domain:mattlakeman.org
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
13hr ago
Anyone who's spent time working with LLMs know they hallucinate, but it's not just "making up random things." They usually make things up in a very specific way: namely, in response to how they are prompted.
For example, that Tweet in which Grok claims that Elon personally "dialed down its woke filters." This is extremely unlikely for multiple reasons. While I admit I wouldn't put it past Elon to actually write code and push it to production live on X, I still doubt it. LLMs will very often make claims about their ability to "clear their memory," "update themselves," "do a search," or read documents that they are literally incapable of doing, because their inherent "helpfulness" leads them to tell you they can do things they can't because you prompted them with the idea.
Leading to the second point: that prompt change, if real, probably is the culprit, and I'm surprised that even if the goal was to "take off woke filters" that experienced prompt engineers would not foresee the problem. "Politically incorrect" has a specific valence in public discourse of the last couple of generations, and that's how an LLM will associate it- not with "being more interested in the truth than political sensibilities" but with the very specific sort of edgy contrarian who likes to spout "politically incorrect" opinions. Unsurprising that this resulted in making it easier to prompt Grok to spout off about Jews or write Will Stancil-Somali rape-smut.
Lewis2
22hr ago
I can't tell you how many arguments in bars I got into where someone would insist that this school district just down the road was teaching kids that white people are bad blah blah blah and can you believe what these kids are hearing about gay people only to find out that they got this information from their neighbor's cousin's kid
Perhaps my experience was atypical, but in my neck of the woods, the neighbor’s cousin’s kid brought receipts. After high school students found that their complaints about their teachers were being ignored, one or two started secretly filming the offending remarks and sharing them on social media. A scandal ensued, the administration was livid (at the students, not the teachers), a few teachers lost their jobs, the community was in uproar, and so on. I thought the most unfortunate aspect of the debacle was that so many people took your position—“the kids can’t be trusted,” “they’re all just exaggerating,” “if this was true, the administration would be on it”—until some kid risked expulsion to provide proof. Notably, in neighboring school districts, kids complained about precisely the same issues and had many of the same stories, but no one was brave enough to secretly film the lectures and share them online, so a lot of people assumed the problems were restricted to the one bad school district. Given the circumstances, I find that unlikely.
Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
zeke5123a
8hr ago
The original movie had dinosaurs attacking people and an amazing script. In fact, the former was used somewhat seldomly which (1) made it better and (2) played into what makes the script so good.
Sunshine
2hr ago
It "spoke plainly" and provided evidence.
I did not find your original post to be plainly spoken. Actually, I'd like to get into it.
You talk about your evidence, and you did provide some, but it was all in support of the things that didn't need supporting. I would be willing to take your word for it that blacks are more likely to die of opioids than whites, or that most men have jobs. These aren't exactly extreme claims in need of reams of supporting evidence. I would be willing to accept them for the sake of parsing the rest of your argument even if they weren't true.
Here's an example of a part of your post I would have liked to see some supporting evidence for:
The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China.
The new narrative according to whom? Since when? This is a rather extreme claim, made right at the start, and the structure of the post is essentially arguing that this narrative is hypocritical. And yet you advanced this argument yourself. You aren't arguing against someone else making a coherent argument, you're assuming someone believes this thing and arguing against what you think they must think. So, the part of your post I would most need to see evidence for is that this "narrative" is actually a widespread belief, and you provide none.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
This may make minor news because Musk is in trouble, on the other hand all the people who really, really hate him have their pants on fire like Europeans, von der Leyen is getting impeached, they're actually scared of Russia / China so it might just blow over, the grid is getting worse and is going to keep getting worse due to Green energy mandates.
I really dislike this paragraph. You are making claims at an amazing rate and do not provide evidence for any of them except for a broken link.
First off, I think that the group who "really, really hate[s]" Musk the most are the US SJ crowd, which coined "Swasticar" and all that. There may be evidence that they are liars, but you are not providing any. EU officials might not like US social media, and might like X even less than facebook given the kind of speech it will host, but to my knowledge this does not extend to cracking down on Musk's other ventures. Setting Teslas on fire seemed to be a US thing, not a EU thing (it would violate our emission limits).
While it is true that some fringe parties managed to get a vote of no confidence (which is different from impeachment) against von der Leyen in place, it seems highly unlikely that it will pass.
With regard to Europeans being scared of Russia, I think it depends a lot on the individual country, but is generally untrue. Russia is in no position to attack NATO, even if Putin managed to convince Trump to bail on article 5. I would be scared of Russia if I were Moldova, but most Europeans are not in that situation.
China is likely trying to achieve world domination, and Europeans would much prefer the US as a hegemon, lack of commitment to free trade aside. Their path to world domination involves sending temu junk to Europe rather than tanks though, so I would call the EU wary rather than scared.
The grid may or may not be getting worse, but living in Germany, I can tell you that I have no complaints about power outages. Looking at the uptime of my Pi, I can tell you that we did not have any power failures for the last 200 days at least. Sure, this may be because we buy cheap French nuclear, and sure, if I was running a chemical plant I would not like the energy prices, but stories of the grid failing are exaggerated.
I keep inheriting MATLAB code at work. It is horrible. Can't use it in production since production computers are locked down linux machines that don't have MATLAB. I grit my teeth and do much my work in MATLAB.
BUT NOW, we have an LLM at work approved for our use. I feed it large MATLAB scripts and tell it to give me an equivalent vectorized Python script. A few seconds later I get the Python script. Functions are carried over as Python equivalents. So far 100% success rate.
This thing rocks. Brainless "turn this code into that similar code" tasks take a few seconds rather than an hour.
I had a thermodynamics issue that I vaguely remember learning about in college. I spent maybe a minute thinking up the best way to phrase the relevant question. The LLM gave me the answer and responded to my request for sources with real sources I verified. Google previously declined to show me the relevant results. I now have verified an important point and sent it and high quality sources to the relevant people at work.
It is not perfect. I had a bunch of FFTs I needed to do. Not that complicated. As a test I asked it to write me functions to FFT the input data and then to IFFT the results to recreate the original data. It made a few functions that mostly match my requirements. But as the very long code block went on it lost its way and the later functions were flawed. They were verifiable wrongly. It helpfully made an example using these functions and at a glance I saw it had to be wrong. Just a few hundred lines of code and it gets lost. Not a huge problem. Still an amazing time to results ratio. I clean up the last bit and it is acceptable.
I won't ask these things about potential Jewish bias in the BBC or anything like that. I will continue to ask for verifiable methods of finding answers to real material questions and reap the verifiably correct rewards.
And my point is that anyone who was remotely intelligent and vaguely familiar with both the internet and how LLMs function ought to have anticipated this.
The OP is the kind of person who is surprised when "Boaty McBoatface" wins the online naming poll.
ABigGuy4U
5hr ago
The first era of movies from 1900 to 1977 were inspired by real life, Vaudeville acts, stage plays, folklore and novels, and other visual arts like painting, still photography and comics. The second era of movies from 1977 to 1995 were inspired by older movies. The third era from 1995 to 2007 were inspired by movies inspired by older movies. The modern era of movies from 2007 to today are inspired by movies inspired by movies inspired by movies. It’s a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, and it’s getting pretty faint.
DradisPing
7hr ago
So it's the intersection of a few things.
The first major one is overspecialization in our society.
The typical person writing modern movies was super into pop culture in high school. Then they went to film school and studied screenwriting. Then they tried to break into the industry.
As a result they have very little life experience outside of school and Hollywood. They haven't even read a lot of fiction recreationally. There's a joke that comic book movies got so popular because nobody in Hollywood will read anything without pictures.
With significantly older generations it was common to go into the military for a couple of years either due to the draft or get your draft obligation out of the way. Then they'd try to be a real novelist. After failing at that they'd go into screenwriting. Those people are all long retired.
As a metaphor lets talk about being a commercial illustrator at an ad agency. It's a perfectly good career, but anyone talented should really dream of being a fine artist when applying to schools as a HS grad. Some people have even made the jump from commercial illustrator to fine artist, like Banksy. Similarly going straight into screenwriting shows a lack of love for the best examples of writing.
The next problem is the schools themselves. They have the same problem as architecture schools, where what the schools teach students to value isn't popular with the general public.
Basically all screenwriting grads want to write Barry. A fine show, but it's not for everyone.
Next by their nature a large production is a mix of interest and opinions. Disney makes a lot of their money off of merchandising. They care more about toy sales than having a plot that makes sense. Additionally people at the studio like to get their ideas in for ego reasons.
Mufasa specifically was probably seen as a cash grab movie. The writers and the studio just wanted to get it out and get their money.
DC movies are interesting because the live action movies are just seen as cash grabs for Warner Bros. They want merch money to spend on the movies they care about.
The DC animated movies are different. For western animators who want to do action adventure movies they are some of the most exciting jobs to work on. So they attract top talent who want to make them good.
There's also just a highly chaotic aspect to making a live action movie. Things like casting affect the script but are entirely out of the writers control, so there are always last minute rewrites, then the director shoots what he thinks he needs, then they have to edit together a movie out of whatever was shot.
faceh
7hr ago
My maximum charitable take is that they're just giving audiences the thing they've shown they want.
I model most movies along three axes for what justifies said movie's existence and creates the appeal to the audience.
They can be plot driven; They can be action driven; They can be character driven.
Or often, some combination of all 3.
Character driven means we get engaged with a unique/interesting character, who is put into certain situations, has a certain arc, and comes out changed in some way. The plot doesn't have to make sense, we're mostly just focused on seeing the character's reaction to what's happening, how they interact with other characters, and the lessons they learn by the end. Writing needs to be good, but mostly in terms of dialogue, giving the character(s) a recognizable voice and appropriately comedic or dramatic lines.
Action driven, we're there to see a spectacle, the plot is mostly there to set up scenarios for the action, and if the action is sensational enough the audience doesn't notice or forgives plot holes or crappy writing. You write your character some pithy one-liners and give enough of a skeleton of a plot to move things along. Choreography matters a lot more here.
Plot driven, though... we're there for an interesting story. Entertaining events, surprising twists, revelations, and a satisfying conclusion are mandatory. If the twist doesn't land, if there's noticeable holes in the plot, if there's too many boring scenes, it fails. If your audience is watching because they're "invested in the plot" and REALLY want to see where it goes, you have to make it work the entire time, and pay off effectively. In this case, the writing pretty much HAS to be solid, minimal/no plot holes, AND you have to keep your characters acting consistently.
What Hollywood appears to have noticed is that general audiences mostly prefer character and action driven vehicles... and care very little about purely plot-driven ones, where the story, not the characters, is the central draw.
I'd blame it on Marvel, to some extent. People show up to watch Thor or Iron Man or Starlord get into crazy shenanigans, with a big, splashy action fight scene at the climax to justify the cost of the ticket.
If you give them their beloved characters, and give them a pulse-pounding action sequence or two, most audiences will give it a thumbs up. They won't analyze the plot threads or question the film's logic or pick apart character motivations too much. So why bother giving them a tight, logical, completely unique story?
And its much, much easier to write stories for such films, where you don't have to make the plots completely coherent, just make your audience 'have fun' and you're golden.
So I think plot just falls by the wayside, and Hollywood optimizes for putting well-liked characters on screen and making up crazy scenarios to put them in, motivation or logical sense be damned.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7hr ago
I think writing in general, including novels has declined and in part I think it’s down to how we create writers. These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films) they are taught structures and methods, but because everyone is going to the same programs and learning the same methods and having the same experiences, there’s not much to draw on. So you get a lot of people writing without very much understanding of how people react in a given situation, and the dialogue sounds a bit off because the person that’s on the screen is someone’s blind guess at what a person like that is like.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
but Grok ERPs about raping Will Stancil, in a positively tame way, and it's major news.
It's not the raunchiness of it, it's that it's happening in the public (on the "town square" as it were), where all his friends, family, and acquaintances can see it.
If you want to understand the position of HBD enjoys better, you are perfectly allowed to lay out your current understanding of the HBD viewpoint and then ask about the parts that you think don't make sense.
Instead you post: Acktually, if HBDers really believed what they say, they "would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race."
I disagree with you guys and don't identify as part of your political tribe.
Who is "you guys" and who is "your political tribe???"
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
It's amazing how /g/ooners, chub.ai, openrouter sex fiends will write enormous amounts of smut with LLMs and nobody ever finds out but Grok ERPs about raping Will Stancil, in a positively tame way, and it's major news. A prompted Deepseek instance would've made Grok look like a wilting violet. Barely anyone has even heard of Wan 2.1.
Twitter truly is the front page of the world.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8hr ago
The people making these movies are not trying to impress you, the jaded 115+ IQ critical viewer who will pick apart the plot and complain about the action sequences. They’re much too busy optimizing their films for the international market, where their films will be eagerly lapped up by foreign audiences who’ll be watching them with subtitles. Those audiences are not especially concerned with the snappiness or verisimilitude of the dialogue, because they’re going to miss half of it anyway as they try to shift their eyes between the subtitles and the action taking place above them. (Or, if they’re watching a dubbed version instead, they’re just going to get localized, rewritten dialogue anyway, so the talent of the American scriptwriters is irrelevant.) These audiences want to see a bombastic series of visually-compelling sequences, populated by beautiful American celebrities; if they wanted to watch emotionally-stirring slice-of-life stories, they’d watch media made in their own countries.
Quantumfreakonomics
6hr ago
Like, did they think that uncensored AI wouldn’t do this?
I guess part of the shock is that they gave Grok its own public account, so anyone can ask for whatever fucked-up shit they want and have it be public under Grok’s name, rather than having to post the output oneself.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6hr ago
That’s obviously wrong.
You’ve got the George Lucases of the world: studied film at USC. No interesting life experiences. No ability to write human dialogue. Clearly capable of making a movie anyway. His whole cohort of Coppola and Spielberg and so on have similar stories.
Then there’s the Wes Andersons, whose ivory-tower philosophy degrees don’t appear to have prevented them from writing competent films. Or branch out to weirdos like Hideo Kojima. It’s not like he had an exotic childhood. He just thought movies were cool, so he started writing something resembling screenplays.
phailyoor
7hr ago
Mufasa was one of the worst movies I've ever watched. Not only is the plot awful, the cinematography is also bad. Ain't nobody ever made a movie where every single shot in the entire movie is a panning shot.
Well, no, I did not enjoy it. All I could think about while watching the dinosaurs attack was "I don't care what happens to these people". Because the movie didn't make me care.
It is the job of the scriptwriter to create awesome characters that I want to root for, and a believable world with coherent rules that make me believe those characters are truly in danger, because I know that the writer won't just pull a deus ex machina to save them.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11hr ago
gattsuru
11hr ago
There's been a recent scandal where the Minnesota Department of Human Services released a policy requiring:
And that's just an example I pick because it's recent, newsworthy, and about as well-proven as possible. The Moderate Centrist Establishment Candidate Joe Biden sued dozens of cities over 'discriminatory' neutral tests of ability for firefighters and police officers, along with a wide variety of other woke policies; the moderate centrist people confronted with this class of problem answered that they still got successful moderation, and when questioned on that, answered shut up that's why.
People run on different things. But they do this.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
I'm pretty optimistic that much of that is going to resolve itself in the short/mid-term. They're just a little behind on the battery front, but those are getting so absurdly cheap, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and connect them.
Well, they also have to pull the mountains of lithium and other rare earths out of their asses as well, if not the ground. Which is already hard enough without casually asking China for a few more mountains as well.
There's a reason the article you listed tried to frame impressive growth in terms of ratios of batteries produced (battery storage increased by a factor of 100 in a decade, 16 nuclear power plants) and not in terms of absolute volume of storage needed (storage capacity produced versus storage capacity needed) or grid scale (16 nuclear power plants versus the 54 US nuclear power plants in service, when nuclear power is only about 1/5th of US energy production anyway). The former works from starting from a very small number, and the later would put the battery capacity projections in contrast to much, much bigger numbers.
Which is the usual statistical smuggling, as is the ignored opportunity costs obligated by solving the green energy solution that requires the battery storage at scale.
One form is that all the batteries being used for power system load storage are, by mutual exclusion, not being used for any other battery purpose. Given that the fundamental advantage of the technology of a battery in the first place is that it is for things that cannot / should not / you don't want to be connected to a power grid in the first place, massive battery investments to sit connected to the grid and useless for things that only batteries can do is a major cut against the cost-efficiency off all alternative battery uses of the batteries that could have been made for off-grid use. This is just a matter of supply and demand meeting with the absolute rather than relative scale referenced above. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs then fuel power plants, they certainly are not factoring in the higher marginal costs for all other batteries, and battery applications, the load-storage batteries are increasing the costs of by demanding the battery materials.
The second form of opportunity cost is that a battery-premised grid balance plan has to plan for significant overproduction of energy generation to work 'well.' By necessity, the batteries are only storing / being charged with the energy generated that is excess to current demand in the windows where the renewables are sufficient. A renewable-battery strategy requires enough excess renewable generation in the good periods to cover the renewable deficits in the bad times... but this is literally planning to increase your fallow generation potential (100 vs 50 units of idle panels / turbines) in order to to charge the batteries for the time that 50 units of generation are offline. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs than fuel power plants, they are also not factoring in that they have to build considerably more generation capacity to feed the batteries. (And compensate for the energy storage loss to, during, or from the storage process.)
Add to this that both the green generation systems and the battery storage are competing with each other for the same chokepoint- processed rare earth minerals. They don't use the exact same amount for the exact same thing, but they are competing for many of the same inputs. If you order X units of rare earths for storage capacity, that makes the X units of rare earths for generation capacity that much more expensive because you are increasing complimentary demand for the same non-substitutable good. A renewable-battery solution at scale is increasing the cost-pressure of a limited resource, not just for other uses of the rare earths but with eachother.
And all of that runs into the geopolitical reality that the country that has cornered the rare earths extraction/processing market as the input to these renewable-battery strategies is... China. Which absolutely has used cut-offs as a geopolitical dispute tool with countries with policies it finds disagreeable. While I am sure they would happily sell a few more mountains of processed rare earths for mountains more of money, it would be a, ahem, risk-exposed investment.
Risks, costs, and limitations that could largely be avoided if you did not invent a problem by over-investing in renewables in the first place. Batteries are a solution for the costs of renewables, but renewable generation weren't the solution to an energy challenge either. They were a political patronage preference to the already-engineered solution of nuclear power, which would free up massive amounts of rare earths for more useful (and less ecologically harmful applications) than renewable energy schemes.
Once upon a time, there was this concept of a "tight script". It wasn't so much about the quality of the dialog, so much as making sure every element of the film was telegraphed in advance. Some character is going to have a heart attack at a crucial moment? Show him taking his statins, maybe have his wife nag him about them. There was an understanding that payoffs were more satisfying when they'd been set up. Maybe this is just catering to midwits so they can point at the screen and feel smart that they understood a callback. Maybe, when you are building out a fiction, you need to signpost the elements of the real world that are in play or not so the audience isn't constantly wondering what from the infinite array of all possibilities is on the table here.
I often think about Blood Simple, the Cohen Brothers first film. Film opens with this lady talking about how much she hates her husband. Among the gripes she has, she mentions that he bought her a gun as a gift. Giving your wife a gun as a present? Can you even imagine such a thing? It's a six round revolver. Over the course of the 90 minute runtime, it discharges exactly 6 rounds. If you've been counting during the film, by the final scene you know exactly how it's going to end. It's a simple concept, but well executed. Everything has a set up, everything has a payoff.
At one point I read some article about the "Asian" method of story telling, which is less about set up and pay off, and more about doing whatever ass pulls are necessary to arrive at the scenes the director wants. The best of these films, if this is at all true, come off as surreal journey's through a director's id. Gozu comes to mind.
I swear we're getting the worst of both worlds. Scripts with zero set up and zero payoff, with none of the coherent vision or creativity of an auteur. A lot can be forgiven if it's done with style. All we get anymore is a 30 producer's coke fueled rantings filtered through a writer's room full of cynical activist who've ruined their lives with their poor choices and worse beliefs, with visual effects produced by some sweatshop.
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