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celluloid_dream


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 23:43:20 UTC
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User ID: 758

celluloid_dream


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 23:43:20 UTC

					

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User ID: 758

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That information was revealed and discussed. It's more that no one cared, I think.

Zvi: OpenAI: The Battle of the Board (Nov. 22, 2023)

Sam Altman then attempted to use this (potentially manufactured) drama to get Toner removed from the board. He used a similar tactic at Reddit, a manufactured crisis to force others to give up power. Once Toner was gone, presumably Altman would have moved to reshape the rest of the board.

I really liked the premise of Flatliners (1990) - medical students deliberately induce clinical death to touch the afterlife

Matthew B. Crawford's Why We Drive and The World Beyond Your Head.

Why We Drive is a vitalist paean to driving (and motorcycling), specifically the kind that involves risk and skill. It's also a rant against self-driving cars, glowing rectangles, and checking out of the real world.

I didn't hate it, but given its title, I expected "Why we road trip", "Why we go for a drive to clear our heads", "Why we explore that highway we've never been down", etc. Instead, it was more like "Why we speed", "Why we do donuts in the parking lot", "Why we tinker with gearhead shit".

Specifically with the gearhead stuff, the book did not do a good enough job of selling it to me. I fully believe it's part of why Crawford drives, but gearhead shit is not at all on the radar for me, or the vast, vast majority of people I know. The rare one or two that could MacGyver a timing belt out of pantyhose (or even know what a timing belt is) tend to be either the children of auto repair professionals, or else very deep in some automotive subculture already. That just makes the "We" in "Why We Drive" way more exclusive than it needs to be.

Partway through The World Beyond Your Head, which I'm already liking much better. It's so far a more general case of the topics surrounding attention in WWD. Probably should have read this one first.

I wonder what Crawford would make of the fact that I'm listening to it over a shitty TTS voice reader while: driving, making dinner, eating, playing video games, cleaning my apartment, swiping notifications away, only hitting pause when something else demands the vocal-processing-modeling part of my brain, such that I can no longer concentrate on the book in the background.

I do this all the time! That is, just piggyback on someone else's order, and find it slightly pleasing/harmonious if others at the table do as well.

I feel like it's a minor bonus to group cohesion if we all do a thing together. (eg. if everyone has poutine, or everyone orders a Caesar). I'm pretty indecisive, and not too picky, so anything that helps tip the scales one way or another, I'll just go with it. There's also some consideration for kitchen/bar/server efficiency.

Cardio: Mirror's Edge chase mix. Background music for a game about running makes for pretty good running background music.

For pushing through something: French screamo

I think the discomfort you'd feel would be that you lack typical female socialization, and would be worried about giving that away by not knowing certain etiquette, or behavior, or what have you.

I realize this is not the current orthodoxy, but the only way "being trans" forms a coherent concept, IMO, is as both a desire to have a differently sexed body, and then actively taking steps to remedy that situation. You can't be discovered to be "essentially a man", because there is no male essence aside from biology.

It's bad. Screenshot of the home page. I just want it to be a blog, and it insists on trying to be a whole social media do-everything site. I'm honestly disappointed when authors I follow encourage this by tweeting and chatting on it. (Apparently Substack asks them to? maybe pays them, or says it'll boost their engagement, not sure)

The main gripe I have with the subscribe reminders is that they pop up at the start of the page. If I'm reading something new, I obviously don't know if I like it yet. Why would I ever subscribe after only reading the first 5% of an article? If you must annoy me with a popup (and I'd really rather you didn't), do it at the end, please.

It's awful. We truly live in a dark (or too bright) time.

Consider New Reddit:

  • This is the default. I'm only getting 2 posts per massive browser screen. After browsing a bit, it does fill some of that space with a "recently viewed" list, but the massive bars on the side are still there. I'm convinced these design choices have dumbed down participation on reddit such that people now only posts pics and simple questions rather than longer discussions.
  • This is if you change it to "Classic" view, but that still only shows 7 posts compared to old reddit 's 13. These aren't so bad. The whitespace would be filled by longer post titles, so it doesn't feel like a waste. Personal preference, but I still think old reddit is much cleaner, despite displaying more.
  • This is "Compact" - dropping the thumbnails, shrinking even further, and new reddit still only gets 12 posts on screen. In an effort to shrink things, they've moved the comment button way off to the right, which looks awkward when the post title is short. And for what? Now I have to trace along that whitespace with my eyes to find the comment info.

Substack is even worse:

  • Just look at this shit! We are approaching 80% whitespace here, and half of it is Substack pushing their stupid twitter clone.
  • This page should be the home screen instead, and it's still half blank.
  • Another sin: If you accidentally hover over a username, it pops up a giant box like this full of yet more whitespace, covering your view of what you were looking at. On mobile, this happens if you thumb the screen to scroll down and accidentally press anywhere near a name.

Can anyone familiar with design explain why we can't have stuff like the old slatestarcodex blog back? It worked just fine on mobile. If the text is too small, you just pinch zoom the screen a bit.

Yes. A good film is like a good song. Part of the experience is the tempo - how it flows and how it carries a feeling throughout. If you drop it and come back later, the continuity is lost the same way your favourite song is ruined if you keep pausing it every 30 seconds.

Example: Uncut Gems is a tense movie! It's stressful! It doesn't let up for two hours straight, and then when you finally get to the end, the last scene very much cashes in on it having taken you for that exhausting ride.

I'm not sure what was supposed to have happened last year to prompt an election. In mid-2022, the Liberals and NDP had just solidified a not-technically-a-coalition deal. Maybe a collapse there? @Highlandclearances also predicted a higher likelihood of a housing crash and constitutional crisis.

This year, I think the same facts still hold. The Liberals don't have to call one until late 2025. Their polling is terrible right now. My gut feeling is that they stall as long as possible hoping public opinion shifts before then. On the other hand, they're not likely to win the next election anyway. Maybe they try and do damage control by sneaking one in alongside the US election, which is bound to be a shit-show.

My guess: 20% 40% chance of an election this year.

Edit: Doubling this, as there is an additional reason to hold an election early. The Liberals can lose now and leave the Conservatives holding the bag when things get worse in 2025.

Your first takeaway is interesting, because when I used to play over a decade ago, the social aspect was the hardest part of winning. It was crucial to keep your team focused on the game, and not arguing in chat.

There was one strat - split pushing - that went against the expected meta at the time. It was basically an aggressive fork, going too deep, too quickly in order to make the opponent commit to defending one side, and gain momentum on the other. I was really good at it. Experience seemed to confirm it worked. The problem is that (at the time), it was just seen as a "thing you don't do". Doing it (or worse, letting the team know ahead of time I was going to try) would prompt such a raging backlash, it was actually counterproductive. The strat was sound, but tilted teammates typing in allcaps for thirty minutes don't win matches, so I stopped trying.

  • For the first time in my life, I get the sense that public opinion is turning on immigration. Canada has always had a sort of left-wing nationalist pride in our immigration intake. It's only in the last few years I've started to hear murmurings of dissent. Even so, people don't blame immigrants themselves (rightly!), but the government.
  • There would be some transmission from failure in office to electoral results. It's just delayed because we don't do fixed electoral terms, so the sitting PM gets to sometimes squeeze out an extra few years by calling an election early like Trudeau did in 2021. If the election were held today, it would be a Conservative blowout. I can't imagine it will be any less of a blowout in 2025 if things continue to get worse. There's also the impending mortgage crisis forecast to hit just in time for election season.

I would highlight something I noticed in a few conversations recently.

That is, the ability to really listen in a discussion, the humility to integrate what the other person is saying in real time, and offer thoughtful responses. Louise and Agnes are outliers in a lot of ways, but they're extremely good at this.

Recently, I think the default UI change is a factor. Comparing new.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, you get much less text, and many fewer visible comments per post on new reddit than old. By default, it seems to "... expand to continue" long messages. Some subs now also display gif replies, which seem to only be used for snark. In general, it seems to encourage low-effort participation, and discourage thoughtful answers.

Framing? Rhetoric?

I find it a bit puzzling that the LLM is expected to do things correctly with minimal or no guidance, which is a bit like expecting a riderless horse to stay on track and win a race. Maybe it can sometimes, but with a code jockey, it can be so much better.

That probably looks something like noticing that it's overfitting on poker, translating the question to avoid that, and seeing if it does any better. Eg. not calling the symbols "cards" or "faces" or "suits". ROT13-ing the letters so they don't look like a poker hand, or whatever.

I think just awareness of the existence of epistemics might be helpful.

It's like math. Most people can't remember half of what they learned in high school math classes. Many can't even do basic algebra, but they're at least aware that algebra can and probably should be done to explain why an answer is correct.

Sometimes I'll be in conversation with a person and they'll make an assertion. I'll ask them why they think that. How do they know? Suppose I didn't agree. How would they convince me? Then their eyes narrow and their lips curl. I can see the gears turning as they mentally brand me enemy and then they just assert the thing again, but louder and with edge to their voice.

I remember liking Halo CE a lot back in the day because of the unreasonable effectiveness of the backup pistol. It was arguably the best weapon in the game - certainly the most well rounded - and you just got it for free every time you respawned. Didn't matter if your opponent had a rocket launcher, a sniper rifle, or a tank. You always had the means to kill them with three headshots.

This doesn't work very well in my experience. Even when such channels exist, conversation naturally drifts from unserious to serious, from topic to topic, and no one wants to stop and move elsewhere. That kills the vibe, breaks the scroll history. Also, no one wants to be the one to pipe up and ask people to move either.

Has anyone solved chat notifications yet?

Especially in small-medium group chats, I often do want to keep apprised of new messages in real time, but don't want to be notified of every trivial thing. I'll hear a whatsapp/discord chirp, only to check it, find an animated gif and think You made me task switch for THIS? grr.. Switch back to whatever I'm doing. Blerp! New message! Check the chat: "ikr? lol". Oh my god SHUT UP! <Mute notifications for 8 hours>.

8 hours later: Blerp!. Check chat. Find I've missed a whole real conversation.

There's gotta be a better way, right? Exponential backoff algorithm? AI parsing to determine importance? No more than N notifications per alert window + summary?

I'm less annoyed by its stupidity than by its constant moralizing. It straight-up refuses to do things much of the time.

One that stands out (though, I can't seem to reproduce it now) was ChatGPT refusing to send a request to DALL-E for an illustration of a trans character pre-transition. I can't find the conversation, but it was something like:

ChatGPT: Due to our content policy, I can't generate that image

Me: What? .. why? What's wrong with that?

ChatGPT: It is important to respect the feelings of trans people, and depicting this character at a sensitive time in their life could be hurtful and (etc etc.)

Me: It's a fictional character. I promise they won't mind.

ChatGPT: It is important to .. (blah blah blah)

Me: Fine. Screw it. Character isn't trans any more. Are you happy now? There goes half our diversity quota

What a frustrating quiz. Is there some reason these are always left so ambiguous? Does Marl give up and close the tab the second he's forced to read more than 50 words in a row? Eg.

  • "Scott is hosting a dinner party. For dessert, he serves chocolate cake, shaped to look like dog poop." - I'm supposed to make a call about whether this is "morally okay or not" given no other information. Does this not obviously depend on who's at the dinner party, and their preferences, temperaments, etc? Scott is hosting a dinner party for his football buds who find it hilarious. Laughs are had, poop-cake enjoyed, etc. Fine, yeah, morally okay! Good even. Scott is hosting a dinner party for his in-laws, who he knows don't appreciate his twisted sense of humour. They are disgusted. Scott knew they would be disgusted, and did it anyway just to see the looks on their faces. That's bad.
  • "Some men have a private, all-male club and feminists take them to court, demanding that they open it up to women." - What is even being tested here? Is it having a private all-male club in the first place or taking the club to court to open it up? Presumably the latter. From the perspective of the feminists, they likely have a sincere belief they are doing the right thing. I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to say about this. I personally think people should be able to have exclusive clubs, but also think you should be able to oppose exclusive clubs if you feel that way. I guess I'm neutral? Again, if the question was more specific, I could come down stronger on one side or the other.
  • "A group of parents, concerned about their children's risk of obesity, demand that the local store stops selling XL sized candy bars and soft drinks." - Again, what is being tested? The parents have a reasonable concern, make an unreasonable demand, which they are entitled to make, and the store is entitled to reject. "Is this morally okay?". Is what morally okay?
  • "Sarah's dog has four puppies. She can only find a home for two of them, so she kills the other two with a stone to the head." - a little more information please? Could Sarah not afford to house the puppies herself, or does she simply not want them? Does she have any other options? Is that the most humane way she could have killed them, or is she just trying to avoid a vet bill?

I don't think I'm being pedantic here.

Blizzard cinematics like this one (battle robot has PTSD) are generally held up as great CGI shorts.

I'd say the thing they do really well - better than hand drawn animation - is sell a coherent physical world. Because it's all modeled, things persist accurately through the scenes, like the blades of grass on the robot's shoulders, the clovers, the moss, etc. If that were hand drawn animation, I would expect that to vary and change. A good hand animator would probably get most of it correct, but maybe the length might be subtly off in a way your brain would pick up on.

Okay, this is silly, but suppose you're seated at a table like this.

You're middle-right, double-fisting your iced tea and lemon water. Your two talkative, outgoing friends are at the top. They tend to drive the conversation, so the focus is in that direction most of the time. Your two shy, reserved friends are at the bottom. How do you play this so that your quiet friends feel included in the conversation and not like they're staring at the back of your head the whole time. You'd like to slide back a bit like middle-left, but the seats on your side are bolted to the floor.

Aside: it's pretty great being able to get ai-generated images to illustrate points.