Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Sengoku Strider]

They really have an obsession for attractive women, eh. I guess Fox News's casting decisions were pretty effective.... ... it's almost like they want to win or something........

It's not just that she's conventionally attractive, practically every woman in media is. It's that she's a particular kind of attractive.

Chicago Tribune: Swift an ‘Aryan goddess' to alt-right - Movement views pop singer as icon

Along with the memes, the Daily Stormer has become home to several pages of articles praising Swift that bear titles like “Taylor Swift, Avatar of European Imperialism” and “Aryan Goddess Taylor Swift: Nazi Avatar of the White European People.”

“Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry,” Anglin told Vice's Broadly. “Athena reborn. That's the most important thing.”

Columnist Milo Yiannopoulos explained in Breitbart that the alt-right thinks “Swift is covertly ‘red-pilled,' concealing her secret conservative values from the progressive music industry while issuing subtle nods to a reactionary fanbase.”

Needless to say, these already love-starved angry men were beyond heartbroken when she publicly came out as not-a-crypto-nazi.

[Sengoku Strider]

How am I supposed to find them if nobody is talking about them? GET IT TOGETHER AMERICA.



EDIT: Actually found the FOIA release page for this stuff. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate

WTF am I looking at here, Deep State?

Spoiler

[BryanM]

The Men Who Stare At Goats went deep into the weird avenues of our military. Chief among them our research into "warrior monks". Some of the goals were to confirm the ability to phase through walls (atoms are just mostly "empty space", so it should be possible, right?!) and being able to kill things by stopping their heart with telekinesis. Which is the titular "staring" in the title - you glare at the test subjects to try to make them die.

One general is on record as saying he got it to work, once.

Spoiler

On a gerbil.

Like other things that sound cute, like the Luftwaffe, baby furs, or sounding... the real world effects are nightmarish. You know those reports of prisoner torture by looping songs like Barney the Dinosaur's I Love You song for days at a time? Straight line, from those programs to your local outsourced torture chamber.


----

Also lol at stories about the Cybertruck (which isn't a truck!) "rusting". I just always kind of love these hideous things, they remind me of The Homer from that episode were Homer designs a car. I hate looking at it so much.

[Sengoku Strider]

Whelp, here we are. Trump lost his NY companies, he and his sons are barred from doing business there or getting a loan from any national bank that does business in NY, and he was fined some ~$350-odd million, which was after he received the $80 million judgement against him from E. Jean Carroll, which followed up the $5 million he had to pay her the first time.

And so, it has come to this.



Looking good, only a few hundred million and change left to go. Time for Gertrude in Peoria to dig under the couch cushions.

The Men Who Stare At Goats went deep into the weird avenues of our military. Chief among them our research into "warrior monks". Some of the goals were to confirm the ability to phase through walls (atoms are just mostly "empty space", so it should be possible, right?!) and being able to kill things by stopping their heart with telekinesis. Which is the titular "staring" in the title - you glare at the test subjects to try to make them die.

One general is on record as saying he got it to work, once.

Spoiler

On a gerbil.

Yeah, I saw the meme and thought it must refer to something more current than the old remote viewing and Scientology mind-bullets stuff.

Like other things that sound cute, like the Luftwaffe, baby furs, or sounding... the real world effects are nightmarish. You know those reports of prisoner torture by looping songs like Barney the Dinosaur's I Love You song for days at a time? Straight line, from those programs to your local outsourced torture chamber.

I don't, but I saw the season of Walking Dead where they do it and also the psycho cop in Oregon or something who was inspired to do the same. Something something cruel and unusual something something.

[Vanguard]

It's an 'ole classic republican trick, giving people a big one time bonus instead of a lasting raise.

Too bad a lasting raise isn't on the table. It would be if the voting public had any real power over policy, but we obviously don't.

[BryanM]

A news story of arming Ukraine with some drone swarms this year came out today. This would be a big force multiplier for their suicide drone pilots, the ideal of course being like in the Slaughterbots short speculative film. Some exciting times to come in the next few years.

In the meantime I pass the time arguing with people over the semantic meaning of the word "understand". I consider it to be a matter of degree and type, a fuzzy metric that can be improved, and has to be broken down into sub-metrics to be more precise. They demand something have a completely human-like mind before they'll use the word.

"Just" is another of those thought-terminating, hand wave cudgels people like to use. It does a lot of work. "A dentist just does dentistry!" All tasks are not equal in complexity, predicting the next token can be extremely easy to excruciatingly hard.

In the movie Ex Machina the dudebro boss makes a proto AGI by just scraping data off the internet. I thought it was silly at the time, I'm pretty big into simulation runs being important, but it's turned out more effective, with a higher ceiling, than I thought it would. Or almost anyone else did, either.



An excerpt from And Yet It Understands:

Spoiler

The other day I saw this Twitter thread. Briefly: GPT knows many human languages, InstructGPT is GPT plus some finetuning in English. Then they fed InstructGPT requests in some other human language, and it carries them out, following the English-language finetuning.

And I thought: so what? Isn’t this expected behaviour? Then a friend pointed out that this is only confusing if you think InstructGPT doesn’t understand concepts.

Because if GPT is just a Chinese room it shouldn’t be able to do this. A Chinese room might be capable of machine translation, or following instructions within one human language, but the task here is so self-evidently outside the training set, and so convoluted, that is requires genuine understanding. The task here involves:

Abstracting the English finetuning into concepts.
Abstracting the foreign-language requests into concepts.
Doing the “algebra” of the task at the conceptual level.
Mapping the results back down to the foreign language.

The mainstream, respectable view is this is not “real understanding”—a goal post currently moving at 0.8c—because understanding requires frames or symbols or logic or some other sad abstraction completely absent from real brains. But what physically realizable Chinese room can do this?

Every pair of token sequences can, in principle, be stored in a lookup table. You could, in principle, have a lookup table so vast any finite conversation with it would be indistinguishable from talking to a human, the Eliza of Babel. Just crank the n higher for a conversation lasting a time t. But it wouldn’t fit in the entire universe. And there is no compression scheme—other than general intelligence—that would make it fit. But GPT-3 masses next to nothing at 800GiB.

How is it so small, and yet capable of so much? Because it is forgetting irrelevant details. There is another term for this: abstraction. It is forming concepts. There comes a point in the performance to model size curve where the simpler hypothesis has to be that the model really does understand what it is saying, and we have clearly passed it.

[BulletMagnet]

Too bad a lasting raise isn't on the table.

Even if you disregard the recent and numerous state-level increases already on the books, assuming that 2024 resembles the past eight years it will be; of course, that doesn't matter at all, because it is not being proposed that we summarily execute every millionaire in the country and rain their ill-gotten wealth from solar-powered airplanes unto the masses.

As such, it stands to reason that supporting the people sponsoring bills like these, as opposed to those who openly advocate for eliminating not only any minimum wage but all workers' rights across the board, is, y'know, just pointlessly choosing whether you prefer to be stabbed or shot.

[Sengoku Strider]

A news story of arming Ukraine with some drone swarms this year came out today. This would be a big force multiplier for their suicide drone pilots, the ideal of course being like in the Slaughterbots short speculative film. Some exciting times to come in the next few years.

In the meantime I pass the time arguing with people over the semantic meaning of the word "understand". I consider it to be a matter of degree and type, a fuzzy metric that can be improved, and has to be broken down into sub-metrics to be more precise. They demand something have a completely human-like mind before they'll use the word.

"Just" is another of those thought-terminating, hand wave cudgels people like to use. It does a lot of work. "A dentist just does dentistry!" All tasks are not equal in complexity, predicting the next token can be extremely easy to excruciatingly hard.

In the movie Ex Machina the dudebro boss makes a proto AGI by just scraping data off the internet. I thought it was silly at the time, I'm pretty big into simulation runs being important, but it's turned out more effective, with a higher ceiling, than I thought it would. Or almost anyone else did, either.



An excerpt from And Yet It Understands:

Spoiler

The other day I saw this Twitter thread. Briefly: GPT knows many human languages, InstructGPT is GPT plus some finetuning in English. Then they fed InstructGPT requests in some other human language, and it carries them out, following the English-language finetuning.

And I thought: so what? Isn’t this expected behaviour? Then a friend pointed out that this is only confusing if you think InstructGPT doesn’t understand concepts.

Because if GPT is just a Chinese room it shouldn’t be able to do this. A Chinese room might be capable of machine translation, or following instructions within one human language, but the task here is so self-evidently outside the training set, and so convoluted, that is requires genuine understanding. The task here involves:

Abstracting the English finetuning into concepts.
Abstracting the foreign-language requests into concepts.
Doing the “algebra” of the task at the conceptual level.
Mapping the results back down to the foreign language.

The mainstream, respectable view is this is not “real understanding”—a goal post currently moving at 0.8c—because understanding requires frames or symbols or logic or some other sad abstraction completely absent from real brains. But what physically realizable Chinese room can do this?

Every pair of token sequences can, in principle, be stored in a lookup table. You could, in principle, have a lookup table so vast any finite conversation with it would be indistinguishable from talking to a human, the Eliza of Babel. Just crank the n higher for a conversation lasting a time t. But it wouldn’t fit in the entire universe. And there is no compression scheme—other than general intelligence—that would make it fit. But GPT-3 masses next to nothing at 800GiB.

How is it so small, and yet capable of so much? Because it is forgetting irrelevant details. There is another term for this: abstraction. It is forming concepts. There comes a point in the performance to model size curve where the simpler hypothesis has to be that the model really does understand what it is saying, and we have clearly passed it.

I think it's an interesting development, but also one that plays into the spirit of Searle's critique. Because I think the argument that "Well it looks exactly like understanding so what else could it be?" when there's still no legit model for g to begin with is kind of skipping a few steps.

[BulletMagnet]

And so, it has come to this.

The gold high tops, priced at $399 and featuring an American flag design, made their debut at the event he called “Sneaker Con” in Philadelphia

I always say "I have no idea how much more loudly he could mock his supporters", and always he manages to make me eat my words.

[BryanM]

I think it's an interesting development, but also one that plays into the spirit of Searle's critique. Because I think the argument that "Well it looks exactly like understanding so what else could it be?" when there's still no legit model for g to begin with is kind of skipping a few steps.

The matter of qualia does always turn into a useless ouroboros of faith and other navel-gazing. Solipsism is the only rational take, and even then your brain's probably lying to you. The illusion of continuity of self being a big one. I always think about people who've had a hemispherectomy and keep on trucking along.

(Slightly related is a meme in the AI safety crowd, where they note that other human's are shoggoths wearing masks, too. A difference between the two I suppose is the mechanistic interpretability people can stick a stick in there and trace a bit of what's really going on at a level that's pretty impossible to do with meat.)

The matter of "consciousness", well my definition is being a functional animal-like agent. It requires multiple faculties working together and overseeing one another, to form a less wrong model of reality. A slightly more perfect version of Plato's cave. The recent development of using AI of one kind of faculty to train another is a very low level of this. Like NVidia using an LM to train a hand how to twirl a pen; creating a training set for that would be impossible otherwise. (It's basically using vision to practice movement.) Children spend years developing their motor cortex, and they have the benefit of a big brain primed with billions of years of evolution behind them.

At some point it just all gets really silly and annoying. If you get to the point of a god computer, there's still going to be Chinese Room philosophers claiming it doesn't really "understand" anything and all you can do is slap them in the face with a fly-swatter.

I have a bit more sympathy for the crowd of people practicing the reverse of human chauvinism (after all, the way you or I prove we "understand" a specific thing is by demonstrating it with observable metrics. Seems a little unfair to hold rocks to a higher standard), the hippies already advocating for AI rights. There's a massively dark undertone to the idea these things will have subjective experience, and creating robot slaves that love being slaves is just one of the disturbing thoughts most people would rather not engage with.

But yeah, it's largely skub wars based on emotion. A lot of people are offended at the idea they're just ropes and pulleys with the interpretation of "you're just the weights stored in your synapses" and have to add duality and quantum effects and other sorcery in there. Maybe the brain is nothing more than a big network of input<->output modules that optimize to specific tasks. If we build AGI that works like that and it works nearly flawlessly, it's at least circumstantial evidence imo. (And better evidence than navel-gazing could ever produce. It's not like there isn't plenty of magic and wonder and crackpot woo to explore in the ropes-and-pulleys model of the mind.)

David Shapiro, a fun clown everyone likes to dunk on because he's a very silly man, made a good point about how much emotion is getting thrown around recently. Specifically regarding timelines - the estimates given by experts in the field have been plummeting in recent years. He notes that these estimates are more about when the guesser is comfortable with AGI arriving, than rational extrapolation of things like timelines of hardware doubling, capital investment into neuromorphic processing substrates, etc. (Everyone else is freaking out over Sora, a level of capability that was 100% expected this year if you weren't a potato, and here I am all alone with my eyeball on that paper that claims their team managed to turn graphene into a semi-conductor.)

The Grey point about flowers and butterflies is in full effect. Just tons of people losing their minds going into nerd spaces they'd never be caught dead in the last 40 years, to yell at the nerds and tell them that nothing will ever change, that they're a bunch of dumb cultists. ("Everyone who disagrees with me is in a cult.")

People... really hate change.

[Sima Tuna]

Too bad a lasting raise isn't on the table.

Even if you disregard the recent and numerous state-level increases already on the books, assuming that 2024 resembles the past eight years it will be; of course, that doesn't matter at all, because it is not being proposed that we summarily execute every millionaire in the country and rain their ill-gotten wealth from solar-powered airplanes unto the masses.

Well, part of the problem with these wage increases is that megacorporations still rule the day in America. While it's conceptually a good thing to increase the minimum wage closer to a living wage (note the actual living wage is something like $22,) corporations have so much power in this country that they can get around being forced to pay more. One way is replacing people with automation, which is happening more and more in the service industries. Another way is by outsourcing, which they have already been doing for the last 30+ years. A third way is to reduce the number of staff, period, and force the existing staff to do the work of the missing positions (they refuse to rehire) in addition to their own. Yet another move they have is the one they always use: pass the cost directly to consumers rather than reducing the payouts for their CEOs and top executives.

In a world with strong unions and a supportive government that prevents corporations from running roughshod over the citizenry, maybe all of these counter-moves could be stopped with legislation aimed at the major megacorps. Or maybe the unions could say, "no, motherfucker, you're not allowed to cut half your staff and force the remainder to do all the work, or else we'll ALL just strike." But we don't live in that world.

Spoiler

Not to say that I think unions are amazing, but in a capitalist society, much like with boycotts, it's really the only way you can make your voice be heard by these amoral colossi.

[BryanM]

Replacing everyone with robots is gonna really help labor's bargaining power~

Sam Altman once wrote an essay called Moore's Law For Everything where he posited we'd all be rich and the cost of everything would plummet into the dirt. More realistically, my jokes about elon cubes over the years are on the more optimistic spectrum of possibilities.

When labor has no value, and all value is determined by atoms and energy, well. You seem to have a few atoms in and around your general vicinity, you know...


For those who enjoy naval-gazing, the less wrong people started a channel where they have animated essays narrated by Robert Miles about things like asshole genies, instrumental convergence, grabby aliens, and the like. It's a bit more stimulating than chanting "Cheeto Mussolini" into a mirror nonstop like certain people have been doing for the past ten years...

[Sengoku Strider]

And so, it has come to this.

The gold high tops, priced at $399 and featuring an American flag design, made their debut at the event he called “Sneaker Con” in Philadelphia

I always say "I have no idea how much more loudly he could mock his supporters", and always he manages to make me eat my words.

Every time I think I've found rock bottom, I find a hilarious new sub-basement underneath that one.



True patriots know the shoes were just top secret comms from the top secret president though:



NO COINCIDENCES. None.

[BryanM]

See, anger pushes people away into the out-group, while comedy draws people into the in-group. Every sells guy knows that. Who could possibly hate a humble shoe salesmen? They're harmless.

The Vaush anime pr0n thing that made him out to be a hypocrite and had people going "what's in the folder?" reminded me of a similar moment here on our forum. This is one of those things that'd go on the wiki if we had one, but we don't so I have to pass on our history for the new kids to tell their kids one day:

Once upon a time a poster by the name of fighter17 posted a pic of his desktop. One of the files on it was named "Black Man.txt". Everyone was really curious about what was inside. Like Twiddle said, the journey would be more fun than the destination.

Unfortunately it seems like the posts that got him banned were deleted, I couldn't find anything too shocking from a skim.

On the upside, I found this thread's much less successful little brother. Had absolutely no memory of it.

Some memories of the election, though I wasn't invested in it once I saw Obama's Opensecrets page. Thought he was marginally better than Clinton, at the time. Romney's donors were something I used to give conservatives pause. In retrospect, those banks were just butt-mad that Citigroup had way more representation than them.

It is neat to note that these entities have since realized how bad the optics is to have their names on the top contributors list. So their bundlers funnel money to PACs I assume, and the individuals max out to the candidates directly...

[BulletMagnet]

Well, part of the problem with these wage increases is that megacorporations still rule the day in America.

This is true, but the overarching question I've been asking to this end is "to get bigger changes to happen should we consistently attempt to build on the smaller successes that are already happening, or pretend that such successes haven't happened while sitting on our hands and bitching that everything hasn't already been fixed by now?"

Once upon a time a poster by the name of fighter17 posted a pic of his desktop. One of the files on it was named "Black Man.txt".

My memory is hazy, but I thought it was a different member from way back when whose screengrab sparked that local meme...shoe, maybe?

[BryanM]

Lebanon war, eh..

My memory is hazy, but I thought it was a different member from way back when whose screengrab sparked that local meme...shoe, maybe?

Noooo, shoe's a good boy who loved turkeys and bacon too much, he ain't no race lord. If he could have controlled his urge to make new threads, he'd never have been banned.

... I don't know who posted the original screengrab, honestly. I did a search on the topic from your post here, and there's no obvious evidence. I'm not gonna scrape through every post fighter ever made just to conclude it's been deleted. The jpg twiddle reposted is gone like tears in the rain, since only imgur will bother hosting images for more than two seconds...

[Sengoku Strider]

New York, are you still there? This wasn't my screenshot so I can't confirm.



The secret Vice President is right though, not a word about this on Facebook.

[Sengoku Strider]

Today in grifting: You know you deeply respect your followers when you hide a mandatory 50% tip in the fine print of your $10 000 a plate cash-only fundraiser. Where you made people serve themselves at a salad bar and 'champale fountain.'

[Sima Tuna]

$5,000 CASH TIP?

Get absolutely fucked. Even for rich people standards, only the biggest fool in the world should fall for that.

[Sengoku Strider]

$5,000 CASH TIP?

I'm sure the MAGA salad bar comes with a guy who'll remind you that only giving the bare minimum mandatory 50% is for communist losers.

[orange808]

$5,000 CASH TIP?

Get absolutely fucked. Even for rich people standards, only the biggest fool in the world should fall for that.

And, our society says we have a meritocracy. Just check the bank accounts and you'll find our best and brightest, eh?

[BryanM]

The OpenAI Tiktok page should be amusing for another week or two. Sora was practically made for tiktok. (Shit, they've even got Will Smith Eating Spaghetti in real life, now..) There's still whinny goalpost movers complaining about where its flaws are, somehow still incapable of drawing a straight line from then to now into the future.

Even the ads to the kids are starting to get the message.

Something Athene said a year ago about the chatbots... how they predict one token ahead, and compared that to how we construct sentences one word at a time... I'm coming more around to the idea that another two or three doublings of scale, slap the word predictor together with a vision guy and a voice<->text module, and a motion optimizer... maybe that really would be sufficient for a janky proto-AGI. Something that really could do a lot of stuff.

It would make sense why they want $7 trillion and have been holding back on the Neo android reveal. With NPU's, they could have something really freaky in the range of ~$200k within a couple years. The model T of robots, and the price will only go down and the performance will only go up from there.

So maybe this is a good time to talk about one of the emerging weapons that will kill us all, that you won't see a big focus on from most humans. Because it's the kind of thing our monkey brains won't glom onto:

Batteries.

Fuckin' batteries.

As you know, the electricity to pull a car 300 miles can fit inside the palm of your hand. The trick is in building a cage to contain, charge, and unload that potential energy. We're a long way from the ideal, but. There's an emerging technology that should soon improve these things a good deal: Solid-state batteries. TLDR: they can, at best, store about four times as much juice for the same weight. Or you can cut weight and cost, or a mix of the two. Also they're far less likely to catch on fire, which is a small plus.

1x's Eve robot has a runtime of 4 hours. The range of the suicide drones being used in Ukraine right now is from 300 to 1000 kilometres.

We're starting to get to the point of the tech tree where supply lines can start to become less and less important; an army that runs 100% on electricity can be fueled by almost anything. Solar, fission, trees, the corpses of the foolish meat that got too uppity, etc. The dream being a fully mechanized military (and police force.. of course...) like in those Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation games.

And just like the usual difference between reality and fantasy, reality is going to be totally lame. Square-cube law says no giant t-rex robots that shoot missiles out of its mouth and lasers from its eyes. You're gonna get smol murder dawgs, tiny OGRE tanks, and killer bees, and you're gonna like it.

(At least the chihuahua-sized robots with handguns will be really really cute. Always look at the bright side of [s]death[/s] life!)

The backlash will be pretty fun to see. People are already lighting automated taxis on fire. There's always more to come~

[Sengoku Strider]

The backlash will be pretty fun to see. People are already lighting automated taxis on fire. There's always more to come~

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. Too many folks already don't process others as fully human. People are absolutely going to take any and all life frustrations out on this stuff, and let out their absolute darkest, nastiest sides on it.

[Sengoku Strider]

196 pages is my threshold for whether books matter. So driving me crazy or not, I am in.

[Sengoku Strider]

CPAC GAMING REPORT: If you didn't know republican conspiracy-themed pinball tables were a thing, Freedom Dawg Games has got what you need. They're showing the January 6 themed J6: Insurrection Pinball, the best/worst Visual Pinball mod yet, at CPAC:

Experience the truth around the events of Jan 6 through this full-sized playable digital pinball table!

Work through each Rally mode:

Stop the Steal
Fake News
Peaceful Protest
It’s a Setup
Babbitt Murder
Have Faith
Political Prisoners
Earn bonuses for Free Speech and Don’t Tread on Me. Aim to defeat Voter Fraud, Covid Lockdowns and the DC Gulag.

GIFs:

Spoiler

I'll stick with Last Gladiators for now, but if anyone has Visual Pinball this is free, so please let us know how it is.

[Rastan78]

Gotta light up pepper spray, bludgeon and trample a cop to get "PTSD" multiplier for big score. Hey kids, bloody insurrection is good family fun!

Edit: Oh sorry. That's actually the "peaceful protest bonus"

[Sengoku Strider]

Gotta light up pepper spray, bludgeon and trample a cop to get "PTSD" multiplier for big score. Hey kids, bloody insurrection is good family fun!

Edit: Oh sorry. That's actually the "peaceful protest bonus"

You have to get that and the Truth Multiplier so you can defeat the DC Gulag.

Presumably to build a new, bigger Trump™ brand gulag:

Posobiec, who helped popularize the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, appeared at CPAC’s opening day on Wednesday. He spoke during a panel moderated by former White House adviser and white supremacist Steve Bannon.

“Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely,” Posobiec said as the event began.

“We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this, right here,” he said, gesturing to the crowd and holding up his fist.

As he spoke, Bannon laughed and said, “Amen!”

Posobiec then said, to cheers from the audience, “All glory is not to government. All glory to God.”

CPAC 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.



I'm ready for Steve Bannon vs the Fantastic Four now though.

[orange808]

We 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.

[Sima Tuna]

That Fantastic Four comic is more a case of art imitating life rather than the reverse. Villains like the Hate-monger are very thinly-veiled references to the KKK and other anti-foreigner groups which were very much still alive at the time of the comic's publication.

It shouldn't be surprising if we (the country's discourse, not me personally lmao) sometimes revert back to a previous age in our social politics. I don't think a culture ever outgrows anti-foreigner bigotry. Sadly.

[BryanM]

CPAC 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.

We 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.