domain:savenshine.com
Mantergeistmann
1hr ago
How about the appeal of legos? But there's also a mode where instead of just having all the legos you want, you have to hunt for/create them, following a gameplay loop, with just enough adversarial events (monsters) to keep you from getting complacent too easily.
07mk
1hr ago
I see a couple of issues with that scenario.
One is that there will almost always be plausible deniability with respect to LLM usage. There would have to be a slip-up of the sort of including meta-text that chatbot-style LLMs provide - something like "Certainly! Here is the next page of the story, where XYZ happens." - for it to be definitive proof, and I'd expect that the audience and judges would pick up on that early enough to prevent such authors from becoming high status. That said, it could still get through, and also someone who did a good enough job hiding this early on could slip up later in her career, casting doubt on her original works.
But the second, bigger issue, is that even if this were definitively proven, with the author herself outright claiming that she typed in a one-word prompt into ChatGPT 10 to produce all 70,000 words of her latest award-winning novel, this could just be justified by the publishing industry and the associated awards on the basis of her lacking the privilege that white/straight/cis/male authors have, and this LLM usage merely ensures equity by giving her and other oppressed minorities the writing ability that privileged people are just granted due to their position in this white supremacist patriarchal society. Now, you might think that this would simply discredit these organizations in the eyes of the audience, and it certainly will for some, but I doubt that it would be some inflection point or straw that breaks the camel's back. I'd predict that, for the vast majority who are already bought in, this next spoonful would be easy to swallow.
SerialStateLineXer
1hr ago
Bones heal, pain is temporary, and chicks dig scars.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
Ah, well yes I'd say so, so that's a good point. Anyone college age or younger when it started getting big 2010-2011, so I'll admit that only captures... maybe half? Dunno if it really "counts" the older half Millennial parents playing it with their kids. I'll admit I'm '93, on the tail end, so that might skew my perspective slightly. Considering also the male-coded aspect, maybe it's only about a quarter of Millennials? Still, curious if any broader theme resonates, or if the whole thing is making a mountain out of a molehill.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
Yes, the problem with classical liberals is playing cooperate-bot. The answer to academics wanting to enforce orthodoxy is not to invoke academic freedom to protect them from those with power who oppose the orthodoxy; they have to be driven out somehow.
No_one
1hr ago
Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.
Not all of sci-fi, just the part taken over by white leftist yanks and their copycats in other parts of the world. The anti-AI rhetoric is due to the ideology of the people involved, not the nature of the genre of which they are a small part, at best a plurality.
The entire mil-SF genre is I believe completely unaffected by it and so are most people publishing outside of the well-defended legacy ghetto.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs.
I don't see how you can avoid ideological capture by making research explicitly part of the government. That's just begging for ideological (specifically, political) capture.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
Indeed. Even Isaac Asimov, who thought intelligent humanoid robots were great, wrote stories where their use resulted in the destruction of a portion of humanity.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, with nerdy overtones. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close, yet so far.
I've never played Minecraft, is this more of a late-millennial thing? (I was born in 1984.)
07mk
1hr ago
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI
(Emphasis added).
If they admit to using ChatGPT, how can they claim they didn't use generative AI? ChatGPT and all LLMs are a type of generative AI, i.e. they generate strings of text. ChatGPT, I believe, is also trained on copyright-protected works without permission from the copyright holders, which is the criterion many people who hate AI consider to qualify as the generative AI "stealing" from authors and artists.
Just based on this description, it sounds like these WorldCon people are trying to thread a needle that can't be. They should probably just say, "Yes, we used generative AI to make our lives easier. Yes it was trained on copyright protected works without permission. No, we don't think that's 'stealing.' Yes, this technology might replace authors like you in the future, and we are helping to normalize its usage. If you don't like it, go start your own AIFreeWorldCon with blackjack and hookers."
There's this fascinating twitter thread (unroll link for better reading) about A Minecraft Movie, and how it is fundamentally a Zoomer movie on an emotional level, not just a subject matter level. Specifically, he calls it (followed by some key excerpts, though I recommend the entire thread):
the most reactionary movie I've ever seen and the future zoomer world order is bright and wonderful. I would have called it "The humiliation of the coward Jack Black and the end of irony"
... [A]fter this introduction, when [Jack Black] sends the mcguffin to earth to be found by the main character, the movie’s language changes. It is no longer gen x nihilism, or millennial irony after Jack Black is put in prison in hell, and we change protagonist to Young Zoomer Henry.
The reason the movie resonates with the Zoomers is because it reflects their own life experience back at them, and they pick up on that in a subconscious way even if they can’t articulate it.
The real plot of the movie is that a boy is SUCKED against his will into a RECTANGULAR PORTAL into a world that is HYPER STIMULATING and OVERSATURATED, where the people he meet tells him it is a beautiful world of “creativity”, but it’s actually a really simplistic world of base Id expression and Id satisfaction
... On a literal plot level, the antagonist of the movie is some witch pig lady. But on an emotional level, Steve is a villain, the shadow of the protagonist of the movie. The main character Henry is a genuinely creative and smart kid. This is illustrated by him being able to draw well, and being a literal math genius, who can engineer a functioning rocket from scratch. Jack Black is a “Creative”, which is illustrated by him making silly faces and yelling random nonsense. When Henry and the other cast of characters are stuck in minecraft world, they are not actually aided by Steve.
... The story ultimately never portrays “the minecraft world” as a good place, but a place of indulgence, of Id expression and satisfaction... [Steve] is a gooner. And the film itself utterly rejects him: there is no ambiguity here, the minecraft world is bad, and the real world is what matters. “being creative” in minecraft is shallow and hollow, and is a bad outlet for your talents.
The hypersaturated world of hyperreality, of the media-mediated reality that was forced on the zoomers, as their parents plopped a phone or ipad on them as children, is a shallow and hollow mimicry of the real world, and exposing children to “minecraft” at age 9 is not going to make them more “creative”, it is just going to make them into autistic gooners. It is not really a minecraft movie. It is a movie about the zoomer life experience, and a genuine and open confrontation with prior generations. The minecraft branding is arbitrary. The emotional core of the movie, and there truly is a genuine human emotional core, is a genuine inter-generational dialogue.
And I say, the reason the zoomers like it, is not some ironic doubly irony joke where they pretend to like a bad movie - that is just what it looks like to millenials, because “that’s what millennials do”. The reason they like it is because they resonate with a story about being raped by a magical portal that sends you to a fake world you have to escape from. And that is extremely genuine and real, and the movie totally succeeds in expressing something, that possibly haven’t been captured in art before, with the novelty of our technological-historical situation.
I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.
But in a way maybe this is all healing for Zoomers? There is definitely some actual awareness and maturity that their brains are on some level being cooked, they know they use TikTok too much, but there's still some earnestness left despite all that. Also, Minecraft is a weird thing because it is one of the few completely crossover experiences between Zoomers and Millennials, but even so, the actual experience is somewhat different. For Zoomers, it's a simple childhood exploration time and a cultural touchstone, with some nostalgia and force of memes and videos. For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, and with nerdy overtones. Spending time in Minecraft and building things creatively were quite literally different for the two age groups, in the aggregate. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close in the overt trappings, yet so far in their emotional response to modernity.
... showing over and over again that Jack Black, as a stand in for gen X nihilism and millennial irony, is totally oblivious, that he doesn’t “get it”, that he is a clown who is not in on the joke... It’s funny, engaging, and genuine. And Jack Black is not in on the joke. That’s what makes it work and that’s the point, and as the credits rolled in the theater, two zoomers who were leaving turned around and waved and smiled and yelled something to me, and I had no idea what they were saying, and I think that’s beautiful.
Thoughts? Is he way off base here?
pbmonster
1hr ago
You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced
Agreed. I proposed a solution for that downthread: move all university STEM research to national labs, and have them train grad students. Undergrads stay with their "teaching professors" at the current universities.
pbmonster
1hr ago
I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts. STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture.
Yes, absolutely. And the only reason I'm doing that is because the current culture warriors rampaging through universities and science funding are doing the same.
I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs. All undergrads stay at the current universities, where only "teaching professors" remain. Even in STEM, most undergrad classes don't benefit greatly from having an active researcher teaching them - but graduate level classes do.
I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.
I kind of disagree. There's a lot of small stuff happening behind the scenes at universities and then silently creeping into products all over the world. There's two relatively recent prices for lasers, those came from "classic-size" groups. Advances here (independent from those prizes) also still frequently make it from universities into (e.g. telecom) products. In biochem, CRISPR/CAS9 was an incredibly small team. In material science, I expect small university groups making big contributions to high-entropy metal alloys and to further improvement of semiconductors.
WestphalianPeace
1hr ago
your link does not seem to work.
This is the part I'm more concerned about:
If you take gabapentin around the time of giving birth, your baby may need extra monitoring for a few days after they're born. This is because they may have withdrawal symptoms from gabapentin.
Ms. Smartie wanted "I need my uppers, I need my uppers, and then I need my downers so the uppers won't make me too high" while in labour.
As per the linked information, taking Ritalin is a lot riskier:
Methylphenidate and similar drugs have been linked to reduced growth of the baby in the womb. This is thought to be because they can affect blood flow through the placenta.
Methylphenidate can potentially cause short-term withdrawal symptoms in the newborn baby if taken in the weeks before delivery. For this reason, a baby may be monitored for some time after birth to check for symptoms such as jitteriness, difficulty sleeping and breathing problems.
But her drug pusher psychiatrist said it was okey-dokey for her to keep taking her fixes during pregnancy, so what do I know?
And I would have argued to fuck the blood glucose numbers and have as much apple juice as I wanted. Maybe Soylent too, especially small amounts.
And that's not a good idea because...
Monitoring during labour
It’s important that your blood sugar levels stay in the target range during labour. This will help to prevent your baby’s blood sugar getting low in the first few hours after they’re born.
Take your testing kit with you to the hospital, so that you can monitor your own blood sugar at first. Once you are in active labour, the hospital team will monitor your blood sugar every hour to make sure it stays at a safe level. You might be given insulin and glucose through a drip to help with this.
I'm finding this stuff after some cursory Googling. She surely had an ob-gyn or other doctor during the course of her pregnancy? Who she could have asked all about this? But she seems to have just floated on by in a cloud of "me smart, me not need to figure this out" and then blamed the hospital staff for all being dumb and not even knowing what Soylent was. Four alleged adults in the house, the husband couldn't even be bothered to wake up for his kid being born, and none of them had a clue what to do during the labour and birth.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
I recognize this is a bit pithy, but "If only there were a genre of fiction regarding how humans interact with technology to consider the moral and ethical implications of current-year AI as applied to human civilization, specifically how it impacts creators and consumers in these sorts of cases." Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.
I think there are probably some interesting ideas to explore. "The dialog for the ship's computer was generated entirely by ChatGPT, which is why it uses 'delve' and em-dashes (verbally!) and won't shut up. At some point the characters end up on a different, older vessel whose computer is hellishly inspired by Clippy: 'It looks like you're trying to land this thing!' at only peripherally appropriate times." Show how these tools are helpful -- or not helpful -- to the broader human condition. Does viable alignment even exist? Have a congenitally blind person talk to an AI about what color means to two different things with vastly different exposure to the concept.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Particularly if the hospital had to deal with three different guys showing up with her - "so you're family?" "oh no" "spouse?" "he is, we're just her significant others". And then all three of them bugger off and leave her on her own.
If you're a nurse on a maternity ward full of women about to give birth, in the middle of giving birth, or just after giving birth, you don't have time to deal with all that drama.
Author certainly does think she's smarter than the average bear, but given the way she describes how she and her partners acted, and how none of them seemed to have researched "having a baby: what happen when?", e.g. "I have gestational diabetes, what does that mean when I go into labour?" for one, I think she's not that much more clever than the ordinary woman.
A, it’s not true, and B, even if, I’m not in the habit of surrendering my beliefs to the zeitgeist.
I think Trump II being so very unbounded in its trumpism has the potential to flush out a lot of postmodernist rot on both sides out of the west’s system. Step 1 : conscious sledgehammer to woke institutions. Step 2 : unintentionally fuck the rest up with post-truth populism. Step 3 : everyone’s back in the happy happy modernist center.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
The Bush admin also didn't post any of those images, making this a strange comparison.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2hr ago
I don't think spotting the weak links is actually as hard as this framing makes it sound. You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced. In stark contrast, many social "sciences" cannot and will not ever produce any true information about the world and I think these are pretty easy to spot from a mile away. No deference is owed to fat studies scholars on the basis that the university also employs materials scientists and agricultural microbiologists.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Well, I genuinely don't think "I should get therapy for my normal human emotions" is a good prescription. If he was being possessive and controlling and unreasonable and accusing her of whoring around with guys just because she looked at a guy on the street, that's when you need therapy. Being in a relationship where you expected or hoped for monogamy but then you were persuaded into being poly - or letting your partner be poly - and having difficulty with that? That's normal. "Oh get therapy, go on medication" is the crazy stuff here.
Now if they've decided the game is worth the candle, that's their decision and good luck to them. But the talk about "all the female presenting persons are leading and are so empowered and queer" and the wife of the guy who got depressed about being replaced by the stud is a self-described "radical alien witch academic nerd" and they treated the entire thing like some horrible blend of the worst kind of management speak work situations: "We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called “agile scrum,” which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing" - I just feel like shouting "man, get out of there and find someone normal who will be happy to be monogamous with you!"
It is cheating with extra steps, except the women are patting themselves so hard on the backs for being in charge and rebellious and all the rest of it. If the men decided to stop being the acquiescent partners/spouses and left, or they decided to be 'radical alien witches' themselves, I feel the entire house of cards would collapse.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
There's pictures floating around of what looks like MICA shaped debris (a fairly exclusive European missile that mounts on the Rafale).
There is no non trivial Western political movement today that isn't postmodern.
If post-NRX reactionaries are "woke right" then IDW Liberals are "woke center". To say nothing about how post-liberal libertarians are today. Nobody actually believes in metanarratives anymore, not even Joe Rogan tier normies. And insofar as they do their views are instantly dismantled. All that's left is a handful of classical fascists and orthodox marxists acting like the clock stopped in 1937.
Modernism has died God's death. It's over. It's been over. And those that refuse to see this like Lindsey are driven mad by it. But there is no journey back to our illusions, because material conditions have dispelled people of the idea that institutions can be neutral.
Foucault won. Popper lost. A very long time ago.
Now can we move on to actually addressing the issues we are facing, or must more ink be shed bringing Liberals kicking and screaming into the present they created? You have to grow out of the debate club and into actual politics someday. Or you can keep getting diligently thrown around by cultural communists and scheming reactionaries.
I have no idea, but this unroll is the only thing I've seen that has made me want to watch the Minecraft movie. My Zoomer students all seem to have enjoyed it, though the only explanation they could give was "I just thought it was a good movie, actually, and that kind of surprised me."
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