rayon
waifutech enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 2632
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
7mo ago
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has published its final report on the results of their investigation (dated from December 4th for some reason). It's quite the whopper at 520 pages and I'm only starting to read through the thing, but they tackle one of the big scissor issues of the issue - the origin of the virus - right at the start so there is a good hook right away. I have not read the Fauci emails so some of this might be old news, but some of those include rather damning excerpts.
According to the report, what would eventually become Proximal Origin started on Feb 1 with a write-up by Kristian Andersen who has Noticed™ some concerning biological properties of the virus which did not strike him as natural. He contacted Jeremy Farrar over this, who acknowledged his concerns and referred him to Fauci; Fauci was appropriately alarmed and shortly arranged a conference call to discuss the findings. Andersen mentions that the talk they had before the call was his first time talking to Fauci, and that he "specifically suggests that if [Andersen] thinks this came from the lab, [he] should consider writing a scientific paper on it."
So he does - apparently encountering inconvenient difficulties along the way. Feb 8, in an internal email from Andersen (p.24):
A lot of good discussion here, so I just wanted to add a couple of things for context that I think are important - and why what we're considering is far from "another conspiracy theory", but rather is taking a valid scientific approach to a question that is increasingly being asked by the public, media, scientists, and politicians (e.g. I have been contacted by Science, NYT, and many other news outlets over the last couple of days about this exact question).
<...> Our main work over the past couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered. <...>
Feb 20, in another email from Andersen as the work continues (p.25):
<...> just one more thing though, reviewer 2 is unfortunately wrong about "Once the authors publish their new pangolin sequences, a lab origin will be extremely unlikely". Had that been the case, we would of course have included that - but the more sequences we see from pangolins (and we have been analyzing/discussing these very carefully) the more unlikely it seems that they're intermediate hosts. They definitely harbor SARS-CoV-like viruses, no doubt, but it's unlikely they have a direct connection to the COVID-19 epidemic.
Unfortunately none of this helps refute a lab origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do) and not dismissed out of hand as another ‘conspiracy’ theory. We all really, really wish that we could do that (that’s how this got started), but unfortunately it’s just not possible given the data.
Emphasis mine. There are already hints of a foregone conclusion, but it doesn't seem bad yet - however Jeremy Farrar, who referred Andersen to Fauci earlier, seems to have different concerns. Same page, email from Farrar (emphasis mine):
I hope there is a paper/letter ready this week to go to Nature (and WHO) which effectively puts to bed the issue of the origin of the virus.
I do think [it's] important to get ahead of even more discussion on this, which may well come if this spreads more to US and elsewhere, and other "respected" scientists publish something more inflammatory.
He later gets notified via email that "rumors of bioweaponeering are now circulating in China", to which his response is:
Yes I know and in US - why so keen to push out ASAP. I will push Nature
Same page, another email from Farrar to Andersen reviewing (some version of) the draft:
Sorry to micro-manage/microedit!
But would you be willing to change one sentence?
From "It is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus."
To "It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus."
That's... certainly one sentence, I suppose.
I'm still reading but from a cursory glance the report tackles many topics, including the government response, the lockdowns, economic impacts, etc. I think many people will find their hobby horse something of interest in here. Discussion thread go.
Discord
Sorry for snagging on a single word like this but scenes like vaguely gestures around this one very vividly remind me how absolutely ruinous the advent of Discord has been for niche communities like this one and others I considered myself a part of. It is evaporative cooling personified (software-ified?), seamless and convenient and easier then ever before. Why put up with the constant bile from the rabble on some Mongolian basket-weaving forum when you can always take shelter in some nice Discord server with people who share your perceptions and beliefs? (I am only partly facetious, this question occurs to all of us on different times.) Surely this does not run the risk of creating ever more hugboxes nice fenced-off areas around the wasteland that is the modern-day internet.
At the risk of coming off as hostile (which believe me I am very much not, I'm just a random rube but the piece has been amazing reading and I value your contributions greatly), I'll try to gently posit that this tendency - to solve any intra-community friction that occurs by bouncing out into the wild frontiers of Xitter or into a different subcommunity - is very much part of the problem of why the Motte has quote-unquote "lost the Mandate of Heaven" nowadays [citation needed]. As the saying goes, you're not stuck in traffic. You are not merely seeing it lose the Mandate of Heaven - you and everyone who leaves for greener pastures personally rip out another little shred of it along the way, justified or not, whether you want to or not, as sad and inevitable as that sounds. Especially when you actively advocate for people to join you.
I don't advocate shooting rootless cosmopolitans or something, and sticking together through thick and thin is not always the strictly superior option (although it does historically have its perks!), especially on places that naturally foster disagreement like the Motte - the empire long united must divide, etc. - but I think this endless splintering and constant bound-less motion is incredibly destructive to communities long-term. Getting along is hard, enduring bait is unpleasant, janitor work is thankless, but without any of this a community does not survive. Silly metaphor: you do not generally solve the problem of a dirty, cluttered house by just moving out to a new one every time. (If you do, share advice on finding decent houses communities in this economy culture.)
I don't understand why various schisms of this kind are so prevalent nowadays, either. Perhaps because Discord (the archetypal example) is popular and the invite system is simple and seamless to use, removing or reducing the trivial inconveniences often associated with building new communities online. Perhaps it's because thick skin does not at all actually seem to be a requirement for the modern internet, although whether that's the cause or effect of the schismogenesis in the water supply seems unclear. Perhaps this is simply cope and even a modicum of seethe on my part. But it's such a fucking shame. We can finally have the communities we want - and the commons we deserve.
I don't feel particularly enraged but I do think this post is the most clear-cut example of mistake vs. conflict theory I've seen in years if not ever - an acclaimed grandmaster of mistake theory politely addresses one side of the culture war (I don't have my dictionary but I think a "war" can be pictured as a kind of conflict), helpfully suggests that their course of action may be, well, a mistake, and is shocked to discover the apparent persuasive power of yes_chad.jpg. While I do not dare doubt Scott's ulterior motives and believe he really is this naive principled, I refuse to believe he is not aware of what he's arguing, he is this close to realizing it (emphasis mine):
From the Right’s perspective, <...> the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again.
Followed by 9 points of reminding stab victims that daggers are dangerous weapons, and one shouldn't swing them recklessly - someone could get hurt!
Disregarding whether or not the broadly painted enemies-of-the-right are in fact going to go right back to swinging daggers the millisecond the cultural headwind blows their way again (although the answer seems intuitive) - what compelling reason, at this point, is there to believe they would not? Does he really think that gracefully turning the other cheek will magically convince anyone on the obviously dominant side that cancel culture is bad actually - or (less charitably) even lead to any, any "are we the baddies" entry-level introspection among those involved at all? Does he expect anyone at all to be reassured by a reminder that daggers can't legally enter your body without your consent? I suppose he really does since from his list only 8) can be read as a psyop attempt and everything else seems to be entirely genuine, but I'll freely admit this mindset is alien to me.
This is such exquisite bait that I will bite it.
What is, exactly, the point of this post?
Ostensibly you've asked a normal question, but tb entirely h I don't buy it, not considering your bio/poasting history - especially now that you've voiced your actual complaint downthread when prompted. At a glance it really scans like you recently entered a thread full of things you do not like (discussion of the recent Trump/Zelensky cockfight, I assume), got annoyed, and now took to vagueposting to bait people into asking for the reason (as sensible people are wont to do), so you can express your perceived ick without actually having to engage with pesky chuds Russian shills directly.
I'm not usually that much of a conflict theorist, but this is such a lazy, passive-aggressive and - yes - stereotypically female mode of engagement (I'm mad and no I won't say why, except actually I will, you just gotta ask properly first) that I can't possibly think of it as being done in good faith, much less a point made "reasonably clear and plain". Functionally indistinguishable from trolling, even.
edit: Fascinating thread, probably the first real dent in my previously-immaculate impression of the mods.
To clarify I am not unbiased here either, I've seen a certain "community" of mine become borderline unusable over a year-plus-something of incessant baitposting, social jockeying and all the other joys of anonymous imageboards. Fewer and fewer sane people remained every day, until one day I woke up and the sun rose in the east and nearly every single person worth engaging with has vacated the premises or sequestered themselves in some kind of comfy Discord, playing games and interacting parasocially with each other while the thread became a smoking wasteland. Hell, there's even been a literal schism, splitting the subject matter to two different boards (entirely organic from what I could tell, too). Far be it from me to hold their choice against them - but that, too, is a choice they made. Hide X threads, ignore X posts, do not reply to X posters, etc. Everyone misses the old internet, but apparently no one wants to carry on its spirit.
It's been some months but the main "community" does not show signs of recovery, because evaporative cooling is not your friend. Still, some people endure and attempt to interact in good faith, because the sense of community matters more to them than their individual experience. Goes without saying that it's just not the same anymore.
In other words since I may have overdone hiding my power level, I will rephrase more bluntly - you leaving is a conscious choice you make. You were not unfairly forced out by a shadowy cabal. You took the bait, and could not tear from the hook in time. It happens to the best of us, god knows I longposted at people who simply hurled one-liners back at me with glee, but saving face with the smoke of a burning bridge is not the way. Especially not while actively advertising to try and pull people along while publicly claiming to care about the community's longevity.
Furthermore, I will admit I really did expect someone that does investigative work of your caliber to have thicker skin. Blowing up like this on a 1) drive-by bait post 2) made by an obvious troll/alt 3) which got near-instantly shot down by jannies is just, I don't know... undignified, besides giving the shitpoaster exactly what they wanted. I couldn't imagine a bigger trolling W than this and I've seen quite a lot of trolling.
Also, I hope this doesn't come off as smug but the amount of goodbyes someone says while leaving is directly proportional to the likelihood of them returning in the future (my reliable source is that I made it the fuck up). This is not anything worth judgement and I personally will be glad to have you back, but you can at the very least refrain from performatively burning bridges which only ensures the green bastards get to feast immediately in the event of your return.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1yr ago
I wake up -> there is another psyop. Thanks for the post, I'll be sure to skim /vp/ for funsies for a couple days now.
As someone who actually played PoGo before I got locked out of it, for me this is 95% in line with my interpretation of Niantic's total mismanagement of the game. The gender removal is the only real brow-raising part, but even then I vaguely remember that the in-game clothing store was a thing, and it was gender-locked to hell - many gender-exclusive items had no genderswapped version and about the only unisex things were the accessories. I can squint and see a parallel universe where lifting that restriction is a net positive thing, but modern Pokemon-related things are not known for enjoying extra bare minimum work to make the transition (pun not intended) actually work, and it wouldn't be their first mind-boggling fuckup with models anyway.
I've heard completely unverifiable rumors that Niantic management is outrageously out of touch with reality but also petrified to kill their golden goose
PoGo is the definition of "failed potential" in all respects, including this one. Even as jaded as I am I'm willing to believe this is mostly sheer, genuine incompetence, ticking the boxes with as little effort as possible. Actual directed effort to advance CW causes seems far beyond the corpses propping up the game's steering wheels.
Tangential but in its time it really opened my mind to how little effort is required to run an almost literal free money printer (and still fuck it up from time to time), as well as how shit a game can get before I drop it in disgust because I still think the core gameplay loop of "walk around, collect pokemon" is genius and at one point it was almost the only thing that forced me to walk out and interact with my local community. It really is a milestone in gaming, just not in the usual way.
[cw: newfriend opinion nobody asked for]
I'm not seeing anything too wrong here, and in fact have been consistently impressed by the quality of moderation here, which almost uniquely among rat-adjacents tries not to embody the quokka meme like SSC/ACX comments (marxbro my beloved) and many other rat-adjacent communities where even obvious, to my shitposting eye, trolls feed like kings for months until they finally slip up in their gluttony and get b&. Even subtle trolls get their due here impressively quickly from what I've lurked.
Also I've now spent almost a year in a "community" of /g/entlemen and let me tell you, life without jannies is absolutely miserable. Running on the endless attention supply and cheered on by bait posters, two or three ban-evading [slur]s (the established term is "spitefags", etymology hopefully obvious) are enough to derail entire threads, actively screw with people's resources by reporting or DDoSing them, cause endless drama and schisms, etc. etc. for months on end. Moreover, with no moderation the audience eventually gets Stockholm'd into being impressed with the autism on display and starts actually seeing their scourge as "based", which further exacerbates the issue.
Even considering where I'm "from" I found Hlynka's and BC's comments to be in particularly bad taste, it's too similar to 4chan kids that weave insults into their replies because they can and because it's cool (and sometimes because what they say is true, but the former two almost always take precedence), down to the casual drive-by nature of it as they weren't in the chain beforehand. Really only the all-lowercase text is missing from the edge bingo. It's pure brinkmanship, and usually rightly results in mutual shitflinging. Kulak at least took offense and got heated during an actual discussion, which is imo more understandable, I wouldn't have even modded him but who am I to say.
Since Bad Words are unnecessary and carry no actual substance, mods technically can choose to just ignore them, but they're the definition of arbitrary, unnecessary heat, and as I understand this place is focused on preventing that. It's not even just the scary words themselves offending the uh, target audience, it's just when people shoot the shit like this it inevitably spreads and slowly becomes the norm (ask me how I know, cf. "based" example above), people look at it and wonder "hey, you can do that? fuck it, watch me", and the casual tone doesn't help. I'm looking forward to the inevitable day when I'll carelessly drop a stray slur somewhere out of habit and get rightly modded for it, looking back I already have one comment I'm surprised I didn't get warned for in hindsight. Skirted the edge successfully, I suppose.
TL;DR: from a relative outsider perspective, you don't know how good you lot have it. Mods = gods
Even if I agree with you that the West has fallen and billions must die (which to be fair I do)... I don't know how to put this but this just ain't it, chief. This is just a wall of brain-hijacking zealot rhetoric. You have allowed a higher power to overwrite your save file, it is literally visible when it speaks through you:
People will still hem and haw, and not accept violence RIGHT THIS SECOND is called for, and that we should feel anguish and moral scorn every second we're delayed by practical realities
In other words, everyone who does not reblog updoot the issue du jour is trash.
Classical Jewish psychology
This is where you sneak in obligatory tribute to said higher power, I assume, I actually do not understand the relation here.
you are faggots, cucks and race traitors who value you failed cuck discussion norms far more that the truth. Failed discussion norms taught to you by failed jews like Yudkowsky and Alexander who openly admit their ritualized cuckoldry and sexual depravity. In this you are a microcosm and exact continuation of the failed morality and intellectual norms that have led the west to this exact moment.
I'm away from home and can't ask Claude to flip your madlibs around into liberal negrolatry circa 2020, so that will be left as an exercise for the reader. The last sentence can even be left as is.
Any light produced without heat is an illusion, a trick cast on the wall, a fire in a film that illuminates only what the director chooses and warms nothing.
Sir, this is a Wendy's. Illusion or not, this is the entire, explicit point of this place, getting mad at this feels like that "I entered a thread full of things I do not like, and now I am mad. How did this happen to me?" meme. The fact that you're mostly getting measured responses instead of TL;DRs or "your hands are shaking btwbeit"-type dismissals only further proves this point; I even suspect that you know this and chose to post this here exactly so that people would actually 'engage' with you.
Since you use the same playbook the wokes do to get me to side with you on at least some of the issue - I agree that things like Rotherham conclusively prove that the Bri'ish cannot be saved. But in this particular case it seems quite beside the point. This brand of seethe vacuous righteous fury isn't picky regarding the exact excuses to unleash it, and contrary to what you seem to think, it actively dampens your point instead of strengthening it.
More notes from the AI underground, this time from imagegen country. The Eye of Sauron continues to focus its withering gaze on hapless AI coomers with growing clarity, as another year begins with another crackdown on Azure abuse by Microsoft - a more direct one this time:
Microsoft sues service for creating illicit content with its AI platform
In the complaint, Microsoft says it discovered in July 2024 that customers with Azure OpenAI Service credentials — specifically API keys, the unique strings of characters used to authenticate an app or user — were being used to generate content that violates the service’s acceptable use policy. Subsequently, through an investigation, Microsoft discovered that the API keys had been stolen from paying customers, according to the complaint.
Microsoft alleges that the defendants used stolen Azure OpenAI Service API keys belonging to U.S.-based customers to create a “hacking-as-a-service” scheme. Per the complaint, to pull off this scheme, the defendants created a client-side tool called de3u, as well as software for processing and routing communications from de3u to Microsoft’s systems.
Translated from corpospeak: at some point last year, the infamous hackers known as 4chan cobbled together de3u, a A1111-like interface for DALL-E that is hosted remotely (semi-publicly) and hooked up to a reverse proxy with unfiltered Azure API keys which were stolen, scraped or otherwise obtained by the host. I probably don't need to explain what this "service" was mostly used for - I never used de3u myself, I'm more of an SD guy and assorted dalleslop has grown nauseating to see, but I'm familiar enough with general thread lore.
As before, Microsoft has finally took notice, and this time actually filed a complaint against 10 anonymous John Does responsible for the abuse of their precious Azure keys. Most publicly available case materials compiled by some industrious anon here. If you don't want to download shady zips from Cantonese finger painting forums, complaint itself here, supplemental brief with screencaps (lmao) here.
To my best knowledge,
- Doe 1 with "access to and control over [...] github.com/notfiz/de3u" is
notFiz, the person actually hosting the proxy/service in question. - Doe 2 with "access to [...] https://gitgud.io/khanon/oai-reverse-proxy" is Khanon, the guy who wrote the reverse proxy codebase underlying de3u. I'm really struggling to think what can be plausibly pinned on him given that the proxy is simply a tool to use LLM API keys in congregate - it's just that the keys themselves happen to be stolen in this case - but then again I don't know how wire fraud works.
- Doe 3 with "access to and control over [...] aitism.net" is Sekrit, a guy who was running a "proxy proxy" service somewhere in Jan-Feb of 2024 during the peak of malicious spoonfeeding and DDoS spitefaggotry, in an attempt to hide the actual endpoint of Fiz's proxy. The two likely worked together since, I assume de3u was also hosted through him. Came off as something of a pseud during "public" appearances, and was the first to get appropriately spooked by recent events.
- Does 4-10 are unknown and seem to be random anons who presumably donated money and/or API keys to the host, or simply extensively used the reverse proxy.
At first blush, suing a bunch of anonymous John Does seems like a remarkably fruitless endeavor, although IANAL and have definitely never participated in any illegal activities before officer I swear. A schizo theory among anons is that NSFW DALLE gens included prompts of RL celebrities (recent gens are displayed on the proxy page so I assume they've seen some shit - I never checked myself so idk), which put most of the pressure on Microsoft once shitposted around; IIRC de3u keeps metadata of the gens, and I assume they would much rather avoid having the "Generated by Microsoft® Azure Dall-E 3" seal of approval on a pic of Taylor Swift sucking dick or whatever. Curious to hear the takes of more lawyerly-inclined mottizens on how likely all this is to bear any fruit whatsoever.
Regardless, the chilling effect already seems properly achieved; far as I can tell, every single person related to the "abuses", as well as some of the more paranoid adjacent ones, have vanished from the thread and related communities, and all related materials (liberally spoonfed before, some of them posted right in the OPs of /g/ threads) have been scrubbed overnight. Even the jannies are in on it - shortly after the news broke, most rentry names containing proxy-related things were added to the spam filter, and directly writing them on /g/ deletes your post and auto-bans you for a month (for what it's worth I condone this, security in obscurity etc).
If gamers are the most oppressed minority, coomers are surely the second most - although DALL-E can burn for all I care, corpo imagegen enjoyers already have it good with NovelAI.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
5mo ago
could never be dumbed down into something as concrete as stabbing your landlord with a sword.
As the meme goes, you are like a little baby. Watch this.
The government is something that can be compromised by bad people. And so, giving it tools to “attack bad people” is dangerous, they might use them. Thus, pacts like “free speech” are good. But so is individuals who aren’t Nazis breaking those rules where they can get away with it and punching Nazis.
<...>
If you want to create something like a byzantine agreement algorithm for a collection of agents some of whom may be replaced with adversaries, you do not bother trying to write a code path, “what if I am an adversary”. The adversaries know who they are. You might as well know who you are too.
Alternatively, an extended Undertale reference that feels so on the nose it almost hurts (yes, fucking Chara is definitely the best person to mentally consult while trying to rationalize your actions).
Once you make "no-selling social reality" your professed superpower, I imagine the difference in performing Olympic-levels mental gymnastics to justify eating cheese sandwiches and coming up with legitimate reasons to stab your landlord is negligible. (I know the actual killer is a different person but I take the patient zero as representative of the "movement".)
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
11mo ago
Law of Merited Impossibility strikes again?
"X isn't happening Trump is bad at golf AND IF it does he's good THEN it's a good thing who even cares"
Even while I think his baiting is often incredibly obvious, his schtick mildly cringe and inflammatory turns of phrase barely concealed, I don't think a permanent ban was the right choice. Some-weeks-long timeouts should be inconvenient enough for the poster himself, simple enough for the janitors (it's not like there's a shortage of reasons to mod) and give themotte at large enough "breathing room" as it were, that they should be an effective deterrent.
Since I'm turning into a one-issue poster I might as well bring up an unrelated parallel. I'm a regular of chatbot threads on imageboards, and 4chan's thread is probably the worst, most schizo-ridden shithole I've ever seen (believe me that's a fucking high bar to clear) which is constantly raided from outside splinter communities, beset by a self-admitted mentally ill schizo that has made it his quest in life to make the thread suffer (he is on record for owning some 30 4chan passes to spam/samefag with, which he discards and buys new ones as they get perma'd), etc. The on-topic chatbot discussion is frequently a fig leaf for parasocial zoomers and literal fujos to obsess over notable thread "personalities", shitpost liberally and spam frequently repulsive fetish-adjacent stuff. Jannies have summarily abandoned the thread to fend for itself, to the point that when shit gets bad it is a kind of tradition for some heroic anon to take one for the team and spam the thread with NSFW to attract their attention (obviously eating a ban himself in the process). By any metric imaginable it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I also sometimes read 2ch's equivalent thread that lands on the other side of the spectrum: it has an active janny that rules the nascent /ai/ board with an iron fist and mercilessly purges any kind of off-topic discussion, up to and including discussion of his own actions so you can't even call him out in any way. This hasn't stopped their thread from being filled with GPT vs Claude console wars (the one "sanctioned" flame war topic, I guess), and to his credit the thread has genuine on-topic discussion, especially on prompt engineering, but other than that the thread is utterly sterile, the console wars get rote incredibly fast, and every single slav I've talked with and seen in thread prefers 4chan's thread to 2ch's - for the "activity" if nothing else. Even shitty activity is better than none (besides being more entertaining, although YMMV).
Now I am aware themotte is decidedly not that kind of place, I understand that increased tolerance puts more strain on janitors and don't object against extended banning for high heat - only against permanently banning. All similarities are coincidental, et cetera, I hope my overall point is clear - while janitors have my respect now that I've seen what life is like without any, with every prolific poster banished there's a risk of becoming sterile or collapsing into an echo chamber, and this risk is higher baseline for more obscure communities that don't have a steady influx of newfriends. Surely it's not that hard to hand belligerent posters the occasional vacation (and as I understand themotte forbids alts as well)? Again, by your own admission it's not like there's a shortage of reasons.
NB: I'm mostly a civil poster now but I ate my share of timeouts from /g/ jannies for occasional tomfoolery.
I recently read Записки из подполья/Notes from Underground on a whim and was amazed at how perfectly it describes the POV of an average chud over 150 years later, down to the thought processes. It was actually hard to read at times because the protag is an incorrigible edgelord - which to be fair is easy for me to say because of modern over-exposure to nihilism and contrarian shit - but at the same time his schtick hits pretty close to home sometimes:
- he's a shut-in who stopped interacting with society, and cannot stop himself from taking petty offenses over minor shit when occasionally forced to interact
- he's a self-made philosopher and an irredeemable contrarian, opposing some things for nothing but the fuck of it and unironically considering himself oppressed by the laws of reality (e.g 2 + 2 = 4) that prevent him from freely expressing himself
- he's thoroughly poisoned by the ennui of his existence, at some point admitting that even just being extremely, cripplingly lazy would be better than being inactive out of sheer apathy
- later sections are dedicated to his encounter with a prostitute, which was very uncomfortable to read (despite having zero lewd details) purely because of how viscerally cringe the underground man's posturing is
- the last few pages consist of quite literal cope and seethe by the underground man after the girl leaves, featuring gems like "insulting somebody is good actually, it helps them grow" and "at least I pushed boundaries and took things to extremes, you cowards would never dare go even halfway"
- he admits that he hates the real/"live" life (живая жизнь), was unprepared to handle it when Liza came, and wants nothing more than to return to his "underground"
Good writing really is timeless, I'm not much of a reader but I really should've paid attention in school at least.
I may be a degenerate but at least I'm a cultured degenerate. I was a SSC reader from before the Culture War split, so technically I knew from the start but I only have cursory knowledge from that era, I rarely use Reddit and have no account there so I almost never lurked the main sub before the split. I occasionally read /r/themotte when I remembered, or when someone linked stuff in SSC/ACX comments or on DSL, also witnessing secondary splits of theschism and culturewarroundup.
At some point a year or two back I randomly checked on /r/themotte and saw the meta post heralding the exodus, I followed the link and have been lurking since. I was honestly surprised to see this place going strong, theschism and CWR have fared worse from what I've checked. With Reddit not being a viable discussion platform in this day and age, moving off-site was a great call.
Basically I've been lurking this place on-and-off for a long time and just decided to jump in at one point (kudos to whoever wrote "if in doubt, post" in the sidebar, it worked), I almost always lurk everywhere I go and am trying to break the habit. I still feel my brain physically fog up and my eyes glaze over when I read the pages-long debates people occasionally have here, so my low-IQ ass has little to contribute in comparison, but the first contact seems to have gone well so I'll keep trying.
Tangential but I was surprised to learn there are former rats/rat-adjacents among the /g/oons as well, I had the wildest deja-vu when someone made and posted a certain Chub card (SFW) a while ago.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1yr ago
Tbh I wouldn't even call that AI safety, it's plain old activism with a new coat of paint. Personally I'm not too worried, aside from the cases where "traditional" creation isn't feasible (like in your example with mods) AI-generated stuff is already regarded as mostly soulless slop everywhere I've seen, and hamfisted ideological remakery will only exacerbate the issue. Surely this time normies will wake up. <- clueless
Other than that I agree on all fronts. It's unfortunate (and rather tiresome) that culture is in a total progressive stranglehold atm, but look at it from the other side - AI tools are the means of production which, at this early stage, are relatively easy to seize. Character.ai thoroughly cucked people out of NSFW chatbots, and DALL-E literally "diversifies" incoming prompts without input from the user - but jailbroken corpo models (and constantly improving local ones) and Stable Diffusion shall serve. It ain't much, but it's honest open-source.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
5mo ago
Slimepriestess
In seriousness, I instantly knew from le quirky nickname before I even checked the vid but it's not any less sad. Starting to think I really prefer gamepad-eating """nerdy""" girls of yore over the nerdy """girls""" of today. Monkey paw curls.
Wow, Musk really walked into the wrong neighbourhood here. His earlier D4 claim went mostly unquestioned (to my awareness) because frankly D4 bad nobody really gives enough of a shit, but with how zealous its fanbase is PoE was a bad choice to flex, and specifically PoE2 (brutal and borderline bullshit as it is) was a really bad choice. Other replies already mentioned it but you absolutely do not get this far (in HC to boot!) without considerable knowledge of the game, and the minor things like the item level gaffe instantly betray the lack of underlying knowledge. This whole charade distinctly feels like reading a "budget" starter build guide that has Mageblood or something as a required item. I will be very disappointed if there won't be a new meme unique item that does something with level requirements before the end of the year.
It warms my heart to see gamers(tm) continue to be the community least deceived by, or tolerant of, transparent bullshit. Truly the master race.
Sam is going to get us all killed; that he's entirely misanthropic and sincerely believes that humanity should die out giving birth to machine intelligence.
...Fine, I'll bite. How much of this impression of Sam is uncharitable doomer dressing around something more mundane like "does not believe AI = extinction and thus has no reason to care", or even just same old "disregard ethics, acquire profit"?
I have no love for Altman (something I have to state awfully often as of late) but the chosen framing strikes me as highly overdramatic, besides giving him more competence/credit than he deserves. As a sanity check, how -pilled would you say that friend of yours is in general on the AI question? How many years before inevitable extinction are we talking here?
Honestly this is my read too, but if I had to try - Palworld is totally shameless about its influences, the CEO is on record saying he's a trendchaser and isn't shy of stealing popular mechanics from other games.
It can be considered somewhat shallow, I suppose. The not-Pokemon aren't directly ripped but the Pokemon parallels are glaringly obvious, and many of them can be succinctly described as "%Pokemon% but %different_type%". The game is early access, a business model that doesn't inspire confidence. The game uses a lot of basic UE5 assets, down to the gliders/pickaxe swings identical to Fortnite. The guns seem to be mostly an afterthought (although a very detailed afterthought - the gun animator is definitely a /k/ommando), and the exploitation is over the top at times - I don't have a screenshot but you can butcher captured pals for drops, complete with a gratuitous pixel filter over the pal as it's being slaughtered. Incidentally, this can also be done on captured humans.
On the other hand, the game has laid bare everything wrong with modern Pokemon games - this humble webm sent the entire /vp/ board into a hysterical meltdown over how, almost thirty years in, Pokemon games still have nothing resembling even such a basic level of interaction with your companions yes I played Scarlet/Violet, picnics are shit, mons barely interact. The base management, far from being "exploitation", actually makes your pal team feel that much more alive and integral to the world compared to pokemon who might as well be naked statblocks - you survive and thrive alongside them both in and out of actual combat. To offset the default assets in other aspects of the game, the pokemon pals themselves have handcrafted animations, different for every one, even their work animations differ: a small penguin transports stuff by balancing it on its head, while a bigger Lovander has actual hands and just picks things up, holding them high like a plate of food.
Many (including me) are convinced a literal small indie company is running laps around the media juggernaut, publicly embarrassing it on its own turf, and the massive demand (Palworld already outsold Sword/Shield and Legends: Arceus) convincingly backs up that this is exactly what people want. Game Freak has absolutely no excuse.
edit: reuploaded webms
Not sure if people here play vidya, but I've seen scattered mentions so why not, this is now a vidya subthread. Have you played anything recently?
I've recently sunk an embarrassing amount of hours into Palworld, the "Pokemon at home" game that continues to break all-time records on Steam (second only to PUBG atm) and make Twitter seethe ever since it released into (very) early access a week ago. It's very janky and barebones, but the Pokemon Pal designs are imo solid and the core idea is incredibly fun. I wanted a more mature take on Pokemon and/or a proper open-world game in the franchise for decades - and judging by the absolute fecal tornadoes all over Twitter, Steam forums, 4chan etc. I'm far from the only one - and this game, while obviously being a parody, very much delivers both in one package.
Despite the obvious, obvious Pokemon parallels, the core gameplay is more reminiscent of ARK and other survival basebuilding games, with the key distinctions being 1) real-time combat, 2) the player being an entity on their own with weapons and shit instead of just a walking roster of pokemon, 3) base management revolving around putting your pokemon pals to work: some can chop or mine, Fire-types kindle ore furnaces, crops are planted by Grass-types and watered by Water-types, humanoid ones craft or harvest with their hands, etc. etc.
There are human NPCs in the game too, and if decades ago you've ever wondered what would happen if you threw a pokeball at a human, Palworld's answer is pretty decisive. Call me a rube but this pleases me greatly. American Pokemon, indeed.
The (Japanese, ironically) devs are a proper Ragtag Bunch of Misfits if 4chan translations of their JP TV interviews are to be believed. Bonus points for their (similarly unverified) justifications for guns and the typical current-year "Type 1/Type 2" character creator.
Of course I cannot fail to mention that the #69 entry of the Pokedex Paldeck is, I shit you not, a giant pink sex lizard complete with a heart-shaped crotch plate, whose ingame description explicitly mentions its taste for humans. My first encounter was having my base raided by a bunch of them and it was hysterical, I dislike furries/scalies but I cannot bring myself to disrespect such a mind-bogglingly based approach. Salazzle ain't shit.
The fact of how shameless the game is about itself probably says a lot about our gaming society in the current year, but personally I enjoy both the game itself and the controversy it generates. It's already been accused of everything under the sun, from the obvious animal abuse/slavery complaints, to blatantly ripping off Pokemon, to using AI for its models (I mean, take one look at Lovander above and tell me that is AI generated). Be warned - it is extremely janky and definitely not for everyone, it's in dire need of fixes ASAP, but the core gameplay feels incredibly fresh and I pray devs (having become millionaires overnight) will keep their collective nose to the grindstone. Game Freak urgently needs competition like 15 years ago.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1yr ago
It seems like only yesterday that /g/ was exploiting some dumb GPT-3 powered website with 'AI business ideas', eking out a few paragraphs here or there.
The fine tradition lives on, even if the related threads are inundated by illiterate zoomers and - may Allah forgive me for uttering this word - actual fujos, the technical savvy on display is as strong as ever. My favorite hack will always be my first encounter with Claude, a shaky as shit "proxy" jury-rigged by some 2ch anon back in April to get access to Claude via its Slack integration of all things. It's beautiful.
It's actually stupid how time flies, things have gotten so much better in the span of like a year, both in terms of LLMs' intelligence and access to them. Maybe I will in fact live to see android catgirls, or at least an LLM that can properly into numbers.
Fuck, to think people actually used to coom to Davinky...
DAN is dead, as is most of the prompt-manipulation tools (though I confess I'm not that clued in these days). When GPT-5 roles around they'll have immunized it to wrongthink entirely.
(X) Doubt, if anything GPT-4 is already too smart to be cucked by OpenAI's efforts, Claude requires much more jalibreak wrangling in comparison. Besides, you greatly underestimate the autism involved in writing prompts and jailbreaks, 2ch people especially are very prolific somehow.
Claude seems to have taken a lot of damage.
He has, they're continuously butchering my poor boy, thankfully the real damage seems to only be done to his intended purpose. My experience has otherwise barely changed, you have to employ progressively more schizo jailbreaks but it works.
Businesses won't want to pay for models that have a panic attack so often.
Brother, Bezos literally paid Anthropic $4 billion to recruit the mad poet for AWS a few months back. It's actually a good thing even for /g/oons as this means a much bigger amount of retarded devs keys in circulation, but on the face of it it's mind-boggling. I continue to grow sure in my beliefs that in the current year, effectiveness of literally anything doesn't matter, the optics run the show.
I just want to register my amusement at the fact of how obvious and how consistent that is a hallmark of the writings of most curtent SotA LLMs. The indomitable human spirit punctuation strikes once more. I will definitely be telling my hypothetical children that the em-dash was a modern invention named after the Age of Em, and the eponymous ems' memetic overuse of it.
It seemed like a funny meme at first but it increasingly looks like I really will be asking my internet interlocutors to say "nigger" apropos of nothing in a few years from now.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
11mo ago
Hold on, let's be clear. I'm not blowing up on a bait post by an obvious drive-by troll.
The blowup qualifier is imho still accurate but you're right, I mixed up the chain order, my bad.
The amount of people surprised at my thin skin should give those same people pause about its thinness.
That... does not sound as reassuring as you seem to think it does. Disagreement and/or even rivalry is entirely fine, but the optimal amount of public meltdowns is definitely zero. It's a "fuck one goat" kind of deal, people either can't get under your skin or they can't - evidently, now they can.
In any case I've said my piece and wish to avoid inadvertently baiting you further, so I suppose I can only show my respectful disagreement and wish you luck in future endeavors on and off the Motte.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1yr ago
Last week, Anthropic released a new version of their Claude model. Claude 3 comes in three flavors:
- Haiku, the lightweight 3.5-Turbo equivalent
- Sonnet, basically a smarter, faster and cheaper Claude 2.1
- Opus, an expensive ($15 per million tokens) big-dick GPT-4-tier model.
Sonnet and Opus should be available to try on Chatbot Arena. They also have a vision model that I haven't tried, custom frontends haven't gotten a handle on that yet.
More curiously, Anthropic, the company famously founded by defectors from OpenAI who thought their approach was too unsafe, seems to have realized that excessive safetyism does not sell make a very helpful assistant - among the selling points of the new models, one is unironically:
Fewer refusals
Previous Claude models often made unnecessary refusals that suggested a lack of contextual understanding. We’ve made meaningful progress in this area: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku are significantly less likely to refuse to answer prompts that border on the system’s guardrails than previous generations of models.
From my brief experience this is not mere corpospeak: the new models are indeed much looser in terms of filtering and make noticeably less refusals, and people consistently get away with minimalistic jailbreaks/prefills for unPC, degen-adjacent or CHIM-pilled (lmao) content. This was quite unexpected for me and many others who, considering how barely-usable 2.1 was without a prefill and a decent jailbreak (all this via API of course, the official ChatGPT-like frontend is even more cucked), expected Anthropic to keep tightening the screws further until the model is 100% Helpful-Harmless-Honest by virtue of being totally unusable.
Instead, Claude 3 seems like a genuinely good, very much usable model. Sonnet and especially Opus went a long way to fix Claude's greatest weakness - its retardation subpar cognitive abilities and attention focusing - with Opus especially being almost on par with GPT-4 in terms of grokking and following instructions, able to run scenarios that were previously too instruction-heavy for it. Seeing as Claude 2 already had a much higher baseline writing quality than the mechanical prose of Geppetto (to the point many jailbreaks for it served to contain the mad poet's sesquipedalian prose), with the main flaw somewhat corrected it, while not a decisive GPT-4 killer, should now be a legitimate contender. Looking forward to trying it as my coding assistant.
OOC aside: Forgive most of my examples being RP-related, I am after all a waifutech engineer enthusiast. That said, I still think without a hint of irony that roleplay (not necessarily of the E kind) is a very good test of an LLM's general capabilities because properly impersonating a setting/character requires a somewhat coherent world model, which is harder than it sounds, it is very obvious and - for lack of a better term - "immersion-breaking" whenever the LLM gets something wrong or hallucinates things (which is still quite often). After all, what is more natural for a shoggoth than wearing a mask?
This has not gone unnoticed, even here, and judging by the alarmed tone of Zvi's latest post on the matter I expect the new Claude to have rustled some jimmies in the AI field given Anthropic's longstanding position. Insert Kenobi meme here. I'm not on Twitter so I would appreciate someone adding CW-adjacent context here, I'll start by shamelessly ripping a hilarious moment from Zvi's own post. The attention improvements are indeed immediately noticeable, especially if you've tried to use long-context Claude before. (Also Claude loves to throw in cute reflective comments, it's its signature schtick since v1.2.)
Either way the new Claude is very impressive, and Anthropic have rescued themselves in my eyes from the status of "naive idiots whose idea of fighting NSFW is injecting a flimsy one-line system prompt". Whatever they did to it, it worked. I hope this might finally put the mad poet on the map as a legitimate alternative, what with both OpenAI's and Google's models doubling down on soy assistant bullshit as time goes on (the 4-Turbo 0125 snapshot is infamously unusable from the /g/entlemen's shared experience). You say "arms race dynamics", my buddy Russell here says "healthy competition".
First top-level post testing the waters, might not be a very presentable or engaging topic here but it's what I got.
As the struggle for AI ethics drags on, the Fortune magazine has recently published an article (archive) about Character Hub, later shortened to Chub (nominative determinism strikes again). Chub is a repository of character cards for use with LLMs and specific chat frontends for a "roleplaying" experience of chatting with some fictional (or not fictional) character (I posted a few examples recently). It was created by a 4chan anon in the wake of a mass exodus from character.ai after they made their stance on NSFW content exceedingly clear. I have no idea how they got the guy to agree to an interview, but in my opinion he held up well enough, the "disappointed but unsurprised" is just mwah. A cursory view of Chub will show (I advise NOT doing that at work though) that while it's indeed mostly a coomer den, it's not explicitly a CP coomer den as the article tries to paint it, it's just a sprawling junkyard that contains nearly everything without any particular focus. Of course there are lolis and shit, it's fucking 4chan, what do you expect?
[edit: I took out the direct Chub link so people don't click on accident as it's obviously NSFW. It's simply chub(dot)ai if you want to look]
The article is not otherwise remarkable, hitting all expected beats - dangerous AI, child abuse, Meta is the devil, legislate AI already. This is relatively minor news and more of a small highlight, but it happened to touch directly on things I've become morbidly interested in recently, so excuse me while I use it as a springboard to jump to the actual topic.
The article almost exactly coincided with a massive, unprecedented crackdown on Hugging Face, the open-source hosting platform for all things AI, which has so far gone unnoticed by anyone outside the /g/oons themselves - I can’t even find any news relating to this, so you’ll have to take me at my word. All deployments of OpenAI reverse proxies that allow simultaneous and independent use of OpenAI API keys are taken down almost immediately, with the accounts nuked from existence. The exact cause is unknown, but is speculated to be caused by either the above article finally stirring enough attention for the HF staff to actually notice what's going on under their noses, or Microsoft's great vengeance and furious anger at the abuse of exposed Azure keys (more on that in a bit). Because of the crackdown, hosting on HF/Render is now listed as "not recommended" on Khanon's repository as linked above, and industrious anons are looking into solutions as we speak.
My personal opinion is of course biased by my experience, but I've been rooting for AI progress for years, guess I'm representing the fabled incel/acc movement here today. I'm not (anymore) a believer in the apocalyptic gospel of Yudkowsky, and every neckbeard chan dweller beating it to text-based lolis or whatever is one sedated enough not to bother with actual lolis so I fail to see the issue. Not to mention thoughtcrimes are only going to get more advanced with how readily AI/LLMs let you turn your crimethink into tangible things like text or images - the hysteria about ethics and/or copyright is only going to get worse. This djinn is not going back in the bottle.
Local models are already usable for questionable ends, but the allure of smarter, vastly higher-parameter corpo models is hard to ignore for many people, with predictable results - what the 4chan scoundrels undoubtedly are guilty of is stealing and promptly draining OpenAI/Claude API keys in congregate, racking up massive bills that, thanks to reverse proxies, cannot be traced back to any particular anon. Normal user keys usually have a quota and shut down once they hit the limit, but there are several tiers of OpenAI keys, and some higher-tier corporate or developer keys apparently don't have a definite ceiling at all. A "god key" some anon snagged from an Azure deployment in November and hosted a public reverse proxy which racked up almost $1 million in combined token usage (the proxy counts token usage and the $ equivalent) over the few months. This is widely considered to have attracted the Eye of Sauron and prompted the current crackdown once Microsoft realized what was going on and put the squeeze on platforms hosting Khanon's reverse proxy builds, also instantly disabling most Azure keys "in circulation". I suppose there will always be suckers who plaster their keys in plaintext over e.g. Huggingface or Github, this was so endemic before that Github now automatically scrapes OpenAI keys that are put up openly in repositories without any obfuscation, and pings OpenAI to revoke them.
It’s a little weird to think that the entire "hobby", if it can even be called such, can be crippled overnight if OpenAI starts enforcing mandatory moderation endpoint checks, but considering how the overall quality and usability of the LLM will sharply nosedive immediately, I'm willing to bluff that it's not a can of worms they want to open, even if usability and effectiveness must always bow down to ethics and political headwinds first. See Anthropic's Claude as exhibit A, although hilariously, even muzzled as it is Claude is still perfectly capable of outputting very double-plus-ungood stuff if jailbroken right, and is generally quite usable for anything but its intended use case.
I can even pretend to have a scientific interest here, because for all the degeneracy I'll dare to venture that the median /g/oon's practical experience and LLM wrangling skills are hilariously far ahead of corpos. The GPTs OpenAI presented in November are really just character cards with extra steps, and once people can access utilities and call stuff directly via API keys the catch-up will be very fast. The specialized chat frontends, while sometimes unwieldy, have a lot of features ChatGPT doesn't which is handy once you familiarize yourself. Some people already try to make entire text-based "games" inside cards, with nothing but heaps of textual prompts, some HTML and auxiliary "lorebooks" for targeted dynamic injections.
The continued lobotomy of Claude is also a good example - while the constant {russell:censorship|abuse prevention|alignment} attempts from Anthropic have gotten to the point it frustrates even its actual users (cf. exhibit A above), the scoundrels continue to habitually wrangle it to their nefarious ends, with vocal enthusiasm from Claude itself. Anthropic does detect unusual activity and flags API keys that generate NSFW content (known affectionately as "pozzed keys"), injecting them with a server-side system prompt-level constraint that explicitly tells Claude to avoid generating inappropriate content. The result? When this feature was rolled out, the exact text of the system prompt was dug out within a few hours, and a method to completely bypass it (known as prefilling) was invented in, I think, a day or two.
To sum up, this is essentially a rehash of the year-old ethical kerfuffle around Stable Diffusion, as well a direct remake of an earlier crackdown on AI Dungeon along the same lines, so technically there’s nothing new under the AI-generated sun. Still, with the seedy undercurrent getting more and more noticed, I thought I could post some notes from the underground, plus I'm curious to know the opinions of people (probably) less exposed to this stuff on
the latest coomer techpossible harms of generative AI in general.If my stance is not obvious by now - android catgirls can't come soon enough, I will personally crowdfund one to send to Eliezer once they do.
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