naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
I'm pretty conflicted on all of this. It sure seems like the technology has real potential and real applications, but by God does it feel like every single person involved is a sociopathic narcissist who gets off on conning the rubes.
As an academic who has been writing about technology for decades, I honestly feel angry about the sudden appearance of thousands upon thousands of apparent "experts" with papers, books, conference invitations, national news interviews, &c... who clearly have been thinking about AI for like five fucking minutes. It's basically impossible to express that in a way that doesn't sound like sour grapes (at best), but in most cases it's just an extension of the same grift they've been running for years, only with more money spent on Anthropic subscription fees. The truth is, good, meaningful, lasting work still takes a lot more time (and, realistically, a lot less money) than anyone seems willing to admit.
The tech is super cool. It's fun to be able to get incredibly detailed images whipped up from a prompt. I get the impression that coding can happen a lot faster now, in many contexts. But the gold rush is on, and a lot of people who missed getting in on the ground floor of crypto or the Web are desperate not to miss this elevator to obscene fortune. So it's probably inevitable that the grifters and narcissists are out in force.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
CNN had an article at the top of the webpage this morning. It refers to the shooter as female, which is strictly false, and intermittently swaps between "she" and "they" for pronouns. Eventually, far down the article, it quotes someone else explaining that the shooter was born male.
The central philosophical grounding of transgenderism is that gender is socially constructed (and correspondingly malleable) and thus separable from the biological notion of sex. The idea that a "woman" (gender) is not necessarily "female" (sex) may be arguable, but it is at least comprehensible. Forget expecting future Supreme Court justices to know what woman means--journalists don't even seem to know what female means. Or, more likely: they are part of the trans prospiracy to simply deny facts about biological human sex typing. The sex/gender distinction was drawn for political purposes, and now is being collapsed for those same political purposes. They are pointing at deer and calling them horses.
"Running interference," indeed.
I had never heard of "Bad Bunny" before the Superbowl.
Now all I know is that someone let him "sing" (is that singing?) fairly sexually suggestive lyrics on live television because they were in Spanish and presented alongside historical symbols of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory since 1898. (Still less sexually suggestive than exposing a naked female breast to everyone, I guess.)
A bunch of my social media contacts are also telling me that "Bad Bunny" is a symbol of love overcoming hate, which like... what?
Mad props to whoever is running his PR I guess. Er, that's Public Relations, not Puerto Rico...
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