What ever happened to biomass energy? I'd rather burn wood in a controlled way that produces the best possible exhaust than have it burn uncontrolled. Encouraging biomass energy would create a market and economic incentives to manage forests.
Maybe consciousness just does not exist. Could it be that humans invented it to feel superior to animals, but it does not really exist? I wonder if we will think of the word "consciousness" in the same way we think of the word "aether" in the future.
Consciousness exists by definition. It is a subjective experience and you are experiencing it.
Or more precisely I am experiencing it, but since you are, I think, a human just like me, with a brain and biology very similar to mine, I assume that you must experience consciousness too.
And that is the big question, and one that science may never have an answer to. What is conscious and what is not? The only consciousness I know exists is mine, the rest is just guessing based on similarities. Other humans: almost certainly conscious, higher intelligence life forms: probably conscious, plants: probably not conscious, rocks: almost certainly not conscious, LLMs: ???
LLMs are unusual in that they have a very human-like behavior, more than anything non human, which would make them a good candidate for having consciousness, but on a material level, they are more like rocks, which point them as not being conscious.
There’s certainly a debate as to whether animals are conscious or not, and if we’ve just been engaging in a kind of human chauvinism all this time, but I mean consciousness definitely exists. There’s an “I” in here that perceives, and it’s reasonable to extrapolate that I’m not particularly special, that others that have the same parts as me have the same properties (consciousness).
> Maybe consciousness just does not exist. Could it be that humans invented it to feel superior to animals, but it does not really exist? I wonder if we will think of the word "consciousness" in the same way we think of the word "aether" in the future.
I lack a subjective experience and have no interiority.
Watch this. They won't even believe you if report your own internal state. They'll even claim they have epistemic authority over your own interiority while not granting you the same authority over their internal state.
I was on a call trying to schedule a service at my house. An AI agent was the first one to talk with. It was actually decent. It gave me one slightly wrong answer and I just said "Representative" to talk to a real person. The real person gets on the line and is in such a bad mood and not friendly, I almost wanted to say "AI Agent" to get transferred back to the AI agent.
Tesla does a great job not having buttons. I think the real issue is that other car companies have bad interfaces that make physical buttons necessary. Tesla just has a great UI that does not need physical buttons.
Exactly - I own a Tesla and an id.buzz and it’s just insulting how bad the user experience is on the buzz.
I don’t need buttons for the rear view mirrors or lights, I need them to do the right thing for me instead. VW not saving the position of the rear view mirrors on my profile is stupid. Having a hardware button for the seat position “profile” is stupid. Having walk away lock locking and unlocking the bus in a loop in you stay within range with the fob is stupid. Having a fob is stupid.
Those are the software issues you need to fix VW, if you ever want my business again.
Edit: and since people seem to care about AC buttons: the id.buzz has AC buttons! But they are right under the infotainment screen… and capacitive :) the Tesla’s screen is much easier to manipulate.
You are absolutely right. See my other post before where I saw essentially the same thing. It is absurd how bad the German companies are; the only thing they know how to do great is the engine.
I never understand these people with their ac knobs... What are they doing that they need to change AC all the time during driving?
I set it to 21.5 with auto, and it is perfect for the whole car. Why do people need to constantly change ac?!!
Why do you need to change climate control at all let alone when driving? Is it because the car can't maintain proper temperature? Response time is lagging? Or what?
Also, you can just use voice control. Works better than physical buttons.
Not when the great UI is a button or switch that's where you know it is and does one thing only. Can even argue that a HUD doesn't require eyes off the road at all, but regular dash instruments are readable at a short glance.
Having to aim at controls on a smooth surface, let alone menu diving and things moving around, being hidden or otherwise depending on state is the problem.
I'm building my personal home right now. The AI image models have been a game-changer in designing the look of the house. My architect did an OK job, but the details that Nano Banana added really bring the house up a notch. I just do hundreds of renders from the basic 3D models and I find looks that I like and iterate from there. We are implementing the renders from Nano Banana over our Interior Designers designs. We would not have hired the Interior Designers again after using Nano Banana to do our interiors.
I think part of the issue with architects and designers today is that they use CAD too much. It's easy to design boxes and basic roof lines in CAD. It's harder to put in curves and more craftsman features. Nano Banana's renders have more organic design features IMO.
Our house is looking great and we're very happy how it's going so far with a lot of the thanks to Nano Banana.
Part of the job of interior design is delivering the promised images in … yknow, physical reality? How are you going from nano banana images to actual plans, materials, finishes, products, paint codes, … ?
Interesting. I model interior architecture as "here's $xxxK, make it nice" and they do a bunch of work to figure out what you mean by nice, and a bunch more work to codify your definition of nice into, like, SKUs of sconces and so on. Seems like NB helped you figure out your definition of nice, and your subcontractor had a good designer on staff to execute on that.
A sufficiently detailed render won't require a designer to figure out the materials. Any (reasonably competent) contractor can take a sufficiently detailed render with him to the store and find matching products. At least assuming the thing in the render actually exists.
He can also send back a picture of the real product for approval. I think the primary difference here is the level of involvement. A quick consult and then the professional "makes it all work" versus hands on design with the client figuring out all the details for himself.
What a laughably elitist attitude. Contractors are perfectly capable of obtaining materials on your behalf. Although these days it often makes more sense to place online orders yourself.
There's nothing wrong with hiring an interior designer to handle all the work for you. The important thing to realize here is that modern generative image models have significantly reduced the barrier to managing these things for yourself.
Not everyone can afford the best interior designers, my sister had hired one to design the interiors of her new cafe.. the designer did not provide any renders, just a basic CAD drawing. Then I used nano banana pro to create some renders from the photos of the empty space. These turned out great, and she decided to ditch the designer and use the designs created by nano banana. The cafe has opened now, and it looks great!
not the op, but this is what i did too and bypassed the designer. I iterated with nano banana and gave the result to the company that builds the kitchen. the middleman is gone now.
A designer knows things from experience and would be aware of small details that if not designed correctly, become very apparent when built in reality.
The interior designer doesn't really do squat. They can do plan drawings and have some off the shelf cupboards and furniture. They don't implement anything
NB Pro can do some seriously impressive edits around interior decorating - see the prompt that replaces the window with a mirror which correctly reflects the room. It's not perfect, but it's still damn impressive.
I'm deeply impressed, especially with the "replace window by mirror". It did not only do the window thing right, it also changed the illumination of the whole room while keeping all the other details unchanged.
Right? That part kind of blew my mind too - the multimodal model actually altered the overall lighting in the room by eliminating all the reflections and specular highlights when the natural light was taken away WITHOUT being asked in the prompt.
Yeah it's not perfect though I'll have to take your word for it - I looked up the concept of "bokeh swirl" but didn't really understand it in the context of the image.
To me it looks like the two foreground subjects (fox and girl) are at roughly the same distance from the POV camera and thus NB Pro tried to preserve an approximate narrow depth of field on both of them, but I'm not a professional photographer by any means.
Same! I redid my backyard entirely and needed ideas. Gemini took a pile of dirt and gave me countless ideas, improved my plans, recommended materials, etc. a designer gave me two out of the box ideas that Gemini didn’t come up with, but it did everything else perfectly. (Designer said, put a patio out in the yard and put your table there, and take your ugly shed and make it the center of attention, since you’ll never succeeed trying to hide it)
Same thing here. I took a picture of some gravel/grass and asked it to show me what it'd look like with tiles. I showed it another part of the property, and asked it to show me what it would look like with a raised lawn. Super impressive to be able to see a cloudy idea in the physical realm like that.
This was a year ago so I used a lot of different models, if I did it now I’d definitely just use nano banana. Just test and see what works, but IMO take pictures from where you’ll physically be most often and optimize for the view from that location. Ie my dining room table opens to the yard, so I sat at the table, took a picture of the yard, and had ai work through that to start.
Can you write a bit more about your workflow? I've been thinking about doing the same, but since I'm very non-interior-design minded have struggled to ask the right things.
Like...
What are your inputs to the model? Empty renders of the space, or more fully decorated views/ photos?
Do you have a light harness around this to help you discover the style you like and then stay consistent with it?
Do you find that giving a lot of context around the space you're designing helps (it hasn't in my attempts)?
I started with sketchup to make basic floor plans and house shapes. I had a rough idea of the style of the home. I picked "Transitional English Estate" since the build site is out on a farm that sorta looks like the Cotswolds. I used AI in this process to get rough renders and feedback on the floorplan. I then took that basic floorplan and house dimensions to a Draftsman who did a lot of tweaking to get it up to code and fix issues. I got his plans and took it to a Sketchup Pro on Fivver . They made a detailed sketchup model. I then took that model and took screenshots from different perspectives and tweaked the prompt to get renders I liked. These changes were reencorprated into the blueprints. I did the same thing with the interior. Took screenshots from sketchup and put them into AI and tweaked the prompt. https://imgur.com/a/lSIYTYr
Mine was far more lightweight, but u just uploaded pics of my yard and prompted manually a bunch of times. Sometimes id find reference images to give as context, draw on the image to call out specific areas, etc.
It wouldn’t show me the exact things I wanted, but got close enough that I could test ideas and iterate quickly.
I actually built an app to accomplish this exact thing as I was finishing building my home and was clueless when it came to interior design. I'm genuinely astonished by the capabilities of these models with regards to this, and it feels vastly underutilized by the general populace. Being able to try out multiple paint colors in seconds, or add real furniture or wall decor from Ikea, or move objects around instantly - it still blows my mind.
The cost of doing more complex designs is analogous to the cost of doing more complex builds.
If you can afford the extra cost for someone to figure out how to build the blue sky designs that nano banana spits out, maybe you can afford something more thoughtful and interesting than a shitty mashup of other peoples mcmansions.
Out of curiosity: what is your input to the model? A CAD file or a drawing?
I find it does a good job at isometric views from floor plans. However, I needed Gemini 3.1 Pro to be able to have a chance at rendering 3D human point of view images from floor plans.
Any chance you'd be willing to share an album? I've considered doing this for my own home and I'd be psyched to study practical examples. Honestly this would make one helluva blog post (imo).
Is any of this intrinsically a strength of Nano Banana, while not of other models/generative tools? Have you tried doing the same with say Klein, ZIT, etc.?
Nano Banana was the first generative image tool that seemed to understand architecture. I have some 18th century engravings that I've been trying to get AI tools to visualize as though they were photographs of real structures, and the results were comically bad until Nano Banana came along. I remember seeing the announcement, dropping a sketch into Gemini with the prompt "Make this a photo" and it preserved all the features and dimensions, but added photorealistic textures.
I still do a lot of modeling of historical buildings in Sketchup and Twinmotion, but Nano Banana has really helped me with more easily visualizing a world before photography.
As much as bashing capitalism is in vogue. I'd take capitalism running the food system over communism any day. The reverse article could have been written 50 years ago. "Starving communism: How collectivism killed the kitchen"
Well, yes - but that's a false dichotomy. In most western countries, food & agriculture are so regulated/subsidized/twisted that "capitalism" is as much an ideological facade as it is a description.
I grew up in a post-communist country, freshly out of the waiting lines for oranges. It's not about that. We can take the beneficial from capitalism and use it to run the food systems too. And we are. But I think it's just good to be aware of what you put in your body, as the supermarkets or food producers don't really incentivize that.
This is yet another item on the cosmic formation hypothesis conveyor belt. These types of hypotheses have been coming and will continue to come forever. They are non-falsifiable and are just stories. They will only ever be hypotheses. We cannot visit the past to see what exactly happened and test them to consider them theories. Being a strong skeptic means understanding that a hypothesis does not represent deep truths of the universe and should not be used to inform any decision.
It's in human nature to need origin stories. Science's current one is the Big Bang. It is only a hypothesis and will never get to the next level of scientific rigor because it's impossible to test. I only believe in falsifiable theories. A good skeptic should realize the differences in scientific rigor and know that this is just a story with no truth behind it.
> What’s novel in my theory is the idea that all the supermassive black holes must form first, by direct collapse – before galaxies form, and indeed before there’s any significant number of stars, or (probably) any stars at all. This emerges directly from the application of Darwinian evolutionary logic to universes. It’s not predicted by any other theory, and if I’m wrong, my theory wobbles badly and a wheel falls off. So the theory is falsifiable.
And in the other post
> Most of the first generation of stars will, if I am right, contain traces of carbon at formation, because early quasars make it by fusion and distribute it into the clouds to seed star formation. And such stars will therefore be relatively efficient at fusion, element formation, etc. (They will still be very low in carbon, and other elements such as oxygen, relative to later stars; but not completely lacking, as Population III stars are theorised to be.)
Your suggestion about carbon is not falsifiable observationally. With real data you can only place an observational upper limit, you cannot measure the abundance is exactly zero. Without a quantitative calculated prediction of the carbon abundance it cannot be falsified. Similarly you can only test direct collapse black holes if you have some way of finding them, their observational properties depend on the formation scenario. You also need the expected number density and redshifts of such objects to reject anything.
Dark matter is also not falsible observationally, every time a supposed DM effect fails to be observed it's just assumed it's darker than expected.
One could re-postulate the theory as the innumerable tiny hands of god pushing on mass in the divinely chosen direction and nothing really changes but the name it theory.
The hands are there, they're just smaller than the resolving power.
At some point it's time to admit fault, but so far that's not happening despite the ever accumulating pile of evidence against DM. For a supposedly mature main stream theory the proponents are surprisingly fragile.
> What’s novel in my theory is the idea that all the supermassive black holes must form first, by direct collapse – before galaxies
That's not novel. In quantum cosmology there are theories where primordial black holes appeared as fluctuations of some quantum field. In cyclical universe models primordial black holes are leftovers from previous cycle.
Don't know anything about the topic but saw you downvoted for asking a question so went down the rabbit hole. Turns out that no, primordial black holes aren't supermassive. In fact one could call them superlight since they could be the size of an atom.
Cosmology, like many sciences, is about learning the scientific truth through the remnants left behind. Just like we can see an early earth by digging, we can see an early universe by zooming.
A well reasoned theory in any science should include and test for implications in the past and present. We can't just ignore time if we want a proper understanding of the universe.
> It's in human nature to need origin stories. Science's current one is the Big Bang.
Isn't it funny how we always make the "true source of creation" just nearly outside of our observational capabilities? The God was just on top of the mountain, just behind the ocean, just behind clouds ... and now the creation was right before 13bln years ago, because that's how far we can look.
That isn't quite right. The Big Bang is farther than we can look. We can only look as far as the CMB, some 380.000 years after the Big Bang. The timing of the Big Bang instead comes from calculating the density evolution of the universe backwards. Unless you define "look" as "calculate".
I think 380000 when compared to 13000000000 counts as "nearly outside". Also math is definitely a way of looking even if it can lead you astray when you extrapolate your mathematical model beyond its range of applicability.
Currently the most enduring theory of galactic formation is how some kids showed up on Charn and rang a bell, awakening the White Witch; then they all witness a lion singing in the dark until it’s not so dark anymore.
This theory has been widely accepted in the English speaking world for 70 years, and provided a model for expanding the theory sixfold. However a competing theory was introduced there at Oxford, which was more complex and had something to do with Illuvitar.
Novelty and Theory are mutually exclusive to scientists. Likewise with Obscurity. Now a lack of empiricism and even less falsifiablilty has never stopped them. Paleontologists love to play Mad Libs with sedimentary layers and connect the dots with mythical lost worlds.
If scientists want to weave myths to share with one another and entertain 8-year-old STEM aspirants, that’s fine, but we’ve boldly gone where Theories and Scientific Facts fear to tread.
You're smart to be skeptical, read Thomas Aquinas he gives real proofs for his beliefs and demonstrated that there has to be a Prime Mover. God bless you.
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