Have not read it yet, but seems relevant to our collective interests. NSFW due to NASB. Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip. (A long post about Nick Land).
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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https://xcancel.com/jrawson/status/1814232925967089808
The fuck.
Reposting this from the last Stubsack here by request.
love is love ✌️❤️
Amazing how many of them eventually morph into somebody else. Trained on celeb faces, and still cannot keep a consistent facial shape. One more dataset bro.
One, this looks like absolute dogshit. Two, this looks like an ad campaign for a celebrity cloning service for spare organs. Three, with the music it sounds like a drug ad in the US. It just needs a voiceover telling you the monkey paw side effect you’ll inflict upon yourself in return for eternal youth.
Three, with the music it sounds like a drug ad in the US
as I remarked to a friend elsewhere, there's something I've noticed in a couple of these things now, and that's how "cutesy" they're made to be
this one for example: it’s so clearly intended to be as unnatural as possible (based on the pairings presented), while trying to sell it as cozy as possible - all the gestures/poses, the music, the lighting, the clothing, the who's-picked-for-portrayal
obviously there's going to be some kind of observation bias etc involved here (of however many of these things get created, only some with some x property end up crossing my feed/radar somehow) but still. it doesn't even have artistic shock dimensions value - it's just creepycopy.
which has led me to wonder: what is it about genml tech specifically that makes this kind of bullshit the thing produced so frequently?
One answer perhaps would be that anyone who thinks AI art is good probably lacks the taste to appreciate anything beyond the generic, and the discernment to tell that it is submerged in the depths of uncanny valley. So you have a bunch of AI chuds sharing this creep shit without realising it’s creepy and that it looks terrible.
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Just found out from a screenshot in a tweet that Marc Aandreesen considers Nick Land to be some kind of patron saint of "techno-optimism". Setting aside Land's ugly views about everything... I didn't think optimism was what he was known for. More like grasping, desperate, disgusted embrace of the onward march of capital.
Nick Land (...) “techno-optimism”
His thing is literally called DARK ENLIGHTENMENT, fucking Final Fantasy villain level of grandiose menacing naming, how on earth would that be "optimism".
Marcee do you even like know who your idols are?
ChatGPT's new search feature hasn't even launched and already its shitting the bed
The sneers are writing themselves
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AP takes down CF Vance apologia, not asserting things that they cannot evidence (that Vance did not have sexual relations with that couch)
before: https://archive.is/fXiMc after: https://archive.is/j3aot
This is the journalistic integrity we expect of AP News
Not a sneer, but a mildly interesting open letter:
A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.
The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.
Personally, I don't expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people's wishes and avoid scraping shit without people's permission.
Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people's work, and the fact a lot of people's work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say "no", the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.
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after all this time, TIL that Roko pronounces his name "Rocko" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIwJDnej7pg
I'm not a native english speaker, how else was he supposed to pronounce it?
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Regarding that claimed breakthrough about AI winning the International Mathematical Olympiad: a reminder that a proof which hangs together logically is not necessarily a proof that makes sense.
Those formalized proofs are so incredibly ugly, it's amazing. Of course it doesn't much of a sensible indentation, but then there are single proof steps where I have no idea what it's even doing. [...] And then there are nonsense mathematical steps. The solution of problem 2 starts with induction, before introducing any variables. It applies induction to the number 12. And it write 12 as
(10)+2. Then it proceeds to do the whole proof in the base case of the induction, and notices that the induction step is trivial, since the goal is the same as the induction hypothesis (but instead of theassumptiontactic it usescongr 26).
Also, choice sneer in the comments:
AlphaProof is more "AlphaZero doing self play against Lean" and less "Gemeni reading human proofs"
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Let's see how long HN takes to ban yet another literal Nazi.
I'm pretty sure that if the community "takes out the trash" (i.e. downvotes to dead status[1]) the mods won't bother to ban the user.
[1] I happen to believe thta this is not sufficient to get rid of bad actors