“So, professor sir, are you OK with psychologically torturing Black people, or do you just not care?”

The “simulation hypothesis” is an ego flex for men who want God to look like them.

I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.

From the Wired story:

As a comparison, Cui cited another analysis that GPTZero ran on Wikipedia earlier this year, which estimated that around one in 20 articles on the site are likely AI-generated—about half the frequency of the posts GPTZero looked at on Substack.

That should be one in 20 new articles, per the story they cite, which is ultimately based on arXiv:2410.08044.

David Skilling, a sports agency CEO who runs the popular soccer newsletter Original Football (over 630,000 subscribers), told WIRED he sees AI as a substitute editor. “I proudly use modern tools for productivity in my businesses,” says Skilling.

Babe wake up, a new insufferable prick just dropped.

Edit to add: There’s an interesting example here of a dubious claim being laundered into truthiness. That arXiv preprint says this in the conclusion section.

Shao et al. (2024) have even designed a retrieval-based LLM workflow for writing Wikipedia-like articles and gathered perspectives from experienced Wikipedia editors on using it—the editors unanimously agreed that it would be helpful in their pre-writing stage.

But if we dig up arXiv:2402.14207, we find that the “unanimous” agreement depends upon lumping together “somewhat” and “strongly agree” on their Likert scale. Moreover, this grand claim rests upon a survey of a grand total of ten people. Ten people, we hasten to add, who agreed to the study in the first place, practically guaranteeing a response bias against those Wikipedians who find “AI” morally repugnant.

shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.gif

Breaking news: “AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably”!

Or, you know, not.

If you find yourself saying

There isn’t a single good term in English for people who are post-pubertal but below the legal age of consent or majority

you may already be morally diseased.

My own final project was a parody of the IMDb that was “what if the IMDb was about books instead of movies”, except that the user reviews told stories about people who turned out to have all gone to high school together before scattering around the world, and reading them in the right sequence unlocked a finale in which they reunited for a New Year’s party and their world dissolved so that their author could repurpose them for other stories.

Senior year of college, I took an elective seminar on interactive fiction. For the final project, one of my classmates wrote a program that scraped a LiveJournal and converted it into a text adventure game.

“I was somewhere in the middle of your mother last night, Trebek!”

Serious data might not be available for months. For comparison, the Pew Research Center didn’t come out with their numbers for the 2020 election until June 2021. Who knows? The country might burn down before next summer.

here’s a matt yglesias article on the ordeal that i think is pretty even-handed

eat a dick

Good change, I think, but maybe “alleviate” is too weak a word when combined with “promises”. I feel like the claptrap that influencers are selling would be better captured by a more emphatic line, like “magic away writer’s block” or “make writer’s block go poof”.

Not enough for the presidential race, sadly; perhaps enough to scrape by with a few Senate victories.

Those are the actors who played Duncan Idaho in the David Lynch adaptation and in the two Syfy miniseries. So, yeah, it’s not wrong, just incomplete — though I have no idea why it only serves up those three. There’s certainly no limitation to three images, as can be verified by searching for “Sherlock Holmes actor” or the like.

Even the AI summary is quite good

insta-block

The level of fucked we are is too big for words

I wanted to say something darkly comedic about the AI bubble popping under the new regime, but my heart is too sick to make a joke

My sense growing up in Huntsville was that the airport ads for defense contractors were kind of like, e.g., Exxon sponsoring a pavilion at EPCOT. The intent wasn’t to push any specific consumer towards buying any specific product, but to pump out a positive image for the company generally.

And a lot of those contractors’ people fly through Huntsville on business. (For those not in the know: The airport is just down the highway from Redstone Arsenal, which is where we brought all them Nazis we recruited to help us beat the Commies to the Moon. The only reason Huntsville exists as more than a sleepy/dying cotton mill town is the space program and missile warfare.) There may well be deals along the lines of “advertise here and your people get the cushy lounge”.

“I have been unfailingly polite, and [your lemmy instance has] been nothing but rude.”

eigenrobot:

almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.