MudMan

MudMan , 1 day ago to 196 in Stone Rule

No.

And you can't make me.

And since a protest is ultimately an attempt to manipulate an entire people into shifting the national consensus over to your opinion, if I'm refusing to stop being dramatic about the optics of what they did then what they did was an abysmal failure.

That's the point people are trying to make here. That ultimately this thing is marketing, and that if everybody is pissed at you after your marketing impact you just did bad marketing.

Alright, you want me to tone it down? Here it is toned down: it's not the puppy coat.

It's Apple's hydraulic press iPad advertising.

You do realize that isn't any better, right?

MudMan , 1 day ago to 196 in Stone Rule

Nah, when you deface a one-of-a-kind prehistoric monument that not only is of genuine historical relevance and recognizable worldwide but also a key cultural touchstone with deep identitarian components for a whole country you are deep into Cruella territory. In good faith. Genuinely. I'm not even English and I am pissed. You don't even get the usual excuses about bourgeois art these idiots have used for other stunts like these.

This is literally supervillain stuff. It's the stuff they put in Superman movies to show he's gone bad. In the zeitgeist of normal humanity it's shorthand for "these are the bad guys", right alongside suspiciously spotted fur coats and shooting your minions for failing to catch somebody.

How anybody wouldn't get this makes me not only question their ability to socially engineer a planetary revolution of the ways we generate power and consume goods, but the ability to function as an adult and put their pants on in the morning. If I hired a PR consultant to advertise "climate action" and they proposed this I wouldn't just fire them, I'd sue them for trying to sabotage me. It's incredibly stupid. Seriously. Genuinely. As somebody who wants these people to actually succeed.

MudMan , 1 day ago to 196 in Stone Rule

Oh, is it? Man, this is such a Rorschach test of a thread.

Is the point of a protest to be in the news? I guess the clout economy has rotten our brains after all.

I mean, yeah, you can make news by acting like an idiot, in that the people that oppose your cause will thoroughly cover it. It's not hard to be in the news with a protest, as long as you don't care why you're news. Stage a mass murder of puppies to protest against the lack of gun control and I guarantee you'll get a spot in Fox News every day for a year, very much accompanied of a pro-gun lobbyist commenting the footage.

That may be the core of the confusion here. I'm saying that turning climate change activism into the puppy murder cause is not an effective way to curb climate change. I'm saying that feeling powerless doesn't make it any more effective at curbing climate change just because it gets news coverage.

It's not making anybody aware of the issue who already isn't, because everybody is already aware of the issue. It's not explaining anything about the issue to anybody, because all we're talking about here is the stupid stunt. It doesn't convince anybody who was neutral or hostile to the cause because they came off as complete idiots at best, malevolent assholes at worst.

So I guess my answer to your question is that even if the jet thing did nothing it still was more effective than this. Because it's not about being in the news, it's about making effective action more likely to happen.

MudMan , 2 days ago to 196 in Stone Rule

Did the other thing achieve any of that?

I'll say the jets were effective in that I don't like the jets while I am primed to try to physically stop you from doing the other thing if you try it in front of me. And I already agree with the underlying point already, so imagine how the normies that don't think about this at all feel.

"Ah, a cartoonish self-parody of activists defacing a monument I've spent my entire life feeling a sense of kinship with, I feel compelled to rethink my stance on this dry, complex political issue". That's a bold pitch for a PR stunt.

MudMan , 2 days ago to Fuck AI in OpenAI's Mira Murati: "some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place"

Your "we" and my "we" are probably not the same, I'm afraid. I'm not shocked that the difference in context would result in a difference of perception, but I'd argue that you guys would need an overhaul on the regulations and safety nets thing regardless.

MudMan , 2 days ago to Fuck AI in OpenAI's Mira Murati: "some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place"

Well, yeah, that's what I'm talking about here, specifically. There was an application of technology that bypassed regulations put in place to manage a previous iteration of that technology and there was a period of lawlessness that then needed new regulation. The solutions were different in different places. Some banned the practice, some equated it with employees, some with contractors, some made custom legislation.

But ultimately the new framework needed regulation just like the old framework did. The fiction that the old version was inherently more protected is an illusion created by the fact that we were born after common sense guardrails were built for that version of things.

AI is the same. It changes some things, we're gonna need new tools to deal with the things it changes. Not because it's worse, but because it's the same thing in a new wrapper.

MudMan , 2 days ago to 196 in Stone Rule

Oh, spare me that rhetroric. Protestors in the 90s and especially the 2000s felt just as disenfranchised. That's how you end up protesting in the first place. And those were the nice ones. The stories my parents could tell you about the 60s and 70s.

It's not like "don't be an idiot" is a struggle only now. I was in protests back in a different millenium where the smart ones were already standing in front of cops and bank windows to stop the idiots from throwing rocks at them and spoiling the whole thing.

The despondent "you just don't get it" online discourse is pretty new, though.

MudMan , 2 days ago to 196 in Stone Rule

Man, the way this channels a mix of "it is the children who are wrong" and sheer impotence is hitting me hard. I mean, it really explains so much about modern activism.

MudMan , 2 days ago to Fuck AI in OpenAI's Mira Murati: "some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place"

Every industrial transition generates that, though. Forget the Industrial Revolution, these people love to be compared to that. Think of the first transition to data-driven businesses or the gig economy. Yeah, there's a chunk of people caught in the middle that struggle to shift to the new model in time. That's why you need strong safety nets to help people transition to new industries or at least to give them a dignified retirement out of the workforce. That's neither here nor there, if it's not AI it'll be the next thing.

About the linear increase path, that reasoning is the same old Moore's law trap. Every line going up keeps going up if you keep drawing it with the same slope forever. In nature and economics lines going up tend to flatten again at some point. The uncertainty is whether this line flattens out at "passable chatbots you can't really trust" or it goes to the next step after that. Given what is out there about the pace of improvement and so on, I'd say we're probably close to progress becoming incremental, but I don't think anybody knows for sure yet.

And to be perfectly clear, this is not the same as saying that all tech disruption is good. Honestly, I don't think tech disruption has any morality of any kind. Tech is tech. It defines a framework for enterprise, labor and economics. Every framework needs regulation and support to make it work acceptably because every framework has inequalities and misbehaviors. You can't regulate data capitalism the way you did commodities capitalism and that needed a different framework than agrarian societies and so on. Genies don't get put back in bottles, you just learn to regulate and manage the world they leave behind when they come out. And, if you catch it soon enough, maybe you get to it in time to ask for one wish that isn't just some rich guy's wet dream.

MudMan , 3 days ago to Fuck AI in OpenAI's Mira Murati: "some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place"

OK, so one caveat and one outright disagreement there.

The caveat is that she herself points out that nobody knows whether the jobs created will outnumber the jobs destroyed, or perhaps just be even and result in higher quality jobs. She points out there is no rigorous research on this, and she's not wrong. There's mostly either panic or giddy, greedy excitement.

The disagreement is that no, AI won't destroy jobs it's learning from. Absolutely no way. It's nowhere near good enough for that. Weirdly, Murati is way more realistic about this than the average critic, who seems to mostly have bought into the hype from the average techbro almost completely.

Murati's point is you can only replace jobs that are entirely repetitive. You can perhaps retopologize a mesh, code a loop, marginally improve on the current customer service bots.

The moment there is a decision to be made, an aesthetic choice or a bit of nuance you need a human. We have no proof that you will not need a human or that AI will get better and fill that blank. Technology doesn't scale linearly.

Now, I concede that only applies if you want the quality of the product to stay consistent. We've all seen places where they don't give a crap about that, so listicle peddlers now have one guy proofreading reams of AI generated garbage. And we've all noticed how bad that output is. And you're not wrong in that the poor guy churning those out before AI did need that paycheck and will need a new job. But if anything that's a good argument for conusming media that is... you know, good? From that perspective I almost see the "that job shouldn't have existed" point, honestly.

MudMan , 3 days ago to Fuck AI in OpenAI's Mira Murati: "some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place"

I think there's plenty of rightful criticism to the things she actually says, and plenty of things she says I wouldn't take at face value because they're effectively token corporate actions to dismiss genuine concerns.

She actually gets asked in the Q&A about the IP rights of creators included in training data, and she talks about some ideas to calculate contributions from people and compensate for them, but it's all clearly not a priority and not a full solution. I'm not gonna get into my personal proposals for any of that, but I certainly don't think they're thinking about it the right way.

Also, if you REALLY want a chilling thing she says, go find the part where she says they may eventually allow people to customize the moral and political views of their chatbots on top of a standard framework, and she specifically mentions allowing churches to do that. That may be the most actually dystopian concept I've heard come out of this corner of the techbrosphere so far, even with all the caveats about locking down a common baseline of values she mentions.

MudMan , 3 days ago to Fuck AI in OpenAI's Mira Murati: "some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place"

She's the CTO, you're just agreeing with every person who has held that role since the beginning of time. I guarantee that's her first wish to the genie. Like, seconds after rubbing the lamp. Wouldn't even let it get to the "crick in the neck" part.

MudMan , 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago) to Fuck AI in OpenAI's Mira Murati: "some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place"

Thanks. I hate deliberately out of context quotes. Watching the entire interview is actually very interesting. Lots to agree and disagree with here without having to... you know, make things up.

On the jobs situation she later mentions that "the weigth of how many jobs are created, how many jobs are changed, how many jobs are destroyed, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows(...), because it's not been rigorously studied, and I really think it should be". That also comes after a comment about how jobs that are "entirely repetitive" (she repeats that multiple times) may be removed, but she clarifies that she means jobs where the human element "isn't advancing anything", which I think puts the creative jobs quote in context as well. I like how the intervewer immediately goes to "maybe we can cut QA" and you can see in her face that she goes "yeah, no, I'm gonna need those" before going for a compromise answer.

I don't agree with the perspective she puts forward about how the tools are used, I think she's being disingenuous about the long term impact and especially about the regulations and what they do to their competitors. But latching onto this out of context is missing the point.

MudMan , 4 days ago to memes in Too powerful for their Euro arteries

Italians will cook your pasta inside a whole wheel of cheese. Spaniards deep fry pork belly and serve it as a snack. Last time I was in Eastern Europe I thought something was a sweet only to discover it was a lump of straight-up pork fat. Just raw. To munch on.

Americans may be more consistent at eating gross murderfood regularly and in large quantities, but they sure aren't the only ones to have it.

MudMan , 4 days ago to memes in Too powerful for their Euro arteries

Fun fact, in many places, soft-serve ice cream is known as "Italian ice cream".

What we are seeing here is a slightly botched traditional Italian lunch.