RedRegard
6d ago
Study the notes on Substack that get picked up by the algorithm. They're highly artificial and they take a fare bit of skill to craft, but they'll get you large numbers of page views. KulakRevolt manages them regularly. I've managed a few myself. Also important for traffic are front facing materials like cover images, titles, even your Substack's name. In order to get people to stick around, your writing has to actually be good, your authorial personality and overall concept need to be good, but there are achievable mechanisms for driving the raw baseline of traffic you need in the first place.
RedRegard
6d ago
If you write to his level on Substack, the algorithm's going to pick you up and you're going to get a ton of subscribers and even enough paid subscribers to make a decent income. I'd also count his ability to market himself and manage how he comes across as a personality as part of his writer's skillset, especially in how it directly informs the content of his writing. But there's much less necessary hustle than you make it seem. Putting quality stuff on Substack is alone sufficient to gain some measure of success.
RedRegard
6d ago
If you can write as good as Sam Kriss, you will enjoy the same success as Sam Kriss. Algorithms make recognition of ability easy, efficient, and reliable. No more languishing in obscurity. The problem is that algorithms also select for cheap, shallow thrills in addition to hardcore skill and talent, so most aspiring writers take the easy route of producing trash for the masses (see KulakRevolt and Scott Alexander) rather than more significant aesthetic works.
Overall, the market for writing may have shrunk as well, as the attention economy has gotten hyper saturated. It may follow the general trend we're seeing of entry and midlevel opportunities drying up as things become more concentrated at the highest levels. That's probably also the work of efficient markets.
RedRegard
19d ago
Societies perpetuate their values through Symbols, and these are incumbent in a reverence for books and such, and this sort of thing can be considered acts of communication. A company that has reached mythological levels of performative and broadly recognized evil is now implicated in a new feat of symbolic desecration. If you recognize that SYMBOLS, COMMUNICATION, RITUAL, GESTURES, and so forth can matter in terms of a society coordinating itself, then it's rather dull to switch tracks and start talking about the utilitarian benefit of century old pulp novels.
RedRegard
19d ago
I find you need to match the number of ideas you're treating to the length of whatever you're writing. Microfiction can sustain one idea per story. Short stories several. Too few ideas and you won't have anything to work with. Too many and you won't be able to provide a solid basis for them and you'll have trouble with any sort of depth or believability. Or you'll just overshoot your desired length altogether and wind up with a project you didn't choose.
RedRegard
28d ago
Interesting. I think the AI effect comes from the lack of meaning permeating his pictures. The characters are posed dynamically but without purpose. Gargantuan objects loom randomly. All sorts of outlandish crap from our commercial trash-heap culture are juxtaposed in a way that brings out their banality. Subtextually it's undermining itself, presenting a sort of anti-meaning. It's funny that he's probably going for these effects deliberately, whereas it's more of an inherent byproduct for AI.
RedRegard
1mo ago
The Half-Life games, particularly HL1, had pretty good mechanics and were quite similar to those movement shooters/boomer shooters of yore... In fact I'd say one of the chief draws of the first game is that it does have a satisfying feel to it mechanics wise. You have lots of mobility, your movement carries weight, as do the effects of the weapons you wield. You dodge a variety of projectiles. You dart in and out with your shotgun. It's not as mobile as something like Quake, but for a solo campaign based game it ranks among the best in my experience.
Compare with Halo or CoD, where things are much more sluggish, weightless, etc., all in order to play better with a controller. Those games have their own merits, of course, but as far as the feel of movement shooters goes, which I'd say is their chief virtue, HL does a much better job.
Even Half-Life 2 does pretty well. The vehicles are clunky but, again, they carry momentum, they dispense and absorb shocks, get yoinked down by gravity. There's an enjoyable physics to everything.
Beyond that, and this goes beyond mechanics and simplicity, but their other key asset is their personality. Their mix of capital w Weird elements, hodge podges of relatively exotic sci-fi ideas, their departure from rote action genre fare (burritos getting blown up in microwaves; involved characterizations; crowbars), sets them apart narratively from most other offerings. There's maybe a Twin Peaks vibe to it if I'm not mistaken, a bit offbeat. Games like Halo do the full-on action game approach very well, and that's what most shooters aspire to, but Half-Life's got it's own little niche storywise, and so gives us something of variety.
RedRegard
1mo ago
That’s hardly a very intriguing or incisive throughline, though. Take a snapshot of any day in the past century and you’ll find a bunch of political organs massaging the truth. If you want to prove the present is particularly egregious, you’ll need to step into the world of statistics.
RedRegard
1mo ago
Moderation is best. Be neither too hot nor lukewarm; walk the middle path.
RedRegard
1mo ago
I think there's a brief reference to the 'demons' having horns and the 'witches' having tails. Then there's the foliots, who have wings? I took it to imply these weren't ordinary men at all, which made the story much more intriguing!
RedRegard
2mo ago
Yeah, the mulch will also help regulate temperatures throughout the day-night cycle, keeping it cooler during the day and warmer during the night, which plants generally like. Might not be as important in California as in other places, but anywhere there's major swings it can be highly valuable. It will also protect the soil microbiology from the sun and its deadly radiation, and thus create for a healthier root environment. I waited probably half a summer before applying it when I first started, but I now regard it as one of the highest impact improvements a gardener can make.
RedRegard
2mo ago
You can get a lot of mileage from leafy greens like kale, and also watermelons are pretty cool. The AI advice doesn’t sound super useful. Do you use mulch at all? I’d focus on fundamentals like that. Check out some gardening YouTube videos just to see what you might be missing. I recommend Gardening Like A Viking.
RedRegard
2mo ago
The show seems to have been dependent on his continued input to maintain quality, given, for instance, that it took a nosedive once it outpaced his published novels, so he could quite plausibly have continued to monetize his story and creative abilities just through his unique ability to continue putting out quality installments.
RedRegard
2mo ago
Art requires a huge degree of specificity to create its effects, so trusting AI prompts to get what you want is like trying to wield a giant mallet to repair a delicate wristwatch. To give an example of the specificity often required, in this image, the artist chose to highly stylize the bars in the way he did to create an effect of solidity and imperviousness, in order to convey the extent to which the character on the other side was locked there, and that's just one detail among many for just one comic frame among many in a very long manga book. Zeroing in on the bars in particular while also controlling all the other details and framing with AI would be incredibly difficult and arduous. It would probably be faster for a skilled artist just to draw them himself, not even counting the superior quality (especially in terms of exactness) he would undoubtedly achieve. Furthermore, while there are many non-artists who claim they have 'ideas in their head' just as good as the man who drew this scene, the truth is that in order to conceive this scene in its full panoply of detail, you need to have a highly developed artistic skillset in the first place. That is to say, to even know that you ought to stylize the bars in a given way to achieve a particular effect, you need to already be fairly well trained in this kind of art, what its potentials are and how they are craft-wise achieved, because the art is more in its buildup of details and controlled effects than any central, floating idea. So the notion that AI would allow non-artists to get those ideas out of their heads and onto the page through bypassing the actual need to learn the foundations of a craft ends up being inert.
RedRegard
3mo ago
Aliens in these sorts of space opera stories are commonly representative of the 'other' or cultural diversity or what have you. Exploring the vast galaxy was about exploring our own formerly interesting planet. When Luke goes to the cantina with Obi Wan, much emphasis is placed on the bizarre habits of the locals. I'd say it's fair to assume the directors knew what metaphors they were playing with, although maybe not pointedly.
Furthermore, back in the timeframe the sequels were made, colonialism was still alive, minorities were sometimes mistreated by the police (uniformed white men primarily), and immigrants were, and still are, exceptionally precarious population groups, in many cases. So I'd say it was fair of them to employ this dichotomy.
I'd say it's less of a worldbuilding decision than an expressive one, perhaps gotten secondhand from stewing around with all the other genre works and their tropes.
That Monet painting might be operating along extremely fine and subtle principles, and so be highly opaque to the large majority of people who view it in terms of any brilliance it may hold.
My favorite painter is Max Ernst. The genius of his paintings is quite a bit louder and more flamboyant. Even to relative laypersons like myself, it's easy to distinguish his paintings against AI, as AI cannot match him for creativity, intricacy, etc.
This is to say, there might be situations where AI art cannot be separated from masterful human work because the human work operates on principles potentially no one besides the master who created it understands, but for masterful works which are more scrutable, which do exist, it is easy to see that no AI can compare against them.
And the distinction should be made between the creative effort required to conceive a painting and configure it, versus the technical effort required to reproduce one. AI is fully theoretically capable even now of producing identical or near identical copies of works it has seen. The only reason it doesn't, during the course of casual prompting, is that its designers for copyright reasons sought to inhibit that behavior. What AI can't do is create wholly original works, or even to composite existing works at a high level. Anyone saying AI cannot reproduce existing works is wrong. Anyone saying AI can produce good original works is also wrong.
RedRegard
3mo ago
To some extent art and entertainment are something you’re taught to interpret. For instance, having a moustache and a cape isn’t inherently nefarious, but common tropes in our culture teach us to associate the qualities together. Essentially artists use the symbolically coded languages of their mediums to impart ideas and stir emotions. Highly refined sensibilities come in part from understanding these languages at a high level.
Sure! If you're up for some heavy reading and don't mind receiving Harrison's thoughts poetically, check out his Viriconium series and his Empty Space trilogy. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) The first, his most popular set of works, he began early in his career, grew disillusioned with, and eventually set aside. It tracks the arc of his thinking with regards to commercial fantasy, and you can see its development through the effects of his shifting aesthetic philosophy. Where it opens with a pretty prosaic first novel, the Pastel City, it becomes increasingly epistemologically degraded as it goes on, until the world of Viriconium itself has become nothing more than a reflection in a dirty restroom mirror in A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium, a captstone short story of sorts.
Empty Space opens with the novel Light, a tour-de-force revival of the Space Opera genre updated to include a bunch of quantum theory notions. Light opens with the concept of the Kefahuchi Tract, a symbol of endless potential wrapped up in the genre's core interests. As the trilogy goes on, it plays with this metaphor in increasingly critical and bleak ways.
For more direct deliberations on the relationship between fantasy and modern life, check out his literary magical realist story The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. It dramatizes the negative influence that omnipresent fantasy can have on modern persons.
If you want some nonfictional, direct commentary on these matters, you can check out his blog and try to root out those essays I mentioned, which would have been from quite some time ago (I couldn't find the one I was looking for, but here are two somewhat related responses). As you will note, much of the blog posts' response to the topic of fantasy is snide and dismissive, however he does actually provide substantial criticisms in places if you dig for it.
You might be interested in M John Harrison. A fantasy writer in his early career, he turned on the genre vehemently and spent much of his middle career attacking it, trying to cope with it, or pretending it wasn’t there. He wrote a famous internet essay on genre fantasy and its negative influences, but later wrote a second, less famous response to it, a decade or so later, saying that he was wrong. Fantasy was to blame, he still agreed, but it went far beyond just the genre. Everything in the modern world had become a fantasy, essentially, from cellphone commercials to presidential elections to the way that ordinary people lived. Fantasy and its deleterious influences had become all encompassing. He continues to grapple with the matter in books he writes today, in what is some of the most pertinent writing I have ever come across. I more or less agree with his present, complicated verdict, to the extent that I can understand him. Fantasy is bad, but in the modern world, everything is fantasy.
RedRegard
3mo ago
It goes towards proving the basis for what we observe: that LLMs are very good at recalling large and disparate amounts of knowledge but are poor for functionally utilizing said knowledge, especially in matters complex, unusual, or otherwise not 1:1 with stuff from their training material. Whether this proves or disproves they are sentient or intelligent or whatever is a matter of semantics, but what it does do is give us a clue as to why we observe certain disparities in their capabilities, and can help inform our expectations about what further capabilities might emerge.
Humans lean on theory, trained pattern spotting, and various heuristics or memorized devices (i.e. king opposition) when playing chess. Memory plays a role to, but outside of maybe Magnus Carlson it is dwarfed by the capacities of LLMs. This is a level of intelligence that can also be employed for creating architecture or symphonies. LLMs lean a lot harder on brute memory recall (although I won't discount entirely their capacity for higher-tier reasoning) through hyper-intensive statistical calculations, and these make it very good for things like discoursing on a broad variety of facts or semantically juggling abstractions, but they do not, apparently, allow LLMs to create complex architecture, symphonies, or do anything else involving the complex interlocking of smaller elements.
The small elements are found in its memory and can be expurgated intact individually, but the LLMs do not possess the intelligence to complexly fit them together. The LLMs do not operate at a level of intelligence that would allow that. They are hyper-intensive exploiters of lower order processes but not high tier ones. That's what's suggested by the fact they can recall 96% of a novel. That they lean on highly scaled relatively brutish methods to repeat stuff verbatim, or close enough.
RedRegard
3mo ago
LLMs can reproduce 96% of the text of Harry Potter verbatim. Even if they do not store all their training data with perfect fidelity, their underlying operations are such that it doesn't matter. It's data compression with variable loss depending on what they were trained on. When 1:1 outputs from their memories of training data can't exist, they reach for similar patterns and smooth over the disjunctions using sophistry. They must be commended for semantic fluency.
RedRegard
3mo ago
Craft would be about strategically wielding the narrative elements in order to achieve affect or to convey meaning. In the second video in the post to which we are replying, when the girlfriend character gets stabbed by the demon, does it register as anything other than bathetic? Or does it even register at all?
Those artists you mention, they achieve affect through the careful arrangement of skillfully created elements. With the AI, there is no cumulative impact, and it doesn’t use skill to recreate things. All we have is a clunky copy-paste machine.
RedRegard
3mo ago
Disagreed on the 90% figure. The AI can spit forth from its datasets superficially accurate renditions of tropes and imagery from other works that it has seen. What it cannot do is perfectly mold every detail towards the purpose of a given scene. The act of expression is missing, and thus 100% of the relevant criteria for an aesthetic-artistic work is missing. All you have in the end are a variety of statistically likely tropes and images strung together in some pattern of Baudrillardian remove, lacking any signification or meaning.
RedRegard
3mo ago
I've given up on planning my stories beyond the starting circumstances. My best ideas come to me while I'm in the midst of writing. Potentialities that I can spot, take notes on, sometimes even act on before they flutter away from my brain each night while I sleep. The key is to just dedicate unbroken blocks of time, I've found, and to think about projects frequently. As far as hardcoded outlines go, those have never worked for me. My mind goes blank when I try to enact them.
This one's pretty good: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-century-of-the-maxxer
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