old man dave

Ender's Game but it's Unpacked

@Noahpinion Tomorrowland was the most important science fiction story of that era

In the 2010s, the science fiction genre was taken over by writers who were basically uninterested in envisioning the future, and who just wanted to tell fantasy stories using retrofuturist tropes. I'm not saying this literature was bad, but that's what happened.

@codetaur Lots of people discovering they're not the main character in the story that teaches robots what it means to be human

guy living an endless sea of cool androids and interesting computers: "FUCKING TECH BROS WHERE ARE MY COOL ANDROIDS AND INTERESTING COMPUTERS?!"

@signulll EZ vp/svp at a big co. Anyone can say they are a startup founder

which job is more difficult? vp/svp at a big co. or startup founder & why?

@LyricAiLove Crypto requires collective belief to be useful. AI does not. Whether you use AI or not does not affect its usefulness to me. That isn't true of crypto. A better comparison would be mobile phones or internet at large.

The way we killed NFTs by not using them or buying into the hype, I feel like we could've done the same with AI. But people are lazy. They don't want to learn new skills. And now AI is more common than it ever should've been and killing the planet at a fast rate.

@derekhalpern "inform, persuade, or entertain" We only tolerate AI at doing one of those things

@derekhalpern I assume you're reading mostly current events and social media. If so I don't think anyone disagrees on either side of this.

I’ve embraced AI, but long-form AI slop writing is ruining the internet. You won’t change my mind.

@OFF_HVND @mattckrell This thread has given me hope that real, interesting discussion can still happen on this hell site. Thank you.

@OFF_HVND @mattckrell It's what leaves me wondering if this is a new medium of art rather than a new method in an existing one, and we simply haven't developed true artists in the form yet.

What irritates me about the AI art discourse is that one side are tech-bros who don't understand art, and the other side are artists who don't understand the tech.

@OFF_HVND @mattckrell If he is an artist, could AI prompters not be artists for similar reasons? In their own medium the way being a photographer does not necessarily make you a good painter? It seems to me, as the tools get better, nothing is stopping a good prompter from using AI art for expression

@OFF_HVND @mattckrell I love this. Allow me to poke at this a bit. You said Harry Potter is art. Is David Yates an artist? Arguably his efforts as director required little direct creation. His medium of manipulation is cast and crew.

@mattckrell This is apt

@emollick But can you cost in all the AI reply drivel generated to make content about this

If this is true, using the best public estimates we have of LLM resource use, solving this Erdos problem took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity and about 3–31 liters of water. So that is less than three almonds worth of water and the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving.

@GG_Observatory @emollick Also not pricing in the cost of all the AI replies talking about it

The energy comparison misses the structural point. A team of postdocs working on this for two years would consume far more resources -- salaries, lab space, conference travel, the whole apparatus. The real cost asymmetry is not kWh versus human-hours. It is that one inference run replaced a research program that would have employed half a dozen people for months. That displacement is what nobody is pricing in.

@Noahpinion Remember that scene in Good Will Hunting where he burns the paper?

What's the downside of AI discovering all the math that can possibly be discovered? Math doesn't exist as a jobs program for IMO gold medalists.

@benjamin_horne My brother in Christ you are trying too hard

NYC is no longer a city, it is an algorithm. If you live in, say, Cincinnati, when you go to get ice cream with your friends, you really are just going to get ice cream with your friends. In NYC, this is not possible. You cannot just go to get ice cream, because, against your will, you are very self-consciously “someone who lives in NYC, going to get ice cream with their friends, in NYC.” You are never able to achieve full presence of mind because you are constantly placing yourself inside a chapter in some made up, schizophrenic and highly disorienting book. Put another way, as a New Yorker, you do not live in a city, but a massive, procedurally generated simulation of one. You are nothing more than a vapid unit of flesh and bone trapped since a Baudrillardian infinity mirror, where the references have their own references. You become more of a vague concept than a real person—some strange, soulless mix of ambition and violent/sexual impulses—and in your constant confusion you fail to ever become a true subject. You pay $17 for the ice cream cone. Then, you pull out your list of saved Instagram Reels which tell you where to get reservations for pasta later. When you arrive, you find yourself stuck in yet another long line, with people who look just like you. The longer you wait in lines like these, the harder it becomes to ever recover the soul of the person you were before you moved into your East Village studio.

@signulll Wasn't this the plot of Serenity

serious question: did humans accidentally invent a drug that kills *desire* altogether?! that would be an absolute remarkable development for a species.

@chloeallegra228 Easily. Delete your socials.

can we decentivize sociopathy in tech?