swlabr

joined 2 years ago
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 4 hours ago

Ah yes show me a senior engineer that writes tests for their intern’s code. So productive. Much ROI

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Fractal sneer!!! I’m spinning out reading this. Every fucking pixel of this is cursed

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 8 hours ago

tbh I've always read OFC as just "OF Course". Dunno why I never thought there'd be fucking in there.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

as has been said since time immemorial, lurk moar

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

Cars looks better than any AI slop, tho that’s a low bar.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago

Studio executives, the people who seek to monetise every aspect of creativity, as if they cannot appreciate or see the intangible value of art that is uncorrupted by commerce? Hard to say if they have aphantasia. No way to tell

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

Also: if it were possible to create a shot for much cheaper, what is the point of a studio?

My understanding is that you never make a movie with your own money because A. it’s expensive and B. you will probably make a loss, so you go to studios to try sell the film. They also understand A. and B., but they can use that as leverage against you for owning various rights of your production, in case it goes well, and otherwise to tie you down with contracts so they can force you to do their bidding. Making film production cheaper weakens the power of studios- the only card they’ll have to play is distribution, which is dying anyway thanks to the streaming ghouls.

 

(Archive)

Tickled pink that BI has decided to platform the AI safety chuds. OFC, the more probable reason of “more dosh” gets mentioned, but most of the article is about how Anthropic is more receptive to addressing AI safety and alignment.

 

Burns said the driving force behind the Runway deal was to allow filmmakers to “make movies and television shows we’d otherwise never make. We can’t make it for $100 million, but we’d make it for $50 million because of AI… We’re banging around the art of the possible. Let’s try some stuff, see what sticks.”

read: "I huffed my own farts and passed out. This gave me a dream where we made a film via promptfondling. I decided that I'll make a press release with made up numbers based on that dream."

As reported by New York Magazine: “With a library as large as Lionsgate’s, they could use Runway to repackage and resell what the studio already owned, adjusting tone, format and rating to generate a softer cut for a younger audience or convert a live-action film into a cartoon.”

read: "There's no need to do requels like disney does. The serfs will gobble the slop and they'll like it. After all, why risk creating new jobs or any creative output when we could just melt the ice caps instead?"

As for another example of how the studio can use AI, Burns said to consider this scenario: “We have this movie we’re trying to decide whether to green-light. There’s a 10-second shot — 10,000 soldiers on a hillside with a bunch of horses in a snowstorm.” Using Runaway’s AI technology, the studio can avoid a pricy film shoot that would cost millions and take a few days and use AI to create the shot for about $10,000.

read: "Here's a bottle of my farts. Smell it. Feeling dizzy? Good. Now imagine a scenario where you're looking at your bank account, and instead of number go down, number go up. Isn't that nice? Have another whiff."

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

stop it, get some help.pdf

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Agree 1000%. I don’t want to read into Johnson’s comments (not enough context from the article). That being said, he is only about two degrees separated from TESCREAL: the wife of his frequent collaborator JGL is Tasha McCauley, a former board member of OpenAI. JGL himself has spoken at EA events, and is reportedly directing an “AI thriller” for Johnson’s production company. My guess is that he isn’t surrounded by AI-critical people, which sucks, and would explain the lack of acknowledgement of the slop vortex on his part.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Followup to this bit of news: 'Natasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI "hybrid" movie'

Link to interview: (variety) (archive)

relevant section from interview:

As the second season of “Poker Face” trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled “Uncanny Valley,” the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an “ethical” model trained only on copyright-cleared data.

“It’s all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a “generative AI movie” but uses tools for things like set extensions.

When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.

“It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” says Lyonne. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”

“I’ve never been inside of one of those before,” Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. “It’s scary in there, if anyone’s wondering. It’s not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.”

She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of “Star Wars” fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive “Last Jedi.” His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before they’re even made, “any great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,” he says. “Anything great is created in a bubble. If it weren’t, it would never make it past the gestation period.”

 

Take that, Saltman! Bet you never thought it was possible!

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
 

Original Title: Elizabeth Holmes’s Partner Has a New Blood-Testing Start-Up

Billy Evans has two children with the Theranos founder, who is in prison for fraud. He’s now trying to raise money for a testing company that promises “human health optimization.”

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/business/elizabeth-holmes-partner-blood-testing-startup.html

 

Original NYT title: Billionaire Airbnb Co-Founder Is Said to Take Role in Musk’s Government Initiative

 

Original link

OFC if there were any real sense or justice in the world, LLMs would be banned outright.

 

No link given because it's all over the news. If you ask for proof you're going to have to eat my ass.

A lot of people are going to say it wasn't intended as a Nazi salute, and to that, I say: it doesn't matter. Was it a dog whistle? A variation of a Nazi salute from a South African neo-nazi party? Or just the vanilla salute? Such pontification is a waste of time. Fokker is a Nazi; you didn't need to see him salute. To all the regulars here, Musk being a Nazi is just an axiom of his whole deal. I mean, it's not called technofascism for nothing.

 

Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.

 

original link

“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”

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