Benji Smith

As engineers, we should spend just as much time building toys as we spend building tools... When people have a chance to PLAY, it lights up their mind with possibilities, and the things we originally built as toys quickly start to become essential tools. Creative work needs play!

If people are fighting for an orb you are reading fantasy. If people are fighting for a cube you are reading sci-fi. If it has more sides than that. I dont know. I dont know man.

The engineer is the maker of history. The masses are content to be peasants and the rich are content to be feudal lords. The engineer disturbs their perfect peace with his unwanted machines and they collude to suppress him. But the engineer’s machines are not easily suppressed.

@RoyalCities Makes sense! But what would actually happen if you asked for some sick helicopter loops?

Don't expect it to know that lol. Models are only as good as the data and metadata inside of them. If I had some samples tagged with say "helicopter" and also swooshing it would be able to guesstimate but it wouldn't be something like that. If I ever do an update with sfx I'd try it then but def not this model.

After months of work, today I’m releasing Foundation-1. A SOTA text-to-sample model built specifically for music production workflows. It may also be the most advanced AI sample generator currently available - open or closed. • ~7 GB VRAM • Entirely local • 100% free 😁

people misunderstand the icarus story. the problem was not that he flew too high. it's that the wings were made of beeswax, which offered very little resistance to heating. with modern materials he would have had no problems. we can fly as close to the sun as we want now

And now for Part 2 of The Antihero’s Journey… In this chapter, we start to understand that an antihero isn’t usually operating from an amoral framework. Antiheroes are deeply moralistic creatures, but their morality follows its own twisted logic. (link in replies)

People really don’t understand the extent of evil. The Islamic Republic didn’t just murder thousands of protestors in the street in January. They then invaded hospitals to murder injured that were being treated and then arrested/tortured medical staff that helped. Even before that, they were holding multiple executions per day to punish enemies of the regime.

The simplest rule to blow up your income, followers, etc.. EVEN when you have no idea what your doing is : "Always Produce" Paul Graham taught me this, and it changed my life. overthinking, feeling sorry for yourself, or anything that is not producing will always get you nothing. If you don't know what to produce ( this is normal ) then just produce anything. the act of producing will naturally guide you to what you should be producing. The MORE you produce, the better you get at producing and learning what you should produce. This is painful because you feel like you are wasting time, and just creating non-sense until one day you produce something that thousands of people love and it changes your life.

After the conclusion of How to Design a Magic System, I’m starting on a whole new eight-part series… The Antihero’s Journey is a grand exploration of the dynamics of antihero storytelling. Come take a look, and learn how to work within this fascinating storytelling medium! (link in replies)

Until we have an objective test for consciousness (good luck!) or an understanding of how "understanding" works in our brains, or what it actually 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 to "experience" something, the only issue I see is the sheer confidence people seem to have that AI doesn't (or cannot) have any of these things. Saying AI is doing nothing more than data processing or computation assumes that humans are doing something more than that. Are we, really? How do we know? If experience or consciousness just emerge from certain types of information processing (which is what it increasingly seems like), why do we carbon-based life forms get some kind of monopoly on it? Is AI really becoming more human-like, or have humans essentially been computers all along? Historically as a species, we haven't done well coping with challenges to our anthropocentric delusions. We didn't take it well when Galileo showed that we're not the center of the universe (or even the solar system). We didn't take it well when Darwin demonstrated that we're not exactly created in God's image. And now that we're experiencing a digital species that seems increasingly indistinguishable from humans in intelligence, creativity, and at least the appearance of consciousness, the cope is off the charts. We don't have these answers yet either way. These definitive proclamations about it being impossible for AI to be conscious are a defensive mechanism from a place of existential anxiety, not empirical evidence. We 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 AI to be "just a machine" so we don't have to face the (very plausible) idea that if consciousness can just emerge from information processing, maybe that's all we are too.

This essay is my humble attempt to write a thorough explainer for the question “What is AI?” and to clear up some pervasive misconceptions about this astonishing technology. (link in replies)

I need to rant about something because I keep seeing the same brain-dead take over and over again. "AI is going to take all our jobs." No. No it is not. AI is not going to make people work less. It's going to make people work MORE. I know this because I'm living it. Right now. Today. I am working more hours than I have at any point in my life. Not because I have to. Because I literally cannot stop. I'm doing it voluntarily. Happily. Obsessively. This is also true of everyone I know that is deeply involved in AI. When you sit down and realize you can go from idea to execution in HOURS with no dependencies on anyone else — no designer queue, no engineering sprint, no "let's circle back next week" — your brain breaks in the best possible way. You just keep going. You build one thing. It works. You build the next thing. That works too?! And suddenly it's midnight and you don't care because you just brought five ideas to life that would've taken you 3 MONTHS six months ago. Every builder I know is experiencing this same addiction right now. We're all sleeping less and producing more and enjoying every second of it. The value of one hour of human input has gone up by an order of magnitude. So what happens when your input becomes 10x more valuable? You don't do less of it. You do WAY more. Because the incentives are insane. The "AI takes jobs" crowd is making the same mistake people have made with every single technology in history. They're assuming there's a fixed pie of work. There isn't. There never was. The pie grows. It always grows. And AI is about to make it grow faster than anything we've ever seen. More work. More jobs. More builders. More opportunities. More humans doing more ambitious things than they ever thought possible. This is the beginning of the most productive era in human history and most people are too busy doom-scrolling to notice. Bookmark this.

Every man eventually discovers that competence is the only real stabilizer of self-esteem; no amount of praise, affirmation, or philosophical comfort can replace the confidence that comes from knowing you can produce results even when conditions are hostile.

Love this! There's a good reason we use words like "exploration" for idea space and "backtracking" when we need to try new approaches...

i regret to inform you that personal growth rarely comes from acquiring new knowledge and almost always from: - getting humiliated - showing up terrified and doing it anyway - admitting you might be the problem

This would be wonderful, truly :)