swlabr

Philly, where robots go to die

>50 min read  
>”why company has perverse incentives”
>no mention of capitalism

rationalism.mpeg

I saw a real stupid post (reposted on the sneersub, I think) about how all the people wanting OpenAI to reinstate o4 after GPT5 was released were soldiers converted by o4, and that o4 had achieved the superpersuasiveness that Yud froths over. Good to know that a pair of googly eyes probably has the same level of persuasiveness.

dicks out for harambe

but I’m not sure I can connect the defacement of a little trashcan with some broad rejection of the liberal status quo.

Well, it’s a metaphor, you see. It’s a comparison, not a direct connection.

we’re talking about a culture that delighted in breaking this stupid thing that wasn’t hurting anybody, and then that culture elected Trump.

Well, that’s just a very first order way of looking at it. I’m not saying “the US is filled with meanies, it killed a robot, of course it elected Trump!”, I’m saying: “Hitchbot was shattered and a collective fantasy was ended. This mirrors how Trump was elected, which shattered liberal fantasies about the US, the west, and the state of politics around the world in general.”

Yes, it’s funny that this happened in the US, and even funnier that it was in Philly. That has nothing to do with the metaphor. Hitchbot could have died anywhere, people would have mourned it, and it would still be an appropriate analogy. Try process that 🙂

But I realized it was just… fucking… music… I could ignore it

I feel another microcosm brewing…

well duh if you break down an analogy it breaks down dawg.

I think dgerard has hit upon a microcosm with this post. I’ve half joked about it elsewhere but this project of collective fun and whimsy and its fate is a crystallization of the life of liberal optimism from early 2015 onward. Hillary was predicted to win, Marvel movies hadn’t majorly fallen out of favor yet, and most people weren’t hip to the tech industry being the sociopathic behemoth that it always has been. But then, as we know, all that rosy-cute whimsy was shot to shreds like a Cincinnati gorilla.

Look where we are today. Canada and Europe are also facing the rising tide of fascism. Western governments are still by and large facilitating a genocide through Israel. That the author, probably not some scholar of geopolitics, had the wisdom in 2015 that liberal optimism was a pile of garbage should be lauded.

Kind of tangential to the sneer sphere. TIL about the Gayfemboy malware

If Hillary were president HitchBot would still be alive

E: followup, from wikipedia:

Smith and Zeller recreated their invention as hitchBOT 2.0 in 2019. The robot was sent to Paris, France, where it was touring about and appearing in a play, Killing Robots, by Linda Blanchet. That tour was put on hold indefinitely due to COVID-19.

As a metaphor for liberal fantasy and optimism, hitchbot was doomed to die, one way or another.

Providing a cathartic release for some pissed-off Eagles fan is the closest it has ever come to usefulness.

They should have covered hitchbot in grease.

To summarise:

1. Author recounts shitty conversations that men have where they objectify women
2. Author thinks about women that are "known quantities" of conventionally attractive, and says they are "only as attractive as the pretty women one meets in real life," and attributes the difference to things like makeup, posing, photography etc.
3. Author refuses to comment on why men have conversations mentioned in 1. (basically just perpetuating the amirite guys? chauvinism)
4. Author proceeds to speculate on why women talk about other women's appearance.

This is just a LWer's version of a shitty greentext ending with "why are women like this?"

E: sorry for necroposting, this came up somehow and I didn't check which sack it was under.

Show me a snippet of nonsense code or image and I’ll nod along if you say it’s good.

Smirk I’m in.

This is Uzumaki by Junji Ito but computers and stupid