domain:ryandv.substack.com
Tanista
3m 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.
pigeonburger
15m 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.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16m 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.
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.
2D3D
18m 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.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
33m ago
Some of them have also wondered why the penguinball speaks with a German accent and is a talented scientist.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
35m 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.
comicsansstein
36m ago
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).
gattsuru
51m ago
The likely worst-case legal scenario is a lawsuit followed by settling out of court for a trivial amount.
Depends on what you consider trivial. TraceWoodgrains pointed to Midler v Ford in California, and it's foundational for Californian law, but the punchline is that Ford got off scot free, and the ad agency in question was hit for 400k USD. But that's because Midler was an issue of first impression at the time, limiting evidence of 'evil motive'; contrast the later Waits v Frito where Frito-Lay and its advertising company got tapped for a combined $2m USD over an ad that "broadcast in September and October 1988 on over 250 radio stations located in 61 markets nationwide" (though the advertising company had verbally offered to indeminfy Frito-Lay before running the ad). Contrast in turn White v. Samsung, where a literal robot acting as but clearly not Vanna White, which rhymes with today's problem, and ended up at 400k USD over a fiery dissent.
It's not business-ending, at least for a business OpenAI's size -- even adjusted for inflation and for how much Californian juries hate tech companies, I'd expect closer to 1m than 100m. But for all the philosophical problems with an expansive right of publicity, it's not toothless.
philosoraptor
56m ago
the guide @No_one posted the other day on what men are actually attracted to (https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/).
Is that available anywhere in a non-stupid font? I probably wouldn't mind reading it but the typeface makes my eyes bleed.
SlowBoy
57m ago
Scarlett Johansson doesn't have an IP right to "female voices that sound vaguely like Scarlett Johansson." As long as they can produce the receipts to show that this is actually what happened, she'd have no case.
No, but she has the rights to her own likeness, which OpenAI wanted to use. Did they? That could only be known through trial, it takes one sympathetic judge to hear the case and start discovery. And I find it extremely plausible that, on a large software engineering team, someone said something bad in an email. And a settlement wouldn't look good for OpenAI's PR either.
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.
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