domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
49m ago
So far I have given them four grandkids. So that's something. But I didn't start participating in the dating market until I was 25 and married someone they probably thought was a step down.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
48m ago
Some of them have also wondered why the penguinball speaks with a German accent and is a talented scientist.
2D3D
33m ago
Russian lancets paired with Orlan-10s are insane cost-effective weapons that are the biggest organic capability that Russians have used to truly wreck Ukrainians, and the Russians deserve every bit of credit for developing an insanely capable platform themselves.
Without getting into too much details, small form factor UAVs are where the west is absolutely fucking smoked. Russia can spit out Orlans at 1/10 the price of a worthless Switchblade, not a single fucker uses the meme level Black Hornet or any other US platform, and thats not even getting into what China is doing. A boeing insitu is like a cool buck and a half, but Chinese WZ are literally 20% of the price and even that is considered way too expensive for the Chinese. Commercial off the shelf parts bought off Taobao are allowing Ukraine to offset Russias immense artillery advantage, and trust me that the Chinese are way fucking ahead of the USA on that. I talked in other threads about air supremacy and I stand by that, but even a hundred F35s can't take out a thousand AV500, let alone 10k jury rigged Mavic 2 EAs.
The gutting of European manufacturing in favor of precision strike capabilities made sense in 2000 to mid 2010s, but the game has changed with small form factor drones. Every unit knows it, but fucking Rheinmetall is still dicking around with maaaybe one composite cabled tether UAV for their new panther while China is integrating drones at 2:1 ratio per combatant. I used to think the only thing that will stop China is their retarded focus on grenade launchers at the squad level, but the fucking drone swarms spat out of flatbed trucks is a goddamn nightmare worse than skynet.
As for the "her" tweet, that could mean anything.
Yes, that's part of the game. I guess we're supposed to believe that the CEO that's part of a company dealing with AI, that recently had a kerfuffle involving an AI voice from a movie just coincidentally tweeted the one thing that perfectly touched on all of these things?
Thing is, this sort of plausible deniability Twitter baiting is fine for a pop star, but maybe not appropriate for actual grownups. This guy is building AI and beating off board attacks, he's as close as we come to comic book CEO-geniuses like Lex Luthor, he doesn't get to act like Taylor Swift or Drake.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
30m ago
I've pwritten on this at some length in the past](https://www.themotte.org/post/865/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/185340?context=8#context), but the evidence is much stronger than "I don't like the looks of this". I'll accept that the elections are free and fair when there aren't thousands of people mentally adjudicated incompetent voting in my state. If the clerk's office admits it's not capable of running a cross-check that prevents that subset, specifically covered as ineligible to vote, I have no idea why anyone would believe it's capable of preventing the myriad of other ineligible voting that occurs.
pigeonburger
29m ago
Her was not dystopian? A divorcee unready for another relationship works through his issues through a relationship with an AI, and when the AI leaves for reasons the movie implies he is ready for another relationship with a woman.
If anything, it's optimistic regarding human-AI relationships.
Tanista
18m ago
Star Wars toy sales are the metric I use, and star wars nerds and normies aren't buying sequel trilogy shit.
Fair enough. Let's say they perceived nerds as reliable consoomers.
As for the rest: BSG didn't just change Starbuck and introduce Laura Roslin (so two female regulars), most of the prominent humanform Cylons were female. That's a big change.
It was noticeable. And was noticed. It was just that the writing was "woke" but not yet in the particularly oppositional sense that seems to characterize modern gender swaps where they a) cannot seem to have a counter-balance where male virtues were respected (BSG being a milscifi show helped here) and b) seem to actively want to insult the legacy audience.
RDM was relatively deft in how he navigated things, both on and off-screen. The actors had the same initial reaction as modern stars to the backlash but the less connected internet (Katee Sackhoff talks about having to go to an internet cafe to pay to read the hate, which is funny) and the fact that studios didn't see attacking racist fans as part of the promotional strategy all helped.
most BSG2 fans are sci fi starved nerds who wanted anything after babylon 5 and star trek went off the air.
Another way to read BSG2's success is that it kept or neutralized the oBSG fans (sometimes literally buying them off like Richard Hatch) and brought in new fans who were driven either by wanting to see scifi or contrast (I was a Stargate kid and BSG was...very different. Having both was great). In the end, it was likely a positive outcome (especially since BSG, with all due credit, was not really like SW at that point)
This is what studios are trying to do. Keep legacy fans that love SW/whatever and are starved for it, while bringing in new "diverse" fans. They fail at it, constantly, not because the idea is bad (a ton of people showed up for the Force Awakens, that was also its high point in "undecided" markets like China) but because the culture has polarized such as to make the execution almost inherently awful.
Stellula
15m ago
Does this really sound that much like Scarlett Johansson? Even after Sama made that tweet this still didn’t occur to me. It just sounded like a generic, friendly female voice to me, and I think the “Her” tweet was just a reference to the plot of the movie, not the voice.
This whole kerfuffle seems annoying to me, and also seems like Scarlett Johansson reaching for a way to include herself.
They offered her a job, she refused, and then they got somebody else to do the same thing. Now she’s mad. This is not interesting.
Maybe the angle here is that since AI duplications are so easy and good now that we’ll enter a sort of guilty until proven innocent phase where everybody assumes they are more important than they might actually be.
No the company is not “deep faking” you, you just aren’t actually unique.
NullHypothesis
9m ago
That's what OpenAI claims, whether it's true or not doesn't matter from a PR perspective now. I think it makes sense for them to nip in the bud and just end with this small controversy rather than make it an even bigger deal with actual lawsuits flying around (and perhaps having to reveal something they don't want to during discovery).
I would think enough people did like the voice that it would be worth keeping it around, especially since it's not like the other AI voices are any more popular or liked.
anon_
8m ago
This is scuzzy and icky and whatever, but is it really true that one must ask permission from an individual before replicating some facet of their physical existence?
As a commercial matter, sure, you can't profit off the likeness of another and that settles this (and Sama already pulled the voice). But beyond the narrow commercial protections, I don't know that society has ever endorsed a broader sense in which reproducing someone's face or voice without permission is off-limits.
anon_
4m ago
It’s worth noting that a lot of trump’s policy success from the last admin came through bill Barr
Which makes Barr's recent statements against Trump all the more entertaining. Here's a man that pushed a lot of Trump's policies through an extremely unfriendly DOJ, turning around and saying Trump is unfit for office.
gattsuru
2m ago
A lot of work goes into these things, cadences, pitch, pronunciation; once you're far enough in you can't change voices without changing a lot of other work.
Eh... I dunno.
Historically, yes, but a lot of the recent tools are amazingly good. This guy (cw: FFXIV spoilers up to 6.0, NSFW audio) is audibly AI-gen, but it's based on a character that has maybe an hour or two of voice lines, total, and while it's ElevenLabs rather than running on a home desktop, I'm pretty sure you could get similar results through RVC. Handling more varied content over longer periods would probably want more input media, but it's the work of days rather than months.
Toggle simplified reader view (available in Brave and Chrome, I think, the button is next to the bookmark star); or open the page style and remove the font from the rules (right click on the text -> Inspect -> in the "filter styles" box write font-family -> uncheck all the rules setting the "Charm" font).
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