Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Recently read Brian Merchant’s latest piece on the upcoming election, and I felt like making a quick-and-dirty prediction:
If Harris wins, I expect there will be some pretty harsh regulation against Silicon Valley. Putting aside everything but simple political pragmatism:
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Elon Musk’s election antics and Trump’s support from tech billoinaires have shown SV holds a significant amount of power over politics - power which will almost certainly prove a constant thorn in Harris’ side. As such, it’d be in her self interest to kneecap the Valley ASAP.
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Public opinion of Silicon Valley has taken a pounding over the years for a variety of reasons, with the AI slop-nami just the latest and most serious grievance the public has against them. Any tech regulation a Harris presidency makes (especially against AI) is gonna enjoy significant public support from day one.
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In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Kari Lake told Politico why she feels confident in her chances, despite recent polling showing her behind Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego: “Our polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of what’s happening on social media and across the Internet.”
Edit: Found the map she’s using:
I’m sure her results would be very accurate if troll farms could vote and chatgpt was doing the count.
Ubisoft’s NFT game is going great:
Ubisoft’s NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.
“One player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. It’s not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win them”
unfortunately the six active players bit is a joke
a real web3 moment if there ever was one.
The orange site is an easy target, but the lack of solidarity in the comments about the NYT Tech Guild strike fills me with dread.
A significant fraction of the people commenting on HN believe themselves to be the next Jeff Bezos. They cheer for the boot that crushes them, as surely one day they themselves will own that boot.
Said it before, I’ll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out
NASB - Brian Merchant’s celebrating the first anniversary of Blood in the Machine’s release
Reading through it, its clear an earlier comment of mine was dead-on - the public image of the Luddites has been fully rehabilitated, and we can primarily credit Merchant for pulling it off.
For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn’t a great rolemodel.
(more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on ‘traditional rationality’)).
Feynman reminds me of the brujo (one specific man, not brujería in general) from Pirsig’s Lila. Feynman’s safecracking and unorthodox approaches are like the brujo’s routine flaunting of social norms; through routinely doing things the wrong way (sacred clowning), new possible behaviors and modes of social existence are explored. Also, Feynman’s attitudes towards women remind me of that brujo’s tendency to spy on women by looking through their windows into their homes while they were not necessarily dressed, which the brujo’s society did not tolerate.
Before my postmodern deconstruction and unlearning of the worship of Great Men, all I needed to know about feynman not being a good person to look up to was the calling women bitches thing. Miss me with that PUA shit
Considering the history of PUA stuff on lesswrong, Im going to assume this was a pro not a con for them even.
Forced to endure an episode of an Irish tv programme about the environment in which a guest sincerely listed carbon capture & storage and small nuclear reactor as potential energy solutions. As mentioned above, the earth is our coffin, hope is a mistake, etc
Carbon capture, small nuclear reactors. We stopped thinking big. To really solve climate change we need to do one easy, but big thing. Blow up the Sun.
Kill and dethrone God.
Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?
Don’t think we should put another space guy into politics, no matter their expertise at blowing up stars. They tend to go bad quickly.
You’ll hear no complaint from me.
Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I don’t have the energy to fully investigate their politics.
I’m about to pass out from the cognitive dissonance I’m feeling from seeing andressen and musk talking about privilege
Unfortunately there aren’t enough mind altering, ego-killing drugs out there for either of these dicks to understand and internalise the (common usage of the) words they posted.
Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:
- The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
- I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
- it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.
Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
NB: am not a US voter.
The Martians seem to think that Mars will be like a new colony, with all the “hope” that implies, but it seems to me that colonization was a wretched process for many of the colonists (to say nothing of the people being colonized). Musk is only cheerful about it because he thinks he’ll be whipping the slaves rather than working the arid red soil.
The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
such a metal album name
Their grindcore coverband is called Earthcofffin Hopecrusher. Their 2 minute long album with 14 songs was pretty good.
Afterwards I was thinking it could also pass as an emo album name. I wonder if there is a good guessing game in “metal album title or emo album title?”
I feel like it’s slightly more emo for sheer length, “The Earth is Our Coffin” and “Hope is a Mistake” are both awesome metal albums in their own right, but the combination can only be from the genre that brought you “A Detailed and Poetic Physical Threat to the Person who Intentionally Vandalized My 1994 Dodge Intrepid Behind Kate’s Apartment”
Brb mailing this to myself
I think “any idiot that got lucky under capitalism” is a pretty good description of Musk and his type, to be fair.
You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?
Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results are… basically abysmal:
https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual “gameplay”.TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things aren’t even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer they’re using to render this.
Note that the person in the video isn’t part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.
Showed this to my wife.
You know what the worst part is? We’re spending all this computing power to generate this bad acid trip, but if I just took a bunch of LSD you know what I’d still have? The things in my pockets. I’d have a better time just having a bunch of LSD and walking down to the 7-11
maybe i’m a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there weren’t armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gaming… if you look at this “game” as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging
it reminds me of other “games” like Marian Kleineberg’s Wave Function Collapse and Bananaft’s Yedoma Globula. there’s one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i don’t recall the name
I do like it also, but notice how they try to hide most of these strange effects in their demo video. They’re trying to pass it off as a playable minecraft. Anything interesting about the technology is a defect to these people.
They also claim this is “the first playable AI-generated game” when the exact same sort of thing already existed in 2022 (and it looked a lot more efficient and haunted): https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/ Maybe it doesn’t count if you call it “Neural network” instead of “AI”.
That article gave me a whiplash. First part: pretty cool. Second part: deeply questionable.
For example these two paragraphs from sections ‘problem with code’ and ‘magic of data’:
“Modular and interpretable code” sounds great until you are staring at 100 modules with 100,000 lines of code each and someone is asking you to interpret it.
Regardless of how complicated your program’s behavior is, if you write it as a neural network, the program remains interpretable. To know what your neural network actually does, just read the dataset
Well, “just read the dataset bro” sound great sounds great until you are staring at a dataset with 100 000 examples and someone is asking you to interpret it.
yeah, that “most of the internet will be Al-generated” nonsense is tanking my ability to take them as domain experts seriously.
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you’re-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you’re-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
It’s dream logic.
oh cool, Minecraft LSD: Dream Emulator edition
which would be a cool concept, if the generative AI model weren’t incredibly prohibitively expensive to run, trained on plagiarized videos, and incapable of coherently tracking state (believe it or not, LSD: Dream Emulator does have a gameplay and progression loop… game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick)
game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick
This has been a thing with games leaning heavily on procedural generated content as well. Takes a lot of effort to make those more interesting in the longer term. The ai is the future of gaming people are sure to rediscover this fact again. Sadly compared ro pgc people they will waste a lot more energy and money.
I think it’s fine to have little art games that are only interesting to play for a few minutes. They can still have an impact that stays with you forever. Catacombs of Solaris for instance is one I love and think about all the time.
These AI guys though, god it must be so sad working on this stuff. They can’t be proud of what they’re making if the goal is to trick people into thinking you can have a real Minecraft game in there. The game is not even relevant, as far as I can tell they’re only using it to draw attention to their stupid and doomed ASIC business.
goddammit! you have no idea how many variations of “first person walking simulator projected image texture trippy visuals” i slapped into every search engine!
but yes, that was the one i was thinking of
Ah awesome! I didn’t think it was because you can’t upload pictures, but maybe you can in the “Revisited” version!
i went and bought it, and yup, the revisited version is the one i was thinking of. time to walk around inside a picture of Sam Altman so i can absorb his raw intellect and business acumen
Pgc can be a useful tool in the toolbox however. Just look at dwarf fortress for example. But games need more than just that. And with LLMs there could also ve some use (generation of voices I think for example, or some low level of conversational chatter). The problem is the data usage, the anti worker stuff (no voice actor wants their voice stolen for example), and like in this case, the people just promoting their other crap. Like how crypto games are just a shell to promote their crypto bs.
LLMs could have some minor use but with the backlash due to techbros going their usual vc style techbro ways, and steam requiring disclosure I doubt it will be of much use the risk is too great. Which considering the power costs is great.
We also have stuff like DLSS, which is pretty cool and I imagine ends up being more efficient in energy usage. The key thing I believe is it’s built as a specific tool for a specific purpose, instead of general purpose slop machines eating humongous databases to excrete absolutely nothing useful for anyone.
Note that the person in the video isn’t part of the team/whoever that creates it, just someone who is reviewing it.
See, there’s the mistake. You can’t let outside people actually interact with the thing; you need to stick with cherry-picked 2-3s clips.
I’ve seen this floating about quite a bit, and everyone I know is dunking on it - the most frequent comparison I’ve seen is calling it “Minecraft with dementia”.
It also shows why those DOOM demos were only 2-3 seconds long, because that’s how long it can keep cohesion for.
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