This is a moronic take.

It’s just a capital gains tax

Console yourself with the fact that its 90% bots at this point.

Anti-intellectualism isn’t real. Same for misinformation.

There’s a kernel of truth to this. People aren’t “anti-intellectual” in the broad sense, they’re biased to a certain worldview or partisan to an ideological lens. You can get liberals and conservatives to agree on quite a bit if you just channel the message through a trustworthy proxy. You can get them to split by making them watch Crossfire for an hour a day.

Vaccination is a great example of this in action. Big church groups that value being able to meet in public do a 180 on the jab when they see the impact a disease has on its congregation. Meanwhile, woo-woo liberals living in heavily insulated suburban communities can get very cavalier about vaccination when they hear an Oprah spokesperson claim it impacts their childrens’ academic performance.

I remember when COVID first hit and we got an earful about needing to conserve medical masks. “Don’t bother wearing them, just socially distance, they don’t really help” was a thing we initially got from liberals. Conservatives were masked up and liberals weren’t. And then the zietgeist flipped and it was liberals clutching them while conservatives were tearing at the gazy discount paper covers screaming “I can’t breath! I can’t breath!”

What we like to call “anti-intellectualism” is, at its heart, a trust issue. Which professionals do you consider credible? Which personal experiences inform your worldview? What do you value - personal safety? financial success? self-expression? religious dogma?

If you’re living in a country that functionally eliminated measles 30 years ago, you can get pretty fair on herd immunity and never have to see your beliefs challenged. Then, when your bubble is breached by the outside world, all those warnings about Diseased Immigrants ruining your pocket paradise are reinforced by the same crop of reactionary news shows and fascist politicians who raised you.

The important thing isn’t that your kids don’t see porn, it’s that they feel the requisite amount of shame and never talk to you about their sexuality.

Also, it’s one more thing we can criminalize in a surveillance state. So now we can more easily extort horny people with fines and prison if we feel the need

This is just the whole robot sandwich thing to me.

If home kitchens were being replaced by pre-filled Automats, I’d be equally repulsed.

A tool is a tool. Fools may not use them well, but someone who understands how to properly use a tool can get great things out of it.

The most expert craftsman won’t get a round peg to fit into a square hole without doing some damage. At some point, you need to understand what the tool is useful for. And the danger of LLMs boils down to the seeming industrial scale willingness to sacrifice quality for expediency and defend the choice in the name of business profit.

Doesn’t anybody remember how internet search was in the early days? How you had to craft very specific searches to get something you actually wanted?

Internet search was as much constrained by what was online as what you entered in the prompt. You might ask for a horse and get a hundred different Palominos when you wanted a Clydesdale, not realizing the need to be specific. But you’re never going to find a picture of a Vermont Morgan horse if nobody bothered to snap a photo and host it where a crawler could find it.

Taken to the next level with LLMs, you’re never going to infer a Vermont Morgan if it isn’t in the training data. You’re never going to even think to look for one, if the LLM hasn’t bothered to index it properly. And because these AI engines are constantly eating their own tails, what you get is a basket of horses that are inferred between a Palomino and a Clydesdale, sucked back into training data, and inferred in between a Palomino and a Palomino-Clydesdale, and sucked back into the training data, and, and, and…

I think artists could use gen AI to make more good art than ever

I don’t think using an increasingly elaborate and sophisticated crutch will teach you to sprint faster than Hussein Bolt. Removing steps in the artistic process and relying on glorified Clipart Catalogs will not improve your output. It will speed up your output and meet some minimum viable standard for release. But the goal of that process is to remove human involvement, not improve human involvement.

I will say, gen AI seems to be the only way to combat the insane BEC attacks we have today.

Which is great. Love to use algorithmic defenses to combat algorithmic attacks.

But that’s a completely different problem than using inference to generate art assets.

Isekai but you just reincarnated as another kid who lives down the street and then your old self and new self become best friends.

You know it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, right?

Part of the “magic” of AI is how much of the design process gets hijacked by inference. At some scale you simply don’t have control of your own product anymore. What is normally a process of building up an asset by layers becomes flattened blobs you need to meticulously deconstruct and reconstruct if you want them to not look like total shit.

That’s a big part of the reason why “AI slop” looks so bad. Inference is fundamentally not how people create complex and delicate art pieces. It’s like constructing a house by starting with the paint job and ending with the framing lumber, then asking an architect to fix where you fucked up.

If you don’t like them, you can just chuck them in the trash and you won’t have wasted the work of an artist

If you engineer your art department to start with verbal prompts rather than sketches and rough drawings, you’re handcuffing yourself to the heuristics of your AI dataset. It doesn’t matter that you can throw away what you don’t like. It matters that you’re preemptively limiting yourself to what you’ll eventually approve.

…Now, if they ship slop into the final game

At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.

I can see legitimate frustration with an industry that seems reliant on increasingly generic and interchangeable assets. AI just becomes the next iteration of this problem. You’ve expanded the warehouse of prefab images, but you’re still stuck with end products that are uncannily similar to everything else on the market.

And that’s before you get to the IP implications of farming all your content out to a third party that doesn’t seem to care where its base library is populated from.

We’ve had tools to manage workflows for decades. You don’t need Copilot injected into every corner of your interface to achieve this. I suspect the bigger challenge for Larian is working in a development suite that can’t be accused of having “AI Assist” hiding somewhere in the internals.

Not just the health care system. South Italy might as well be a different country.

If you zoom in on the actual municipalities in Southern Europe where people “lived the longest”, it was inevitably poor townships that were still using paper accounting systems. Also a strong correlation between “living long” and “being in a neighborhood that’s unusually mobbed up”. Sicily’s a classic example.

That’s not even to comment on health care. Italy, Spain, and France all have excellent public health care systems. And there’s plenty of evidence to suggest people with access to public care do benefit enormously relative to their peers overseas and south of the Mediterranean.

But if you want to know why certain neighborhoods had a surplus of centenarians, when the average lifespan in even the most developed countries caps out at around 80? That’s just fraud.

Paxton’s definitely in campaign mode. I wonder how many of these lawsuits disappear after the GOP primary.

UCL demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans wins Ig Nobel prize

Turns out it was pension fraud.

Next level?

Ooooooh nooooo!

Hey now, if you hand everyone a “Hitler” card in Secret Hitler, it plays very strangely but in the end everyone wins.

Idk about “useless”. But the way the article doesn’t seem to want to mention the read/write speed is definitely indicative of some drawbacks to the medium. They repeatedly stress “cold storage” which could mean its a useful form of long term archive or backup for static data. Plenty of demand for that kind of information, especially in an era when real time overwriting by malicious actors and artificial engines has been fucking with historical data retention.

But its not going to replace your hard drive any time soon.

Anyone get the IO on this device? Cause I’m guessing its going to be less good than magnetic storage.

One Piece is the straw hat.

He finds it in the first episode.

There. Saved you 1100+ 22min episodes full of fun and adventure and friendship.

You’re welcome.