celluloid_dream
No bio...
User ID: 758
Against this, I'll dig up my favourite quote from The Fountainhead:
- It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.
- Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon! The ruler struck the glass over the picture.
- Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”
Maybe those were nice houses for their time (though on many, I see exactly the sort of cargo-cult ornamentation Rand's character complains about). Today, when I hear people clamour for beauty in architecture, they seem to want those old designs back! They have no positive vision of the future. Concrete boxes might be uninspired, but I'm not sure they're that much worse than making a modern copy of a Victorian copy of a Renaissance copy of ancient woodworking.
celluloid_dream
5mo ago
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?
celluloid_dream
7mo ago
If you believe the accounts in this documentary (timestamped 40:50-42:30, CW: conservative propaganda), the addicts receiving free drugs from the government proceed to exploit their higher risk tolerance by trading the clean drugs to their dealers in exchange for (presumably higher qty. of) street drugs. Then the dealers resell the government handouts to addicts elsewhere with lower risk tolerance and no access to free drug programs.
Obvious follow-up questions: Is this just a case of insufficient dakka? Also, even if it's not providing safer drugs to the population it intends to, doesn't it reduce some property crime?
celluloid_dream
14d ago
the profession they are getting a degree for
Well that's the whole damn problem, isn't it? You want someone who went to school for Computer Science, which tends to be mostly theoretical, to have training in the most practical and tangentially related sub-field. Why should they?
I'd argue job training is a role universities are uniquely not well-suited to fill, given the glacial pace of curriculum change, and other structural handicaps, like tenured hedgehog dens.
celluloid_dream
21d ago
This sounds like cope.
I snowboard, fast. I can't count the number of times where I've had "I love helmets" moments on the slopes. Snow is softer than concrete, but it's hard enough that I'm sure I'd have had a concussion if I wasn't wearing one, and instead I got up without a scratch. I appreciate you've linked a study, but my lived experience disagrees.
The objection my European skier buddy always had was "well, you don't catch edges like that on skis, so you don't need one", but no matter what's under your feet, if you bail at any speed, you're still falling vertically at least your own height, then tumbling down the mountain after that uncontrolled. Funny enough, same guy now wears a helmet after slipping on ice and bonking his head hard enough to knock some sense into him.
You can get very light helmets. Most don't obstruct your vision, since the front piece is cut away past where your goggles sit. You can get a glossy exterior that doesn't catch on the snow, and if anything presents more of a smooth surface to glide along and not wrench your head any direction that would hurt your neck.
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.
celluloid_dream
5mo ago
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
celluloid_dream
8mo ago
I'm sure that works as you describe - cultivating a reputation, social proof, all of it, but doesn't it feel dishonest to its core? Like, the whole edifice is built on wanting to be seen as the kind of person who is a sociable regular at a fancy cocktail bar and not actually being that person. If you were that person, you'd already have such a place in your back pocket.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
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.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
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.
celluloid_dream
6mo ago
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.
celluloid_dream
7mo ago
I feel the other side of this analogy too.
A few years ago, I bought a nice electric mountain bike. Fast, fun, capable (you can ride MTB trails uphill!) - I love it to bits. If I could, I'd ride it everywhere. So what's the problem?
It's that my city has a rampant bike-theft-culture. Within a few weeks of locking it unattended outside, some fucking junkie would try and steal it, and even if they didn't fully succeed, they'd loot it for parts, jamming a screwdriver through the flimsy battery lock and prying it out. They'd go for the wheels, or try and take the seat. They would still end up causing damage. It's enough to dissuade me from riding it, and I feel it's a legitimate frustration with the state of the city that that is just accepted as normal and expected.
celluloid_dream
8mo ago
I tried Replika a few months ago to see what the fuss was about and found it to be a baffling disappointment. It could be so much better than it is.
It was fine at matching tone and texting style, but it constantly forgot basic things I'd just told it (and it claimed to have saved to its memory). It didn't seem to develop any consistent personality, and just overall came off as the retarded generic chatbot it is. I think it's running some early version of GPT (2?) combined with a custom db for long term stuff that apparently doesn't work.
Just .. How? How is it not running something like GPT4 under the hood? Whatever it would cost for the API would surely be made up tenfold by having a more believable companion to talk to .. right? It did offer an upgraded chat model, but only with a $90/year subscription and no free trial. It seems like such a basic failure of drug-dealer business sense.
celluloid_dream
9mo ago
Sure, but why is the thing good?
In its original form, it was good because it served a functional purpose. Thereafter, each copy was only good because of nostalgia or familiarity, and I think it settles for being merely good, when it could innovate using more recent techniques, new materials, creativity and perhaps be better. At least, that's the ethos I got from the book (and, I'm told, it's kinda-sorta what the Modernists were going for).
celluloid_dream
11mo ago
Think that's just a general Hollywood problem. We want our actors to look youthful, but also be famous and well established. By the time they reach that point in their careers, they're pushing the limits of what their natural genetics plus plastic surgery plus vfx can hold. I cannot confirm or deny that Vin Diesel gets certain parts of his face edited in post.
celluloid_dream
5mo ago
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.
celluloid_dream
7mo ago
Dear Dame Caroline,
I can confirm that Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content on our network and will continue to be able to do so unless his content is found to violate our terms and conditions as listed here: <link>
Please refer to the same document for <company>'s policy regarding inappropriate and illegal behavior on our site.
Sincerely,
Some Person, PR Drone, <company>
Was that so hard?
celluloid_dream
9mo ago
I don't think it's that difficult to drop Hammerlock-style hints and not treat it as a big deal, especially if it wouldn't be a big deal in-universe.
Example, minor spoilers for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, also tagging @TowardsPanna , who asked about it in the Friday thread.
There's a NPC character who is a "trans" woman. I put that in quotes because this is a universe where you can literally take a magic potion and permanently transform into the opposite sex (or, presumably, like, a giant spider if that's more your style). You only find out if you pick up some random junk item, then ask the character's spouse about it (spouse wants to keep it private and won't tell you the details), then ask the character about it again much later in the game. You could easily finish the game and not come across that detail.
That seemed totally fine? It respects the worldbuilding and doesn't come off as unrealistic, or in your face.
Contrast with the Hogwarts Legacy character that stood out like a sore thumb, not so much because she was a non-passing transwoman, but because the HP universe has transformation magic, and if that exists, why would any transwoman not avail themselves of it?
You could also do ambiguously-trans, like this character in the recent pokemon games. When I saw this market, I was pretty baffled - hadn't even considered that when playing through the games - but reading the evidence, it does seem plausible.
celluloid_dream
10mo ago
I'm coming around to the idea that the free+advertising model was the internet's original sin. A site like Reddit, maybe the largest and second most trusted repository of human text on the internet, apparently can't make money.
Reddit must look at third party clients scraping "their" data (especially LLMs training on it), using "their" site, then reselling it at an actual profit and feel like they should get a cut. Meanwhile the mods have a good argument that they're providing much of the value, and of course it's ultimately the users' generating the content in the end.
I wonder how the net would have evolved if something like Brave's basic attention token was around back in the day, with users paying in proportion to what they consume, with mods being compensated and ultimately the site not being beholden to advertisers like it is now.
celluloid_dream
26d ago
Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy.
When I get the "oh, you spent a month in India? How was that?" small talk, scenes like this, and a hundred others flash through my mind before I politely lie: "it was fine", and change the subject. The pristine western retail stores with literal rubble half-blocking the entrances.. The designated landfill streets.. The street curs gnawing at their severed paws in the middle of the road.. The absolute state of the power infrastructure (live? wires pulled down to street level and woven into clothesline). The constant smell of rot and pollution and feces. I could go on.
It's not so much the squalor. It's the squalor plus dressing up in shirt and tie, working in an air conditioned office and pretending there's no problem at all.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
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.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
If you take a look at the top posts on /r/Canada right now, we have:
- Canada’s Immigration Plan Is Not Viable In Any Version of Reality
- Canadians Flee The Country In The Fourth Highest Volume In 73 Years
- Rents would be tapering off if not for high immigration, hints BoC governor
- Hunger in the house next door: What relying on food banks looks like
- Canada has added more than 1 million people and counting in 2023, it’s unsustainable
- Nova Scotia sees spike in military personnel living in tents, couchsurfing amid housing crisis
I didn't cherry-pick these. That's what's at front of mind for a lot of Canadians right now, as best I can tell, and I think people have already updated. If you look at the polls, the Conservative party has shot up to a clear projected majority starting in about September of this year.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
- 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.
celluloid_dream
6mo ago
Don't have data for you, but I wanted to add:
- Fire alarms - It's gotten to the point where schools/companies doing fire drills have to send around staff to make people go outside.
- Emergency phone alerts - In my area, these also get used for AMBER alerts, which everyone ignores. When they need to warn everyone about the big west coast earthquake, there's going to be a lot of phones left in pockets.
- Screaming in public - In a healthy society, it'd be normal to pay attention to this, right? I'm totally desensitized to it. I assume others are as well.
A humble request to the voters of this forum:
Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with. Contrary views are fertile ground for good discussion, as several of these QC reports show. Please try and see them as a complement to your side of the argument, not a threat. If nothing else, they provide a contrasting backdrop against which to paint one's own picture. This should be encouraged, not discouraged.
A prime example would be the discussion about pronoun policy a few days ago.
More options
Context Copy link