swlabr

joined 2 years ago
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 6 days ago

Ah yes show me a senior engineer that writes tests for their intern’s code. So productive. Much ROI

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Fractal sneer!!! I’m spinning out reading this. Every fucking pixel of this is cursed

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

tbh I've always read OFC as just "OF Course". Dunno why I never thought there'd be fucking in there.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

as has been said since time immemorial, lurk moar

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

Cars looks better than any AI slop, tho that’s a low bar.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago

Studio executives, the people who seek to monetise every aspect of creativity, as if they cannot appreciate or see the intangible value of art that is uncorrupted by commerce? Hard to say if they have aphantasia. No way to tell

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

Also: if it were possible to create a shot for much cheaper, what is the point of a studio?

My understanding is that you never make a movie with your own money because A. it’s expensive and B. you will probably make a loss, so you go to studios to try sell the film. They also understand A. and B., but they can use that as leverage against you for owning various rights of your production, in case it goes well, and otherwise to tie you down with contracts so they can force you to do their bidding. Making film production cheaper weakens the power of studios- the only card they’ll have to play is distribution, which is dying anyway thanks to the streaming ghouls.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

stop it, get some help.pdf

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Agree 1000%. I don’t want to read into Johnson’s comments (not enough context from the article). That being said, he is only about two degrees separated from TESCREAL: the wife of his frequent collaborator JGL is Tasha McCauley, a former board member of OpenAI. JGL himself has spoken at EA events, and is reportedly directing an “AI thriller” for Johnson’s production company. My guess is that he isn’t surrounded by AI-critical people, which sucks, and would explain the lack of acknowledgement of the slop vortex on his part.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Followup to this bit of news: 'Natasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI "hybrid" movie'

Link to interview: (variety) (archive)

relevant section from interview:

As the second season of “Poker Face” trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled “Uncanny Valley,” the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an “ethical” model trained only on copyright-cleared data.

“It’s all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a “generative AI movie” but uses tools for things like set extensions.

When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.

“It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” says Lyonne. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”

“I’ve never been inside of one of those before,” Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. “It’s scary in there, if anyone’s wondering. It’s not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.”

She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of “Star Wars” fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive “Last Jedi.” His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before they’re even made, “any great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,” he says. “Anything great is created in a bubble. If it weren’t, it would never make it past the gestation period.”

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

trying to process this post is giving me a headache, so I am giving up. Here, have this:

cart FAR

oh that's what CFAR is short for.

alt: hehe. fart car

 

Abstracted abstract:

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.

*

 

Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.

https://archive.is/XwbY0

 

This is somewhat tangential to the usual fare here but I decided to make a post because why not.

I’ve been listening to the back catalog of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, and this ep came up. This ep is the second crypto based case after “crypto facto” in ep 333.

John Hodgman is a comedian, probs best known for being the “I’m a PC” guy in the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign from ancient times. In the podcast, he plays a fake judge that hears cases and makes judgements. In this ep, “Suing for Soul Custody,” he hears a case in which a husband wants to sell his soul on the blockchain, while his wife does not want him to do that.

Some good sneers against the crypto bro husband (in both this case and the other I linked). Brief spoilers as to the rulings in case you don’t want to listen:

333Judge rules that the husband should continue to mine ETH until his rig burns down his house.

556Judge rules that the guy shouldn’t sell his soul, for symbolic reasons.

Note: I like John Hodgman. He’s funny. He’s not really inside the tech space, but he is good friends with Jonathan Coulton, who is. If all you know of him is the “I’m a PC” ads, he has an entertaining wider catalogue worth checking out.

 

On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9

 

Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.

I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.

13
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/meta@awful.systems
 

Wish I had a screengrab of this, but occasionally when I open the awful.systems page, it looks like I've logged in as a different user. Just now the username "autumnal" appeared instead of my own. Don't know how to reproduce.

This has happened in chrome on macosx a few times, haven't seen it elsewhere.

22
VoughtCoin (the-boys.fandom.com)
 

TIL that television program “The Boys” has an in universe cryptocurrency as a satire of, well, cryptocurrency in general but also specifically that time when DJT was selling NFTs. They occasionally tweet about it.

It has a listing on the “BSCScan” crypto tracker under the name “VTC” so someone might have actually minted it? It might surprise some of you that I have no way of telling the realness of such a thing.

 

Uncritically sharing this article with naive hope. Is this just PR for a game? Probably. Indies deserve as much free press as possible though.

 

As is tradition I am sharing this link without having listened yet.

 

The video game in question:

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