swlabr

joined 2 years ago
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 27 minutes ago

Yahtzee, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I stumbled onto that vid a while back, watched the first minute or so, lol'ed at the glazing of kokotajlo, and stopped the vid. I did think about posting it here to be torn apart but forgot about it. I watched a little bit further and got "they chose to write this as a narrative" of course they fucking did. It's their one thing. Write a shitty 10k word story that amounts to some combination of "really makes you think" and "big if true".

Here's a story: Once upon a time there was a world. In it people were sad. Then one day swlabr was elected supreme benevolent ruler and then nobody was sad again :) the end. Wow make u think. Many experts agree

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

but maybe I’m being too picky?

This is something I’ve been thinking about. There’s a lot of dialogue about “purity” and “purity tests” and “reading the room” in the more general political milieu. I think it’s fine to be picky in this context, because how else will your opinion be heard, let alone advocated for?

Like, there’s a time and place for consensus. Consensus often comes from people expressing their opinions and reaching a compromise, and rarely from people coming in already agreeing.

So wrt this particular example, it’s totally fine to be critical and picky. If you were discussing this in the forum where this letter was written, it probably wouldn’t be ok.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

hi, I’m Misa! — uh, Ani

this is Jar Jar Binks coded btw

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

God forbid a woman has hobbies

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

“What’s the difference between these two things that I refuse to see a difference between because thinking hurts my tummy”

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Ah yes, stochastic terrorists famously do not self-radicalise by nestling deeper into extremist spaces, AI definitely doesn’t do that by design, and AI companies have famously been good at detecting when people have gone off the deep end and need some form of intervention. So we should definitely give Sam Altman the keys to the golden panopticon

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

I’m not saying you are wrong about anything in particular. Just I think you would be surprised how similar your words are to what was uttered in good faith by many well meaning people over a wide variety of times and places, over things that later were mostly forgotten.

Checkmate, atheists

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

I swear to god if yud goes on conan needs a friend (who recently interviewed a freshly minted riyadh comedy festival alum bill burr) i will unplug from this simulation

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

You can get a mod to insert Weyland-Yutani cells, after a short incubation period you'll see a real burst of improvement.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

I think you could only really faithfully adapt the really dramatic arguments. Like ones with real world consequences. Closest thing I can think of is probably the saga of Nicole Shanahan, Musk, and Brin. RFK Jr also shows up in this story.

Otherwise you’d just make gimmicks based off of internet archetypes. Keyboard Warrior, White Knight, etc.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Fair! Since you’re coming in with lotr references, maybe pumpkinware. Named after the pumpkin in one of the endings of PJ’s RotK where the hobbits are in a pub and everyone else is impressed with the large pumpkin, oblivious to what the present could have been.

Also, in order to grow a large pumpkin, you probably gotta ignore/prune all other pumpkins and just feed the one growing. So there’s that too.

 

Hi folks, another shitty story from the slop-pocalypse ((AI-)slopalypse?).

Archive link

Article from billboard, archive

NB: I think this story is bullshit. I imagine some parts are true, but there's no concrete source given for the "$3 million" figure. So it's my speculation that this story is hype cooked up by Suno (the AI company enabling this all) and thrown at publishers for an easy headline. Also the human behind this has their name spelled differently in the two articles, so clearly some quality journalism is happening.

 

originally posted to the stubsack but it makes more sense as a top level post.

 

(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."

 

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

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months 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.

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