aiislove
12d ago
imo, ai generated porn other people created feels very cringe, but ai generated adult imagery I have prompted myself is not cringe at all, to me. I am sure the ai generated adult imagery that I have prompted myself is cringe to other people.
aiislove
12d ago
I scored 64. This is such a crazy way to test face blindness. Once it got to the pixelated faces I did not recognize any of the faces. I have done other face blindness tests online in the past which have been a bit easier to me but I scored about the same in relation to the test's "average." I also know that I am significantly more face blind toward women than men: when I am meeting a bunch of new people in a new class, for example, it takes me a really long time to memorize the names of females especially. I do think I am relatively face blind though, recently I made the mistake of introducing myself to someone I had just met 5 minutes prior (granted it was in an overwhelming social situation where I'm usually anxious, but my friend and the person I did this to were both a bit annoyed with me.)
aiislove
12d ago
He just did a long as hell Soft White Underbelly video too. (yes the channel which usually interviews prostitutes and child abuse victims and whatever). I watched the whole thing. He's kind of flat and creepy like a lot of recovered drug addicts. I'm surprised he's a democrat. His paintings are bad enough that they trigger a Harrison Bergeron response in my brain.
aiislove
12d ago
The movie is very pretty, specially compared to the original series. This is to be expected; the animation of a 1979 TV show cannot possibly compete with the animation of a 2025 theatrical film. The colors are vibrant, with red and blue uniforms popping out of the screen.
I haven't watched the Netflix adaptation but I just watched the trailer and the OP sequence for it and I have to disagree. I am a huge fan of 70s anime (shoujo especially) and think the art style in the original version is a million times more attractive and effective than the art style of the new version. The 70s artists communicate so much in their sparseness and simplicity. The new version overloads you with a maximalist scrapbook aesthetic that looks very like, illustrator vector frutiger metro but sort of adapted to the 2020s. I mean the techniques of reproduction (the camera work or whatever process is used to convert the illustrations to a final image) has obviously "technically improved" but the charm and soul of the original is missing. It is similar to how AI generation or smartphone cameras continue to improve in clarity and definition but degrade in terms of soul and art and the sort of in between imprecision of the act of creation. The color grading also seems to lack cohesion in the new version compared to the original anime. And really I don't mean to disrespect the artists working today and it's good that they have careers at all but the taste to me is just a world apart from the taste of the 70s illustrators and animators.
aiislove
15d ago
This status-and-love-seeking behavior from full grown adults seems increasingly cringe to me the older I get. I can't help but imagine it's downstream of feeling unloved by the parent as a child and they are desperate to seek love from the world instead. This hit me so hard a few years ago when I met up with a few friends while I was in another country and they insisted that everywhere we eat was statusmaxxing or whatever, the type of place you could brag about going, even to the extent that they wanted to walk out of a place run by a sweet old man when they deemed the food subpar. This stems from insecurity and once you grow out of it it's horrible to see in other people. The full grown adult who wants a golden child actor or a star is doing something so horrible and so tacky and I really doubt most of them are happy at the end of it. Britney's parents raised a global superstar and they probably spend every night wishing she was bringing in more money instead of dancing half naked on instagram. I don't sympathize with the parents.
aiislove
17d ago
Have been to South Korea a handful of times, they learn American english there, everyone around 35 or so and younger speaks really good english in my experience. Older people may not know it at all though. I'm surprised you find Koreans hard to understand.
aiislove
17d ago
I find strong Scandinavian accents irritating in their dullness and weirdly Indian rhythm. Though I will say that many Scandinavian people speak really good english without much accent at all so I don't mind those speakers. Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian are pretty languages to my ear.
French and European Spanish speakers are also a bit monotonous to me, the German accent is fine but their speech patterns are usually too pedantic for my tastes
Certain overly nasal midwestern accents are irritating to me and east coast accents sound aggressive and unpleasant. AAVE can be charming but is grating in my internal monologue.
aiislove
22d ago
Ehhhh it's kind of a mess all the way around. There are a handful of companies like Levi's which are grandfathered in and have a very specific niche that they do well enough that they are hard to mess up and I would describe as well run, though even those have rough patches.
Luxury brands are currently going through a huge problem where they've inflated prices outside of the reach of aspirational shoppers (basically everyone but the very rich) with zero increase in the quality of the goods they are selling- this is the case right now with every brand in the category from Chanel to the LVMH labels to McQueen. I believe I just read in the Business of Fashion that the luxury market (as in the number of buyers consuming luxury goods) has shrunk like 40 percent in the past 5 years. Of course before this LVMH for example was doing great for over a decade so things are cyclical and to some extent outside the control of management but the mishandling of the price point and quality control has been ridiculous and unnecessary and avoidable IMO.
Fashion management is also very prone to misunderstanding the customer's needs or desires, doing a poor job of matching expectation with product selection, they tend to fall for flavor of the day gimmicks that often fail, there is often friction between the business and creative sides of the businesses, and so on
aiislove
22d ago
Great post, thank you for sharing.
I have written a lot about this before but the trajectory of a nation and how we compare with our parents' and grandparents' generations is massive for our own self esteem and the vibe of a society. America is in a tough place because we're so obviously doing worse than my grandparents' generation which has largely died out about ten years ago and there's little hope among all classes that they'll be able to afford a better life than their parents or grandparents did. I suspect the opposite is true in China and that accounts for the very different vibe and outlook between the two countries right now.
aiislove
22d ago
I grew up my whole life in the midwest and never visited the west coast until a few years ago and got to visit the Bay Area for the first time about a year ago. I got the sense that it has declined in recent years while I was there and I imagine it's declined in the same way that other American cities have. But I also found the city really beautiful with incredible weather and still a million times better than anything on the east coast, midwest or the south. Californians love to complain about traffic and homelessness and a handful of other things but frankly they are all so much worse in Baltimore or Detroit or even Cleveland or Pittsburgh. All the billionaires leaving California seem insane to me, the weather and landscape of CA are unreal, the rest of the country is unbearably hot and/or humid for at least half of the year and/or suffers from terrible cold and depressing winters etc etc etc
Anyway besides all that I've been all over the world and coastal California from SD to SF is genuinely the best place to live imo. Granted it is expensive (still less expensive than Hawaii and a handful of other places) and, perhaps, the dense majority of people there are left leaning, though I find them less irritating than their east coast counterparts, and really quite easy to avoid if I just socialize with the Mexicans and non whitewashed Asians instead
I'm sure it's difficult and annoying to see your city decline and perhaps I'm naive and just haven't spent enough time in the area but I do think the complaints are overblown or maybe I just don't have the perspective to know what I'm missing but I've only had good experiences there
aiislove
22d ago
Yup there have been a handful of services with this model over the years, they never seem to catch on. Actually fashion startups with sort of gimmicky business strategies (rent the runway type things for example) almost never work out, I suspect investors are not usually the type of people to understand the fashion industry, and fashion companies are notoriously poorly managed in general
aiislove
22d ago
Yeah don't worry about how autistic it is, there is so much crap in the world that when you find the perfect thing just get tons of it. I have 3 pairs of my favorite pants which were a random seasonal piece from Express, I'm going to be annoyed if I can't find a 4th pair since I've already worn through the first two
aiislove
23d ago
At first I thought you were asking how many of the clothes you try on work out for you and you buy them, which my answer was going to be like 10 percent, but then I re-read your question and realized you're asking what ends up working for you after you take it home.
In that case it's probably around 75% for me. I try to be extremely picky in what I purchase because I hate wasting money on stuff that doesn't work out. The biggest culprits of things not working is stuff shrinking after the first wash and the irritation of having a slightly inferior product compared to what I already own and I can't stand to trade down when I have something better on hand. Also I have a habit of thinking something looks good in the mirror without realizing it's uncomfortable as hell which I can't unnotice the first time I try to actually wear it
For reference I have a degree in fashion design and shop all the time and this is still a terrible problem.
If I find something I like from a brand that makes the same things all the time (like MUJI, Uniqlo or LA Apparel) I will happily buy multiples of the same style in different or same colors which helps a ton but is incredibly irritating when they change things or discontinue items and you have to start all over
aiislove
24d ago
Would recommend checking out recraft.ai
aiislove
1mo ago
Oh, good timing, I just crossed a very large milestone in my portfolio today. A few questions:
- What do you think the chances are that we are currently in a large (AI related or not AI related) bubble that will pop? It seems like the money printing of the past few years has massive upward pressure on the stock market so I don't know how to unpick the two.
- I have always been a saver and live fairly frugally. But I am itching to increase my standard of living with some of my invested money. At what number in USD would you personally be comfortable beginning to draw down, say, 4% of your portfolio a year to increase your standard of living sustainably?
- It seems like I am outpacing the rate of inflation with my investments. For example I have doubled my money in 4 years, whereas I am not paying nearly 2 times as much for gas or groceries or restaurants compared with 2022. And it seems like inflation is much slower at the lower end of prices- for example goods at thrift stores or antique stores seem to be retaining low prices while things like houses and fine art are exploding in valuation. Do you think it's likely to stay this way in the US for a while or do you think the inflation will be coming for lower priced goods as well?
- Do you think it's too late to buy bitcoin or is it still wise to buy it today? I have only like $2000 worth of bitcoin because I never found it very appealing or interesting but I can see its use in hedging against fiat currency debasement and many people smarter and richer than me are still interested in its success.
- The older I get, the more I have access to but the less I want. I have already satisfied most of my needs and desires from my youth. How do I generate more desire within myself as I grow older? (I am in my mid thirties if that is relevant.)
aiislove
1mo ago
(note that everyone besides sub-Saharan-Africans basically descends from one lineage of Africans that crossed into Arabia)
From what I understand there were two separate migrations out of sub-Saharan Africa, the earlier of which resulted in East Asian and Austronesian people and the latter of which resulted in European people. I don't have the time right now to do the sketchy google searches to back up my claims but if you google "multiple human migrations out of Africa" you'll see that there's evidence for this (or at least for more than one out of Africa migration.)
Re-reading your claim I suppose it's possible that the two migrations derived from the Arabian population you refer to rather than Africa, I don't know
aiislove
1mo ago
As a designer and a creator and aesthetic person I would argue that "the act of expression" is nowhere near 100% of the relevant criteria for an aesthetic-artistic work. This is a really postmodern notion, if you're someone who like weeps at Cy Twombly or whatever then sure I guess that's what you think. But the technical detail of say, JC Leyendecker or Maxfield Parrish to me is easily 90% of the value of their work. I actually agree with you on the rest of what you're saying but I think you are devaluing broadly the value and worth of the technicality of craft or whatever which the AI can do in, on average, 90% of the same quality that a talented human can do. The 10 percent of expression in the end is crucial as I tried to lay out but it's not 100 percent of what matters.
aiislove
1mo ago
What is the general reaction internationally to the US war against Iran? Like, is western Europe as anti-USA as they are anti-Russia in the context of the Ukraine-Russia conflict? How are people in other countries reacting to or viewing it so far?
aiislove
1mo ago
Sorry I’m not sure if you’re asking about video or text/scripts, I’m guessing you mean video, and I assume “human generated” means like traditional CGI and/or actors being filmed (I’ll call this combination “Hollywood” going forward) so I’ll answer from that angle
I would say for these two Highsfield videos specifically they are really really close to what Hollywood would look like. Especially taken out of context the ability of AI to mimic the CGI portion is extremely good and I think I’d have to be more familiar with CGI itself to identify the tells. On the other hand there are subtle uncanny valley-esque tells that do give away that it’s AI, like the Asian male character in the first video’s face appears much younger in a handful of scenes than in others which is strange. The women in the first video are much more beautiful than most actresses which also makes it seem fake. The monsters and robots and environments/action sequences in both videos are so good that I don’t think I would know they were AI vs trad CGI. Voices were sometimes inconsistent from the same character and more importantly lacked the distinctiveness of real voices.
I could go on, I think the conclusion I’d draw is much the same as the conclusion that I’d draw from ai chat bots or ai still image generation which is that all of these tools are very good at getting you to like 90% of a perfect product but it’s the last 10 crucial percent that it’s almost never able to achieve. In certain domains you can manually bridge the gap with a bit of human intervention but it varies from task to task.
Not as relevant but I also noticed that there is an issue with AI generation in general VS human work: when humans create something, the person making it nearly always does the best they can, or in the least something that they wouldn’t be embarrassed to produce given their level of skill or experience. And we are usually not overly critical of other people’s work, when they do a task for you we tend to accept it as their work. But with AI generation the latter problem is an issue where the person checking the AI generation is willing to approve work that is of a lower quality than what any human would produce because it took nearly zero time to produce and it wasn’t their own work so you might as well let it go through. Besides that correcting the final 10% to get it to perfect could take a massive amount of time, so in the end you might produce 100 times as much content but it’s all 90% as good so you think you’ll get 90 winners but the Pareto principle reveals that the final 10% is crucial to anything being good enough to succeed so you’ll run into rapidly collapsing returns
aiislove
1mo ago
Wow, these are really good.
For the longest time ai video generation was really bad with style consistency and character consistency but I didn't notice any problems with these at all. My background is in design/visual art and I think they look really good visually. At first I didn't like the constant cuts which I took as downstream from ai generation but it does seem consistent with the action genre so maybe it was a choice and not a technical issue.
The worst part is that the dialogue and text seems really obviously generated. The lyrics in the song at the end of your second link is fully just copied from another real song ("Ooh I love you so, but why I love you, I never know") but it's way worse in the ai version.
aiislove
1mo ago
Black Men tend to see themselves as more masculine. I'm gonna argue here that this perception is largely harmful to themselves and to the community at large.
This is not a problem for black men. Men of any race benefit from masculinity in any event or situation where they are not cucked sissy hypno'd humiliation ritual'd invited into the realm of feminine dominated status politics. Sexual competition favors masculinity for men. Evolutionary psychology points to dominant masculine males as the most desirable people to mate with. Women and gay men (such as myself) are programmed from millennia of sexual competition and successful fertility and resource scarcity to seek the best mates they can.
You go on to propose that black men should be encouraged to be less masculine, basically. In other words you are trying to bring him down to a level where you can compete with him as you are a non-black man. It doesn't work, it is ridiculous, it all falls apart the second you hit the real world. The black man "studying ballet and in education" is cringe but still more masculine than the white man "studying ballet and in education" and yet more masculine than the Asian man "studying ballet and in education." The ballet and reeducation is going to solve nothing but be a ridiculous charade. At the end you can point to the black harvard educated ballerina and say, ah good, he got the girl because he played the game on my white bourgeois terms: in elegance and sophistication and education, and now I don't have to rip apart my entire worldview where I believe men should be chosen based on their elegance and sophistication and education, rather than submit to the stark reality that women choose mates based on primal instinct of masculinity and dominance and physical power which you or the less dominant man knows he can't compete at and win.
Much of sex and race relations are totally conflated due to the dual-variable situation. Basically, the races of people who have more desirable masculine traits are the opposite stack from the races of people who have more desirable feminine traits. Black men are more masculine and dominant than white men who are more masculine and dominant than latino and asian men. Asian and latino women are more feminine and attractive than white women who are more feminine and attractive than black women. This is why so much of modern day US race relations are so broken: Polite society is dominated by women's concerns, and white women are more attractive than black women, and in a feminine twist of slave morality (or christian love, or judeo-christian David vs. Goliath ethics) women get to forever place the lives and souls of Black people above their own because it doesn't actually ever interfere with how they as white women are hotter than black women, and get to simultaneously reap the benefits of socially accepted dominant (black) male mate selection and humiliation of the inferior emasculated white or asian man.
The fact that white or Asian men come up with the solution you propose, over and over again, leads only to their humiliation and constant misunderstanding of what a woman wants from them. The answer isn't to bring the more dominant men into the same humiliation rituals they are burdened with, it is to avoid having to compete with more dominant males to begin with.
I also wouldnt be surprised if many of these women were "less feminine" than their non-black counterparts, particularly because black women are in a more violent and aggressive environment, that demands more masculine behavior as a matter of survival. This is more of a hunch than something I have direct evidence for.
I suspect Black women are less feminine than their non-black counterparts because every Black women I've ever met is more masculine than I am (as a white male.) White men will never admit this but let's go through some observations. In sexual dimorphism within the same ethnicity, women tend to have lighter skin than men. So a Black woman is already starting from a distance and at a glance to have a more masculine presentation than any man who isn't darker than she is. In the extremes, of course, there are cute and feminine Black women like Duckie Thot who I think is very cute but she is at the far end of the bell curve in terms of neoteny and half of her female relatives are probably more butch than your average white or Latino or Asian man.
IMO there is a great dignity in ethnostates that doesn't exist in diverse settings. In Japan, there is a great diversity of people in a positive way. Your construction worker is Japanese, your lawyer is Japanese, your doctor is Japanese, your priest is Japanese, your emperor and your empress and your prime minister are all Japanese. There is phenotypical diversity in Japan, yes, but culturally, everyone is Japanese, and there is a dignity in that you know the place you end up in society is a product of your own work and your own ability. In America, your construction workers are Mexican, your lawyer is a WASP or a Jew, your doctor is Nigerian, your priest is Italian, your president is half nigerian or part cheetoh or whatever. What of the Mexicans who want to be a lawyer and not a construction worker? The Jew who would be happiest laying bricks? We have a great illusion of choice but once you notice the specialization of race linked to profession it's a bit sad.
There are no black pretty boys, like we see with asians.
Again there actually are black pretty boys. Usher is pretty. There are Black ladyboys and Black trans women and Black cross dressers and anything else you can imagine. Your insistence that there are no black pretty boys is an artifact of your judgment of Black people by white or nonblack standards. Black men can point at Usher or other pretty black men and say those are the pretty ones. If you are white and can't imagine Black men being pretty it's because you can't step outside of your viewpoint in your judgment compared with them which is the sexual selective competition problem I'm trying to illustrate. To contrast and reinforce the point, of course you mention asian "pretty boys" because if you're outside of the Asian community then nearly all Asian men are to the "pretty" side of things compared with you.
The first step with black women is to get them on some kind of glp-1
So I think the problem is women need to stop desiring dominance or rather they need to stop putting themselves in positions that require dominant positions. I have a friend who happens to be an obese Black woman. I have experience with weight loss so she sometimes asks me for advice about it. One time she confided in me that she had been thinner in the past, but that she was "afraid people would beat her up." This is a real fear, and is also consistent with needing to have a bit of weight to throw around to assert dominance. In the past 10 years I have weighed 300 and I have weighed 190 lb and from experience, at 300 people are much less likely to mess with you than at 190. Women, especially those who live in an urban environment, are put in positions where they feel they need to dominate things physically. Nomadic women in Mongolia or city girls in China- or even rural/nonurban northern European women, despite what the immigration doomers will have you believe, have no such social threats that they find themselves needing to become obese to assert domination. Women and poor people are not going to start dropping weight en masse until everyone does as it's a sort of cold war (american obesity skyrocketed at the same time that racial integration became more ubiquitous.)
Another step that needs to be emphasized is what a healthy relationship actually looks like, and how to select a dude who will give you a healthy relationship. I have an intuition that this skill, particularly with black women, is somewhat lacking, hence high multi-partner fertility
This attitude is so arrogant to me, people do what they're programmed to do, why are you trying to socially engineer their behavior to begin with? She can choose the more sexy masculine dominant male over the really sweet guy, the problem isn't her, the really sweet guy if he's such a great partner needs to man up and express his masculinity in addition to his ability to take care of his mate and offspring at the same time. If someone whose brain is designed to opt for a masculine dominant mate who are you to encourage her to go against her millennia of programming in favor of you and your preferences, the less dominant male? What's in it for anyone but you?
aiislove
1mo ago
I had the opposite experience. I hated Pink Pony Club the first ten thousand times I heard it and then I decided to give up and now I love it :(
aiislove
1mo ago
Persona 1, Persona 2: EP and IS, Super Mario RPG, FFIX, FFVIII, FFVII. Saga Frontier. Prerendered backgrounds look so much better than anything full 3d. Legend of Mana. I love the art and some of the graphics from the Rune Factory series but they are really a hot mess and basically unplayable as actual games imo.
aiislove
2mo ago
Yeah women shouldn't be seducing men, men need to have agency to perform sexually. All women need to do is express a bit of interest to the point that the man has the confidence to get it up and to know that she's not going to turn him down. The more she does the more likely she is to scare him off. Man being scared off is off-putting to a woman as well who at least wants a man to have the confidence to believe he is worthy of screwing her.
I am confused by the narrative or popular opinion surrounding Elon Musk today. Every time I get on X he has retweeted some inflammatory race baiting thing that gets millions of views (which I generally agree with for context) and yet outside of a handful of "I bought this tesla before he was a nazi" bumper stickers which apparently exist I see little to no pushback on him or what he has done with X. Maybe I'm in a filter bubble and have really managed to mute leftist views in my life but a lot of his views are to me essentially white supremacist by the standards of the overton window of the west and yet he seems to suffer nearly no consequences for it. And at the same time he seems not to be doing anything outside of having too many white kids to raise with sufficient attention and retweeting about how bad things are in the UK or how the west is all going to be South Africa in a few years. Am I wrong? Is he doing anything to try to reverse the great replacement of whites? Has he suffered any major consequences for his beliefs?
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