07mk
3hr ago
The meaning of nudity is that there's no fig leaf covering anything and, as such, someone being okay with fig leaf covering the genitals isn't being okay with nudity, they're being okay with something close to nudity but isn't nudity. Corruption, on the other hand, is something that exists mostly orthogonal to what is or isn't covering it (there's certainly an appearance component of corruption, where the mere appearance of corruption is corruption in itself, even if, in actuality, behind closed doors, everything is on the up and up, but I don't think that's relevant in this case).
07mk
7hr ago
Naturally theres risk of losing principle, but thats true of all investing. The exact investment profile is TBD, i was just using S&P for some back of envelope calcs.
Well, even FDIC-insured accounts have some risk of the principal being lost, but if I were executing the plan you were, I'd put most/all of the principal into a savings account for very low risk 3.2-4% return instead of a low risk 8-10% in an index fund. In a 1-72 month time horizon, I think the difference in risk is sufficiently high as to be worth the lower returns, personally.
07mk
7hr ago
I'm not sure what your criterion for "good character writing" is, even with those examples, but I've long found Ico to be one of the best-written stories ever, in terms of everything, including dialogue. But it's essentially a fairy tale with the writing complexity of "See Spot Run," where you can probably count the number of lines that come out of each character's mouth in both hands (and if not, then both hands and feet).
As a side note: do not ever read the "Castle in the Mist" novelization. It is truly awful. It's about 400 pages long, and I got like 100 pages in before giving up - by that point, Ico hadn't even gotten into the castle (this happens in the first cutscene of the game, which lasts like 5 minutes or less), with extensive backstory written about Ico's village and its leaders and the larger society in which they existed. All irrelevant details for the actual story of Ico. Ico's "novelization" really should have been a picture book with, again, the complexity of "See Spot Run."
07mk
8hr ago
Gay marriage seems to be the least zero-sum of the progressive causes
I think this may be precisely why it was a turning point. The tactics used to win this battle - "born this way," "how does two loving men/women getting married and getting [marriage rights] affect you?" - were so successful in large part because it was so close to zero-sum. But once that battle was won, the same activists applied the same tactics to other things which were not nearly so close to zero-sum (insisting that MTF transwomen be treated exactly the same as women in every context is the most obvious example, but smaller scale examples in things like representation in fiction also count), which resulted in significant push back, which resulted in the activists take the "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach.
07mk
9hr ago
The fact that Trump has happened to preside over some major high leverage situations in world history (ie AI, and also having more SCOTUS picks than average) makes me have a horrifying/fantastic thought, depending on one's point of view. What if Trump ends up being right on the "living" side of the longevity escape velocity, such that immortality is achieved such that whatever therapies are required for it are implemented on him just seconds before he would have died? We certainly live in interesting times, and that would make it interestinger still.
07mk
10hr ago
underlying assumption that being horny is something enviable that women are disadvantaged by not being the equal of men.
I don't think that's the underlying assumption, except maybe in a subconscious way that's close to unfalsifiable. The underlying assumption is that men and women's minds are precisely identical in every way that matters. Therefore, any observation that women are less/more X than men is necessarily the consequence of patriarchy, whether due to bias of observers or unfalsifiable "internalized misogyny" of women or anything else. And but for that patriarchy, if freed from their shackles, women and men would have precisely the same level of X.
07mk
21hr ago
Does that mean they get personal blame for everything a random employee does? No. But it's still nonsense logic to try to sue your administration for what your admin did.
That'd depend heavily on the precise set of details. As you said, the POTUS doesn't get personal blame for everything a random employee does.
07mk
22hr ago
Now maybe he was too incompetent as a boss to ensure that the workers under him don't leak things,
I don't think competence is the limiting factor in something like this. Without resorting to scifi or fantasy, it's hard to fathom how the POTUS could be sufficiently "competent" as to guarantee that no leaks in the entire federal government happens ever. Of course, the buck stops with the POTUS, but also, e.g. we don't execute the POTUS every time someone in the federal government is convicted of treason, and I think the reason we don't is that we don't assign blame to the POTUS for every individual crime that anyone working under him commits (maybe we should! The world might be a lot better in a lot of ways). And I think it's reasonable to believe that not assigning such blame is the correct thing to do.
07mk
1d ago
A thought I had over a decade ago is that my generation (elder millennial) grew up with the notion "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" being fed to us so consistently and ubiquitously that the notion that it could come while burning the American flag and destroying the cross never even accidentally crossed our minds. Thing is, of course, we were also force fed the idea of challenging power structures and rebelling against the hegemon, which would necessarily involve challenging such notions that we grew up swimming in, and it used to confuse me why so many people seemed not only to refuse to take this obvious step but to be downright hostile to it.
07mk
2d ago
I don't know about product endorsements, but in Latin class in highschool, I recall translating some text from actual Roman times that described some specific gladiator as causing women to swoon or get weak in the knees or somesuch (probably some different idiom that I'm not remembering now), and our teacher explaining that top gladiators were legitimate celebrities. I never followed up on it to confirm with independent research, but product endorsements would seem in line with that.
07mk
2d ago
Growing up in the 90s, I recall some of my friends sharing tapes with recordings of songs from the radio and CDs with each other. But what I don't recognize is people calling them "mixtapes." That was something you might share specifically with your boy-/girlfriend as a way to convey your affection, and the exact specific order mattered. Tapes you shared with friends were just tapes that had songs on them, because merely having the song available for play - even with the delay it takes to rewind/fast forward the tape to the specific track - was something very valuable.
07mk
2d ago
I think people generally do think photography is different to painting (less artful even). Obviously there's a lot of creative decision-making involved in a given photo, but not as much as for a given painting.
I'm not sure what "less artful" means, but certainly no one would claim that ai generated images aren't different from paintings, even when they explicitly use painting styles. Much like how photorealistic photographs are different from photorealistic paintings which are different from photorealistic collages which are different from photorealistic CGI renderings, in non-trivial ways. Same would go for any AI generated images.
Whether it's "as much," I'm not sure how it's possible to quantify the amount of creative decisionmaking in a way that can be meaningfully compared like that.
Across a photographer's oeuvre, you start to see more and more evidence of intentionality, and it takes collections and curation to establish your bona fides as a photographer to a greater extent than as a painter.
This phenomenon is quite evident to exist in people who use AI generated images from following anyone who has posted AI generated images for a long time as well. It applies just as well when you take the AI generated part out of it; even Twitter accounts that merely share pre-existing images of any provenance inevitably establish a pattern of intentionality in terms of the images they deem worthy to share, ie curate. I don't know if a curator is an "artist" who deserves "credit" for their "art," but certainly a curator is someone who makes creative decisions.
What I'm saying is that density of micro decisions is a relevant criteria for assigning credit. I'm not suggesting that an ai prompter deserves no credit.
Again, this seems perfectly cromulent to me, but also, I really don't think "deserving credit" is a particularly meaningful thing. People subjectively credit various things for their works, like God or their family, or only their hard work and effort, or their 5th grade teacher, or the barista whose off-hand comment triggered something in their brains, etc. and I don't really have an opinion on that, other than that it doesn't seem worth having an opinion on. My point is just that "creative decisionmaking" isn't a line that cuts between AI generated images and paintings/sketches/etc. and this applies for any other analogous media.
07mk
2d ago
In this case I think the sense that no skill or taste has been exercised is important. Drawing a picture seems to require some level of effort or skill, which a person has acquired over years of practice. There may be an incoherent feeling that 'resistance' is important to art.
I'm not sure if that's incoherent, but it seems perfectly cromulent to believe that "art" requires some minimum effort and skill, and that base ai generations don't reach that bar, and likewise something like 4'33", which took neither to write and takes neither to perform. But that's a very different and completely orthogonal point from the notion that AI generated media doesn't reflect human creative decisions.
To be fair to Mixtape, I understand that the protagonist is a huge music nerd, and the game is about her last day in her hometown before driving across the country to give her mixtape to some music producer to try to get a job. As someone who had even less interest in music in the 90s than I do now, I don't know how much that would make her knowledge of obscure and 80s bands more justifiable, though. The point that no teenager in the 90s had nostalgia for the 80s strikes me as very very true, though.
With respect to the rewinding a tape via pencil scene, one important aspect of it is that she specifically spins the wrong hole to rewind the tape. One doesn't need to have first-hand experience to know this: basic understanding of physics should tell anyone that you have to spin the reel that has less tape around it, and spin it such it "pulls" the exposed part of the tape towards that side. In the game, she sticks the pencil into the one that has more tape, somehow "pushing" the tape into the other reel instead of out of the cassette, as would actually happen. Perhaps it's a bug that will be patched, but it's fascinating to me that this obvious physical error got through. Reminds me of the Wonder Woman film where she blatantly doesn't protect her feet while rushing some foxholes during WW1.
07mk
3d ago
I'm not sure what "created art by themselves" would mean specifically, but someone putting in a penny into that robot would certainly have made a creative decision by deciding to use that particular machine or to use any machine at all to create a drawing. He could have inserted the penny into a different machine, or taken that penny and scratched markings onto a piece of paper to create some "art," or, at possibly the most trivial case, he could have also just decided to frame that penny and present it as "art" in itself, and all of those would have involved some level of creative decisionmaking. In each case, the way the final result reflects his decisionmaking would be somewhat different. I.e. if he actually etched onto a piece of paper using the penny, he would have made decisions on where and how hard each marking was, whereas if he just framed the penny, he would have decided which penny to present, but he didn't make any decision on the angles of the curves that form Lincoln's portrait on the penny.
I find myself wanting to say a similar sort of thing about AI, only a lot of people's decisions were involved in training it rather than just one.
Certainly, I'd agree that many people's decisions went into any diffusion model-based AI-generated image, not just that of the person who typed in the prompt. Much like many people's decisions went into a photograph, such as that of the lens manufacturer and the city engineer who deemed that some building's awnings had to be a certain way and the businessman who spit his gum out on the sidewalk one day which turned into a black mark and the kid who decided to throw rocks at a flock of birds seconds before the photographer pressed the shutter.
07mk
3d ago
The cost would really only be relevant if there was some reasonable expectation for honesty or accuracy on the internet - especially on social media - like there is in a paid transaction, though. And there is no such expectation. In fact, it's such a cliche that the internet is filled with lies that the one thing Abraham Lincoln is loved for, the very reason he was iconic enough to be put on the penny, is that he warned us not to believe everything you read on the internet over a century before the internet even existed.
My first and immediate question upon learning of the whole Mixtape kerfuffle - how does a small indie company get funds to license 20-something actual songs from I imagine what are pretty fucking big labels?
I've heard people hypothesize that this was a pet project of Megan Ellison, who is founder/owner of Annpurna, the publisher of Mixtape (developed by a different Australian company). She is also the daughter of Larry Ellison (a hectobillionaire). I did some basic research, and it seems true, according to what I would consider credible sources, that Megan Ellison owns Annapurna, Annapurna did publish Mixtape, and Megan Ellison did inherit a large trust from her hectobillionaire dad.
Megan Ellison turned 40 this year so she's an elder millennial, though I'd guess that her upbringing wasn't what one would consider typical of a California millennial in the 90s. The narrative I've seen hypothesized is that she wanted a power fantasy where she could live out the stereotypical cliche teenage rebellion that she never could due to her immense wealth and privilege, but that's very much speculative.
EDIT:
As we continue our mission for booze on the way to Camille Cole's party, I require something that fills every possible spectrum of sound, causing the brain to super-aneurysm and explode and die.
This is Love by The Smashing Pumpkins.
I'm a musical philistine, so I didn't quite understand why this was a whopper. Having listened to the song on YouTube just now, it does seem rather repetitive and hitting the same sort of "sound" for the entirety of the song compared to something like, say, Bohemian Rhapsody. Is that why you'd consider it a whopper, possibly generated by an LLM that has no actual understanding of the song and was just putting words together that seem fitting?
07mk
3d ago
Humans can take credit for AI art to the extent I can claim to be an artist when I pay a human artist to "make me a picture of grapes and some flowers and a skull". If I specify the picture extremely specifically then I start to be able to claim a fraction of the authorship, but it takes a lot for us not to intuit that the dude holding the paintbrush deserves most of the credit. Most ai artists are more like commissioners.
I don't particularly care about "credit," or what "art" means, but the part of this analogy that I find wrong is that a generative AI tool lacks agency like a human, and I don't see a way to bridge the gap until we've got scifi-level AI. A diffusion model or an LLM is "making decisions" in the same way that a bristle of a paintbrush "makes decisions" on where to place the paint on the canvas, i.e. by following the laws of physics, compelled by the human that's actually controlling the tool (whether through typing in a prompt or waving the paintbrush).
07mk
3d ago
I disagree, it applies just as well to typing the prompt. Why wouldn't it be? Both are processes that aren't really legible if you watch them without witnessing the result, with the result as its output.
Because the text prompt isn't the actual result, unlike in the case of a poem. It's merely a conduit by which the final result is created, transferring the human's creative decisions to the final artifact. Most accurately, the waving of the hand would be analogous to the finger movements AND the prompt, as ephemeral things that exist momentarily in order to transfer the human's intents to the final piece.
07mk
3d ago
And waving the brush is where the creative decisionmaking is in painting, which is why it's analogous to the prompt (waving the brush would be analogous to the movements for the fingers when we're talking about typing out a poem or essay or somesuch). The painting is merely an artifact that remains as the result of that creative decisionmaking. And that artifact is what people generally consider the actual creative work or "art," not the decisionmaking itself.
07mk
3d ago
Did they use that song in South Park, like the montage song? I thought that was written for Lease, the Rent parody in the Team America film.
07mk
3d ago
To latch on to this with another recent minor CW-related kerfuffle, I've seen some speculate that this segment from the climax of recently-released video game Mixtape (note that the game footage is real and unedited; the only addition is the guy reacting to it on the left side) was based off an AI-generated script. For me, the negative parallelism "this ain't a catastrophe, it's a warning" feels AI, but I worry that it's become such a commonly known AI "tell" that it's just a false positive. But also, the phrase "this will only be the beginnings of my wicked ways" just feels AI-ish to me in a way that I can't put my finger on. Something about how elaborate and almost forced-poetic it feels, particularly given that it's a teenager in a highly emotionally charged moment. But that could just be bad writing.
Season 5 of Stranger Things was also speculated as having been partially written using AI (apparently the making-of documentary included a shot of the writers having ChatGPT as one of their browser tabs, but the speculation started before, AFAICT), with people making compilations like this one, but beyond the negative parallelisms - which could be false positives - I'm not sure how the other parts feel AI. Again, there's a bit of forced-poetic feel in a lot of it, especially given, again, these are mostly teenagers. But also, awful writing of teenagers that seem way too sophisticated or mature has plagued this series since at least season 4, probably at least season 3.
Does anyone better with words than me have any opinions on this?
07mk
3d ago
Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that.
All this seems perfectly cromulent, but this doesn't seem to address the difference in AI generated imagery versus, say, a painting. Whether the algorithm is a diffusion model, an LLM, or the physics of molecules of paint, brushes, canvas, etc., the algorithm itself can't make creative decisions. But humans can and do make creative decisions in terms of how to direct those above algorithms to generate images.
I've seen this exact line of thinking brought up many times in discussion about AI art, and I'm confused why people seem to think that that means (modern) AI-generated images (and songs and poems, etc.) aren't the results of human creative decisions. Even putting in a blank or a randomly generated prompt into the first diffusion model one encounters is a creative decision. Even if we take away the AI and posit that the images were just sitting on the floor, poofed into existence by God or aliens or random chance of nature, the decision to share it with others is a creative decision. Until we get to truly agentic AI, any media that's shared is necessarily the result of a human making a creative decision somewhere.
I don't think "preferring one candidate over another" is generalizable to "murdering someone."
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