Bistable multivibrator
Non-state actor
Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as “content”. “Content” is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you’re designing the layout and don’t know what actually goes on the page yet. “Content” is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car’s trunk. “Content” is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

    “Content”… is Whatever.

    I was going to make a comment on the Stubsack thread about how it kind of ticks me off how “content creator” has permeated its way so deep into the vernacular. I can forgive it when it’s used as a clumsy term to talk about creative workers across multiple media, but something like a video essayist calling another video essayist a content creator just gives me the ick. Have some pride and solidarity in your art form, for fuck’s sake.








  • It’s fair enough to criticize that, but the curtains are blue meme makes a really bad argument. It would be one thing if the author said “the curtains are blue because the detective is colorblind and couldn’t see the bloodstains on the green curtains” or “the curtains are blue to represent Virgin Mary”. Ha ha the teacher was wrong, what a fool, blind leading the blind.

    The meme actually implies that authors typically add utterly superfluous sentences in their stories and that it’s wrong to try and interpret them as if they’re connected to the rest of the story.


  • The thing about colors is they’re so easy and efficient as symbols we don’t even consider them as deeper elements of storytelling. The connotations of the colors black and red are so pervasive and intuitive to an English speaker it’s hard to even imagine a version of My Immortal that doesn’t use them to convey the emo pop mall goffik sense of aethetics associated with the fic.

    Nobody living in modern anglophone society, not even someone pretending to write like a concussed 12-year old, would accidentally dress their depressed vampire goth protagonist in yellow, beige and pink thinking those colors usually represent those character traits.











  • It’s just depressing. I don’t even think Yudkoswsky is being cynical here, but expressing genuine and partially justified anger, while also being very wrong and filtering the event through his personal brainrot. This would be a reasonable statement to make if I believed in just one or two of the implausible things he believes in.

    He’s absolutely wrong in thinking the LLM “knew enough about humans” to know anything at all. His “alignment” angle is also a really bad way of talking about the harm that language model chatbot tech is capable of doing, though he’s correct in saying the ethics of language models aren’t a self-solving issue, even though he expresses it in critihype-laden terms.

    Not that I like “handing it” to Eliezer Yudkowsky, but he’s correct to be upset about a guy dying because of an unhealthy LLM obsession. Rhetorically, this isn’t that far from this forum’s reaction to children committing suicide because of Character.AI, just that most people on awful.systems have a more realistic conception of the capabilities and limitations of AI technology.