ebu

i went and bought it, and yup, the revisited version is the one i was thinking of. time to walk around inside a picture of Sam Altman so i can absorb his raw intellect and business acumen

goddammit! you have no idea how many variations of "first person walking simulator projected image texture trippy visuals" i slapped into every search engine!

but yes, that was the one i was thinking of

yeah, that "most of the internet will be Al-generated" nonsense is tanking my ability to take them as domain experts seriously.

still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you're-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples

maybe i'm a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there weren't armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gaming... if you look at this "game" as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging

it reminds me of other "games" like Marian Kleineberg's Wave Function Collapse and Bananaft's Yedoma Globula. there's one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i don't recall the name

because it encodes semantics.

if it really did so, performance wouldn't swing up or down when you change syntactic or symbolic elements of problems. the only information encoded is language-statistical

oh gods they're multiplying

"blame the person, not the tools" doesn't work when the tools' marketing team is explicitly touting said tool as a panacea for all problems. on the micro scale, sure, the wedding planner is at fault, but if you zoom out even a tiny bit it's pretty obvious what enabled them to fuck up for as long and as hard as they did

there were bits and pieces that made me feel like Jon Evans was being a tad too sympathetic to Elizer and others whose track record really should warrant a somewhat greater degree of scepticism than he shows, but i had to tap out at this paragraph from chapter 6:

Scott Alexander is a Bay Area psychiatrist and a writer capable of absolutely magnificent, incisive, soulwrenching work ... with whom I often strongly disagree. Some of his arguments are truly illuminatory; some betray the intellectual side-stepping of a very smart person engaged in rationalization and/or unwillingness to accept the rest of the world will not adopt their worldview. (Many of his critics, unfortunately, are inferior writers who misunderstand his work, and furthermore suggest it’s written in bad faith, which I think is wholly incorrect.) But in fairness 90+% of humanity engages in such rationalization without even worrying about it. Alexander does, and challenges his own beliefs more than most.

the fact that Jon praises Scott's half-baked, anecdote-riddled, Red/Blue/Gray trichotomy as "incisive" (for playing the hits to his audience), and his appraisal of the meandering transhumanist non-sequitur reading of Allen Ginsberg's Howl as "soulwrenching" really threw me for a loop.

and then the later description of that ultimately rather banal New York Times piece as "long and bad" (a hilariously hypocritical set of adjectives for a self-proclaimed fan of some of Scott's work to use), and the slamming of Elizabeth Sandifer as being a "inferior writer who misunderstands Scott's work", for uh, correctly analyzing Scott's tendencies to espouse and enable white supremacist and sexist rhetoric... yeah it pretty much tanks my ability to take what Jon is writing at face value.

i don't get how after so many words being gentle but firm about Elizer's (lack of) accomplishments does he put out such a full-throated defense of Scott Alexander (and the subsequent smearing of his """enemies"""). of all people, why him?

I didn't read the post at all

rather refreshing to have someone come out and just say it. thank you for the chuckle

they really are just sitting around the campfire telling the exact same shitty spooky story, back and forth, forever, aren't they

I don't think emojis should be the place to have a socio-political discussion.

have some entirely non-political emojis:

🗳️: BALLOT BOX WITH BALLOT

🇹🇼: FLAG: TAIWAN

🇵🇸: FLAG: PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

🗽: STATUE OF LIBERTY

🤡: FACE OF "NON-POLITICAL" PERSON

"rat furry" :3

"(it's short for rationalist)" >:(