according to modern film scholars, this cultural shift was brought about by the lasting audience impact of that scene in Speed (1994) where the bus fucking noclips across a gap while pretending there’s a ramp it’s using to jump (or Keanu made it pop a wheelie?)
no, nobody here is particularly shocked that fascists would lie about being socialists
I stumbled upon this response blog post to people missing the point of Lena and it’s perfect:
Oh boy, what if there was a maligned sector of human society whose members were for some reason considered less than human? What if they were less visible than most people, or invisible, and were exploited and abused, and had little ability to exercise their rights or even make their plight known?
That's real! That actually happens! You can name four groups of people matching that description without even thinking. We don't need to add some manufactured debate about fictitious, magical uploads to these real scenarios. They are already terrible!
and now I’m trying to brainstorm ways to slip a link to awful.systems into qntm’s inbox that don’t look insane
featuring a strong recommendation from @cstross@wandering.shop:
"[D]elivers a refreshing dose of existential despair at the transhuman condition." — Charles Stross
this is making me want print copies of everything, and I haven’t even dug in past Lena yet
somehow I hadn’t read Lena before, and I really like it! this is the style of fiction I’d love to write, if I had time to write fiction.
they phrase it so your brain will think otherwise, but I just want to point out the maybe obvious so nobody else has to do a double-take at the quoted paragraphs:
their example of what an ultra-intelligent AGI could do is of a human speedrunner using a glitch to beat Minecraft in 20 seconds. this asshole is taking something humans are excellent at and saying “but what if AI could do this, and also what if Minecraft was real life?” this is literal baby shit. like, even tool-assisted speedruns are the product of a shitload of human research into the problem space, and the tool’s just executing impossibly precise game inputs programmed, again, by a human. this is another space where AI sucks compared with regular human effort.
and speaking of which, does anyone remember the early OpenAI and Google marketing where they had an LLM play pac-man or some shit at supposedly superhuman levels? can anyone dig up an outcome for any of those in the form of a record on any credible speedrunning site or during an event? cause speedrunning has a ton of categories including stuff like dog-assisted runs, where you train your dog to play the game, and it’s all considered valid as different forms of skill applied to the game. the one thing you can’t do is cheat, and they’re very good at verifying runs (ie, you must be provably using the method you claim, and you can’t splice video together or use emulator cheats to achieve a better run). so where’s the verified LLM speedrun records?
deleting your stupid fucking debatebro tantrum won’t save your posting privileges when you piss off everyone who actually posts here
there’s a direct line from SA not explicitly banning ironic naziism to anime nazis being everywhere and I fucking hate it
that is true! usually these assholes set things up so the communities they founded collapse when they leave (and from what I’ve heard that almost happened to SA) so I’m glad they’re flourishing within their niche without said asshole parasocially positioned at the helm. I really should re-include the forums in the list of places I visit when I’m bored.
one of the follies of the early non-research internet was that the folks in charge of the more influential communities (Something Awful comes to mind) all tended to be weird fucking libertarian assholes insisting that debating fascists in a “free and fair environment” (whatever that is) must be a good thing, we can’t just ban them on sight for some reason. generally these weird libertarian assholes were motivated by typical weird libertarian asshole things — greed, or being fascists themselves.
and all of these horseshit policies around not banning fascists ended in complete disaster for those communities and those libertarian shitheads (SA again), but somehow they’re practically the only element of those early communities that carried over to the modern internet, likely because caring about community quality doesn’t make money, but pandering to nazi fuckwits does.
it probably goes without saying, but I take the apparently radical stance that nobody needs to interact with fascists and assholes and I won’t give their bullshit transit on any system I control. it’s always been surprising to me how many sysops consider “kick out the fucking fascists” an unworkable policy when it’s very easy to implement — it only gets hard when you allow the worst fucking people you know to gain a foothold.
it’s a fucking tragedy what techbros, fascists, and gurus have done to the perception of what a trip even is. there’s this hilariously toxic idea that a trip must have utility or else you’ve wasted your time and material; these people will gatekeep and control how you process what should be a highly personal experience, because that gives them a subtle but powerful amount of influence over what you’ll take back from your trip. the Silicon Valley/TESCREAL crowd have even ritualized bad set and setting so much that they don’t need a guru personally present in order to have a bad fucking time.
the damage these fucking fools have done is difficult to quantify, largely because psychedelic research is either banned or firmly in the hands of those very same fucking fools. it’s very important to them that you don’t use your temporarily jailbroken neocortex for your own purposes; that you never imagine a world where they don’t matter.
no, programming.dev, let’s fucking not