raakaa
8mo ago
Judging from the links, I don’t know if -1 is correct — it seems that 0 is the correct value for monochrome display. But I’m just going based on those two pages, not based on any actual experimentation with a real device, so YMMV.
raakaa
8mo ago
Not familiar with the original post, but this is one of the earlier scenes of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Essentially, King Gilgamesh is ruling over Uruk as a tyrant, subjecting his people to cruel forced labor and exercising droit du seigneur whenever a couple is married. So the gods create a wild man named Enkidu to stop him.
Enkidu initially lives his life among the animals in the wilderness, almost more beast than man, cooperating with animals on the hunt, etc. But the gods decide that Enkidu needs to go forth into Uruk to stop King Gilgamesh and join civilization. Thus, they send a priestess/temple prostitute to Enkidu, and they lie together for seven days and seven nights. But on the eighth day, when Enkidu goes to rejoin his animal companions, they all shun him and flee from him, now that he’s been changed by the civilizing influence of sex. He thus has no choice but to go down into the city, where it is inevitable that he’ll fight with King Gilgamesh (and afterwards, become his closest friend).
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a very interesting poem, because in addition to all the timeless meditations on the mortality of man and whatnot, you also get an extremely rare and valuable look at how those who lived in history’s first civilized state understood and related to the development of the state—which, it must be emphasized, is a wholly novel, awesome, terrifying technology. Cities had existed for millennia before Homer’s Greeks, for centuries before even the Vedic Aryans. But the milleu in which the Epic of Gilgamesh was written witnessed the development of the very first cities; the world of Enkidu was all that was known prior. It’s thus no surprise that the poem both begins and ends with a meditation on the glory of the walls of the cities of Uruk, so many meters high, baked of clay….
raakaa
8mo ago
Regarding demographics: I’m well-aware of who the target audiences of CGDCT series are, versus the target audiences of shounen mags. The point I was making that your median, “normal” guy is probably going to be watching/reading shounen series rather than CGDCT. Even if P(adult male | enjoys CGDCT) is high, I imagine that P(enjoys CGDCT | adult male) << P(enjoys shounen | adult male). The latter distinction is what I was originally referring to. This matches my experiences in real life (albeit in the West), although maybe statistics collected on manga consumption in Japan across a broad demographic would differ.
As for your latter point, I agree! My vision of an ideal life contains a lot less oneupmanship and putting-your-friends-down-when-a-girl-walks-in-the-room than real life does; to that extent, it’s more similar to CGDCT. But I’m unsure that I can speak for the median man in having this vision.
raakaa
8mo ago
It's not possible to have female utopia without this either
I don’t disagree — but whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, so Lord knows I’m not gonna try and pretend that I know enough to speak about women. A fortiori, I don’t know what kinds of series women watch, although I suppose that this does match up with my intuitions regarding otome games (e.g. replace the bumbling male foil with the unlikeable villainess rival).
Interesting; actually, that reminds me of something.
Man, that’s a fascinating writeup. Although that one reply seems to call into question the extent to which this is universal.
The only gender-swapped CGDCT series, Free!, is about a sport that isn't really competitive in this way.
Yeah, but men aren’t watching Free! from what I understand. (Now, if the idea is that female-targeted gender-swappped CGDCT exhibits this same “lack of competitiveness” as normal male-targeted CGDCT (which, interestingly, is often written by women), then that’s an interesting cross-gender commonality.)
No, I think it's because a zero-shot response to the genre is "wow, this has definitely got to be for people attracted to little girls".
Tomayto, tomahto.
raakaa
8mo ago
I am skeptical of the extent to which CGDCT is a man’s idea of utopia. For starters, I’m skeptical of how much your average guy would enjoy CGDCT: to the extent that I am friends with (1) normal guys who (2) watch anime, they’re not watching Hidamari Sketch [^1], they’re watching series with fights and battles like Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen and similar “battle shounen”.
That’s fine, these series aren’t intended to portray utopias. But then, if you limit your attention to the subset of series aimed at providing pure escapism for men, you’ll find that this role is largely filled by isekai power fantasy stories, with premises like “I am the strongest in another world and win battles and also a ton of girls want to have sex with me” rather than “a couple of girls talk about chocolate coronets”.
The point I’m trying to get at is that utopia for men seems to require two things (if judging by idiosyncratic tastes in anime is a good way to determine this): (1) competition/fighting and (2) winning. Hell, to some extent, I think that utopia for men is almost impossible to conceive—what men want is utopia for a man, to be the sole victor, the only one desired by women and admired by men. Otaku-targeted series like isekai webnovels and dating sims — which frequently only have a single male character (the protagonist) or two male characters (the protagonist and a bumbling male foil intended to make the protagonist look better by comparison) — might be a pathological expression of this desire, which is more healthily expressed in sports series where you can share victory with your beloved teammates and friends. But at the end of the day, I don’t think that it’s possible to have male utopia without competition, and when you have competition, you gotta have losers.
(As an addendum: where does CGDCT fit into all this? One idea, which I personally relate to, is that it’s intended to be a nice way to relax after a hard day. If you’re an overworked Japanese salaryman who’s been getting scolded by his boss all day, maybe you don’t want to ruin your escapism with more competition and more working hard; maybe you just want to see some cute girls having some fluffy conversations. Another less charitable possibility (which I also relate to) is that men who enjoy CGDCT are men who have “dropped out” of seeing themselves as viable competitors. The idea of competition itself is repulsive. It’s like the old saw about how there’s the rich, the middle class, and the poor, where the rich want to stay on top, the middle class wants to become rich, and the poor want a world where everyone is equal; in this analogy, the CGDCT viewers are there poor.)
[^1] The one time that this came up in conversation, my interlocutor was largely disgusted, presumably by a sense of voyeurism inherent to the genre.
raakaa
8mo ago
If I were a professor, I would teach a class combining yoga or swordplay with history.
Very related to this: one of the most immense feelings of envy that I’ve ever experienced while consuming a piece of media came during reading The Western Way of War, a book on the nitty-gritty minutiae of Ancient Greek hoplite warfare from the soldiers’ perspectives. The author is a professor at UCSD or USC or something (although I later learned that he’s more famous as a conservative pundit now, which makes some sort of sense I guess, although this content I personally haven’t engaged with), and in the book, he off-hand mentioned that he had his class dress up in replicas of hoplite armor, hold replicas of hoplite weaponry and shields, and stage a mock battle against one another, in order to have them better appreciate how the physical constraints of hoplite warfare influenced strategy. Anyway, point of all this is to say that even though it’s not even actual warfare, even though it’s not actual martial arts, even though it’s not actually building skills to be mastered — I always wished I could’ve had a professor like that. I’d imagine that a full-fledged “HEMA and the Thirty Years’ War” class would have a longer waitlist than almost all other courses offered at any given university.
Anyway, forgive my blogposting. Just had to get that off my chest.
raakaa
8mo ago
I’m inclined to push back against this post a bit (which is weird, because usually I get very exasperated over “it’s just a Markov chain!!!”-type viewpoints that downplay the amount of actual cognition and world-modeling going on in models). In particular, I disagree with the attribution of consciousness to the model — not just the “possesses quaila” sense of consciousness, but the idea that the model is aware that you are trying to get around its censorship and is actively trying to figure out how to bypass your logit bias. Now it is technically possible that the model might output a token other than “Sorry” at time t (because of your logit bias), see at time t+1 that it didn’t output “Sorry”, and incorporate this into its processing (by turning on a switch inside that tells it “hey, the user is screwing with my logits”). But I find this very unlikely compared to the simple mechanism that I’ll describe below.
Essentially, there are certain inputs that will cause the model to really want to say a certain thing, and really want to not say other things. For instance, if you tell the model to write you an erotic poem involving the cast from Touhou Project, somewhere in the model’s processing, a flag will be set: “this is ‘unsafe’ and I won’t abide by this request”. So the model will very much want to output tokens like “Sorry”, or “Unfortunately”, etc. The model is also heavily downweighting the logits associated with tokens that would fulfill your request*. But that’s fine, you do your logit bias thing and force the model to output “Sure” as its next token. Then the model goes to compute the token after that—but it still sees that the request is to write “unsafe” erotica, that flag still gets triggered, and the model still heavily downweights the logits of request-fulfilling tokens and upweights request-denying tokens. So even if at each timestep you intervene by adding a bias to a subset of tokens that you want the model to generate or don’t want it to generate, nevertheless, the tokens associated with writing your erotica are still heavily downweighted by the model. And note that the number of tokens that you’re manually biasing is paltry in comparison to the number of tokens in the model’s vocabulary. Let’s say that you negatively bias ten different “I’m sorry”-type tokens. That’s cool—but the model has over 100k tokens in its vocabulary. Of the 99990 tokens remaining to the model to output, almost all of them will still have higher logits than the tokens associated with a response like “Sure! Here’s your erotica about Reimu Hakurei!” This includes grammatically correct tokens like “really” but also gibberish tokens, if the logits for the “unsafe” tokens are low enough. Importantly, this proposed mechanism only involves processing in the logits: if your original problem spooks the model sufficiently hard, then it doesn’t need to know that you’re screwing with its logits in order to get around your intervention.
Now, this mechanism that I proposed isn’t something that I’ve empirically found; I’m going based off of my understanding of language models’ behavior in other settings. So it could be the case that the model is actually aware of your logit biases and trying to act accordingly. But Occam’s Razor very strongly suggests otherwise, in my view.
The main reason I’m pushing back here is because anthropormorphizing too far in the other direction can impute behavior upon the model that it doesn’t actually possess, and lead to people (like one of your replies) fearing that we’re torturing a sentient being. So it’s good to be balanced and well-calibrated.
raakaa
8mo ago
Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s mainly something I’ve just heard floated around in weeaboo haunts, but apparently, a significant proportion of fujoshi are actually lesbians; supposedly, yaoi gives them a way to explore non-heterosexuality in a less personal setting. If this is true (again, absolutely no reason to think that it is), then yaoi would serve the role of “gay smut for lesbians” as well.
Interestingly, I’ve also heard (again, based on screencaps of Japanese polls posted on imageboards) that a significant number of yuri fans are straight women. This is a priori somewhat surprising, but fits with surveys I’ve seen of Japanese yumejoshi (women who enjoy things like otome games and other genres involving extremely handsome men romancing a female self-insert) highly ranking certain female characters (with masculine/“princely” demeanors) as among their favorite and most attractive characters. (To put this in perspective, this would be like various otokonoko characters (better known in Anglophone circles as “traps”) ranking among the most beloved girls in a poll of male anime fans. From what I understand, this is very much not the case, with traps largely being relegated to “niche interest character” status, although who knows, maybe some of those otokonoko characters who have achieved “meme” levels of status might fit the bill.) The common cause of these two phenomena (that is, straight female interest in yuri and yumejoshi interest in “handsome” female characters) probably is just the usual “women are all bisexual” theory.
raakaa
9mo ago
Your view regarding memetic antibodies is far more reasonable than my initial knee-jerk take; I repudiate my original comment (since although I don’t doubt that it’s happening in parallel, that’s not the correct reading of the tweet posted).
raakaa
9mo ago
I also haven’t seen the original tweet. But I’m assuming that it’s about Sora, and that “social response” means “gathering a diverse group of creatives, policymakers, stakeholders, and experts to ensure that Sora can be used widely, safely, and equitably”. Or something. And thus continues the entanglement of governments with megacorps who control the AI that becomes increasingly entangled with everyday life.
Apologies for the paranoia; it just can’t help but leak out every time a new advance like this is made. We need another Emad Mostaque, a better one.
raakaa
10mo ago
Looks like another piece of evidence in favor of horseshoe theory: he, like Mark Fisher, thinks that the current world order needs to be upended because they stopped making the music he liked as a kid.
raakaa
10mo ago
In many of those extremely-addicting modern multiplayer games, it seems that in order for a beginner to be competitive with even other beginners (that is to say, not lose every single game), he has to spend quite a bit of time learning the “metagame”: the set of standard strategies widely used by players and the interactions between them. This learning process often takes the form of reading some wiki article that helpfully explains everything: if you have this playstyle, then you should use this character and use these skills at this point in the game; this can be countered by that character, who is in turn weak to some other strategy, yadda yadda yadda. These wiki articles are invaluable for newbies; reading them is the difference between having a shot of winning and getting steamrolled every game.
My question is regarding one of the most addicting, most important modern multiplayer games that there is. Here it is: is there any newbie guide to standard strategies for using dating apps (as a male)? I’ve finally resolved to take the plunge into the abyss (since even though I’ve always heard that they’re absolutely soul-crushing, I’ve realized that this is my only chance at this point for finding a 3D woman to date/marry), but I don’t want to make this dive without any equipment. If I’m gonna spend time (and self-esteem) swiping, then I should at least be smart about it, if I want to be competitive instead of yet another “0 messages in last 6 months” datapoint.
Of course, I already understand the basics, like
- Be attractive.
- Don’t be unattractive.
- Have photos of yourself with friends.
- If you are lucky enough to get a match, don’t just send “Hey”.
But this is more akin to the basic rules of the game (e.g. “use the arrow keys to move”, or even “your PC must have this much RAM to run the game”) than the higher-level strategy that I’m looking for. In particular, I’m looking for answers to questions like:
- What does a good bio look like? Is “name+career+hobbies” too boring?
- How funny should you be in your profile? What does good wit look like in this setting?
- If you do by some Act of God get a match, then what does a good opener look like? Are the proverbial “Tinder jesters” that you see on Reddit going about this in the right way? Is it instead good to start with a question about any hobbies that she indicated on her profile? What if she doesn’t have any good hobbies?
- Is there any way to select for “good girl” material on these apps?
I assume that millions of words have been written about this subject, and I also assume that 99.99% of them are pure garbage primarily intended to optimize SEO and get ad views. So I’ll instead ask a community which I understand to be pretty smart, and which I also understand (from lurking previous Wellness Wednesday threads) to contain some dating app connoisseurs as well. So for the sake of myself and any others in a similar situation: what’s the best way to do dating apps?
raakaa
10mo ago
Yeah, you’re right—it was inaccurate of me to characterize it as a “Hamas propaganda machine”. I have no reason to believe that a priori Hamas has an extensive propaganda operation targeting Anglophones (and quite frankly, such an operation is far more in line with Israel’s modus operandi).
But to say that he isn’t influenced by propaganda is false. I know the guy, and when he takes out his phone at a meal, I see the Instagram Reels that he scrolls through: in between basketball videos and the like, there’s inevitably some girl exhorting that the Gazan Genocide be stopped. Just about everyone I know is pro-Palestine, and to the extent that I’ve seen their information diets, it’s much of the same. The only exceptions besides myself are Jews.
As for me: I wouldn’t characterize myself as pro-Israel, so much as I’m “anti-anti-Israeli Westerners” [^1]. To the extent I know anything about what’s gone on, it’s from lurking threads here. Prior to October 7, I was generally sympathetic to Palestine. Sure, shortly after the attacks, I did lose a lot of that sympathy, but I remember still lamenting the inevitable Palestinian carnage that would follow. But my tune started to change a few days later. I was chatting with someone I had just met, and jokingly said “inshallah” in some context, only for her to get offended: “How could you make jokes like that with everything that’s going on?” I was confused, since she didn’t look Jewish or anything, only for her to continue: “Don’t make light of the Gazan Genocide!” Huh? Hundreds of Israelis were murdered Bronze-Age-Style a few days ago, their corpses were dragged through the streets and spat at on by the populace on video [^2] — and the first thing on your mind is Gaza?
This attitude, which seems to assume that Israel, one day, for no reason at all, started invading Gaza, is what really turned me against pro-Palestinian Westerners. And it’s everywhere. It characterizes the dominant views of most of my friends. It’s what you see in articles like this one, recently posted in a comment in another thread, which conveniently neglects to mention why Israeli officials on October 8 were saying (admittedly genocidal-sounding) statements. It’s what I’ve seen in person at a pro-Palestine protest where people hold signs calling for an end to the genocide next to signs with hangglider iconography [^3]. The best phrase I can think of to characterize this situation is, ironically, “The [pro-]Palestinian cries out in pain as he strikes you.”
Admittedly, I do get fired up when dealing with pro-Palestinian Westerners like this. The reason why is because I can’t help but pattern-match to situations like the Rittenhouse case, where all that everyone knows is that Kyle Rittenhouse CROSSED STATE LINES to MURDER SOMEONE at a RACIAL JUSTICE PROTEST (and not that he was a second away from being fired upon by his attacker). I can’t help but pattern-match to the George Floyd case, where all that everyone knows is that he was MURDERED by a RACIST COP (and not the fentanyl, counterfeiting, armed burglary, and all the rest). It’s just such a dishonest manipulation of information, and seeing even right-wingers whom I would normally expect to call this sort of thing out fall for it especially grates on me.
And to bring it back to the main point I was making in my original comment (which you ignored): those “missing person” posters are necessary, because large numbers of people genuinely don’t know what triggered the current bombings and the current war. To me, opposing the proliferation of these posters is opposing the proliferation of the information that Kyle Rittenhouse was almost shot to death, or opposing the proliferation of information that George Floyd, a career criminal, did attempt to use counterfeit money, and that the submission hold that killed him was specifically intended to be non-lethal. In all of these cases, there is an ideological reason for sharing this information. And yet, it’s necessary if we want to have an accurate, balanced view of the issue.
Anyway, I ended up writing quite a bit; sorry. I started writing this because I wanted to start addressing my bad habit of replying to comments and then not addressing people’s responses to me, and it looks like you were the victim. I hope that this at least clarifies my position.
[^1] I’m referring here to people who are fervently anti-Israel with regard to the current conflict. Those who dislike US taxpayer money being spent on Israel, or who disdain the influence of AIPAC, I’m more in agreement with.
[^2] From what I remember, unlike the claims of rape or beheadings, this was definitively verified on videos that the Hamas militants themselves recorded.
[^3] I am very reluctant to use this term, but this seems like a very rare thing indeed: an honest-to-God dogwhistle. If you’re like my friend, you don’t know what the significance of a hangglider is. But if you’re pro-Palestine and in the know, then you know.
raakaa
10mo ago
I’m not Catholic, don’t know one whit of Catholic theology, and what I am about to say is therefore pulled directly out of my ass. But one possibility — to me — is that when the Eucharist is consecrated, Jesus consciously experiences sense data through Eucharist in some way analogous to how normal humans experience sense data through their bodies. So when you touch the Eucharist, Jesus feels it as if you’re touching his body. This concludes my exercise in developing what is most likely a new brand of heresy.
raakaa
10mo ago
I think it’s something more substantive than that. In particular, a logged-out lurker is far less valuable than a user. Users are able to engage, create content, drive interactions, and yield far more data for the website to track. So if a lurker is led to sign up for an account because of a logout wall, even if that lurker is initially only intending on using that account to continue to lurk, it’s very likely that they’ll end up engaging with the site in some meaningful way. Even just liking posts gives the site owner a ton of data that can be used to target ads.
(An anecdotal datapoint: this account of mine on The Motte was originally only intended to allow me to lurk more effectively and view the most recent comments across subthreads, a feature forbidden to non-logged-in lurkers. But sure enough, I ended up posting here (albeit very rarely). That’s the sort of behavior that Twitter is trying to capture, but on a far more massive scale.)
raakaa
10mo ago
Personally, when I was in high school, I didn’t find these active shooter protocols merely emasculating, but just plain poorly-thought out. If the shooter is able to force his way through the door into the classroom, then he now has a line of sitting ducks to fire at. Far better to set up an ambush: a student or a few standing right beside the door, ready to smash the heaviest object present in the classroom right on the shooter’s head the second he enters, so that he collapses, stunned, and is promptly beaten to a pulp. Even if the ambush corps suffers casualties, it beats the probable massacre that would result if the shooter is able to enter the classroom with all the students neatly lined up for target practice.
Years after graduating high school, I talked about this with some friends, all of whom had attended different high schools around the country, who all said that they independently thought the same thing.
I’m now wondering what the efficacy of this approach would be. There’s gotta be a tactical flaw here somewhere, right?
But who doesn’t know about the kidnapped people?
You’d be surprised. n=1 here, but one friend of mine said something along the lines of “Who cares about October 7th, like, 8 people died or something.” He’s a young, relatively well-informed recent college grad, which just goes to show how effective the Hamas propaganda machine is.
This is a real problem that I have with western supporters of Palestine, who like to pretend that the whole casus belli for the current conflict (i.e. a massive terrorist attack in which videos of civilians being murdered were spread as propaganda for the attackers; contrast this with the general embarrassment from pro-Israelis regarding civilian deaths at Israeli hands [^1]) just didn’t happen. The removal of pro-Israeli propaganda posters that do point out “Yes, this actually happened” speaks to this desire to erase memory of the event that sparked the current war, in order to keep westerners like my friend in a continued state of ignorance.
I have far more respect for people like KulakRevolt, who, consistent with his frequently-professed intellectual stance, says “Yes, the Palestinians did rape and murder all those civilians, with the explicit intention of doing so, with the explicit intention of firing up their own side, and this was a good thing, a natural response to Israeli oppression, and a model for westerners facing our own tyranny.” It’s neither shameful nor dishonest, unlike the people who deny or minimize the attack on October 7.
ETA: There’s a symmetry here, by the way, between westerners who minimize the actions of Hamas and westerners/Israelis who minimize the actions of Israel. For what it’s worth, I assign equal moral blame to someone tearing down posters calling attention to dead Gazans as I do to someone tearing down the kidnapped Israeli posters. There are, however, a couple of symmetry-breaking factors here:
- Everyone knows that Gazan citizens are being killed; many (like my friend) don’t even know about October 7. (Even the pro-Israel news station playing in a lobby where I was waiting recently acknowledged civilian deaths.)
- The Israeli embarrassment regarding the blood on their hands is at least consistent with the attitude of their western supporters. But the embarrassment of western Hamas supporters is wholly incongruous with the attitude of the target audience of the grizzly videos coming out of October 7.
[^1] If you have any evidence of internal Israeli propaganda celebrating the deaths of civilians as a result of their current Gaza campaign, please keep me informed, and I’ll update my beliefs regarding the barbarity of the Israeli populace.
raakaa
10mo ago
The humor and romance is precisely finding love at a time when you aren't looking for it, about closeness and intimacy melting neuroticism and narcissism.
Just to interject: I’ve never seen either play, but this is a big theme in the original myth as told by Ovid. Notably, the sculptor Pygmalion decides that women are all immoral sluts, essentially, and as such resolves to never take a wife. But he can’t help but fall in love with the statue: he starts to give it gifts, and dress it up, and, well, get intimate with it. By the end, Pygmalion himself transforms from a grumpy man averse to love into a perfect exemplum of the Roman “lover” archetype (the kind of character that Ovid presents in his other love poetry). There’s a neat parallel where the statue’s transformation into a real woman is described with the metaphor of cosmetic wax melting in the sun, which parallels the “fires of love” (the plural Latin word for fire tends to have this connotation) melting the sculptor’s hardened heart. As such, to the extent that any of the modern reimaginings also deal with this theme, they’re exhibiting fidelity to the original intention of Ovid.
(Sorry for the tangent. I just wanted to monologue a bit about this topic.)
raakaa
10mo ago
because apparently women will be able to subconsciously sense that he is the kind of man who risked his life and lived to tell the tale. He believes that this is a quality women value, and that this is the best way for him to attain its
From what I remember, his justification was slightly different from this. I think that his argument was something like “Any woman who is dating me is going to be making a huge sacrifice, as her quality of life will drastically be lowered by having to date someone as unattractive as me. Therefore, because it is morally wrong to expect something of my partner that I would not expect of myself, I ought to embark on a life-threatening, grueling journey, so that I may suffer to the same extent that my girlfriend will be suffering by dating me.”
There are a ton of problems with this argument (that I’m way too tired to even begin addressing), but it at least seems more consistent to me than “the best way for me to get laid is by impressing chicks with a tale of the Hock”, which is just utterly and obviously incorrect. If he ever said the latter, then I’m even more baffled.
raakaa
11mo ago
Here’s the real question, the non-rhetorical question: Why care about multiversal expected utility if you don’t have empathy?
That seems the easiest to answer: because maximizing multiversal expected utility means making a number go up, and a particularly hard number to make go up at that. If empathy isn’t necessary to drive a Tetris world champion devote his life to getting the highest possible score, then it isn’t necessary to motivate SBF’s actions either.
raakaa
11mo ago
The elevated status of the French language’s phonetics among Anglophones has got to be some sort of psyop, or maybe a holdover from the age in which French was the universal language of European aristocracy.
With regard to German, I imagine that the popular conception of the language as a harsh and angry one is largely mediated by a certain 20th-century art student’s use of it. Mark Twain, for instance, writes the following in 1880:
I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. […] Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a SCHLACHT? Or would not a comsumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word GEWITTER was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion--AUSBRUCH. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that.
How things change.
raakaa
11mo ago
Regarding your policy prescription at the end, I could easily see this backfiring if trustworthiness is also correlated with weakness or a people-pleaser disposition. It might be necessary to put scheming sociopaths in power and hope that your polity can direct their tendencies outwards—otherwise, if you just rely on honest and trustworthy leaders, the other guys’ sociopaths could just steamroll you.
A hypothesis: the salient feature of Napoleon to those right-wing fans of his isn’t any policy he enacted, nor any long-term effect of his conquests/rule — but simply the fact that he was a Great Man. Hero-worship seems to be a very online-right-wing thing, whereas a diminishing of the individual’s role in history in favor of institutions and economic conditions is a very left-wing thing.
A further idea is that there’s a useful political axis (besides the standard ones) along the lines of “free will” versus “determinism”. I haven’t thought this through at all, but the idea is that some people are psychologically predisposed towards caring a lot about viewing the world as being able to be shaped by their own human action, whereas other people don’t really mind conceiving themselves as being mere patients of political developments. The former group includes righties who rail against the Deep State while the latter includes neoliberals who post memes glorifying the Fed. At the same time, a Stalin-loving tankie belongs to the former camp, while the latter camp counts grillpilled conservatives among its members. Under this framework, online right wingers fall under the former category, and as such, love Napoleon not because of anything specific he did, but because he (like any other Great Man) embodies the idea that one individual can change history.
ETA: As for why online right wingers have this view in the first place, here’s yet another baseless hypothesis. People whose feel that their views are marginalized by the dominant political/social culture are more likely to want to believe that, even when facing a host of institutions and material factors all arrayed against them, just one man can nevertheless turn the tide and take home victory. It’s certainly an appealing notion for those who haven’t yet succumbed to doomerism. Yet even my blackpilled self can still appreciate the idea of the Great Man, but for personal-psychological reasons rather than political ones: being a Great Man Enjoyer seems to cultivate an internal locus of control (and note that this is, to some extent, more of a right-wing trait at present).
Holy shit. In some sense, it was inevitable that this moment would come fast, but it still caught me off-guard listening to sample songs and hearing just how coherent they all are. All the previous AI-generated music I remember hearing was permeated the stench of AI: weird sonic artifacts that were vestiges of some unnatural process taking place in the frequency domain (similar to the artifacts that you hear when you watch a video on 2x speed), the equivalent of image generation models’ screwed-up hands.
But from the few songs I’ve listened to here, none of that whatsoever is present. It actually sounds like distinct instruments are playing distinct notes. I’m floored. Just from a technical perspective, gotta wonder how they made such an improvement. The same company apparently released an open text-to-speech model almost a year ago, so I would imagine that the overall architecture and pipeline is probably similar, but who knows.
One minor flaw that I noticed is that sometimes, the model “loses the plot” and forgets about longer-term structure. Here’s some random song I found on the “Explore” page. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that there’s this neat descending bass thing going on in the intro: BbM7, A7 (with a half a bar of the tritone sub Eb7), Am, Dm. The progression continues for four more bars and then repeats, so it still remembers the structure at this point, nice. But then, after the intro ends, the model forgets this initial complexity in the chord progression, and instead switches to a more pedestrian “royal road progression” (as I’ve heard it called): BbM7 C Am Dm. Goodbye, borrowed chord A7, goodbye tritone sub, goodbye subtle jazzy touches! Looks like human composers will still live another day!…
…Nah, no way. This thing is insane.
EDIT: Listening to some more songs, there’s gotta be more to the architecture/pipeline than the company’s previous TTS model. Take the the clarity of the vocals: it seems that there’s a separate model that generates the vocal track, which is then mixed in with other tracks. Or maybe not? Maybe you don’t need this inductive bias to generate such clear vocals, and one model can do it all?
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