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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I think Emad is substantially more intelligent than he lets on on twitter/discord, but also «visionary founder» is often to some extent an idiot; they both naturally exhibit those traits and learn this hot dog vendor chutzpah from the noxious superstimuli-ridden startup culture depicted in one famous sitcom*. (Does Musk's Twitter indicate intelligence?) It's good marketing at this stage of the project, if anything – followers love him.

In reality they are doing some clever things to work around their late comer disadvantage. For example, they're hiring all the memey Twitter ML stars who have been underappreciated by corporations; hardmaru is not Hinton or Le Cun, but he's good and also decades younger, so it's an interesting bet. I am also not sure if these nonsensical projects are not at least 50% real – everything he posts related to audiovisual generation is in principle doable and his hires ought to be chomping at the bit to do it, only hamstrung by compute.

He is also much colder and rational in business matters than the hyperactive tweeting indicates. This quid pro quo NovelAI-Automatic story is evidence enough; «community vibes» are very important but not as important as moneyed partnerships.

Ultimately, the idea seems to be «fuck it, we need compute, any ML talent we can get and visibility, the rest is easy». And even if the rest is still hard, I can see where he's coming from. It's jumping into the last door of the departing train. With what Stability has got, they are an entity at least theoretically capable of surviving the Purge by means of some of those galaxy brain business ideas. The second act, then, is triage.

April 24 / May 7, 1919

I’m rereading The Precipice [Goncharov’s Обрыв]. It is long but so intelligent and forceful. Still I have to force myself — given that I find these Mark Volokhovs so repulsive now. What a multitude of hooligans have descended from this Mark! “How can you creep into someone else’s garden and eat their apples?” “But what does this mean: ‘someone else’s garden or apples’? Why can’t I eat when I feel like it?” Mark is a brilliant creation, and here lies the remarkable business of artists: an individual captures, distills and reifies a type, one that has existed diffuse in the air, and does it so well that sometimes his presence and influence increase a hundredfold—in complete disregard to the purpose his portrait had. One wanted to poke fun at the remnants of knighthood, and has created a figure who never existed in life, but became the catalyst for hundreds of Don Quixotes to spring into existence. Another wanted to castigate all the things that were associated with Mark, but wound up giving birth to thousands of Marks whose origins were already not in life but in books.

Generally speaking, how does one distinguish between that which is real and that which books, the theater, and films give us? Very many living people who have taken part in my life have had, most likely, far less of an impact upon me than heroes of Shakespeare and Tolstoy. Others have allowed Sherlock Holmes to enter their lives, and some maid allows in some woman whom she saw in an automobile on the movie screen.

– Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days.

Incidentally, Thomas Gaiton Marullo's translation (at least my copy) is nonsensical, to the point he seems to confuse Goncharov in the author's speech with Cervantes and utterly mangles the passage about real people and characters. I tend to suspect that this is one reason for the weird reputation of Russian lit, which some Westerners adore and others take to be cryptic pretentious ravings of drunk madmen. Our prose is often philosophical, but it's more like philosophy of the naive Socratic and Western Moralist tradition and not any clever Postmodernist sort; a translator needs intelligence as well as common sense to work with it, not indecent infatuation with Ze Slavic Soul. One shouldn't let Muscovite culture pass through Brooklyn intellectuals on the way to the library.

Here's hoping, particularly if he continues to train and disruptively open-source interesting models. But... I dunno, I've heard a lot of successful founders speak publicly and privately and they usually don't sound like idiots to me.

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