminal and data services. In terms of the business model, the consumer news service is basically a vanity project, so I don't think they are that concerned with what newsfeed changes have done to them.

Despite the tough situation for Facebook, I suspect they are somewhat pleased that the focus right now is on an older data breach instead of on the toolset and functionality they provide currently that people aren't talking about.

Although the media is currently focusing on Cambridge Analytica and the simple targeting they offer to ad buyers using likes/interests, the reality is that advanced buyers can buy/collect data elsewhere, chop and segment it as they please, upload names and email addresses, and have Facebook automatically match the data that they have with fairly high accuracy to users on Facebook.

This removes any of Facebook's "liability" in terms of targeting using likes and interests in their system, but still allows anyone with the data and know how to do as they please and still reach all the users they want using Facebook's tools.

Sure, Facebook will take a hit with this, but ultimately Facebook can and will get away with the current narrative that this was something that only happened years ago and they are better now.

To me, the current toolsets and targeting using your own uploaded data is what is even scarier. Facebook will just shirk all responsibility this way but still allow for the same thing to happen in the future.

I agree it's tough to do justice in a few sentences in a forum, which is why I assumed it would be done in the very in depth and otherwise interesting article you wrote :)

In my opinion it's the absence of this topic from the article that makes YC look tone deaf once again by glossing over a serious repercussion that technology can have on society for the sake of self-promotion -- especially given current events regarding the manipulation of social networks by foreign entities and a very serious history of censorship and media control.

I'm a little disappointed in this post given China's penchant to controlling news/media/content.

I see how this could easily be manipulated into an extremely powerful propaganda tool - especially hiding behind a guise of "algorithms" are doing all the work - and yet it is not mentioned at all in the post.

We have already seen how content systems like Facebook, Google, and Twitter can be manipulated via botnets, but when a central power manages this it can obviously get significantly worse.

Does this concern you as an investor who lives in America?

Yeah me too, Hype Machine is fantastic for that. Such an undervalued service nowadays. If you haven't subscribed as a supporter I'd recommend it http://hypem.com/supporters

Sadly, I don't think it would have really helped. And I'm not saying that lightly.

Beacon, although many called it Beacon Reader.

I had a startup that tried something like this.

Initially we went with a similar membership concept, except people subscribed to one writer directly, and got access to the collective. It barely worked, and we moved over to more of a crowdfunding model which was about 100x more effective.

In the end we worked with major publications and hundreds of journalists, had a million dollar matching fund program, and paid out millions of dollars to writers directly, but it still didn't work as a big business.

This makes me think Medium is pretty clueless about what they are getting into - especially after raising more than $100 million.

Great work! I made a whole interface for easily generating this kind of art in the browser

http://blog.zmitri.com/studio/

open source: https://github.com/dmitric/studio

If you want to add some "shaders" would love to collaborate in some way.

Yep - just posted my response because thought it would be interesting to see others. Anyway, seems like they have some functionality to provide canned responses based on events and the reason you provide.

Yeah, or signing up again later. That's why I posted my response, to see what else other folks had got in response.

the message I got when I tried:

  We're sorry to see you go, {first_name}. We've marked your account to be deleted. Please bear in mind that we cannot recover your account after it has been deleted.

  You can always create an account again in the future if you change your mind! You can do so by visiting get.uber.com.

  Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you need anything else.

I've used this service a few times and have to say it's fantastic. Compared to setting up LaTeX on a mac to manipulate a few docs every now and then, it's a dream.

Something of note - not a single woman on here. Pregnancy, birth control... so many expensive, and common medical procedures that are very relevant to all female founders have been overlooked or neglected.

As someone who has gone through YC, I think a lot of the kind of absolute talk you are pointing out has to do with consistent messaging and providing general advice to an entire group of people who might not have the experience to understand for themselves what the best way to proceed is.

Obviously in reality, things are a lot more nuanced than 'always', but when your goal is to help as many companies at once, where the degree of experience varies, it often help to simplify the problem. In one-on-one situations, the partners can give you more personalized insights and in general are quite insightful.

This isn't just great for international founders, it's great for anyone in YC!

As an international founder, the two things I took away in my batch were: 1) How to deal with visa issues - which can be gruelling + take time and money. That being said, just being associated with YC helps you out a lot. They can recommend great lawyers and alumni who've gone through similar experiences. 2) If you have a non-english sounding accent, pg is likely gonna scream at you when you try to pitch. It's kinda weird, but try not to let it get you down.

Speed is halved using fast.com (140 down) vs speedtest (287 down) and I'm currently on Paxio in Oakland http://www.paxio.com

Another corollary of this is that if you take a good image of someone else, you can build a model of it (sometimes automatically), and you can map it on to your face and appear as them digitally. I've built tools like this that even let you do it live in the browser using this library https://github.com/auduno/clmtrackr/

Maybe, but the cap is so oversubscribed now that even if they were banned, and even if the 1/3 of the H1B visas those kinds of consultancies take went to someone else, there's still no more guarantee you'd make the lottery/cap.

Increasing H1B caps does help immigrant founders who aren't already millionaires. I've been on an H1B visa and I've started my own startup. You can be on an H1B for your own company so long as it's clear there is a board that can fire you.

There's two ways to go about making it easier for immigrant founders to work legally in America: create a new startup visa class that is likely ridiculously nebulous, or increase the H1B cap. I think the second is much more likely to pass.