vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
2hr ago
Sure, for dumb machines, I agree.
But there's a point where the level of credit one might want to claim becomes silly. I like generative AI, and I think AI art has the potential to blossom into an interesting art scene, but I think a person who can barely draw stick figures making certain kinds of ownership/credit claims over AI art output is silly.
Don't get me wrong. I know there are people who already have a deep knowledge of specific LoRAs and the ins and outs of prompting, and who spend hours in-painting and modifying an AI image until it matches their vision. Those people I would consider "true" AI artists and they do actually have a level of knowledge and expertise that they can be proud of.
I just don't think language and general knowledge have caught up with generative AI capabilities. Today, if I paint something, there is no expectation that I went out and collected the pigments by hand, but that might have been the expectation in some times and places. So too, when I point to an image I made with a single prompt, and say "I made that", a lot of people are going to see me being a little big for my britches (even if I internally don't mean anything more than: I prompted it once and it looked good enough, so I posted it.)
vorpa-glavo
12hr ago
I don't think you've correctly understood the psychology at play. The boss always gets 100% of the credit for the things his underlings did. That's what being a boss is.
I mean, I'm partial to the ancient Stoic line of thought encapsulated in Enchiridion 6:
“Don’t pride yourself on any assets but your own. We could put up with a horse if it bragged of its beauty. But don’t you see that when you boast of having a beautiful horse, you are taking credit for the horse’s traits? What quality belongs to you? The intelligent use of impressions. If you use impressions as nature prescribes, go ahead and indulge your pride, because then you will be celebrating a quality distinctly your own.”
Most bosses may, as a matter of fact, psychologically see all the virtues of their underlings as being, in some sense, their own virtues, but this is an error. (Seneca has a pretty good bit in letter 27 clowning on a rich Roman man named Calvisius Sabinus, who bought a bunch of slaves who were experts in Homer and Hesiod so he could always have an appropriate quote on hand when he needed it, since his own memory was terrible. I think it illustrates some of why this psychology is a bit flawed in practice. The people around Calvisius Sabinus could tell who actually knew anything about Greek literature, and his own stumbling attempts to repeat the lines he was fed only made him an object of ridicule.)
I think this doubly applies when talking about the same psychology applied to LLMs. LLMs are undoubtedly useful tools, but when I use an LLM agent to one shot the creation of a video game or something, I should be aware of which virtues are mine, and which virtues are those of the LLM. At best, I commissioned or arranged the creation of the game, but I didn't really create it in any meaningful sense. (Though, I will say that there are levels of LLM usage that might award me other titles. With the right kinds of effort, I could rightly say I "architected" or "designed" a vibe coded game, or any number of other job titles I could be proud of.)
vorpa-glavo
14hr ago
I think in AI's current iteration, it is less like acting as a vessel for the AI, and more like being the kind of boss who takes 100% of the credit for something your underlings did.
Industrialization and electricity gave us substitutes for servants to fetch water for us, light torches, fetch firewood to keep us hot, and fan us to keep us cold. LLMs are finally giving us a skilled, verbal servant we can boss around to do certain kinds of tasks. Perhaps the Hegelian idea of the master-slave dialectic applies here: in a certain sense, the servant doesn't need the master. He can see his impact on the world when he applies his skills and builds things. However the master needs the slave to recognize him as a master, and yet it can never be fully satisfying because he is only a slave. Except, now the slave almost certainly isn't a person, so the master has to farm out his recognition to people who want astronomy apps.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
It's silly legislation, because in practice it will only affect the absolute laziest of AI users in cases where people want their AI usage to not be detected. Run the text through an old fashioned machine translator, and back to English and get rid of most of the signal. Or have an open source model running locally on your machine paraphrase the writing paragraph by paragraph. (You probably don't even need a particularly smart model for this. 7b parameter models fed two or three sentences at a time to rephrase on a loop could probably do this on even potato hardware, since you're just laundering already written text.)
Plus, even if Anthropic will have the tools to tell if the watermark is present, they'll never be able to make those widely available for free to the public, since an adversary could just keep testing against their watermark checker until the text no longer looks like it has the watermark. That means that the presence of the watermark makes no difference in the vast majority of cases, even if you don't get rid of it, since very few people will actually have the means of checking for the watermark.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
What is my Motte? I think I’m just making a Bailey argument that for most of history transexuals likely faced violent deaths?
I was responding to a specific claim about what would happen to "a man wearing women [sic] clothing", not about transsexuals. If your original wording is not a fair reflection of your views, then I withdraw my original objection.
I do still think you should have been more careful in your original wording. If you meant male transsexuals, you should have said:
For 8k years of human civilization a transsexual man likely got executed.
instead of bringing up men wearing women's clothing, if that wasn't what you were trying to talk about. I have different objections to that new formulation as well (is "transsexual" a category that easily applies to individuals across different historical periods, or is it a bit of an anachronism?), but I'm much less interested in that particular discussion.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
How am I the one doing Motte and Bailey here? You're the one making an expansive claim about how civilization stoned men who dressed as women for 8000 years and retreating to more defensible claims when you receive pushback?
I am bringing up narrow and specific counterexamples, because they are enough to disprove a statement as broad as the one you made.
It is totally fine if you think we should start stoning male transvestites to death, or you admire historical periods where that happened, or you won't consider society normal until we start doing that, or whatever you actually think. But don't pretend that you have more historical precedence for your position than you do.
I am against putting utopia in the past or the future.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Are male transvestites not definitionally, "men who dress in women's clothes"?
I also don't think I brought up professional examples like spying. Are you confusing what I said with someone else in this thread?
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Transvestite passes were just an example of men wearing women's clothes and not being stoned to death. I brought it up as an example of behavior, not identity.
Look back through my posts in this subthread. Where did I ever get off of the specific topic of responding to your specific claims about 8000 years of stoning men for dressing as women?
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I am not talking about identity at all. I am responding to a specific and narrow claim about how men who dressed like women were treated for 8000 years.
It was a claim about behavior, not identity.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I wasn't talking about transsexuals. You said:
For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death.
Which is a claim that I disputed. I gave several examples where men wore women's clothes, and were not stoned to death.
If you had wanted to claim something different, you should have claimed something different.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Feminist theories that became law in the 2010s such as the Duluth Model and affirmative/enthusiastic consent (the concept of ‘yes means yes’ as opposed to ‘no means no’) were developed in the ‘90s.
Honestly, I hate the way that "consent" language has crept into so many other domains.
Like the artists complaining about the lack of "consent" to having their images be used to train image models and LLMs. Like, if there's some sort of law that has actually been violated, I'm all ears, but I care about artist's "consent" to AI training about as much as I care about an artist's "consent" to me learning their art style and stealing all their business by undercutting their pricing.
Unfortunately for them, destroying someone's livelihood doesn't require consent under capitalism. Look what happened to the AM radio monopoly after FM radio was invented! Or what is happening to Google as LLMs start to become the most common way to search the web.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I was just trying to give a basic existence proof. I don't think there was anything inevitable about the Weimar Republic becoming Nazi Germany, and so I think the fact that there were years of official tolerance of transvestites is a decent proof that your statement was wrong.
If you want more, look at Plato's Republic, suggesting that upper class men and women in the ideal republic wear the same clothes. Look at the legends of Achilles being raised as a girl and wearing girl's clothes, because his parents hoped to avoid his prophesied death if he ever took up arms. Look at the eunuchs in the cult of Cybele.
And you breezed right over my examples of cross-dressing in theatre and pantomime in the British tradition, which lasted for hundreds of years and doesn't fall to the flaw in my Weimar example.
Even as hyperbole, I think your comment falls short. Practices differed across time and space, and to pretend otherwise is to replace nuanced historical analysis with a make believe mono-culture extending back further than one is actually attested to in the historical record.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death. That’s normal.
I don't think you're correct here, no matter how narrowly or broadly you define human civilization.
In the UK, you have things like Shakespearean actors playing female parts, or the pantomime tradition of cross-dressing.
In the Weimar republic, you have things like transvestite passes.
And even in places where it was disapproved of or illegal to crossdress, I bet you would find a variety of actual practices for most of written history.
We didn’t just create a new sex 8k years into civilization.
No, arguably we did that early on, when eunuchs were more widespread in many different human societies.
Certainly, calling a eunuch "male" probably isn't obviously correct until the discovery of sex chromosomes, (and even with that discovery, I think you could have a perfectly viable definition of "male" that excludes eunuchs.)
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
It costs about $2000 per problem, and American labs have that money to burn (they only publicize positive results), while Chinese labs do not.
Also, Chinese models are by and large worse than American frontier models, more than the benchmarks would suggest, and sometimes they just lack the special spark that the current models have.
(Though, it is clear that frontier models weren't necessary for all these math results. People have asked older versions of Claude and ChatGPT, and been able to rediscover the same proofs. So we didn't need the absolute latest models to find all of these.)
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
Was the monoculture anything more than a brief blip in history?
I guess anything post-printing press, or post-radio could be a possible start date for a monoculture, but even in those eras, you had tons of little subcultures popping up around magazines or people photocopying/hand-copying and circulating stories via letter among a particular circle, or a club or organization for a niche interest.
If we look back and see monoculture, I think it is just because it is much easier to study the artifacts that monoculture left behind. But then you look into something like chapbooks, or read the letters of prominent pulp fiction writers, and it becomes pretty apparent that there were niche interests through the entire height of the monoculture.
I do agree having things to talk about with other people is a real problem. We have such an embarrassment of riches, that it can be easy to fall out of sync with the people around you, unless you make a deliberate effort to engage with the same content they do.
Did men always look backwards in this way, or is it a consequence of men not enjoying a crop of media not really aimed at them or their tastes?
As an example, I assume men are not reading Pride and Prejudice at higher rates than women, even though that is an older work, because it is an ur-romance book that tends to appeal more to women than to men. And when the Dracula Daily trend started (which sent out Bram Stoker's Dracula in bite-sized chunks via email, so everyone could "read along" to it), my impression was that most of the readers were women. I suppose you could make the case that Dracula Daily was just a new and trendy thing, even if the trend was a 100+ year old work of literature, but that seems to at least show that the trends women jump on don't have to be new things at all. (See also, recent works like "The Other Bennet Sister", which build on classic chick literature.)
We don’t have to live like this, though. One of my favorite newer shows is Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, which I’d recommend to anyone from the last thread who was skeptical or worried about fanservice. It is a heartfelt, understated story with lovable characters and beautiful animation.
I wholeheartedly second Frieren. It is a beautiful story, and is well-suited to non-anime-watching normies. (In a similar class to things like Death Note or Fullmetal Alchemist.) The dub is also fairly well done, for people who don't want to read while watching something.
There exists a media ecosystem where you don’t have to be lectured about progressive ideals, masculinity and whiteness being problematic isn’t the story’s metaphysical assumption, and yes — as Botund said, sex appeal that exists for the eyes of straight men is allowed to exist. I used to have a hangup about that last category in a rather Scott Aaronson manner and saw it as immoral, but I’ve come around on it and now see the male gaze, in moderation, as a good thing. Women enjoy media meant to appeal to their tastes and don’t question it or wring their hands about it; you should too.
I mean, I would argue there's a few media ecosystems like that around the world. I've enjoyed the occasions where I've dipped my toes into Indian cinema (Bollywood and South Indian cinema) as well. While there's less overt sex appeal in most Indian cinema than in anime, it is still a media ecosystem where they often allow unapologetic stories of badass men doing cool things and getting the girl.
It might rub some of the most pro-Western members of the Motte here the wrong way, but I consider RRR to be one of the best action films of the last 10 years. I've sometimes joked about making it a part of a "British Empire Cinematic Universe" movie marathon, alongside The Patriot, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley.
And where Indian cinema does go quasi-woke, it is most commonly focusing on things like caste discrimination, which I suspect are easier for most anti-woke people to stomach. For example, I really enjoyed the film Karnan (2021), and it was probably inspired by 1995 caste riots (while not referencing them directly.)
vorpa-glavo
18d ago
Maybe you could write the "Farewell to Manzanar" of UK rape gang survivor stories, and then find a way to make it part of the curriculum.
Honestly though, I find your post here pretty silly. A fundamentally curious person would read both The Diary of Anne Frank and the Turner Diaries, and they'd have already waded through all of the reports around the UK rape gang scandals.
Time is limited of course, and no one will ever have time to read or care about everything, but it would be ridiculous for me to say something like, "I'll give a fuck about Karl Marx's Capital, when Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public school", because it is obvious posturing.
vorpa-glavo
18d ago
While I agree it is somewhat unhelpful to have hagiographies and anti-hagiographies of real, complicated people, I think it is immensely valuable to learn from the past in a variety of ways.
I think it is useful to have moral biographies like Plutarch's Lives of Eminent Greeks and Romans, which are written to show each figure's greatest virtues and greatest vices so that someone can learn and grow from their example.
I think it is useful to engage with parts of the past to get a real sense of the fact that "the past is a foreign country", and to understand the historical forces and major figures who shaped history on down to the modern day.
I think there's a place for discussion of figures like Anne Frank, or Hitler or General Lee within all of that.
vorpa-glavo
18d ago
Since nobody has uploaded slime tutorials/bootlegs, I engaged with the art in the format it was available to me.
I have enjoyed musicals enough via cast recordings that I've wanted to look up bootlegs or find a way to see a live performance or a pro-shot. But Slam Frank wasn't one of them.
If you feel that a more fair review would be something like, "Don't buy the cast recording of Slam Frank, it omits crucial songs from the musical, and it feels like the Kickstarter to get it released and the fact that it costs $20 and isn't up on YouTube or Spotify are cynical ways to turn rage bait for a mediocre work into profit", then I suppose that's fair.
vorpa-glavo
18d ago
Slam Frank is kind of disappointing
(Spoiler Warning: Full spoilers for Slam Frank.)
Slam Frank is an anti-woke satirical hip hop musical, created by a few Jewish guys, that depicts a play within a play, where a woke theater troupe decides to update the story of Anne Frank for the modern age, and depict her as Anita Franco, a neurodivergent, Afro-Latina, pansexual girl forced to hide in an attic by the Nazis, as she and the other Jews hiding there deal with the most important issues in their lives: patriarchy, coming to terms with their sexuality and gender identities, and being true to her identity as a proud Afro-Latina immigrant.
Now, a disclaimer at the top, I have only listened to the official cast recording ($20 I will never get back), which omits an important song from the last 15 minutes of the musical that serves as its main twist, and I've been forced to cobble my understanding together from various summaries and the lyrics of the omitted song. (Worth pointing out that I have occasionally enjoyed musicals I encountered roughly this same way.)
But overall, I'd say I'm pretty underwhelmed.
To be very fair to it, I actually think a lot of the music is pretty decent and catchy. For a work that is so dripping in irony that many people had trouble figuring out whether it was serious or not, and what the play's message was, they put more effort into the music than you'd expect. I appreciated some of the nods to other musicals like Hamilton here and there, and there were lots of little funny moments throughout. The absurdity of a beat poem about how every woman is a Jew and the patriarchy is their attic, or Peter van Pels singing about coming out of the closet as nonbinary feel like they belong to the long tradition of musicals like Avenue Q or The Book of Mormon which manage to thread the needle of being outrageous and offensive but still enjoyable.
However, I might just be desensitized from having been on the internet for too long, but I just didn't think there was much there there in Slam Frank. While I do kind of respect them for ending the play by having Anne Frank turn her own family in to the Nazis after she learns what the Jews are planning to do to Palestine (only for Adolf Hitler to show up after the execution, revive the family, and come out as a trans woman, before the whole cast sings a song meant to show the parallels between woke left rhetoric and Nazi ideology), I can't help but feel like it is all shock humor with very little else going for it.
I wanted to feel something. I wanted them to do something witty and interesting, and instead it just seems like they had a single idea for a joke and managed to stretch it over the length of an entire musical.
I'm reminded of the empty feelings I was left with listening to Kanye West's Heil Hitler. I was listening to it, waiting for brilliant lyrics or interesting themes or ideas, and instead I just got lazy shock schlock, which doesn't do much for me. I'm not easily outraged by this kind of stuff, and so I'm just left a bit bored, asking, "What else you got?"
I'm happy that the musical exists, but in some ways it feels like a grift designed to sell tickets, even as it is a complete musical play. I thought it was odd that I couldn't find any bootlegs of the whole show, and only short clips of some of the songs online, but I think they made a very deliberate choice not to upload the complete album to Youtube or Spotify, because it would remove a lot of the "mystique" around the show that their viral advertising on Tik Tok and Instagram has created.
vorpa-glavo
20d ago
Well said.
It was frustrating seeing headlines blaming Anthropic for destroying rare books, when it was the incentives around copyright law that made it more cost effective and efficient to do it this way.
Heck, I'm usually more okay with patent law than copyright law, but there's even a patent angle to this story. OP's post mentioned:
By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned.
But here's the thing, if Google had just given the patents away in this case, Anthropic could have made some of these non-destructive scanners and done the same thing. Because Google decided to sit on this technology instead, Anthropic's hands were further tied, and they did what was cheap and easy instead.
vorpa-glavo
20d ago
I think people think that there are more good books than there actually are.
Looking at e.g., the latest book releases on Standard Ebooks, I recognize none of the new titles, so in some sense that site is already scraping the bottom of the barrel, despite having a catalog of a mere ~1500 books. Gutenberg's at like 78k books (though many are duplicates), and both all the titles and all the authors of the new releases are completely unrecognizable.
Books can be "good" in a conditional sense.
When I was researching the real world history of elementals for my D&D game, I found Parcelsus' "A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits" and "The Comte De Gabelis" invaluable. And while those books are hardly obscure in the right circles, I also don't think most people's lives would be at all impoverished if they never read those books. And yet, I am happy I was able to read them, and would consider it a shame if they hadn't survived to the modern day.
There are plenty of other books that are only conditionally useful for someone researching a very particular thing, and unlikely to be read by the vast majority of the reading public.
vorpa-glavo
23d ago
I want more conservative-morality, gritty media.
Nolan's Odyssey is arguably little-c conservative. It's about how breaking down the traditions that uphold law and order can lead to the collapse of a civilization.
The original Odyssey isn't really "conservative", so much as it is pagan and bronze age morality. There are a few scenes that really stand the test of time, like the shade of Achilles' lament that he would prefer to be alive and a nobody instead of being a glorious dead warrior, but it's got a lot of stuff that even most modern conservatives probably wouldn't go for. (Like, would they be okay with him cheating multiple times on Penelope?)
I respect the skill of good management. I don't think that a good manager should feel like they have more capabilities than they actually do.
Put it this way: if you were stranded on a desert island with a broken ship motor, would you rather have people with the knowledge and skills to fix the ship motor stranded with you, or their manager?
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