The important thing isn’t that your kids don’t see porn, it’s that they feel the requisite amount of shame and never talk to you about their sexuality.

Also, it’s one more thing we can criminalize in a surveillance state. So now we can more easily extort horny people with fines and prison if we feel the need

This is just the whole robot sandwich thing to me.

If home kitchens were being replaced by pre-filled Automats, I’d be equally repulsed.

A tool is a tool. Fools may not use them well, but someone who understands how to properly use a tool can get great things out of it.

The most expert craftsman won’t get a round peg to fit into a square hole without doing some damage. At some point, you need to understand what the tool is useful for. And the danger of LLMs boils down to the seeming industrial scale willingness to sacrifice quality for expediency and defend the choice in the name of business profit.

Doesn’t anybody remember how internet search was in the early days? How you had to craft very specific searches to get something you actually wanted?

Internet search was as much constrained by what was online as what you entered in the prompt. You might ask for a horse and get a hundred different Palominos when you wanted a Clydesdale, not realizing the need to be specific. But you’re never going to find a picture of a Vermont Morgan horse if nobody bothered to snap a photo and host it where a crawler could find it.

Taken to the next level with LLMs, you’re never going to infer a Vermont Morgan if it isn’t in the training data. You’re never going to even think to look for one, if the LLM hasn’t bothered to index it properly. And because these AI engines are constantly eating their own tails, what you get is a basket of horses that are inferred between a Palomino and a Clydesdale, sucked back into training data, and inferred in between a Palomino and a Palomino-Clydesdale, and sucked back into the training data, and, and, and…

I think artists could use gen AI to make more good art than ever

I don’t think using an increasingly elaborate and sophisticated crutch will teach you to sprint faster than Hussein Bolt. Removing steps in the artistic process and relying on glorified Clipart Catalogs will not improve your output. It will speed up your output and meet some minimum viable standard for release. But the goal of that process is to remove human involvement, not improve human involvement.

I will say, gen AI seems to be the only way to combat the insane BEC attacks we have today.

Which is great. Love to use algorithmic defenses to combat algorithmic attacks.

But that’s a completely different problem than using inference to generate art assets.

You know it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, right?

Part of the “magic” of AI is how much of the design process gets hijacked by inference. At some scale you simply don’t have control of your own product anymore. What is normally a process of building up an asset by layers becomes flattened blobs you need to meticulously deconstruct and reconstruct if you want them to not look like total shit.

That’s a big part of the reason why “AI slop” looks so bad. Inference is fundamentally not how people create complex and delicate art pieces. It’s like constructing a house by starting with the paint job and ending with the framing lumber, then asking an architect to fix where you fucked up.

If you don’t like them, you can just chuck them in the trash and you won’t have wasted the work of an artist

If you engineer your art department to start with verbal prompts rather than sketches and rough drawings, you’re handcuffing yourself to the heuristics of your AI dataset. It doesn’t matter that you can throw away what you don’t like. It matters that you’re preemptively limiting yourself to what you’ll eventually approve.

…Now, if they ship slop into the final game

At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.

I can see legitimate frustration with an industry that seems reliant on increasingly generic and interchangeable assets. AI just becomes the next iteration of this problem. You’ve expanded the warehouse of prefab images, but you’re still stuck with end products that are uncannily similar to everything else on the market.

And that’s before you get to the IP implications of farming all your content out to a third party that doesn’t seem to care where its base library is populated from.

We’ve had tools to manage workflows for decades. You don’t need Copilot injected into every corner of your interface to achieve this. I suspect the bigger challenge for Larian is working in a development suite that can’t be accused of having “AI Assist” hiding somewhere in the internals.

Israelis love massacring people at funerals almost as much as the US loves bombing weddings.

genocide denial

Brother, get your ass to Afghanistan and say that to any of the survivors of the US occupation.

You don’t care what genocide is. You just want some foreigner to eat your sins.

Also I’m not American

Did you clap for Yaroslav Hunka with the rest of your ilk?

this is absolutely normal and should be protected

I mean, to take a line from Inglorious Bastards

I ‘magine you’re gonna take off that handsome-lookin’ S.S. uniform of yours, ain’tcha?.. That’s what I thought. Now that I can’t abide… I mean, if I had my way… you’d wear that goddamn uniform for the rest of your pecker-suckin’ life.

I much prefer the Nazis who are wearing their beliefs on their sleeves.

Only problem is that they don’t ever come out of the woodwork until they’ve got safety in numbers.

The problem Germany has in the modern day isn’t a bunch of schlubs throwing up Nazi salutes. Its the much larger pool of industrial and media insiders who have goaded them into it, financed their little fascist friend-groups, and sponsored them to seize power to the benefit of the far-right plutocracy.

Liberals panick when they see the former, but they’re constantly trying to win over the latter. You can’t clean your house of insects if you keep trying to make friends with the Queen Bee.

‘Lebenslüge’, the myth that German racism began and ended with the Holocaust

You can’t re-nazify if you never de-nazified to begin with. Nazis were rebranded and re-incorporated into the new East and West German governments practically before the smoke was clear. While the Russians were quick to round up and execute more Nazis than their ratline-loving Capitalist peers, both governments’ police services were thick with former Wauffen SS officers by the turn of the decade.

We had Hitler’s Chief of Staff running NATO, ffs.

Despite his extensive knowledge and participation in war crimes, he later became a general for West Germany and served as head of the West German military from 1957 to 1961 as well as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1961 to 1964.

China is #2 in military spending after the USA.

China plus the next 13 countries on the list can’t total US military spending. And I don’t even know if Israel + Ukraine should count, given how much of their military budget is just US foreign aid.

As for harassing brown people: well there’s the whole Uyghur thing.

The original “evidence” of 1 million Uyghurs in concentration camps stems from US propaganda outlets and far-right “researchers” like Adrian Zenz. These numbers could not be independently verified, and other media sources that repeat these claims merely cite each other or this original, US-backed research. Zenz himself is a known antisemitic conspiracy theorist, far-right evangelical, and Islamophobe who has written that the Jews who refuse to convert to Christianity will be wiped out by God in a “fiery furnace”. Why would a German with such hateful views toward Jews and Muslims be such a champion of Uyghur rights? It was later found that Zenz had received $625,000 from Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist Steve Bannon to help him fabricate the story of Uyghur genocide.

Brother, you are sucking from the tailpipe of propaganda while your country is drowning in the blood of native peoples.

Next level?

Ooooooh nooooo!

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1786968298636423210

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture

BUT.

AT.

WHAT.

COST!

You’re also blind if you just say “America bad” at every opportunity.

It’s shooting fish in a barrel. You don’t need to aim to carefully when you’ve got a target rich environment.

No, many of the things he’s doing are absolutely not in the interest of the billionaire class

Its not in the best long term interests of the country. But then neither is having a billionaire class to begin with. Trump’s looting various cash-rich institutions and easily extorted organizations and individuals for the benefit of his cronies. That’s necessarily bad for the targets of exploitation and good for his in-group, however you might project their futures over the long term.

And yes, he’s serving some of them, particularly Peter Thiel. But he’s mostly serving Putin and himself.

Nobody in Russia, least of all Vladimir Putin, is well-served by the US continuing to arm and instigate conflicts between Russia and Ukraine. And yet that’s exactly what our foreign services continue to do. You can trace this right back to 2018, when Trump shoveled out a bunch of anti-aircraft missile systems and anti-tank weapons to Ukrainian Nationalists.

Trump’s firmly in the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex. And that occasionally breaks for or against Russia, depending on who is buying. But it is always and forever a policy that favors more international conflicts and more arms sales because US exports of weapons is a GOP moneymaker.

And even Hillary isn’t the devil incarnate you think she is.

Hillary and Trump were friends. They’ve been political allies and social circle buddies since the 1990s. She egged him on to run in 2016 because she thought he’d be her cat’s paw.

If you hate Trump, you should despise Hillary.

Hey now, if you hand everyone a “Hitler” card in Secret Hitler, it plays very strangely but in the end everyone wins.

Idk about “useless”. But the way the article doesn’t seem to want to mention the read/write speed is definitely indicative of some drawbacks to the medium. They repeatedly stress “cold storage” which could mean its a useful form of long term archive or backup for static data. Plenty of demand for that kind of information, especially in an era when real time overwriting by malicious actors and artificial engines has been fucking with historical data retention.

But its not going to replace your hard drive any time soon.

Anyone get the IO on this device? Cause I’m guessing its going to be less good than magnetic storage.

Because his brand of “politics” is dumb, destabilizing shit that’s bad for America and Americans.

We’ve had dumb, destabilizing policies in this country since its founding. That’s got nothing to do with the politics of the civil services. Plenty of civil servants are full-on MAGA adherents (and have been even before his first election in '16). Plenty more are die-hard Hillarycrat Libs who have dragged the country in another direction. Trump’s game is to stack his MAGA cronies above the Hillarycrats withint compromising the function of the civil service entirely, rendering it useless.

Trump only serves himself, Putin, and indirectly, Xi.

Jesus fuck dude. Have you really been watching US politics for this long and still not seen Trump acting in the explicit interests of the American billionaire class? Why do you think the Chinese President is closer to his heart than the people he pulled into his own cabinet - Lutnick, McMahon, Vought, and Loeffler? Nevermind Peter Thiel, a man who has become the nation’s premiere military contractor over the last year.

Nevermind fucking Israel.

How are you liberals this fucking blind? Trump’s CIA is systematically picking apart what’s left of Russian industry. His Pentagon is fixated on purging Chinese businesses from the Western Hemisphere. His Treasury has made cryptocurrency speculation a central tenant of fiscal policy. But y’all can’t stop saying “Foreign Men Did This” every time you look at your own decayed socio-economic system.

Also, did you just link me Trump admin propaganda

Go Lib Out to the WaPo if that’s your poison of choice.

Or reference Congress.gov for an official definition.

Or just bury your head in the sand for another four years.

Trump complained that a secret inner cabal of career bureaucrats would oppose him. And he wasn’t wrong. The various federal agencies are a seven layer dip of careerist holdovers from prior administrations, many of who were hostile to his brand of politics for one reason or another.

Trump’s framing of the existence and internal opposition by career bureaucrats was that of some insidious anti-American cabal. But the fundamental problem is one every new President faces. Namely, the Burrowing In of political appointees to civil service career roles.

This isn’t a new problem, either. Thomas Jefferson was complaining about the problem hires left behind under the Adams administration. Burrowed-in Democrats plagued Lincoln for much of his tenure and were behind many of the smears aimed at Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion (an Eisenhower-era plot that cost Allen Dulles his job when it humiliated JFK).

How presidents deal with recalcitrant career staffers and opposition party moles can define their administrations. This isn’t a problem Trump just made up. It’s one he doesn’t know how to deal with gracefully.