J.P. Morgan investing in Tilia.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

21 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Companies like Meta are probably looking at their empty and boring virtual worlds and frothing at how to attract content creators to give them a world that's not an ugly and empty joke.

This may have been the case until recently but I'd imagine they're now probably more interested in tools like Nvidia GET3D and other A.I. based content generators since they can potentially populate an entire world in a matter of days whereas it would take an army of creators months (and the content generated by the A.I. would be of a consistent quality which would give a feeling of continuity that, for better or worse, SL tends to lack).

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

This may have been the case until recently but I'd imagine they're now probably more interested in tools like Nvidia GET3D and other A.I. based content generators since they can potentially populate an entire world in a matter of days whereas it would take an army of creators months (and the content generated by the A.I. would be of a consistent quality which would give a feeling of continuity that, for better or worse, SL tends to lack).

AI-based content..

From AI art, etc., I shall call it, "Nightmare-Dystopia Land"! 

[Paulsian]

15 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

The one mistake the Lab did make was not making good mesh avatars sooner.  SL is not junk; SL is creator's importing bodies that SL was not built to handle and their specs are for the Classic human avatar.

In my opinion a major mistake LL currently does is allowing the public to view all user suggestions and bug reports through Jira. They are default set to public, savvy users have to manually change the suggestions to private after they are submitted and trust they are not changed to public at a later time. Anyone wanting to be light-years ahead of LL/SL would only need to look at the SL suggestion/bug reporting system. I do enjoy seeing my original suggestions being used in other worlds. And it's really special seeing ideas being used for second life's third party viewers and not the official viewer. Its almost like they are more concerned about maintaining their generic open sourced frankensimulators instead of second lifes. I have other thories about this operation that I do not feel real life safe expanding on. I have to go do laundry. 

[Rolig Loon]

18 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

47 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Companies like Meta are probably looking at their empty and boring virtual worlds and frothing at how to attract content creators to give them a world that's not an ugly and empty joke.

This may have been the case until recently but I'd imagine they're now probably more interested in tools like Nvidia GET3D and other A.I. based content generators since they can potentially populate an entire world in a matter of days whereas it would take an army of creators months (and the content generated by the A.I. would be of a consistent quality which would give a feeling of continuity that, for better or worse, SL tends to lack).

That's a decent point.  As a human creator (scripting, not meshy things), though, I would rather place my bets on originality than consistency.  Human creators have the advantage of being able to manage unexpected non-sequiturs and out-of-the-box designs. If what you project is correct, I can see virtual worlds dividing into a large Wal-Mart sector with AI creations and a small but prestigious Elite sector (SL and whoever) with humans creating things.  That would be an interesting future.

Edited October 19, 2022 by Rolig Loon
I could blame typos on a crummy keyboard, but I would be lying.

[Rolig Loon]

17 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

insert a nickle for more cliches*

Like ... "it ain't over till the fat lady sings."   

[Qie Niangao]

5 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

This may have been the case until recently but I'd imagine they're now probably more interested in tools like Nvidia GET3D and other A.I. based content generators since they can potentially populate an entire world in a matter of days whereas it would take an army of creators months (and the content generated by the A.I. would be of a consistent quality which would give a feeling of continuity that, for better or worse, SL tends to lack).

I was going to say something much like this. Just to add: It may be the small scale of SL that keeps the current user-generated content economy viable. Once Meta or Apple or somebody gets concurrency in the tens of millions, there won't be demand for humans to paint templates and call it "content creation". Rather, much more imaginative content than that will be available to the end user interacting with AI—and it'll be a damn sight easier to just ask the AI than to search Marketplace or navigate shopping events.

If SL is around then, AI content creation will take over here, too, but meanwhile the small scale may limit its inevitable conquest of the 3D content market.

[EliseAnne85]

2 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

That's a decent point.  As a human creator (scripting, not meshy things), though, I would rather place my bets or originality than consistency.  Human creators have the advantage of being able to mange unexpected non-sequiturs and out-of-the-box designs. If what you project is correct, I can see virtual worlds dividing into a large Wal-Mart sector with AI creations and a small but prestigious Elite sector (SL and whoever) with humans creating things.  That would be an interesting future.

I agree with you Rolig, but don't you think we need some kind of cap on the poly count that can be imported into SL because if we don't the whole same problems will begin with a new viewer and new specs in that someone would try to import 10, 25, 50 million or whatever crazy poly count bodies into SL that would not work on the new viewer nor it's new specs.  I'd gather LL can only set specs on it's new mesh bodies it's making as they cannot read minds of what other types of poly counts people want to import or will import.

Sorry, going off topic a bit.  Sorry.  I'll shut up now but I don't feel heard.    Not speaking of you Rolig but in my posts in general, I don't feel heard nor is the importance of needing some kind of limitations on "user-created" content grasped.  I don't want to get a new computer only to find all the same problems starting over again and the new specs out-dated within a month because oh gee wow a 25 million triangle body just hit the grid and is selling out wildly.  facepalm

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

56 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

 Tilia makes it really easy, you get virtual currency then send it to paypal then send it to your bank. If it ends up being a service that goes from virtual currency then directly to bank, and from bank to virtual currency, it could make virtual currencies a lot easier to acquire.

I'd like to see Tilia used by more platforms, such as Blizzard, Epic, Play2Bit and others and have a system to use earnings from one to spend at another without cashing out.

[Rolig Loon]

2 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I agree with you Rolig, but don't you think we need some kind of cap on the poly count that can be imported into SL because if we don't the whole same problems will begin with a new viewer and new specs in that someone would try to import 10, 25, 50 million or whatever crazy poly count bodies into SL that would not work on the new viewer nor it's new specs.  I'd gather LL can only set specs on it's new mesh bodies it's making as they cannot read minds of what other types of poly counts people want to import or will import.

Sorry, going off topic a bit.  Sorry.  I'll shut up now but I don't feel heard.    Not speaking of you Rolig but in my posts in general, I don't feel heard nor is the importance of needing some kind of limitations on "user-created" content grasped.  I don't want to get a new computer only to find all the same problems starting over again and the new specs out-dated within a month because oh gee wow a 25 million triangle body just hit the grid and is selling out wildly.  facepalm

If you hang around in the Mesh forum for a while, you'll find that theme tossed around regularly.  The real creators in SL (as opposed to those who import things that were designed for other environments) understand the advantage of balancing optimal LOD and  minimal L.I.  They avoid making mesh with a high poly or tri count because they know it will not survive well in the market, not merely because there are physical limits. 

From what we've seen of the NUX body in previews, LL not only understands this as well, but they will be driving the market by making their improved mesh bodies the de facto standard. While I know that there are those who will debate the details, I think LL has also been setting a standard for quality in Bellisseria, where LDPW creators are managing the LOD/L.I. balance effectively and creating lovely landscapes.  You may be right, but with guidance like this, I'm not sure whether they need to impose stronger import caps.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

23 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I could blame typos on a crummy keyboard, but I would be lying.

Typos are to be embraced and cherished: they are manifest signs of the human and the creative!

Congrats on not being an AI-generated entity!

[Istelathis]

42 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

This may have been the case until recently but I'd imagine they're now probably more interested in tools like Nvidia GET3D and other A.I. based content generators since they can potentially populate an entire world in a matter of days whereas it would take an army of creators months (and the content generated by the A.I. would be of a consistent quality which would give a feeling of continuity that, for better or worse, SL tends to lack).

It is fascinating to think about, ultimately I wonder where technology will lead us to.  I personally think eventually, we will find ourselves in virtual worlds filled with AI playing out the characters, while most people start to shift their focus away from others.  Imagine a world of your own, with no one else to share it with unless you so choose to.  Filled with a variety of rich characters that are NPCs, which provide as stimulating of conversation as any person could.  

I think that is probably the future, less socializing with real people and instead opting to be with virtual friends that fit within your own world view.  Meta and connecting with people would become less desirable, and we would find ourselves in worlds custom created for each of us.  

By then SL will be gone, so would most social media platforms, meta would be a footnote and society in general would be a very strange place where people isolated themselves from one another.  When our needs for socializing can be accommodated by machines, and done so in a superior fashion, none of these social platforms will serve a purpose for a lot of people and the cash flow will form around generating independent worlds for each person.  Watching society and how we have changed over the past few decades, seems to support people's desires to only be surrounded by those who have the same world view, while trying to squash others who defy them.  Technology has been a large part of this change in others, we no longer seem to need one another as much.

But yeah, I'm going way off the subject of this thread.  I really don't know what to make of J.P Morgan investing in Tillia, all of that banking stuff goes beyond my knowledge.  I hope SL is not neglected, and feel that it still offers enough cash flow to keep the lights on.

Edited October 19, 2022 by Istelathis

[Rolig Loon]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Typos are to be embraced and cherished: they are manifest signs of the human and the creative!

Thank you. Typos are engrained in my persona. I couldn't get rid of them any easier than I could stop mumbling in RL. That doesn't stop me from lashing out at a convenient scapegoat occasionally, though. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

It is fascinating to think about, ultimately I wonder where technology will lead us to.  I personally think eventually, we will find ourselves in virtual worlds filled with AI playing out the characters, while most people start to shift their focus away from others.  Imagine a world of your own, with no one else to share it with unless you so choose to.  Filled with a variety of rich characters that are NPCs, which provide as stimulating of conversation as any person could.  

I think that is probably the future, less socializing with real people and instead opting to be with virtual friends that fit within your own world view.  Meta and connecting with people would become less desirable, and we would find ourselves in worlds custom created for each of us.  

By then SL will be gone, so would most social media platforms, meta would be a footnote and society in general would be a very strange place where people isolated themselves from one another.  When our needs for socializing can be accommodated by machines, and done so in a superior fashion, none of these social platforms will serve a purpose for a lot of people and the cash flow will form around generating them.

And the award for Dystopian Vision of the Year goes to . . .

I actually don't think this is entirely off-topic. The creation and, now, the sale of Tillia is about building systems that enable the scaling of the exchange of capital across ever larger and more unmanageable spheres of human activity. Systems like this are necessitated by the very fact that there is a tipping point at which the "merely human" is no longer an efficient engine to produce and exploit great wealth. And that's as true of producing content within the virtual as it is of finding ways of streamlining the monetization of said content.

And, in the larger world of social media, users are content.

[Flea Yatsenko]

I browsed over the repo for GET3D. Every model needs its own trained dataset. At the moment, it's simply not "make me a blue car that looks like (model)" It's much more like, "I want to make a chair, I need to make a dataset and train a model." AI is all the rage right now but I think people need to lower their expectations. If you try and make something that's not in the pretrained model you are going to be disappointed, probably. It might be enough to get a virtual world started so people have the basics but it's definitely not going to replace humans any time soon.

EDIT: Just as a point, anyone who has tried to use GPT in a niche situation to generate text will know what I'm talking about. It's only really good based on the data it's trained on. Which means GET3D needs huge amounts of existing 3D models to learn from.

Edited October 19, 2022 by Flea Yatsenko

[Love Zhaoying]

18 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

21 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Typos are to be embraced and cherished: they are manifest signs of the human and the creative!

Thank you. Typos are engrained in my persona. I couldn't get rid of them any easier than I could stop mumbling in RL. That doesn't stop me from lashing out at a convenient scapegoat occasionally, though. 

I'd say that Typos are a Pet Peeve, but that would be...typical.

[Rolig Loon]

26 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

It is fascinating to think about, ultimately I wonder where technology will lead us to.  I personally think eventually, we will find ourselves in virtual worlds filled with AI playing out the characters, while most people start to shift their focus away from others.  Imagine a world of your own, with no one else to share it with unless you so choose to.  Filled with a variety of rich characters that are NPCs, which provide as stimulating of conversation as any person could.  

There was a period in my life when I was attracted to dystopian themes in science fiction, so I recognize where you are going. This sort of imaginative exercise is valuable as a cautionary story about where current trends might lead if they weren't balanced by other forces -- mostly ones that have more mojo.  As you say, the unfettered imagination can warn of some rather scary possibilities. Perhaps I am just getting older, but I have seen too many falling sky predictions in SL and RL to take many of them too seriously. AI does make me nervous, but so did mobile phones, automatic transmissions, and Amazon.com at one time. I have even come to an uneasy peace with the existence of atomic weapons. I guess I have a polyannaish faith in human nature and statistical regression toward the mean.  My view of SL's future does not include living alone in an AI-built cave.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

41 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

That's a decent point.  As a human creator (scripting, not meshy things), though, I would rather place my bets on originality than consistency.  Human creators have the advantage of being able to manage unexpected non-sequiturs and out-of-the-box designs. If what you project is correct, I can see virtual worlds dividing into a large Wal-Mart sector with AI creations and a small but prestigious Elite sector (SL and whoever) with humans creating things.  That would be an interesting future.

I would absolutely put my money on a human creator over an AI if the desired result is original and imaginative content, however if you want to create a virtual world quickly then starting with variations of a few template buildings based on varying themes is a much better approach (which is why LL took that approach with Linden Homes in Bellisseria).  I suspect that the main use for AI generated content will be to create the endless "filler" required to populate large areas in order to make virtual spaces feel like actual worlds rather than 256x256 meter fields full of random content, content that can then be customised/iterated upon to suit a users needs or simply replaced with some custom created content made by a human where necessary.

17 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I browsed over the repo for GET3D. Every model needs its own trained dataset. At the moment, it's simply not "make me a blue car that looks like (model)" It's much more like, "I want to make a chair, I need to make a dataset and train a model." AI is all the rage right now but I think people need to lower their expectations. If you try and make something that's not in the pretrained model you are going to be disappointed, probably. It might be enough to get a virtual world started so people have the basics but it's definitely not going to replace humans any time soon.

The current state of AI generated content is definitely still very basic but it seems inevitable that it will improve substantially with further development (I know they mentioned the limitations of needing a dataset for each type of object and are working on overcoming that in future).

Aside from GET3D, in the last few weeks I've seen articles cropping up for various AI powered content creation tools including MonaAI, an AI powered materials generation tool (Al tech aims to make metaverse design accessible for creators).  If you take a system that's capable of generating a large number of variations of 3D models on a common theme (for example building components like walls, windows, doors, etc) and combine it with an AI capable of generating a wide variety of suitable materials for those components, then use those results in a procedural tool such as Buildify...

...you can combine the endless variety afforded by AI powered content generators with a modicum of human interaction and creativity and achieve the sort of results that, while not stunning and original, will be enough to satisfy the majority of people who just want to walk around a virtual city.

[Istelathis]

12 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

There was a period in my life when I was attracted to dystopian themes in science fiction, so I recognize where you are going.

I caution to say this, as I think it will lead others to thinking I am antisocial and without a sense of empathy, but I don't see such a future as being entirely dystopian.  I think of it as being more anarchistic and allowing people to lead the lives they so desire, and having a level of freedom that one could not otherwise experience.  

But I am not a very social person to begin with, more so a timid one that does my best to hide among a crowd.  Groups of people kind of scare me.  

 

Edited October 19, 2022 by Istelathis

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, diamond Marchant said:

Looky!  Lab Gab Streams this Friday at 10am PT with Grumpity and Patch!

Patch and Grumpity are gonna say some stuff on Friday 10/21 at 10am on the Youber Tuber! Maybe they will talk us down.

"Everything's fine here, we're all fine, this changes nothing at all, please don't stop spending money" with a splash of "this is good for SL"

 

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

41 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

I caution to say this, as I think it will lead others to thinking I am antisocial and without a sense of empathy, but I don't see such a future as being entirely dystopian.  I think of it as being more anarchistic and allowing people to lead the lives they so desire, and having a level of freedom that one could not otherwise experience. 

Web 2.0 platforms already have a dangerously high level of control over what we "see" on their sites. It's not just about "targeted ads" but, as the revelations about FB and Twitter have shown, also other forms of content that will generate "engagement." The result is, of course, a filter bubble.

SL doesn't really do anything like this, which is one of the reasons why I am here, and not on FB (at least, in RL).

But imagine the power a company could have over your perceptions, awareness, understanding, and emotional responses to things if they could manipulate not merely advertisements or types of content, but your actual "friends"? The filter bubble would become an iron cage.

[Paul Hexem]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

"Everything's fine here, we're all fine, this changes nothing at all, please don't stop spending money" with a splash of "this is good for SL"

This is good for SL. Usually I can think of a meme for just about anything, but not this time, no way, not at all.

[Arielle Popstar]

So I am thinking that since the Chase Manhatten bank is investing in Tila, they will become privy to all the information and data that Tila has on each individual that has payment information on file. Wondering if that would be up to and including each purchase that is made or does the Lab ie S/L retain control of L$ and payments made from it and would not be accessible to Chase Manhatten via Tila? 

As long as that information stayed within the confines of Secondlife, it seemed ok, but now that another party is investing in what used to be a part of S/L data, I am starting to think I might not be so ok with that.

Any thoughts on that from those more knowledgeable about these sort of business dealings and how that affects our information and purchasing habits??

[EliseAnne85]

36 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

So I am thinking that since the Chase Manhatten bank is investing in Tila, they will become privy to all the information and data that Tila has on each individual that has payment information on file. Wondering if that would be up to and including each purchase that is made or does the Lab ie S/L retain control of L$ and payments made from it and would not be accessible to Chase Manhatten via Tila? 

As long as that information stayed within the confines of Secondlife, it seemed ok, but now that another party is investing in what used to be a part of S/L data, I am starting to think I might not be so ok with that.

Any thoughts on that from those more knowledgeable about these sort of business dealings and how that affects our information and purchasing habits??

I don't think JPM is interested in knowing if you bought every color of stocking at such and such place.

I just read the blog and it says Tilia has secured the license to become a licensed money transmitter which is a requirement now in the USA when it involves either crypto or digital currencies.  If one deals in crypto or digital currencies you HAVE TO BE a licensed money transmitter.

I think JPM will more or less be providing the following which I will copy and paste from the blog.

The "expanding pay-out currencies" part is the interesting part, imo.  Could it mean crypto?

 

********************************************************************************

In addition to the investment, Tilia is also working with J.P. Morgan Payments to enhance its current capabilities throughout its processing platform including providing increased payment and payout methods, expanding pay-out currencies and support services.

https://www.tilia.io/press/tilia-secures-strategic-investment-from-jp-morgan

[diamond Marchant]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

So I am thinking that since the Chase Manhatten bank is investing in Tila, they will become privy to all the information and data that Tila has on each individual that has payment information on file.

Worse case, we are a pimple on a fly's butt. Translated... there are not many of us, multiple orders of magnitude smaller than a successful social media platform. Not an issue (at the moment).

[Evah Baxton]

8 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

AI-based content..

From AI art, etc., I shall call it, "Nightmare-Dystopia Land"! 

Loab?