Pokemon TCG Pocket lets you choose a simple greeting message from some pre-written selection. "I'm confident at flipping heads" is objectively the funniest. If you do flip a lot of heads, your opponent will be amazed. And if you flip a lot of tails, it's hilarious because you said you wouldn't.

One thing (among many others) that human minds can do with language that LLMs cannot - seemingly even in principle - is produce of corpus of written work that can be used to create LLMs.

A fictionalized account of the making of Shadow of the Vampire (the fictionalized account of the making of Nosferatu): E. Elias Merhige (Jeremy Strong) is directing John Malkovich (Michael Fassbender) and Willem Dafoe (Joaquin Pheonix) and suspects the mysterious Dafoe might be a real Max Schreck.

My favourite? Maybe not. The one that has consumed more of my mental energy than any other? Easily so.

People like Andreessen and Altman appear to want to rhetorically close the gap of capability between humans and AI. On the one front, by making us believe in the greatness of AI, and on the other front, by making us believe humans can be reduced to things like a "context window" (an LLM term).

"Emergence" is one of my favourite things to think and talk about, but I feel like, just as with "Darwinian evolution", it has entered the vocabularies of those who don't get it, and want to use it everywhere. This is exaggerated hype, but people eat it up and repeat it, as if it's plausible.

Pete Hegseth's murderous buffoonery, coming amid a lifetime in which he's betrayed everyone close to him and failed up from one disaster to the next, is a perfect example of how the appeal of Trumpism is that it creates a permission structure for people to openly be their worst selves

It could not be more obvious that the president does not care about US service members and in fact regards their deaths as mere political inconveniences. He has more sympathy for Putin than Americans who died because he decided to wage illegal war. Just listen to him.

"They're a corporation; they'll never pull their own plug" Just keep pumping bets in until the counter-bet odds are so tempting, enough internal engineers with the power to break it themselves will have no rational choice but to do so! It's the system working as intended!

Let's collectively begin betting FOR "Polymarket to stay operating beyond next week", until the collective odds are so good, they'd be foolish not to take the counter-bet and pull the plug.

He's more claw than prawn

My daylight savings take is that the workday should itself scale up and down in proportion to the number of hours of sunlight. A winter workday should top out at 4 hours, and a summer one 8. This should vary by latitude. Computers can manage our calendars. This would be easy.

Implicit here is that "so successful" means "killed more people", even when those more people were people it would have been strategically better not to have killed (by its own logic)

If orchestra conductors weren't a thing, if I'd never seen a conductor do anything in my life, I'd still do that with my hands while listening to classical music.

I cannot emphasize this enough: The AI doomer narrative (it’s going to wake up and kill us all) is, whether its adherents intend it or not, pure marketing for AI companies It’s one reason their CEOs have even, on occasion, leaned into it

that books make you use your imagination to *picture* characters, voices, places, events, is a *feature* that cartoons portray an abstract & simplified interpretation of realism is a *feature* live-action adaptations and AI renderings are not some unrealized "final form" of any idea or story

That he seems to think "sci-fi" is an idea. An idea for a movie.

What’s the difference between the government doing this and MS-13 doing this, at this point?

Fucking surreal that people dressed like this and carrying assault rifles are permitted to kidnap people off our streets

2> Cyclists never stopped riding, but they're in the street now. It's a vision of what Doug Ford wants: cyclists mixed in traffic which makes it harder for drivers to get around. This is what they seemingly want to. (They want cyclists gone/dead ultimately - but in practice, this is the vision).

Just a reminder, the greatest living American historian filmmaker, Ken Burns, released a 720 min exploration of every facet of the American revolution using zero generative AI and paying for all of its assets instead of cobbling it from stolen data, then he gave it away for free on PBS this year.

The nihilism gets me. Honour, decency, things you can't see, and so hold no sway with them. If there's advantage to be had, it is taken I'm as physicalist & atheist as they come, but there's something missing from their souls; & because they lead, they give everyone else permission to live likewise

"If I don't get a prize for being good, I won't be good" These people claim to want to "preserve western values", but have never cracked a Greek philosophy text They love the buildings and busts, but wouldn't recognize virtue ethics if it whacked them over the head (it wouldn't - spitefulness)

Catching up, but I gotta say, I'm a fan. (src: Homestar Runner)

Our society was ripe to be plagued by AI-generated hallucinations. We are already accustomed to, and comfortable interacting with, sequences of words that resemble expression, but that are completely devoid of meaning, grounding, reference to real things.

Utterly depraved. We are scared to engage with expression and creation in a way that can't be reduced to a monetizable outcome. We are shrinking our world and us inside it.

“Overthrowing a dictator sounds morally right. No one mourns a tyrant. But international law wasn't built to protect the good, but to restrain the powerful… …if each country decides whom to ‘liberate’ by force, the world reverts to the law of the strongest.”

Whoa!

Trump's comment about Rob Reiner, a beloved American, really demonstrates the rottenness of his character.

Anyway, tell stories that you make up to your kids. My dad did. They were bad, and we laughed. Everyone has the potential to be creative, and I think it's important to look for opportunities to practice that, and avoid temptation to duck out from it.

Here is a publication from last month: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... I can't speak to the validity of an equation for optimal creativity, but I think it highlights the main point: An LLM's function for a "good output" is optimized to produce the most likely output according to past data

I'm thinking a lot about creativity. Having taught improv to folks of many ages, I'm of the belief that most people, most of the time are afraid to exercise creativity. It's a negative feedback loop - fear leads to disuse, leads to poor ability, leads to fear. The result is an uncreative person.

"Shoot, I haven't fed my grandma all week" I turn on my virtual grandma to find her void full of unswept poop, she digivolved into a little shrunken worm out of Ursula's "poor unfortunate souls" "One day, I will have my body back" she weakly utters I roll my eyes and reset her to an egg

“You do NOT want Mr. Mamdani in power if a King Kong returns.”

Never make a joke about someone's name.

"Rivers" by Sugar Ray, an ode to Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, in the style of a perfect Blue-era Weezer jam. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FM9...

When Duck Dynasty first started airing, and I would see it in TV listings, I imagined some kind of Disney spinoff of the duck triplets as young men, vying fecklessly against each other for the reins to the McDuck empire, as Unca Scrooge ages into senility. I think mine's a better show.

It’s an earth day miracle! 🚲

how do you all continue in a world where the Super Mario RPG soundtrack was released in 1996? the only days I get anything done are days when I forget that Yoko Shimomura composed this singular work, days when the furious percussion of the boss battle theme doesn't march into my thoughts

my latest newsletter piece: on how the Democrats' posture toward trans rights signals a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics work

urge to revisit my 15-year-old fanmod idea for a Fallout set in the once-alluded-to "Ronto" of a post-annexed Canada...

White lotus - discussion aside about whether we need more stories of the ultra rich - seems to even forget that it used to be fun. Armond in season one was a delight to watch. S3 is so self-serious and grimdark, and heavy handed with its symbolism to boot.

The fascism is expanding, to suppress the growing opposition to the expanding fascism.

I don't know

America is a homemade submersible, arrogantly and against all advisement cutting away the last red tape that remains between itself and the bottom of the ocean.