Sengoku Strider wrote: ↑Fri Feb 23, 2024 8:00 pmCPAC is getting fucking wild, man. I didn't even believe Americans would really buy into this stuff when I read villains doing it in comic books as a kid.
Yeah, we must've been some sheltered kids. All those authors were doing were writing things that happened in the present and the past.
Unlike the writers at The Onion, who were writing about things that would happen in the near future.
orange808 wrote: ↑Fri Feb 23, 2024 9:50 pmWe are definitely in a new era. The first thing I do when I see a comic image is count fingers and look for extra limbs.
Tsk tsk. You're about six months behind, so it's time to update your world models.
You can still find some temporal wonkiness in video output, but images?
Pretty much impossible to tell, or right on the line.
This one is exploding some minds. Not normie minds, but you know. The normie would think "so it gave him what he asked for, big deal." The gigachad brain-haver would respond "YES, IT IS A BIG DEAL!"
The genie can't give you what you've asked for, unless it
understands.
As a reminder, back when this thread launched in 2015, I was quite impressed with this GAN that made
decent looking flowers and birds after seeing it featured in a Two Minute Papers episode. About a year later we had ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com.
Extend the line for another ten years, and maybe jackup the rate of ascent if you think capital will finally invest seriously into NPU's.
OpenAI and 1x seem to be poised to demo their Neo android in a few weeks. I don't think it'll be the Model T of robots, not enough compute scale for that if they're not using a rack of NPU's, but their website has claimed "jogging" as a capability. In a human-shaped body, not one of those weird hopping digitigrade things. If it's even close to smooth, they're going to get so much fucking money from capital investers.
Reminder of
the DARPA robotics challenge, also last held in 2015.
I don't think a culture ever outgrows anti-foreigner bigotry.
Maybe in gay space communism land. I thought about that from one of Strider's posts a while back, I'll dig into the archives and reply to it...
When I saw the footage of that, the first thing I thought of was the scene from the beginning of Blade Runner 2049 where everybody is hurling abuse on Ryan Gosling's replicant as he walks home and he's designed to just passively take it.
Butlerian jihads are a popular trope. That one series I keep telling everyone to watch, Time of Eve, had one as a backdrop. A series about humans and robots sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee and talking about their
feelings. It's a good detox from all the dark mirror shit we're saturated with.
Of course in the real world, when you pit
Feelings versus Lasers, the lasers usually win.
In the 5th grade my teacher was talking about how bronze beats copper. Steel beats bronze. Guns beat swords, etc. And he asked us the question: what beats guns? The responses were as you'd expect: tanks, planes, bombs, atomic bombs even. He was like "nope!" "well, what is it, teach?" And he smugly says he says: "love."
That anti-climax flopped pretty badly. 30 years later, I'm more certain than ever that tanks beat guns. They put an end to trench warfare, after all. (And I don't see this "love" thing putting a stop to the genocide we're supporting, either. I guess Hillary calling for a bigger ocean of dead babies makes me very secure that my absolute loathing for her is the most ethical thing a normal human could feel. And that hate seems a lot more powerful than whatever "love" is supposed to accomplish.)
Anyway, one of the horror memes I've been spreading is the idea of post-humanity arising from breeding with robots. The possibility of doing so with ones shaped like cartoon characters, like Jessica Rabbit or Elmer Fudd, is the thing of absolute nightmares now... but after a couple generations of context drift, would be totally "normal".
All this made me think of the BBC sex documentary series, and one episode called "Guys and Dolls". Some of
the saddest men on the planet. One of the subjects was this.... fellow, we'll say... when I saw him, I was throughly impressed. This guy..... was the weebiest weeb my weeby brain could weebly imagine, ever. Gigguk? Sora the Troll?
NORMIES. This guy is literally the emperor of weebs. If you want to feel better about your life, go take a look at him and pat yourself on the back for not doing
that bad.
All of this essay is to say:
What if the problem isn't with him, though? What if the problem is with the rest of us? And our feeble 60% or less weeby ways? Maybe this guy.
Maybe he's ahead of the times. Maybe everyone will be free to take off their masks and be their true selves, if their literal survival wasn't so completely dependent on being accepted by the tribe.
And that's my ad for The Culture novel series.