domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
spring
safe, legal torment nexuses
6m ago
I was pretty deep into image generation at one point and got the following wrong
Fancy Car, pretty obvious in hindsight but when I was looking at it I convinced myself that the headlights and wing mirror had some weird distortions. Rainbow Girl, the way the artist chose to render the hair on the right side of the image is frankly bizarre and I thought the ear was a bit odd. Giant Ship, decided it was AI at a glance based on the subject matter and rendering style. Very obviously CG/photobash if you know that frontier models still struggle with ship rigging and other similar linear patterns. Still Life, didn't notice any obvious tells Paris Scene, thought I recognised this. Even knowing it's AI there aren't many things I can point to as obvious tells. Pretty Lake Colourful Town, wrote this off as AI because I couldn't make sense of the composition
Many correct guesses were with very low confidence. Stylised landscapes and certain outdoor scenes may as well be a coinflip.
2rafa
24m ago
He was fine. If you disengage from your partisan inclinations and watch Obama, Bill Clinton, even Bush I and II speeches they’re all often very funny and have good jokes. That’s what happens when you hire professionals to write these things for you. Trump’s delivery is fine. He does the job. He’s not embarrassing or bad. He’s also not great or anything.
Pulpachair
25m ago
Piggybacking for some of my recent watches.
American Fiction - A victim of its maketing. It is 95% upper class dramedy with 5% race farce, but the race farce was all that was advertised. I really enjoyed it, but I quite enjoy Jeffrey Wright’s understated acting style generally. I barely recognized Adam Brody. I initially thought Issa Rae was meant to be the foil, but they both made her more relatable and a blatantly worse human as the story progressed. I enjoyed it, but it is slow and frustrating often. Qualified recommendation.
Promising Young Woman - Bo Burnham steals the show and Carey Mulligan is excellent, but this is MeToo passion play scripting. All men are monsters and anything done to them is justified.
Boy Kills World - needed a tighter script. The gimmick of using H Jon Benjamin to provide the protagonist’s internal dialogue wears out quickly, and the action was pretty uninspired. Do not recommend.
Haywire - Gina Carano playing Jason Bourne, but not a wimp. The action scenes are well done - Gina’s time fighting MMA clearly shows and it looks like she could hold her own against her male opponents. The story is pretty weak and Carano doesn’t have a lot of range other than glowering. Wild to me that Steven Soderbergh directed this - it feels so sterile and devoid of human characters for one of his movies. Qualified recommendation.
jeroboam
33m ago
Maybe I'm over updating. I'm a huge DeSantis fan who legit thought that he would win the Republican nomination. He is massively popular in Florida. But he couldn't even get off the starting block.
So here's my updated theory. In the current climate, 95% of the media is enemy territory. You need some sort of guerilla strategy to get airtime. Simply having a great track record and great ideas isn't enough. Look what the media did to Vance. If he gets coverage at all in the media, it's heavily negative. Meanwhile, a midwit like Walz gets tons of positive coverage despite having a terrible record and being a phony to boot. So Republicans need to hack the media to win, which is what Trump did in 2016.
The idea that a conventional candidate like Romney or Bush Sr. could thrive in 2024 just seems anachronistic. The elites wholesale abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats starting around 2010. Without their support, you need something special.
I don't know. I hope I'm wrong.
SubstackNecron
35m ago
Yeah the breakthrough would be ease of use. Even for the rich IVF is a pain in the ass and typically only done if some major issue is expected.
Magusoflight
45m ago
I dispute the information was new to the FBI
Magusoflight
46m ago
Guns have valid uses, do they not?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
47m ago
I think I got about 80% right. I'm a bit miffed that
I basically marked all hyper-detailed or overly colorful paintings as AI (with the exception of the first
The oil paintings I tried to classify based on their composition and perspective.
The abstract paintings were the hardest, since I had to resort to thinking about the emotions of the artist. Surprisingly, I got all of them right.
The anime girls were the easiest, because the AI-generated one had that face. It's like there's one AI model in existence for drawing anime girls, and everyone uses it. It's like Lobsters typeface, once you've seen it, you start to notice it everywhere.
P.S. @ZorbaTHut, aren't spoilers supposed to be inline?
jeroboam
50m ago
I think Trump wins narrowly, low confidence.
One thing that he has against him is his fragile coalition. Although he is ahead in all 7 swing states (projecting for 312 electoral votes), his lead in each swing states is razor thin.
After those 7 states, there is no 8th state which is really in play. Virginia comes closest, but Harris is up by a whopping 6.4 points. That's actually less than Trump's lead in Texas (5.7 points).
So Trump could, just, squeak through, but this coalition is brittle. Texas is just one amnesty away from being flipped Blue forever like California was in the 1980s.
jeroboam
55m ago
Scott's piece on the Dark Ages really touched a nerve. Even seven years later on Twitter, various people in the rat-adjacent and Silicon Valley spaces pass around charts about how the Dark Ages, were, in fact, extremely real and spectacular dark.
But let's not forget the piece that started it all: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
As for me, I am going to die on any hill, it's that the Dark Ages were dark. If Kamala wrote that into her platform, I'd vote for her. It's that serious.
TequilaMockingbird
58m ago
But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.
I feel like this is something the Pumpkin-Spice class tells itself to justify not even bothering to try. Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser degree DeSantis, all being clear counter-examples.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1hr ago
If the Senate is a deadlock and trump underperforms that much in NC, I don't think the Republicans will take the house.
jeroboam
1hr ago
You can already do genetic selection with Orchid, and almost no one is doing it. And the things they are testing for are much higher stakes than a couple of IQ points here or there.
Why is no one using it?
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Public awareness is low
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People think it's "wrong" to want to have genetically normal children. Imagine how wrong they will think it is to boost IQ
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IVF is hard, slow, expensive, and frustrating.
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Genetic screening makes it harder, slower, and more expensive.
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Many hospitals won't even work with Orchid. Imagine trying to convince Woke State University to partner with your IQ testing service. So you will need to go out of state to specialty IVF clinics. Harder, slower, more expensive, more frustrating.
I'll eat my hat if more than 10,000 couples per year are using this in 5 years. Until we get gene editing the best way to get high IQ babies will be to choose an intelligent partner and to have children before the mother is 30 years old. This barely moves the needle.
Glassnoser
1hr ago
A lot more people will do IVF when it allows for genetic selection. The only reason to do IVF now, which is very expensive, is to deal with fertility problems. If you can make your children smarter, it pays for itself.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
Except in super-hot industries like AI, VC checks are too small for a lot of world-of-atoms stuff.
YE_GUILTY
1hr ago
Cuba has lost power. The electrical grid has collapsed and the whole country is in a blackout.
One wonders if Cuba's government might also lose power, but that feels hard to imagine.
bonsaii
1hr ago
These traits are notoriously polygenic, and virtually every gene is pleiotropic. It's not hard to imagine that optimizing for IQ specifically can have unforeseen deleterious downstream effects. Genetics as a field is rife with unknown unknowns.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1hr ago
Spielberg himself openly stated that Miller's mission cannot be justified on moral grounds. If that doesn't say something about the absurdity and arbitrariness of war, I don't know what does.
Yes, Spielberg acknowledges that at least some of the American lives lost during the war were thrown away for cynical and arbitrary reasons, and that this is unspeakably tragic.
What he is unwilling to acknowledge is that the lives of those German boys were also equally tragic and unnecessary.
I’m not willing to call the film “corny patriotic schlock”. It is an incredibly masterful film, and I agree with you that the battle scenes are thrillingly intense. However, you’re also correct that the film influenced battle scenes that came after it, and I don’t think this influence is wholly positive. Throughout the film, the Germans are almost universally treated as faceless foes, who die bloodlessly and instantaneously when shot. In contrast, American casualties writhe in pain, spurt blood everywhere, and cry for their mothers. It’s very affecting and humanizing, but it’s never applied to the Germans. There’s a YouTuber who does great analysis of this aspect of the film. The Germans can be mowed down without inspiring sympathy, because they are just villainous mooks.
This is not an anti-war film, and certainly not an anti-WWII film. It’s just an acknowledgement of how utterly horrible the sacrifices were that American soldiers needed to make in order to save the world from an unambiguously evil force of insane, feral monsters vaguely resembling human beings. It doesn’t ask you to stop and wonder whether the German soldiers felt the same way, let alone whether they would be correct in thinking so.
TequilaMockingbird
1hr ago
Like @Rosencrantz2, I think people here are kidding themselves about how well we understand genetics or the mind.
Psychology is one of the "softest" and least rigorous of all the sciences, and to the degree that IQ tests are measuring a real phenomenon it seems to me that whatever it is produces diminishing returns and starts to come with significant downsides in terms of mental (and to a lesser extent physical) health as you approach the tail end of the bell curve.
Everyone says "the first half-hour is incredible, then it becomes corny patriotic schlock". I disagree: I think the film does an admirable job of sustaining the intensity of its opening throughout the subsequent battle scenes, which are almost as gripping and jarring as those in the opening, and which set the tone for how action films would look, sound and feel for decades afterwards.
I think the film squanders an opportunity to tell a genuinely interesting story about how the war was a ghoulishly unnecessary waste of millions of the best young men that the West had to offer.
On the contrary, I think the film did tell this story. Consider the conversation between Miller and Horvath in the church, in which Miller says that throughout his military career, he was able to rationally justify all the lives lost under his command with the reasoning that more lives have been saved as a result. But for this particular mission, he cannot employ that reasoning: many men must die to save the life of one, and the only way the sacrifice will be worth it is if Ryan "invent[s] a longer-lasting lightbulb or something". Ryan's closing dialogue indicates that he's spent more or less his entire adult life burdened with the knowledge that he's only alive because several men gave their lives to save his, as a public relations mission, and wondering if he has done enough with his time on earth to warrant the sacrifice. Spielberg himself openly stated that Miller's mission cannot be justified on moral grounds. If that doesn't say something about the absurdity and arbitrariness of war, I don't know what does. It may not be Joseph Heller but it's a far more disquieting and confrontational message than the movie is generally credited with. (Not to mention the fact that the film's viewpoint character for the back half is a coward who allows his squadmate to die because he's paralysed by terror, and who is clearly intended to represent how the typical audience member would behave in such a situation.)
Stellula
1hr ago
Oh man I read this the exact opposite of you.
I thought Trump was extremely, savant level charming. It honestly made me sad that most of our politicians are so terrible.
Him pointing out that he wrote Schumer his first check, or getting in the jabs and stuff against Eric Adams (even if they were all pre written, which I doubt since it sounded very much like trumps “voice”) made it feel like there is hope that we can all actually get along.
Maybe this is just crack to me since I’m an upper-class-adjacent (friends and I are now scheming to buy a table at this event) Catholic, straight, cisgendered white male with a wife and children.
I loved this event last night. I am legitimately in afterglow this morning from it text back and forth with the aforementioned friends making (probably just aspirational tbh) plans about going to this event.
Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
Maybe I'm not evolving the discussion much but I think he is unique or at least extraordinarily unusual in his shamelessness.
TequilaMockingbird
2hr ago
But who else can?
Vance, DeSantis, Abbott, and Scott are the obvious candidates that spring to mind, and I wouldn't rule out Kushner or Don Jr. either. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans also have a reasonably deep bench of young-ish state level officials of which i expect at least a couple to ready for promotion to the national stage within the next 4 years.
Recall that no one outside of Florida had even heard of DeSantis prior to 2016. (Sure he'd been a state rep. since 2012 but how many people know who thier own state rep. is much less who anyone else's is?)
Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
I do think that there are advantages to not having too high an IQ. I studied maths at Cambridge and met my classmates.
According to the SSA Actuarial Life Table, a seventy-eight-year-old American male has a twenty-five percent chance of dying in the next four years.
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