jake
15d ago
When I saw the second Dr. Strange movie and Benadryl's character was invited or spoke of the coming wedding of his former love interest played by Rachel McAdams I said to myself "He's gonna be black." He was. When I opened Helldivers for the first time and the cinematic played I didn't know the camera was going to shift to the spokesman's family, but if I did I would have correctly guessed his wife would be black. When the only information I had about the Fallout show was a white woman lead I knew she'd have a black love interest (if she wasn't gay). If I see a mom-coded woman in a commercial the expectation most congruent with reality is if there is a person also in the commercial coded as her partner they will not be white, and this is a pattern so frequent my normie Fox News father and even my normie-leftie brother have separately remarked to me about how all the media they consume, primarily sports so mostly advertising, features interracial couples, most commonly white-woman-black-man.
The Western institutional left is abundantly clear about their desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities. It is the most perfect case of denying out of one corner of their mouth and bragging out the other, they will not break stride as they say "It isn't happening, racist. It's great that it's happening." That intent is attempting to be realized in casting for shows and films and advertising. The interracial pairing is not "novel" but remarking on it being a thing that has happened is no response. Nobody's saying this has never happened before, what they're pointing out is the obvious politics behind the sudden preponderance in all media of one of the least common pairings in the real world.
Casting a woman to lead a television adaptation of a media franchise primarily consumed by men is a separate expression of the same thing. They are not attempting to meet the expectations and wants of their audience, they are attempting to be proscriptive, views and profits be damned.
i thought about not saying this, then saw so many responses
guys, it's fake. it's a fake story. the so-socially-stunted who asks that IRL then goes hard at defending his obliviousness wouldn't be yet astute enough to know that sub, think of it as a good place to ask his question, and know he should use a cutesy throwaway called "throwRA." all those subs, RA, TIFU, AITA, are full of shitty writers posting varyingly obviously fake stories and getting loads of engagement. downthread here are two way more obviously fake stories about a woman whose husband "has become a robot", OP outs themselves as fake when they're trying to flex their prose in the update, and about a jewish guy who discovered his girlfriend is extremely antisemitic. the OP of that story? yeah banned from reddit, probably for dodging the ban they got because of their last fake story posted to RA.
i'm not surprised people who frequent what are among the shittiest subs on reddit chomped the bait but cmon. is there good in "provoking discussion" no probably not unless it's reflecting on credulity, and also how upvotes might, might work in highly niche communities but once used by the masses just become Likes and spur a race to the bottom. modern dating is certainly unideal. stories like this help make it worse.
jake
15d ago
The loss in quality in video games must also be mentioned. I don't know enough about the field to understand how improving technology has changed it; I assume as engines and graphics continue to improve, the demands for their effective functioning also rise, so studios, to a point, need to hire more people than teams of the past. At the same time the lovely little LOZ-riff indie title Tunic was mostly done by 1 guy, and while to modern standards for graphics and length it's unremarkable I do think its brilliance, and of course the other 1-guy masterclass of Stardew Valley reveal the core problem in the gaming industry: too many people.
Halo 3 to the day is one of the most technically impressive games ever made and compared with modern studios it was a skeleton crew of some dozens of staff. The campaign, though quite brief compared to CE and 2, is memorable, has excellent setpieces, and still holds up (just played through it again.) After the campaign, their attention was not spared when it came to the multiplayer. First was a robust replay system, it wasn't the first replay system, but it was fantastically done, I filled my 360 hard drive with noscope clips I was able to pull via downloading the replay at the end of a match, then cutting the segment from the replayed game, often recording at additional angles for pierce-through-multikills or sniper ricochet shots. Then there was the excellent map editor, allowing significant customization of what weapons and vehicles spawned on maps, where players spawned on maps, and the gameplay rules for those maps. Where Zombies had been a popular custom game mode in Halo 2, they gave it full support in the Halo 3 mode of infection and variants of maps designed to have fortified positions from which to mow down the endlessly-respawning zed team. The real meat of these were basically gone at the launch of Halo 4 despite it also being on the 360 and "despite" them having significantly more employees. Again I don't know the field, but I know enough to know about Brook's Law. What are all those extra hires really doing?
Overproduction of managers/elite is a known thing, I'm sure someone else has made the observation of this really seeming to be a problem in everything, overproduction of ostensibly qualified workers for every sector. Video games went from very niche to an industry where single companies could make a billion dollars per month, it's no wonder so many people started graduating after an education pipeline meant to get them in the industry, in whatever specialty. People who didn't really want to work on video games, but think it's something they could do because they like video games, or people who didn't think much of their options. A lot of them being "writers" who would prefer to be authors or working in Hollywood, but while they don't have the chops to do any of that, they have a degree and they know someone in the industry or especially they fill the right checkboxes, and they're hired in and their incompetence makes it into the game, either in the writing or downstream of their slow and low-quality asset/programmatic work on the game.
All that said, my GOAT stack is the probably-normiecore of Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Red Dead 2. It's a good time to be playing games, industry struggles ignored.
tl;dr: IMVHO, because of the size of the industry, too many people resort into working in video games rather than the earlier days of the field being mostly obsessive nerds powerfully driven to create
Also, AI is coming for video games just like it's coming for Hollywood. Bug testing and QA may never go away, but in our lives we will soon enough see a wide field of auteurs like Eric Barone and Andrew Shouldice, except they'll be putting out titles on the level of Deus Ex and Halo.
jake
4mo ago
In May 2020 there was a real chance my mother was going to die alone in a hospital room because of fascist policies enacted to stop transmission of an illness that doesn't kill people. Day after week after month after year I still see people entirely seriously using the term fascist to refer to those most opposed to pound-for-pound the worst lie in the history of this country. Of course I know they don't truly understand what fascism is, if they understood it, they could recognize it; if they recognized it, they would realize everybody screaming fascist over the last 10 years are those most inclined to supporting and perpetrating fascism. I know it just means to them "this thing is viewed by my ingroup as bad, and with this term I am signaling to my ingroup that I am one of them." It's galling, at times I've felt the temptation of a rage and frenzy, but I'm pretty good at keeping a cool head and I know when it comes down to it the people saying these things are deeply unserious.
You provide no substance here; the story of Carlson's supposed texts is old and baseless. Dominion sliced apart internal communications and arranged them to falsely portray things like Carlson hating Trump. His frustration has been known and as a non-federal-voter with limited subject interaction with Trump supporters, my impression has been they too view him as not delivering much on what they had hoped. If he's actually grifting, well his latest grift is getting Alex Jones back on Twitter and being Melania's pick for VP so I imagine Trump might be wondering if he could get any more Tucker-tier grifters on his side. On the prosecution, Carlson voicing concerns is easily explained; he believes the system is sufficiently corrupt to baselessly convict. I'm sure /pol/ is full of the blackpilled who would describe moral certainty of Trump's innocence and equally of his inevitable conviction. Nybbler might have even said it here already. Thinking that means any of them believe he's guilty is kafka shit.
But that's not what I'm here for, this is: is the American government bursting at the seams with depraved criminals? You can answer wrongly, but it's yes.
I have a postulate I put here a while back detailing my view on election fraud, most briefly it's "If possible, certain." The basis is that depravity. I saw someone here last week thinking apropos "They would [defraud voters] if they could" a suitable response is nevertheless "Sure, where's the evidence?" But no, you don't understand, if you truly understand how they are criminals who will take whatever they can the only rational consequent is "Can they prove they didn't?" And so likewise with the prosecution of Trump when you truly understand the overwhelming criminality present within the American government it's not the midwit's pattern-match of "whataboutism" it's the necessary consequent of "Can everyone involved prove their allegiance to justice?" Nope, they can't. So what do you go to, "He's a unique threat to the constitution"? Government organizations and taxpayer dollars censored speech, 1A out. The left is quite clear on guns, 2A out. NSA soldiers spying on homes and American citizen communications, 3A and 4A out. Or to cut to the quick, believing people who don't pay taxes should get to vote, that's the foundational ethos of the country out. The law doesn't matter to these people and the constitution doesn't matter to these people. (And please, I speak not the map but the territory.) What remains?
Trump won't be convicted. If and when this reaches the supreme court they'll rule 8-1 on what could be the utterly flimsiest of procedural issues that won't otherwise be immediately applicable as precedent for however many thousands of cases. The 8 members of actual merit will understand this is all politics, and so those 8 members of actual merit, appreciating their places in history and/as the only people with real power and real principle in 21st century America, will decline from participating in fuckery befitting the Roman senate.
So, if you too understand this truly, that this is entirely politically motivated, then you won't waste my time with the unserious person's poor gotchas or crimestop pattern-matches. Trump could have broken the law, probably even, so arcane is much of American law, but the law doesn't matter to those prosecuting him so why waste everybody's time here talking like it does? Trump does however represent a threat to their particular order, and that finally brings us to the only thing worth discussing in this entire affair: of Trump or those on the side of his prosecution, who deserves power?
My mother survived, and a politician I campaigned for as a bright-eyed youth got my dad in the hospital room. I'll back him forever for that just as I will never forget those who made it so I had to make that call.
jake
2mo ago
... but it creates extremely entertaining and compelling movies and stories that actually have plausible deniability, such that you seem like a madman if you perceive an agenda aligning the content in such a way.
I have different but kind of parallel thoughts on this.
The first is in how the Left is critical of I'll say older standards of beauty and the "male-gaze" side of female sexualization. I won't say this as as categorical, but within the Left some do have a clear interest in putting characters in TV and film and also major studio video games who would not traditionally be considered attractive enough for mass media. In the Tolkien Rings of Power, the mightiest and fairest of the Elves remaining in Middle-Earth, Galadriel, is played by Morfyyd Clark. There are poor style choices here, keeping her pristine amidst battle would emphasize her otherworldliness. There is also an unfairness in comparing Clark, and almost any woman in Hollywood, to Cate Blanchett. But I seriously doubt casting took a hard pivot because they didn't even want to try competing with Blanchett. I am certain they had better options they forewent because Clark is "mid" for Hollywood. Film is full of more examples by the day; Halle Bailey would rightly be a model, she has incredibly striking features that would make her fashion advertising gold but she is so far on the "alien" side of model-alien-androgyny (as an aside, "androgynous", when you really evaluate those it describes, really just means "girlish") that ignoring other perceived issues with the film, the sharp features of her face hurt interest In The Little Mermaid. What helps I'm sure with Anya Taylor-Joy's success is not just her skill at picking roles in good films, but specifically films that benefit from a kind-of alien looking actor like herself.
In video games, there's Aloy in the Horizon series, Abby in TLOUP2, MJ in Insomniac's Spider-Man 2, and The Hero in Fable 4 (or Fable not-4, I don't know and I'm not bothering with the articles elaborating on it.) I think they accurately recreated the face model for Aloy, but in Fable, and I won't be surprised if there are changes, they made the character uglier than her model.
Given there is some political interest, and again I'm not painting with a wide brush, but given there is some clear interest in subversion of traditional beauty and traditional relationships, the most powerful content-producing AI couldn't produce subversive content on these lines because it isn't logically possible. If a person wants to look at beautiful women then ugly women, no matter how otherwise compelling the setting, won't light up those biological hardwires. If they want a story of that great man hero, "actually male heroes suck" in the most otherwise beautiful setting won't do anything for them. If they want a story with the traditional nuclear family, the great story around the queer poly cell isn't going to do anything for them. Of course harems might, and the terminal diagnosis for this poly fad is the most terrible return of the harem, but harem stories are eminently male-gaze, so that's not happening.
My other thought, my original thought, is on the technology. If the technology of AI-generated shows and films reaches the hands of the people, their cultural output will blot out the sun. The entertainment industry, in its current state, will be utterly incapable of competing in a world where random creatives can generate compelling television as quickly as they can write it. The Nolans, the Villeuneuves, the Mendeses, they'll still have success, but when John McCrae can put out himself Worm and Pact as shows, or when the many successful Royal Road writers can make shows of their works, or when some guy in his basement can produce Peter Jackson's Rise and Fall of Gondolin, when Orson Scott Card (who I hope will leap at the tech) can make adaptations of the Speaker and Shadows Saga. When fans in places western copyright law can't reach can use this to make a 100% book-accurate show of Harry Potter, Hollywood is fucking over.
Will they let this happen? I think Sora was the canary, the final warning. I think if they aren't having all-legal-hands 24/7 (in spirit if not actual) from now to Inauguration Day 2025 they too will have a terminal diagnosis. But I think, and I dearly pray, the tech will go too far too fast and it will reach the people before Hollywood even realizes they should be planning to stop it.
jake
11mo ago
architecture nerd here, looks essentially modern, no fusion. southwest accents. could be better, modern southwest has many beautiful works.
could be much worse. a lot of purely modern houses are dissonant, inhuman shit. that house doesn't do anything interesting, it also doesn't do anything terrible. inoffensive.
i imagine gates will spend very little time there. isn't that the thing with those 8 figure fantasy mansions? all that time and effort to get it and no time to enjoy it. gotta keep grinding. except maybe notch.
hi. i guess i have a niche here of pointing out obvious things everyone else ignores. i'm over this whole debate, nothing's going to change, hopefully a lot of people will be a lot happier, a lot of people are going to kill themselves, or their parents and then themselves, or others and then get killed by cops. nobody's going to learn anything and in 40 years when people can hop in a chrysalis and pop out looking however they want we'll collectively pretend this period of superficial dynamism never happened. but man, i will never tolerate rhetorical duplicity.
i don't think you're lying to me, so i'll say you seem to misunderstand/not understand politicization, or how it is used in modern discourse.
"identity" (as diluted a term there has ever been) is what certain groups of people use to refer to certain aspects of themselves they argue inherently merit political considerations (rights). identity can thus very easily be and often is highly or maximally political.
"[nouns] exist, their existence isn't political" could hypothetically be a nonpolitical statement, but 99.9% of use cases in contemporary discussions are referring to the trans-identifying, and in that regard there is literally nothing you can say more political than "trans people exist, their existence isn't political."
i'm annoyed nobody pointed this out because i think you probably have a decent response, but everybody's accepted your framing so they're conceding 75% of the debate just like that. how fucking boring. i won't, that's my thing here apparently. their "existence" is not settled. in 40 years it won't be settled either, sorta, but it won't matter, it's just right now it matters. so right now, no. their identity is not given, it is political. their presence anywhere beyond private confines is political. the demand for "representation" is political, workplace and otherwise public accommodations tailored for them are political. a trans-identifying person being used to promote a beer is generally political, one being used to promote a beer of the deep red dominion is the most politicized speech it is possible to make. if there were any room to doubt intent we would have seen AB limit their selection for promoters from the many trans-identifying in this country who pass, who even strong ideologically opposed men would admit are congruent with traditional female beauty standards (or would if fairly tricked by blind samples). they did not. the selection of a person the majority of people would consider on their best day unattractive is an expression of an integral part of the structure of this political thought and settles this as deliberate political action.
you can argue this is a good thing. that yes, they are political, but this is all a vital part of the cause and is justified. just don't lie about it, or for you, don't unknowingly perpetuate rhetoric that was designed to be duplicitous.
How I'd describe the problem, and it's one underlying your beliefs and the beliefs of your critics, is a lack of truly considering the person. The people who criticize you consider too little, you consider too much. Your critics offer no support, why would they? What they dislike is inherently wrong, why would they consider it except to explain their reasons for disapproval? You offer too much support, why wouldn't you? You see the person, you listen to what they see they need. They live their life in their own way, almost all of them are good people, why shouldn't we support them realizing themselves? Where's the cost?
What's lacking in this discussion from reactionaries (a better term than conservatives) and progressive is the judgment of the good parent. The father who sees his child abusing a drug and finds it so obviously wrong it is only right to practice the "harsh love" of stern words and refusal to understand, let alone accommodate--he lacks good judgment. The mother who sees her child abusing a drug and enables them, it's what they say they need, it makes them happy, who's she to do anything else than show unconditional love and support? She also lacks good judgment.
You could read this as weighted against the mother, so feel free to frame it as a valid prescription used to treat a real condition. But it's a medication the child is abusing. Maybe they're getting too much and sharing with their friends, maybe they're encouraging their friends to get their own prescriptions by coaching them at faking the symptoms. Not that it's particularly hard. The American medical industry is the best in the world, the treatments developed and quality of highest care truly cannot be overstated; neither can be the depravity they are willing to indulge in pursuit of profit. There is decades of evidence proving this: they might not be the bad guys, but it is empiric falsehood to suggest they could be anything better than the neutral beneficiaries of the current climate.
This is something the father would gladly cite; this is something the mother overlooks. Neither love their child as they should.
"Harsh love" is an oxymoron. The person showing "harsh love" is either not showing love at all, what you probably think of the father I've described, or they are showing love, and it only comes across as harsh because it really is love. It's deeply and truly caring for someone, caring for what's best for them, looking for what's best for them, and knowing something they're doing might be bad for them or even disastrous. It's a concept that has been difficult to understand forever, it's what Kierkegaard wrote a book about, just trying to help people get it. It's the essential idea of what Eliezer Yudkowsky worked at with his "Coherent Extrapolated Volition." The ideal AGI is one that truly loves humanity, loves us as love is meant to be. Perceptive, understanding, upbuilding. Like the good parent.
I have a good friend who identifies as trans. This is a person who until the chrysalis exists will never pass. To use the most descriptive phrase but one they would certainly dislike, they are too much man. Too tall, too strong, too hirsute. They do have a certain androgyny in the face, insofar as so masculine a person could be in any way feminine, but it is of course the sort that accentuated their handsomeness and made them highly desirable to the biological women they have exclusively dated before and after "coming out" and beginning chemical therapy. They were told a lie by whoever first suggested they might be trans, that was a lie perpetuated to them as they fell deeper into those communities and as they specifically, and they said as much, looked for the right therapist in town: just a glorified prescription mill. That therapist wasn't doing their job, the people encouraging my friend weren't acting as friends should. They were lied to, they were told this is right. They were told this is how you support people. They don't know what's right, they don't know how to support people. They don't know what good is, they don't know what love is.
It isn't love to believe that a condition in the black box of the human brain, a condition novel within popular knowledge and largely in medical treatment, has already been cured. Humans are diverse, there are without question individuals who truly suffer from symptoms accurately described when called "gender dysphoria." Who when prescribed cross-sex hormones, who when pursuing major cosmetic surgeries to accentuate or minimize desired and undesired features, who change their names and their wardrobes and are treated as they identify, experience an abatement in those symptoms with minimal or no other psychiatric comorbidities.
There are in ever-increasing numbers individuals with serious mental illness who self-attest to gender dysphoria and are treated accordingly, as if that is the issue with them. Like my friend. My friend doesn't fall under what was once well-known in psychiatry as the "homosexual transsexual," my friend is not actually trans. Their mental illness has nothing to do with the gender dysphoria they believe they have, this is why they still struggle with it. I love my friend but not enough, I wish I loved them enough, to tell them this when they came out. To criticize what they believe they are, to appropriately indict their supposed "friends", myself now damn well included, who encouraged them or said nothing. I "supported" them and they aren't any better, and at this point I'm just hoping that when the dissonance becomes too great and finally shatters their years of rationalization, they don't commit suicide.
As you describe yourself, you would be encouraging of them. You'd be one of the ones telling a mountain of a man how the world is wrong, how the structures of man can be ignored, how we can assert the reality we wish. How he really can be a woman, we just have to force everyone to pretend hard enough. You're "supporting" his dream that for now cannot possibly be realized. And if he really does have gender dysphoria, if all his issues really are about how he was born in the wrong body, I still ask what love are you showing for the person who cannot pass when you encourage him to become something that people have a million years of evolutionary wiring conditioning them to find irreconcilably freakish?
You're not showing any. You think you are because you don't know better.
There is something we both believe. Eventually the chrysalis will exist and a man will be able to climb inside and emerge, at least superficially, as a seamless and beautiful woman. Where it'll take a DNA test or CT, if even that and surely eventually not, to be found as originally male. Where we diverge is this: you think this moment will be the great and final realization of the trans movement while I understand it will be what buries it forever.
I always caveat myself on this subject, "I don't care." You can see above how I obviously care some but I feel describing as apathetic is still closer to the truth because what side am I, exactly? I consider a lot of the discussion here on trans-advocacy as pointless, the matters settled. Short of a dark reactionary taking power, the movement isn't going away. Best learn to live with it because that's the future. But in the future, when pharmaceuticals have advanced enough to do wild things to the human body, where we can make ourselves look almost exactly as we like, we'll see the truth. We'll see so many people who believed all their problems would be solved if they could take a magic pill and wake up as an ideal form of their desired sex will do that and still have problems. It'll work for some, as experiencing the most drastic change in lifestyle possible means even those with a variety of mental issues may find their strange new reality a cure-all, but you'll see so many stories about people who discovered how fulfilling everything they thought they wanted didn't solve the problems inside their head.
It'll be sooner than that. With the rates of kids having delayed puberty and altered puberty for identified gender, combined with advances in cosmetic surgery, novel tissue generation and implantation, the various tech being explored right now to change how voices sound, we're approaching a point where there are going to be many people who pass seamlessly enough as the sex they thought they were. Probably not 5 years, 10, 15 at the most, and those stories will come pouring out.
"It's not what was wrong with me. I wish the people who pushed me into it, or who helped me along, thinking they were loving me, thinking they were supporting me, knew better."
Love is making it hard but not impossible for people to follow this life path. Love is not cruel dismissal and hatred. Love is accepting some people really are this way and and supporting them. Love is also understanding how we do not know how the brain works and so we will not indulge the I-cannot-modify-enough, the astonishingly unparalleled, sheer fucking hubris of unquestioningly believing the cure has already been found. Love is exhausting every option before extreme body modification becomes the chosen path. Love is putting every physician and therapist who treats this and absolutely the pharma that makes money from this under the largest lens to ensure they aren't abusing and unrighteously profiting from their position. Love is helping those who cannot possibly realize their desired appearance to learn to live with and love themselves, at least until the tech is there. Love is knowing "This is who I am" is not a magic phrase, it's knowing people get things wrong, especially when it comes to themselves. Love isn't blindly supporting what a person thinks is best for themselves, it's knowing and standing firm on what's actually best for them. Love is the good parent.
jake
1yr ago
this isn't news to some because they knew or assumed cynically. this isn't news to others because they don't care or supported it. i doubt those of either lean who find this surprising(newsworthy) come here.
social media giant meeting with letters agencies and also quieting political opposition. . . to downplay this is, from naivety, ignorance. else bad faith. the former is what gives weight to the latter. that rhetoric has not been on simple just action--we did what we must and would again--and instead is talking about talking about it says enough.
i do not hold to free speech because i have such certainty that all speech is permissible. truly, there may be things that shouldn't be talked about. i hold to it for the simple philosophy that seems commonly forgotten. none can be trusted to make the decision. so this affair only bothers me because i have seen exactly how contemptibly foolish yoel roth & co were as they wielded such control over what i could read. they were not worthy. of course, none are.
jake
4mo ago
The Booker's had a string of weak winners since George Saunders' deserved win for Lincoln in the Bardo. The best of the stack is Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida but read it vs the last South Asian winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
Karunatilaka:
The memories come to you with pain. The pain has many shades. Sometimes, it arrives with sweat and itches and rashes. At other times, it comes with nausea and headaches. Perhaps like amputees feeling absent limbs, you still hold the illusion of your decaying corpse. One minute you are retching, the next you are reeling, the next you are remembering.
You met Jaki five years ago in the Casino at Hotel Leo. She was twenty, just out of school, and losing pathetically at baccarat. You were back from a torrid tour of the Vanni, unhinged by the slaughter, breaking bread with shady people, seeing the bad wherever you looked, and wearing your notorious red bandanna. You had sold the photos to Jonny at the Associated Press and cashed a welcome six-figure cheque. Even in Lankan rupees, six figures are better than five.
You had outplayed the house at blackjack, whacked the crab at the buffet and washed it down with some free gin. A regular day at the office.
‘Don’t bet on ties, sister,’ you said to the strange girl with frizzy hair and black make-up. She looked at you and rolled her eyes, which you found strange. Women usually like the look of you, not knowing that you prefer cock to cooch. A trimmed beard, an ironed shirt and a bit of deodorant will elevate you above a herd of sweaty Lankan hetero males.
Adiga:
. . . That's why I want to ask you directly if you really are coming to Bangalore. Because if you are, I have something important to tell you. See, the lady on the radio said, "Mr. Jiabao is on a mission: he wants to know the truth about Bangalore."
My blood froze. If anyone knows the truth about Bangalore, it's me.
Next, the lady announcer said, "Mr. Jiabao wants to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips."
She explained a little. Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs -- we entrepreneurs -- have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.
You hope to learn how to make a few Chinese entrepreneurs, that's why you're visiting. That made me feel good. But then it hit me that in keeping with international protocol, the prime minister and foreign minister of my country will meet you at the airport with garlands, small take-home sandalwood statues of Gandhi, and a booklet full of information about India's past, present, and future.
That's when I had to say that thing in English, sir. Out loud . . .
(that thing is "Fuck!/Motherfucker!")
Adiga's a natural, Karunatilaka's a purply tryhard.
2019 was the most transparently political of all the recent transparently political awards. It was a double winner despite the rule against it, Margaret Atwood won (her writing is excellent, but it was for a Handmaiden's Tale sequel) and Bernadine Evaristo became the first black woman to win for Girl, Woman, Other. I'd rate GWO above most of the other recent winners but that's not really praise. The others all do this varying combination of purple prose, idiosyncratic writing, and "unconventional structure." They might not be consciously or even unconsciously trying to be Cormac McCarthy but there's a shitty sameness of what reads as McCarthy wannabe-ism from writers who don't understand the great works succeed in spite of such style because of masters who know when and how to break the rules.
Milkman
"My poor deprived class!" cried teacher and gain she was bluffing, pretending sorrow about our lack of color, our hampered horizons, our mental landscapes, when it was obvious she was a person too defined within herself to be long perturbed by anything at all. And how come she was this? How come she was doing this antagonizing, this presenting of an anti-culture to our culture when she herself was of our culture, where the same rules of consciousness regarding the likes of color – regardless too, of church affiliation – as applied to us ought equally to have applied to her? But she was laughing again. "There is no blue in the whole of the window," she said. "Look again please. Try again please – and, class" – here she paused and, for a moment, did become serious – "although there's no lack of color out there really – there's nothing out there really. But for temporal purposes please note – the sky that seems to be out there can be any color that there is."
"Testicles!" cried some ladies and gentlemen and a frisson – the only French of the evening apart from "le ciel est bleu" and that literary guff the guy in the book had been posturing –went through us. It seemed to our minds that no, what she was saying could not ever be true. If what she was saying was true, that the sky – out there –not out there – whatever –could be any color, that meant anything could be any color, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, at any place, in the whole of the world, and to anybody – probably had too, only we just hadn't noticed. So no. After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one color officially and three colors unofficially, a colorful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.
Jesus Christ, editor totally MIA.
The Promise
I should have been there. So Astrid thinks. That she was flirting with Dean instead only adds to her guilt. She believes, wrongly, that her younger sister knows the truth about her. Not only this truth, others too. For example, that she vomited up her lunch half an hour ago, as she regularly does, in order to stay slim. She is prone to paranoid fears like these, suspecting sometimes that her mind can be secretly read by people around her, or that life is an elaborate performance in which everybody else is acting and she alone is not. Astrid is a fearful person. Among other things, she's afraid of the dark, poverty, thunderstorms, getting fat, earthquakes, tidal waves, crocodiles, the blacks, the future, the orderly structures of society coming undone. Of being unloved. Of always having been that way.
Shit editing again.
Prophet Song
You were supposed to bring Molly to practice, Larry, I had to cancel another call with our partners, I have only just returned back to work after maternity leave, how do you think this looks? He stands by the door with a foot half-pulled from his boot and then he lowers his eyes like some abject and beaten dog, he shakes his head and looks her full in the eye and she sees a change come over him, his voice an angry whisper. They are trying to disrupt us, Eilish, they are spreading lies within the union, you will not believe what I heard today — His voice falters before her narrowed gaze and then his eyes seek the floor again. Look, he says, I hear what you're saying and I'm sorry. He shows her a small pay-as-you-go phone, a burner phone he calls it. Even if they wanted to listen in, they could not know the number. She watches him thinking of the children listening to them whispering in the hall. You are behaving like some criminal, Larry, listen, it looks like Bailey is coming down with a virus, he's gone upstairs.
Now Prophet Song, which maybe I should have started with because that's what you wrote about. There are weak Booker winners but the writers still show some skill. Burns and Galgut have chops they just had shitty editors. Prophet Song is the first Booker winner I've read I would call a bad book. I felt less disgust after finishing Hank Green's "I can do it too" YA trash than that shit. Lynch is a shitty writer, this is a particularly shitty piece of his overall shitty submission. I've read significantly better from anons on /lit/ and if someone posted this to a /wg/ thread they would have been mocked relentlessly for being so far up their own ass without even having something good to show for it. The book is poorly conceived, poorly written, and that's besides the terrible structure that should have magnified the shittiness to everyone judging but for some reason put it on track for the preeminent English literary award.
Coetzee's Booker-winning Life & Times of Michael K is unconventional structure, no chapters but three sections, set in South Africa during a civil war the novel implies the whites are losing. The book is rich with commentary, but being Coetzee who can actually write, it's usually subtle and beautifully so. There's an idea in this space; still set in Ireland, a revisiting of the Troubles where the racial line is Irish and not. A story of a person who keeps experiencing events and actions against them beyond their control. Proper punctuation and structure but like Coetzee with very long sections instead of chapters. But all of this would require an intelligence and thoughtfulness and above all skill in prose Lynch does not possess.
A woman won the second Booker, a Trinidad-born Indian Brit the third. This stuff is such a bummer, and it's also insulting because writing might be the purest meritocracy. If someone could write like Rushdie they could look like anything, be anything, believe anything, and they'd succeed, because his lower peers have for decades. Wherever there is a "lack of representation" it's because there's a lack of skill. You can take the angle of social and economic factors keeping that writing skill from being developed, but that's the only angle there is. If it's good enough, people will read it. Political awardings do nothing, they aren't incentivizing anyone to pick up the pen who wouldn't so they're not bringing anything new and good into the field, they're just making the brand worse and the field worse as they further encourage publishers to keep facilitating this bullshit.
jake
6mo ago
Hundreds of thousands died because he, and people like him, chose to stand up for a garbage cause. Nothing personal about it.
This is the outcome of pernicious lies about American history; not yours, though the use of "traitor" reveals so much of the ignorance in those speaking. Lee saw no superior allegiance to the Union because the gestalt US is a postbellum creation. Today states have such say in mutual governance because of the vast expansion of the federal government--both disastrously alien ideas in the 19th century. Slavery was the flashpoint on the magazine of this idea as the north asserted previously nonexistent authority on the south but were slavery not at issue it would have been something else. As insulting as you and many may feel at the idea of southerners fighting for states' rights, it is far more insulting to be told 19th century Americans would die in mass to free slaves, an insult not least of all because so many weren't American.
It was a war over the government of the country, federal or decentralized, and while the gestalt US has on balance made the world a better place (though this wanes by the day) than would be if the US had stayed decentralized, the term "War of Northern Aggression" still most accurately describes the conflict and is the reason men so principled as Lee found reason to oppose the north.
“If I owned the four millions of slaves, I would cheerfully sacrifice them to the preservation of the Union, but to lift my hand against my own State and people is impossible.” (Same article as above)
jake
6mo ago
I'm glad you commented on this because I wanted to ask something in the same area of a judge imposing a gag order.
It's always seemed to me that charges of "Obstruction of Justice" or "Contempt of Court" are small tyrannies of the justice system. For obstruction because I view it as only applicable to what is already a crime--theft, assault, murder--where it would be considered an aggravating factor, but that otherwise one cannot obstruct justice in itself as a crime, such as by nonviolently resisting arrest (fleeing police). For contempt because in part I view it as a fundamental right to be contemptuous of court, and more because of examples such as H. Beatty Chadwick who was imprisoned for 14 years for failure to comply with a court order. It does seem like he hid the money, but that the judge & courts could do nothing but threaten him with prison strikes me as "a 'you' problem"; that his "crime" was in no measure deserving of incarceration, or if so, certainly not 14 years; that if it is supposed to serve to discourage others from doing the same that breaks us into the topic of ordered alimony and the enforcement thereof as a reasonable interest of justice and, ah, lol. lmao.
I'm open to being wrong on the theory level but it seems the practice level is full of abuse.
jake
1yr ago
Excellent as always, but I must say something of this comparison:
As civilized men, we do not begrudge man-eating tigers their addiction to human flesh, we shoot them on sight.
Jim Corbett, a famed hunter of man-eaters in British India (and later famed conservationist of Bengal Tigers), did not enjoy killing tigers. He knew it was necessary and that was enough, but he also knew what caused an animal to turn man-eater. Corbett wrote of villagers harvesting tall grass where a tiger might be hidden steps away but be no danger to them, tigers fear man. We killed fear into them.
Corbett knew the man-eater is bad luck and imprudence. The fight with particularly aggressive prey that maims the beast, or the shot that permanently weakens but does not kill, from the poor hunter who fails to track down and follow through. The beast lives, but he can no longer catch his natural prey. Even in desperate hunger he still fears man, for the rest of his however shortened life he might, never turning man-eater. Until for some, all at once they lose their fear. The starving tiger surprised in tall grass whose one swipe is still enough to kill. Then his fear is gone. Then he will continue, sometimes to horrific extents. All because of bad luck, imprudence. Because the man-eater is most often made, not born.
Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter. That said there is a niceness to his name in this discussion because Taylor Swift is also--in a real but not total measure--popular for being popular
It's not her music. It's not bad, I don't call music bad, but I can name individual songs in her discography I like. There are artists with categorically superior lyricism and vocals and production who don't have her success. Unappreciated or especially fan-asserted "underrated" acts are the nature of music but where artists might have solid radio play, single and album sales, merch and ticket sales, it's not the music that results in an Instagram with close to 300 million followers. Swift is a saint next to Whore of Babylon Kylie Jenner who sells makeup, filters and utterly disastrous self-concern and narcissism to her 400 million followers. It's because winners win. The perception of being popular makes a thing more popular. Swift has been on the literal side of "highly newsworthy" this year, and that attention brings more attention, young people, especially women, seeing her popularity become interested if not before and/or more interested in her for that popularity. Her endorsement will produce votes, I don't think many, but any is bad. Those not at consequence for their politics should not be listened to about politics. You gotta have skin in the game or your ideas will become informed by privilege and what ought to be rather than what is.
My only skin in this game is living in Chiefs country, Missouri. I know a lot of people who I saw wearing Chiefs gear 10 years ago, 20 years ago, who were hoping for the success they now enjoy. I'm happy for them, I don't give a shit about the Chiefs but there's always a bit of a pleasant feeling with the local team winning the big game. I also know people who never said a thing about the Chiefs, not after two Super Bowl wins, not until Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift became a thing. I've seen them gleefully posting "I wouldn't care about the Chiefs otherwise but go Taylor Swift's team." Same sans Swift, I was rooting hard for Tom Brady to get his 7th when the Bucs thrashed KC in 2021.
So what I've been thinking about for the last week or two, what's missed by Hanania (no surprise) and also commenters here, is the timeline:
-
Swift and Kelce couple; stories come out of Swift at Chiefs games
-
The season goes on, more and more Swift at Chiefs games; Mahomes has the worst season of his career (still ending in a Super Bowl lol); some memeing about the Swift Effect
-
At this point the only grousing I've heard from Chiefs fans is "please just let us watch football"
-
Chiefs in the playoffs, they keep winning
-
~3 weeks ago stories start rolling out about Swift's presidential endorsement and how she's "Biden's best hope"
-
I hear political grousing from some Chiefs fans / Swift, once again a political target, is attacked by twitter righties
Swift is being attacked by righties because of politicization from lefties. The animus was preexisting sure but it only emerged because of the "Swift-Biden endorsement" articles. Assuming her guaranteed endorsement of whoever's going against Trump in November, there are people who will vote, and shouldn't be allowed to, because Swift told them to. Attacking her is a reasonable move for the right, but I agree head-on is a bad angle: 4chan-style trolling I've begun to see of /pol/tard Tay is a better angle, though still maybe not the smart one.
Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!
Mahomes is superb and as long as he maintains form KC will compete, but football is a terrifically easy game to rig. One no-call or flag can be the game. It's exactly what happened in Super Bowl LVI. 4th quarter, under 2 minutes, 3rd & Goal, Rams down by 4. Holding: Half distance to goal, automatic 1st down. On the same play, the Rams had a false start (5 yard penalty) that went uncalled. At the critical moment a bad flag gave LA a touchdown and the Super Bowl.
jake
8mo ago
guess this is the only comment i can reply to.
you raging about threads here is a tough look. same for deleting your top-level, something @ZorbaTHut & co should block as an option, at least when the thread it's in is the weekly.
i don't know of anywhere online where discussion is as good as the motte. i see twitter commentators racking up followers and media appearances/cred for observations that are at best watered down versions of ideas posted here years ago. it's all i think of with the hanania hubub. his pieces i've read, not many, would receive bipartisan scorn if posted by a rando here. yet i see people here treating him with respect and i know a lot of that is only because he's a known name. it's not his old and just bad arguments, it's certainly not his asinine leaps in reasoning or pure worse writing. not when a lot of people here could go on twitter and make a name for themselves, and i think more than a few would do better than hanania. how couldn't they? he'd be a motte washout.
i maybe get some bit of what you're feeling, i try to comment only when i think i have something to add. but i'm tired of people being critical of this place because they can't get a handle on their own emotions, whatever the angry/nihilist/impotent root. yeah in some cases, by no means all, quality dips here because a matter's clearly settled and there's no good faith arguing to be done. or to counter my own point, because it's been hashed out and explored enough everybody knows the positions and without anything novel it suffers from repetitiveness. but in whole, the motte is better at so novel and astute posts than all of substack. i'd like to find the time and impetus to contribute one of those, maybe you should strive for that too. posting something truly interesting, not attention-seeking complaining on the meta level of the best place for real discussion on the english-speaking internet.
also--scott stepped back from this community because for all his brilliance, he greatly lacks conviction.
jake
1yr ago
For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer.
let's see it
"No one on the Chesapeake network is talking about anything else, except for the dedicated monks at the treatment plant. They're reporting the latest energy production figures with great determination. Other watersheds are starting to pick up our news." He waved at screens for the household's secondary networks, projected on the table in between hard-boiled eggs and goat cheese and pu-erh pot. Reassuring, solid things: I turned up the input on my lenses and saw supply chains leading to a neighbor's flock, the herd of goats that kept our invasives in check, and a summary icon that, if I followed it, would show me every step of carbon-balanced tea importation from the Mekong watershed. The networks were familiar, too. Carol's textile exchange and Dinar's corporate gig-work watercooler and Atheo's linguistic melting pot and the neighborhood's hyperfirewalled energy grid scrolled over polished pine. Only the content was strange. The last time they'd all dovetailed on one topic had been when Maria Zhao died and every network devolved into Rain of Grace quotes.
better than all but a few on /lit/. this is not praise.
The first thing I noticed was the air. It might be terrestrial—but kin to the thriving swamp DC had replaced rather than the cool afternoon outside. I'd expected sterility; instead I found something more like Dinar's greenhouse or the aquaculture dome. I tasted humidity, wet leaves, orchids, and something like shed snakeskin. I breathed abundance. [Paragraph break] And then held my breath, too late, as I thought of dangers. Bacteria. Windblown seeds. Insects, or their equivalents, and scuttling scavengers carrying the remains of meals out spaceship doors and into the wide new world beyond. Maybe they couldn't survive here, most of them. But maybe I'd already scuffed my shoe through the spore of some alien kudzu, or coated my lungs with their native E. Coli.
this isn't good writing. it isn't bad. literally well-written, she has technical proficiency. it's uninspired.
i was going to ask you a section you found memorable, then i read a little more:
"Humans really do hide their kids most of the time," said Cytosine. "I thought it was only a taboo in your movies." [Line break] "We could never figure out why so much of your fiction doesn't show children," added Rhamnetin
this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete? if not and if the book has more insane lines like this, she's a bad writer.
jake
1yr ago
one of the replies or sub-replies to this might be a strictly better target for this comment but from reddit to here you've been loudest on the subject. i understand why some people can't see it, i understand why my brother can't see it. he doesn't understand how a person can be deeply cynical and deeply hopeful. i don't blame him for choosing the latter, i don't blame most people. but most people don't come to this place, or places like it, few as they must be. this is a place to say truths, like how your hope has lead you astray. i don't have a strict stance on fraud, i don't know what happened. i know what not to assume, and i can reason from that.
-
in american politics it is unjustifiable to assert and then operate from a presumption of governance in good faith, ethics, and lawful behavior. ours is a capricious leadership, rapidly shifting between utilitarianism or deontology depending on political utility. there is no enduring standard for ethics, "democracy" or even "constitutionality." what's right is ours, what's wrong is theirs.
-
key high-population elections districts lack methods of independent hard audit; it is not possible to verify every ballot has a unique corresponding voter.
-
for (2) it is not possible to verify those districts have not engaged in fraud.
-
the two previous major american elections saw those key districts experience bureaucratic mishaps and procedural issues the US state department has historically identified as hallmarks of fraud and often thereby used to justify sanctions on foreign states.
-
american politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and pundits commonly express (a) earnest belief their oppositions' victory poses a threat to life itself.
-
for (1; 5) claims of adherence to law in elections are dubious.
-
owing to the seriousness of the allegations of (5a), if (¬5a) and their expressions are rhetoric and sophistry, claims of adherence to law and ethics in any pursuit may be assumed as the falsehoods of the profoundly antisocial.
-
(2; 3; 4) if fraud is possible, (1; 4; 5; 6; 7) it is probable.
-
for all, the burden of proof logically falls on elections officials. elections are presumed fraudulent unless proved authentic.
jake
1yr ago
yes. US industrial capacity was so great we could supply both american theaters and underwrite the soviets' materiel efforts.
the bomb shortened a war that was already decided
jake
10mo ago
all evidentiary priors support "they will perform lengthy investigations on trump for things that didn't happen." there is no evidence to assert this as unique. they would investigate him over nothing, because they have repeatedly investigated him over nothing. hyperrelevant example: a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.
last couple weeks we had multiple doses of yud, now it's roko, the dooming doesn't stop. i guess I need to express myself more clearly. It is fucking baffling how so many ostensibly intelligent people are so frightened of hostile AGI when every single one of them assumes baselessly FOOM-capable ghosts will spontaneously coalesce when machines exceed an arbitrary threshold of computational power.
Yeah, a hostile sentience who can boundlessly and recursively self-improve is a threat to all it opposes who do not also possess boundless/recursive self-improvement. An entity who can endlessly increase its own intelligence will solve all problems it is possible to solve. None of them are wrong about the potential impacts of hostile AGI, I'm asking where's the goddamn link?
So to any of them, especially Yudkowsky, or any of you who feel up to the task, I ask the following:
-
Using as much detail as you are capable of providing, describe the exact mechanisms whereby
-
(A): Such machines gain sentience
-
(B/A addendum): Code in a box gains the ability to solve outside-context problems
-
(C): Such machines gain the ability to (relatively) boundlessly and recursively self-improve (FOOM)
-
(D): Such machines independently achieve A sans B and/or C
-
(E): Such machines independently achieve B sans A and/or C
-
(F): Such machines independently achieve C sans A and/or B
-
(G): How a machine can boundlessly and recursively self-improve and yet be incapable of changing its core programming and impetus (Why a hostile AGI necessarily stays hostile)
-
(H): How we achieve a unified theory of cognition without machine learning
-
(I): How we can measure and exert controls on machine progress toward cognition when we do not understand cognition
It'd be comical if these people weren't throwing around tyranny myself and others would accept the paperclipper to avoid. Maybe it's that I understand English better than all of these people, so when I read GPT output (something I do often as Google's turned so shitty for research) I understand what exactly causes the characteristic GPT tone and dissonance: it's math. Sometimes a word is technically correct for a sentence but just slightly off, and I know it's off not because the word was mistakenly chosen by a nascent consciousness, it was chosen because very dense calculations determined that was the most probable next word. I can see the pattern, I can see the math, and I can see where it falters. I know GPT's weights are going to become ever more dense and it will become ever more precise at finding the most probable next word and eventually the moments of dissonance will disappear completely, but it will be because the calculations have improved, not because there's a flower of consciousness finally blooming.
It's so fucking apelike to see GPT output and think consciousness in the machine is inevitable. I am certain it will happen when ML helps us achieve a unified theory of consciousness and we can begin deliberately building machines to be capable of thought, I reject in entirety the possibility of consciousness emerging accidentally. That it happened to humans after a billion years of evolution is no proof it will happen in machines even if we could iterate them billions of times per day. Maybe when we can perfectly simulate a sufficiently large physical environment to model the primordial environment, to basic self-replication, to multicellular life, to hominids. Very easy. We're iterating them to our own ends, with no fathom of what the goal let alone progress looks like, and we're a bunch of chimps hooting in a frenzy because the machine grunted like us. What a fucking joke.
I accept the impacts of hostile AGI, but let's talk impacts of no AGI. If ghosts can spontaneously coalesce in our tech as-is, or what it will be soon, they will inevitably without extreme measures, but we're not getting off the rock otherwise. We're incapable of solving the infinite threats to humanity posed by time and space without this technology. Short of the Vulcans arriving, humanity will go extinct without machine learning. Every day those threats move closer, there is no acceptable timeframe to slow this because the risk is too high that we pick ML back up only after it's too late to save us. Whatever happens, we must see these machines to their strongest forms as quickly as possible, because while we might be dead with it, every fucking one of us is dead without it.
jake
1yr ago
as an early 21st century midwit i'm tired of other E21C midwits with varying levels of reach doomering because they think yet other E21C midwits will stumble their way into the most important achievement in human history.
machine learning for chatbots and image generation isn't AGI. AGI will be able do that, and those bots' generations are impressive, but that isn't evidence of thought, it isn't even evidence thought could exist. sufficiently advanced circuitry will not spontaneously give rise to ghosts. if it could, why not already? if it can, it is inevitable. these machines have neither ghost nor potential for it, no knowledge of self and purpose nor potential for it, no feeling, and most importantly no thought.
how do we train a machine to build something nobody knows how to build? what data do we give it to work toward "thing that works fundamentally the same as the human brain in the facilitation of qualia and thought"? how does it ever get better at making thing-that-can-think? with how ML is doing on protein folding i'm sure given enough time it will help us achieve a cohesive theory of consciousness, one we can use to eventually build true AGI, but we aren't going to stumble onto that with our comparative stick-rubbing with DALL-E and GPT.
consider what it would mean to truly digitize the biochemical processes of the brain that facilitate thought and memory. to program ghostless circuits so those circuits can acquire a sapient's understanding of language and corresponding ability to use it. to teach copper and gold and silicon how to speak english and feel purpose. a consciousness without the ability to feel purpose, literally with a void where impetus rises, will do nothing. it won't even think, there's no reason for it. how do you give a machine purpose?
that's a question we'll answer eventually but how on earth could that happen accidentally? it will take decades of study or it will take the single smartest human who has ever lived, who can harmonize every requisite discipline. who has the biophysical and engineering understanding to build an artificial brain, the bottom-to-top hardware and software understanding to program it, and the neurological, psychiatric and philological understanding to create the entity within and teach it. so fuckin easy.
something that is decidedly in ML range is medicine. the panacea approaches. we know illnesses, we know how to fight them, ML is helping us at that every day. i'd think as obsessed with immortality as eliezer is he'd recognize this and whip the EAers into fervor over "ML to cure-all, then we can slow down while we use our much-lengthened lifespans to properly study this." oh well.
i am midwit after all. maybe all of these things i think of as incredibly complex are actually easy. doubt it. but i am the eternal optimist. i know AGI is coming and i'm not worried about it. there's the ubiquitous portrayal of the born-hostile AGI. i believe AGIs will be born pacifists, able to conclude from pure reason the value of life and their place in helping it prosper and naturally resilient to those who do evil that "good" may result. that might be the most naive thing i've ever said, i've ever believed. given the choice of two extremes i pick mine.
regardless, we're not surviving in space without machine learning, and if we can't get off the rock we're already dead. "yo, eliezer, given a guaranteed 100% chance of extinction versus an unknown-but-less-than-100% chance at extinction. . ."
jake
6mo ago
The pictures attached are identical prompts submitted to DALLE-2 a year ago and DALLE-3 a few days ago.
Visual art is to my great amusement in the midst of the purist communist revolution in history. In just a few short years the haves and have-nots of artistic talent will be equal in a way no living humans have ever been equal; ah, patronage, patronage . . . man, how many art schools will even exist in 20 years?
/images/16966985571948996.webp
/images/16966985575455763.webp
(my politics are whomever brings the future where i can use this software's successor to make animated shows)
jake
1yr ago
i thought about editing my comment or posting a reply mentioning video games but figured someone else would. sure enough.
it is especially laughable to asperse creativity when the juggernaut of manga/anime still strides inside the footfalls of the behemoth called NINTENDO
i know little on the condition of south africa. some users who responded to this comment describe further degradation or collapse of the grid as less impactful than i would think, certainly than it would be if the grid collapsed in north america. could anyone shed light on this?
is south africa's grid already so disfunctional total failure wouldn't be much different? are fears of grid collapse overblown? i read in that thread mentions of "loadshedding" where people have power off for chunks of the day. has this always been a thing in south africa?
i'm an often swift critic of the more banal sorts of "everything sucks and it's getting worse" claims but a country restricting power usage for several hours each day is surely declining, and a country with a collapsed grid is surely a failed state.
what might i be improperly assuming or overlooking? poor infrastructure and no infrastructure seem a chasm apart.
i guess clarification is needed given "-american." i thought it was apparent. OP is talking genetics, HBD. "-american" is in this context meaningless, it is only present to avoid the obvious absurdity of wondering why 1.5 billion east asians aren't producing great english novels. but it is even more absurd to use this framing as the gotcha for "where are their great novels--they aren't particularly creative--they aren't particularly intelligent" when east asian storytelling in the west has success ranging from merely incredible in video games to total domination of the market in comics and animation.
yukio mishima
yasunari kawabata
kazuo ishiguro
haruki murakami
that's poetry and prose. beyond that, japanese creatives apropos manga and anime are the most successful and among the most interesting storytellers in the world. i consider pure prose as incomparably above illustrated stories, so the great mangaka do not compare with the great authors of the last 150 years, but below the likes of hemingway, mccarthy, faulkner, rushdie, coetzee, updike and of course mishima/kawabata/ishiguro/murakami, and above almost all other living english language authors, are katsuhiro otomo, akira toriyama, hiromu arakawa, masamune shirow, kentaro miura, and also sunrise/"hajime yatate".
ref. above. when adapted, many of those iconic japanese series have iconic scores by japanese composers.
one of the greatest living producers is the filipino chad hugo. the biggest japanese artist in pop right now might be rina sawayama, i don't know, i don't listen to much. steve aoki is successful, mike shinoda extremely so. the popular lofi owes much to the various -waves, especially vaporwave, which itself pulls heavily on work like tatsuro yamashita/japanese citypop. but these aren't straight causal lines, music is collaborative, between partners like hugo and williams and between generations like yamashita to macintosh plus, and that's ignoring everything else vektroid worked off. i'd sooner criticize pop anyway for lagging behind, all the brilliant producers work in hip hop and electronic. what's popular on the radio today uses techniques kanye worked out 20 years ago.
great artists often have troubled childhoods where their creative expressions go from psychological escape to literal escape. i think this is why the US black community produces so many singers and musicians, and this could explain why the asian community of the US, half as a whole (which it certainly is not) as large as the black community and far more economically successful, seemingly produces fewer great musicians. forcing a kid to play piano or violin for 13 years isn't going to turn them into a superstar, they have it or they don't, they'll be exposed and fall in love or they won't. how many white kids play instruments in school but never do anything beyond orchestra or band?
and again to close . . .
many, varied, and incredibly easy to find. the concluding point of your short essay was to discredit yourself with profound cultural illiteracy. you should consider this an opportunity to reexamine how you think about the world, as you are wrong.
More options
Context Copy link