Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
> Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
Companies (Burberry is mentioned, but it goes unsaid that others engage in it) routinely burn stock to preserve exclusivity[1]. It's a pretty serious issue.
It's the nature of high fashion brands. a $2000 item may cost $200 to create. The high margin is based on exclusitivity. They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
> They would rather destroy it than sell it at $300.
This is exactly it. The actual landed cost is 1/10th of the sales price, and most of the rest of the margin pads the marketing and exclusivity machine. If for instance LV starts selling their $200-landed Neverfull bags at $500 or even $1,000, all the infrastructure sustaining the image becomes unsustainable.
Related note: aren't Louis Vuitton bags being made so crap nowadays that even their own anti-counterfeiting staff can't tell what's real and what's not? I remember hearing of someone who made wallets out of discarded LV bags and got harassed for it by the company.
My personal opinion is that the business model of selling status items - specifically those which only have status because of an artificially limited supply they control - is inherently predatory and should be restricted. Not because I'm the morality police and want to stop people from buying a bag that says "I spent $2000 on a bag", but because there is nothing that stops the company from cost-reducing that to oblivion. If you are going to sell a $2,000 bag, it should be marketed on quality, not a cult.
Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.
IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
That is a feature, not a bug. Risk-taking in "apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear" which results in wasted resources is not something to incentivise.
Counter point to the counter point: also all of human existence.
The "fuckton of failure and waste" which has brought technological advancements to humanity didn't come from destroying unsold clothing, and the risks involved in actual technological advancements are orders of magnitude larger than the risk of not being able to destroy unsold consumer products without penalty.
I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?
Oh no, poor fast fashion companies won't be able to continue maximizing their profits by using slave labor to manufacture ginormous amounts of garbage that goes out of fashion in a week. Guess they'll have to reduce their garbage output or switch to manufacturing quality stuff that can hang out on a store's shelf for a bit longer. The fucking horror.
Fuck them.
The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.
I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.
As another commenter pointed out, Death Stranding focuses on the travel experience, where you have to plan your route according to how much 'effort' and risk you want to take.
Back when there was Morrowind, which didn't have map markers and whose in-game map had to slowly be uncovered. You get a description and that's it. The game did come with a paper map, which was stuck to my wall for years and frequently consulted.
A modern one would be Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2; when you turn on hardcore mode (which was only added after release, but the game was designed with it in mind), you don't get your position on the map, compass, or map markers; every quest involving a location has the NPCs give you a description (and at least in normal mode, your character making a remark when you've reached a landmark). It's not so much about planning your route though.
> Today, 1,165 Bob Ross originals — a trove worth millions of dollars — sit in cardboard boxes inside the company’s nondescript office building in Herndon, Virginia.
This seems like a bit of a waste given that there's demand for them.
The scarcity makes the demand. I doubt there are that much people wanting low/average quality paintings, even if it has the signature of a person as famous as him. But the 3 of them are willing to spend a lot of money on it. If anyone could buy an original batmobile, people would grow tired of seeing them in the street and they would lose their appeal really quickly.
Most fans of Bob Ross would probably have painted something similar. What he teached was that the enjoyment came from the process and that anyone could paint similar low/average uninspired stuff.
I don’t care about art very much and I would be pay a thousand or two for one. I know that’s much but given that I’ve never bought a painting before and I don’t think I’m particularly unique, I believe this signals there is pretty large demand.
I paint myself occasionally some similarly uninspired stuff, and bar 2 painting I hung in the living room and corridor, I throw them away (or rather reuse the canvas) because I don't even consider them art but rather artisanal decorative items.
2 thousand can get you much more interesting paintings. There are many talented but barely known artists anywhere in the world waiting for you. You just have to visit galleries whenever you are visiting a town.
I found a friend's painting in the free pile at an opshop. Told them about it and they thought it was a hilarious - they'd sold it for $65.
I have the painting to another friend as inspiration about the value of art - they love it.
Too many people suggest to artists that they should monetise their work, which is kinda sad I think.
It is good to make art because you want to (assuming one can afford to), not because you want money or $status. If you want to chase money then that's fine too, but understand the negatives that come with that choice.
The thing with art is that there's always more of it getting created by people who either do it as a hobby or will accept low prices out of desperation to "follow their dreams," they're competing with all the existing art out there, and while some gets lost to natural disasters and neglect, the better stuff sticks around.
Perhaps, but unless one of them is Walt Disney, I've never heard of them - therefore their fame does not impact my valuation of their work. I can see myself spend 50 bucks on a (to me) unknown piece of art because it is pretty. Spending more would require an additional connection - fame of artist, depicts something dear to me, seems like a good investment, etc. etc... only being pretty isn't enough.
No, because he painted something that I find pleasant to look at and consider it worth money. The price is higher because of the artist's fame, that much is true - but that is always the case with art.
I mean, you're basically arguing about taste... Bob Ross was a lot more famous than most other artists, not in the least because many people liked what he produced.
He was more famous because he appeared on TV, and transfered/the joy of painting, not because of his paintings. They were unremarkable to say the least.
A lot of people are trying to make a living painting landscapes with the same painting for dummies style that Ross used (not invented). It seems counterproductive to give money to speculators for an unremarkable painting of a dead man when you can spend a fraction of that to buy a similar decorative painting and contribute to the income of someone who actually worked and spent time on it.
The thing is: I'm not looking for an unremarkable painting. I sincerely am not interested in one. So spending my money that way would be counterproductive.
Related: if you feel this style of painting is so unremarkable, why are you advocating for others to support knock-offs?
To use an analogy: I have zero interest in buying a Louis Vuitton handbag - but my interest in buying one of the far cheaper knockoffs you can get at touristy places from shady peddlers is a lot lower than that.
They would certainly go for more than that. Ross didn't paint anything I find even remotely interesting but for $1k, I would buy 20 or 30 Bob Ross paintings right now and sit on them too.
I can't imagine them selling for much less than $20k a painting with a name that everyone knows.
> that anyone could paint similar low/average uninspired stuff.
I hated this sentence. What is wrong with art that is actually, you know, pretty to look at. Obviously Bob Ross paintings aren't very complicated, as they're designed for amateurs to be able to follow along in the instructions. But I find many of his paintings quite beautiful, and if anything the joy in seeing how simple brush strokes can create such beautiful paintings.
Tracey Emin's "My Bed" "sculpture" sold for two and a half million pounds. So people pretending there is some high objective or moral difference between "high art" and "low/average uninspired stuff" are, frankly, full of themselves IMO.
There's wanting to own one as property, and then there's wanting to own a souvenir of an experience. Like a patch, or a t-shirt, or a trophy.
Maybe they should do some Bob Ross events and give the paintings away either as a prize or do a charity raffle. Shit make a foundation to get art supplies to underprivileged kids and use the sales to establish a trust for the foundation.
Curious how they give that information away like this. Therefore I suspect it is bogus, or at least phrased in that manner just to make it sound more quaint.
"Oh heres several millons worth of paintings sitting in cardboard boxes in our Bob Ross Inc. nondescript office building in Herndon, Virignia -- please dont break in and steal anything!"
If he didn't want them sold, he should have destroyed them. Because even if his current heirs decide to keep them locked up, eventually someone is going to come to the realization that they don't need to work anymore if they sell a few of them, and why would you spend your life working for someone else when you could just get rid of something that only takes up space to begin with?
I wondered also, but then I've read to the end of the article. The article seems to be a bit disingenuous, because the real, real reason seems to be, that the Bob Ross Inc. respects the wish of Bob Ross to not make his paintings a commodity.
Came here to make sure this point was made. Bob Ross Inc's only mission is to make money off a dead man and to ensure his family doesn't receive any of the proceeds.
The sheer number of AI written message board posts might just make me stop reading the comments on sites like Reddit and HN. I wanted to stop anyway, this seems like a good push to encourage me to wean myself.
Every one of us leaving (not engaging/commenting) increases the share of AI generated comments (vs real users) the next iteration will train on. I'm not even sure which option is worse. Withdraw and let everyone dilute their own training data, or stay and feed them our mindset and experience...?
To be fair, only 3 posts within "possible LLM usage" timeframe. Also I don't think using LLM to comment == bot.
More curious about the motivation behaviour such behaviour, if it is occurring
And the most important thing about PCC in my opinion is not the technical aspect (though that's nice) but that Apple views user privacy as something good to be maximized, differing from the view championed by OpenAI and Anthropic (and also adopted by Google and virtually every other major LLM provider by this point) that user interactions must be surveilled for "safety" purposes. The lack of privacy isn't due to a technical limitation--it's intended, and they often brag about it.
Something good to be maximized within the constraints of the systems they have to work within. But at some point with enough compromises it becomes maximizing the perception of privacy, not the reality. Promoting these academic techniques may just be perception management on the part of Apple, if the keys are not controlled solely by the user.
If Apple really wanted to maximize privacy, they wouldn't be constantly collecting so much information in the first place (capture the network traffic from an apple device sometime - it's crazy). User interactions on Apple devices definitely seem to be surveilled for "safety" purposes.
From my perspective, Apple's behavior indicates that what they want to maximize is their own control, and their position as the gatekeeper others must pay in order to get access to you.
> Yet this approach is obviously much better than what’s being done at companies like OpenAI, where the data is processed by servers that employees (presumably) can log into and access.
No need for presumption here: OpenAI is quite transparent about the fact that they retain data for 30 days and have employees and third-party contractors look at it.
> Our access to API business data stored on our systems is limited to (1) authorized employees that require access for engineering support, investigating potential platform abuse, and legal compliance and (2) specialized third-party contractors who are bound by confidentiality and security obligations, solely to review for abuse and misuse.
I have to say — I’m kind of amazed that anyone would expect privacy out of chat bot companies and products. You’re literally having a “conversation” with the servers of companies that built their entire product line using other people’s professional and personal output whether they approved, or even knew about it or not. Less a “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission” sort of thing than a “we’d rather just not ask and be pretty cagey about it if they ask, and then if they prove it, tell them they tacitly agreed to it by not hiding it from us even though they had no way to know we were looking at it“ sort of thing. Frankly I’m astonished that open ai, specifically, promises as much as they do in their privacy policy. Based on their alleged bait-and-switch tactics quietly swapping out models or reducing compute for paying customers after the initial “gee wiz look at that” press cycle, I can’t imagine those privacy policies will have much longevity when the company gets a more stable footing… and whooops looks like they figured out how to extract the training data from the models! And it’s different data since we extracted it from the model so the old privacy policy doesn’t apply! Haha sorry, that’s business and we’re building a techno utopian society here, so you should feel honored to be included! You think Altman wouldn’t sell that in a heartbeat to try and fund some big moonshot product if they get clobbered in the marketplace? Never mind the sketchy girlfriend-in-an-app-class chatbots.
Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely think the privacy SHOULD be there, but I’m just shocked that anyone would assume it was. Maybe I’m being overly cynical? These days when I think I might be, in the end, it seems I wasn’t being cynical enough.
Cynically, I think most people know this in this kind of situation, but like clockwork media sources will suddenly dramatize things for clicks, money, lawsuits, or politics, and people will nod their heads not because they agree with the accusations, but because they have preconceived bias against the defendant company.
This sort of convenient semi-arbitrary extension of a partial function is ubiquitous in Lean 4 mathlib, the most active mathematics formalization project today. It turns out that the most convenient way to do informal math and formal math differ in this aspect.
> many of my math friends consistently slept 9–10 hours a day.
Anecdotally, I've noticed an association between long sleeping and math ability in particular, so this doesn't surprise me. I wonder if it's been studied scientifically.
In Meta's case, the problem is that they had been given the go-ahead by the EU to train on certain data, and then after starting training, the EU changed its mind and told them to stop.
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