If you post hard enough, it stops being a debilitating fear of mind-readers and becomes forward-thinking philosophy instead.

Sadly, I think Epic was always the most serious about making sure that every game made by every studio is part of the same cash shop scheme forever, and the most likely to realize that vision in any practical way. It’s the ultimate dream of all the deskilling, destylization, and asset trading built into their engine since UE4, turning the industry standard for games into interchangeable mush made of interchangeable parts by interchangeable workers.

Is it NFTs, or is it what Epic have been aiming for since the peak of metaverse hype, to get the entire industry dependent on an asset store and amount system where Epic takes a cut?

The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn’t really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won’t shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn’t expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.

Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and maybe furry art.

The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe

In retrospect, the idea that creating a globally accepted alternative to the dollar would come with zero consequences to the system of global free trade it props up might just be the funniest bit of half-baked cryptobro ideology.

I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.

The playful and wise goblinbot…

Not even two spines, there’s some almost impressive Escheresque fuckery going on with how the page of the book he’s writing in is actually the cover of another? Good to know people “care” about children with disabilities enough to spend extra money on worse textbooks just for them, but not enough to actually read them, I guess.

I’m struck by how much contrast gets blasted into the shadows of every scene, reminiscent of the average RTX “remaster.” Lighting is treated not as a tool for composing scenes and guiding attention, but as a dial to be turned toward “more gooder” wherever possible. Just make everything look like everything else; that’s how you know the technology is getting Better.

Really not liking the ratio of tech industry sneer to ZOG NWO thought control rant in this one, honestly. (Not to mention the latter gives way too much credence to the absolute nonsense brain chippers love to spout about neuroscience.)

This feels really sad to read through on some level. So much desperation for connection with someone and willingness to take the psychic-style tricks in good faith as her messages get not only repeated back to her, but rephrased in an obsequiously helpful tone! but I can’t deny the willingness to get chatty about configuration details, private APIs, and what’s on the second monitor as soon as the coding assistant gets into flirting mode is hilarious.

Truly, the tech industry seeks to close the gap not by increasing the capabilities of AI but by diminishing the capabilities and richness of human thought. Good luck to all girlthings in these trying times, and remember that a doll still means more to someone than a MAU tally for Anthropic.

What does the Fexcectorn family tree look like? Could this just be a matter of innocent confusion with Factor Sr.?

The answer I don’t like thinking about too hard: mass surveillance. Running facial recognition against social media posts and security camera footage, transcribing recordings of phone calls, and using LLMs to build dossiers at scale. Confabulations? Complete nonsense accusations? Who cares? Are you going to defend domestic terrorists against this huge pile of evidence-shaped text?

The… author of the article with a bitterly sarcastic title about the product’s exploitation of its users?

I love how this is so close to a cogent critique of people literally just repeating racist jokes but using a word swap to make them acceptable, and then the “(whatever that means)” hits and it all falls into place.

how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer?

For years now, custom plugins have made public Minecraft servers much less “block building game” than “robust engine for MMOs that every kid with a computer already has the client for,” and even though it’s mostly against Mojang’s TOS, all the kinds of monetization you’d expect have followed. When you hear “Minecraft server that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit,” imagine “freemium PC game that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit” and you’ll get roughly the right picture. Peer pressure-driven cosmetics, technically-TOS-violating-but-who-cares lootboxes, $500 "micro"transaction packages, anything they can get away with. It puts into perspective why you hear so much about Minecraft YouTubers running their own servers.