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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3961 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've taken the plunge and created a Substack. I've done it under my real name and will be writing about NON CW things I generally find interesting mainly to divert my tendency to write thousands of words into the void of the Internet towards something marginally more "productive" than forum posting and to have a corpus of writing associated to my name that I can use later for career/social status (One of my MEDIUM posts was quite well received by my past colleagues). In light of my previous post on too much forum posting. Now I am not a prolific Motte poster by any means, but I still post too much according to my personal cost/benefit analysis of how I should allocate my time.

Now is an easier time than ever to become a writer, you don't even have to try to make a website (substack does most of the work for you), language models can do some if not almost all your grunt work of writing for you, and you can create artwork/images to supplement your text at no cost using txt2img... This doesn't mean it's easier to make it as a writer, just doing the writing.

Half the reason I finally published and shared my own web serial a week back is because I do actually believe that AI circa GPT-4.5 will genuinely write better than I do, and I'm a pretty good writer!

I've had a modicum of success using ChatGPT for brainstorming, albeit it can't really capture my writing style when it comes to anything but the basics. I think GPT-4 or at least the unlisted GPT in Bing might do a half-decent job, but I'm not going to let Microsoft spam me when I sign up the wait list.

I've had a decent amount of fun generating images of characters and concepts for self illustration of the novel, and tools like ControlNet are great for getting even the derpy Stable Diffusion to output closer to Midjourney (DALLE is trash now, and has been for a while).

I look forward to lazing around while the robots do all the hard work, but that day hasn't come quite yet, even if I think it's merely a year or three away at this rate.

I understand your argument that having AI do all the writing for you would indeed not be writing. Which is why I specified the grunt work of writing.

For example, chatGPT can reformat texts, you can give it a paragraph and ask it to put it in bullet points. Or generate a few variations of what you already wrote, so that you have something to compare your writing against. Neither of those things seems like surrendering my agency to a machine, it feels like using a tool.

Additionally, the average quality of text will probably go up, not down. One mechanistic explanation would be that bad writers might just widescale adopt LLM use and LLM text is far superior to badly written human text, so the floor will be raised. Good writers might not be able to increase the quality but they will be able to increase volume by removing some of the aforementioned roadblocks (literal writer's block) to writing. I might just be a hopeless optimist in this regard though, we are yet to see how humans handle the power of God.

Sidenote: I'd really wish people would move away from Medium (thanks heavens for https://scribe.rip/, which circumvents all the obnoxious crap and adds sane typographic settings) and the new kid on the block, Substack. I just saw for the first time a Substack article asking for a subscription (instead of letting me "read it now") and it just broke the cardinal highlighting rule.

Are Github/Cloudflare pages + Hugo/Jekyll/whatever's hot now that hard?

I miss the open web. *sigh*

GitHub has a half decent censorship record? They usually only fold to DMCA requests (legitimate ones at that). But open to evidence of the contrary I have missed.

Cloudflare is more of a mixed bag. I used to strongly dislike them due to captchas from TOR exit nodes and VPNs, but they have a very robust censorship record, hosting "terrorist groups" and the 8chan until boards/shareholders likely twisted so hard management had their hands completely tied. They offer DDOS protections that allow sites that would otherwise be DDOS'ed to oblivion if they were self-hosted to stay up and available. How would you say they're hostile to the open web?

Doesn't GitHub scan people's projects for words like "blacklist" and threaten to blacklist them if they're not changed? I thought there was drama about that in 2020.

Iirc the same thing happened to someone whose code had something like "retards the process"

No, nothing like that happened. I think you're mixing up github's switching the default branch from 'master' to 'main' because racism slavery with the general push against mean words.

Glad to see evidence of this (can't find any), but I think we've veered close to CW territory.

https://github.com/tbreuss/dns-blacklist-check

^ Project that uses blacklist with recent commits

Oh whoops, I was reading from the comments page and didn't notice which thread this was. But turns out it was a weird isolated incident way back in 2015. I thought they'd changed their TOS to mandate that in 2020, will check later.

https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/03/github-nukes-repository-over-use-word-retard/

Off the top of my head, GitHub censored the Gamergate OP (leading to the creation of gitgud.io) after a tweet complaining about it. I also remember they censored the popular WebM converter "WebM for Retards" (which also moved to Gitgud), presumably for using the word "retard". A search finds this thread from 7 years ago mentioning they also censored C Plus Equality, which was parodying a blog post from a feminist academic calling for a feminist programming language, and ToleranUX, another parody from the same people referencing the campaign against Linus Torvalds.

There's another repo with essentially the same name, so they're not super vigilant about these as far as I can tell. These all seem to be shutdowns in light of negative media attention.

I'll revise my assessment of Github on censorship from "half-decent" to "media/percetion sensitive".

I made the decision to make a substack instead of just adding a blog page to my github.io hosted website is partially because of laziness, and partially because of weak network effects. A lot of potential readers are already there on substack and there is ever so marginal spillover of readers from one substack domain to another through the "reads" list. I agree with you about Medium though, Medium is terrible for quite a few reasons other than its pervasive pay walls. Substacks clean interface where you only see the text is far far lesser of an evil than medium.

As for premade templates like jekyll, you need to run a docker script or two on windows afairecall, which is "hard" for I'd say an overwhelming majority of non programmers many of whom cant even navigate a file system nowdays.

Using github for things it was never designed to do is really obnoxious, I've been wanting to rant about that.

I mean..? It was designed as a hosting service for git repositories. Sources for static websites are kept under version control anyways, is Github Pages that big of a stretch?

Hard agree. It's a source control system FFS, not for hosting a website, or a journal, or any of the other asinine things people do on github.

or a journal

What's the issue other than aesthetic preferences? Code is text in a file, journals are text in a file.

If anything, a lot of things would be improved by a GitHub repository-like interface. I can't find the post/article (not sure) about it, but a github page for legal documents would serve to me immensely useful to a wide array of people. You could see past versions and what was changed easily, you can raise issues, you can see alternate branches and forks, etc. It wouldn't have to be the literal law, but just an experiment on how such a thing would evolve would definitely be interesting. Perhaps even a digital twin of the actual law.

What? I keep all documents under version control, whether blog posts, journals, or source and whether collaborative or individual. It's the most robust way of preserving changes and examining them over time. Git's even used under the hood for pass, my password manager.

You do you, but I think that's a serious jamming of square pegs into round holes.

I needed to learn and grok git when I wanted to start contributing to the linux kernel. Read the docs, the source code, and starting using it everywhere to get it into my muscle memory.

I guess when you're purposefully juggling hammers all day, you do start seeing some loose nails around the house.

deleted

Dont hate on my FREE website hosting service.

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