The Blacksky fork was an amazing accomplishment that took a lot of effort, but it was not supposed to be an “amazing accomplishment” level task to set up another instance of the protocol.
Oh yeah. All the other traits are so common, she blends into the crowd.
Putting “I murdered a puppy” in a book and expecting applause is special.
The sole book accurate adaptation.
That’s also the ideal academic monograph length too.
Ballantine had these in the endcaps of grocery stores, paid huge advances to big name authors, and did TV/print ads, so I think it’s a case of budgeting above the level the actual market supported.
The 90s wunderkind era meant that there was an upsurge in stories that ditched families and relationships as soon as possible.
Followed by an explosion of “troubled single father/child” relationship stories a decade or so later.
Ballantine did a push for this format (around 150 pages) with the Library of Contemporary Thought in the 90s. They made a big splash, got a lot of coverage, but ultimately did not sell.
I adore Wuthering Heights because it is a series of Monty Python sketches that filmmakers have been trying to shove into a two-hour romance for more than century now.
Aliens 3 gets praise for being brave, but it’s really 100 percent in line with the already tired grimdark phase that swept nerd culture in the late 80s/early 90s.
Less visionary and more an example of “fridging” from the era that defined the term.
i went to fayetteville, nc a last month to learn about the city and scene that made j. cole who he is. read about it here at @theassemblync.bsky.social
It’s the inverse of the first Rage, where the pre-release coverage of the game was overwhelming - “Carmack and id make their next generation debut!” - and the game landed with a wet thud despite being overall decent but shallow.
It's a logical, if uncomfortable, extension from having driving directions and the weather on tap to having larger questions answered by the same device.
We got slow-walked into a world where people are willing to outsource huge and essential human questions to a device for convenience.
And as we have seen from everything from Eliza to the pet rock, it does not take much effort to get a human being to impart personality and agency to an anthropomorphized object.
The thing is, a lot of LLM users actually think it’s capable of God-like intelligence, and that’s clear from the ways they interact with it publicly
So a lot of the hype around LLMs and a lot of the userbase just fundamentally misunderstands what the technology is and what it’s capable of, instead treating it like a mythical supernatural or religious being. The industry openly encourages this delusion for profit
I don’t think LLMs would take off without this kind of userbase, because they’re the ones talking to ChatGPT and Grok all day every day because they think they’re reaching Jesus levels of insight. This is why the technology gets called a scam, because the industry is definitely scamming these people
Yo, Nazi grandpa, your dye job makes you look like an anime villain.
“It’s getting better” means nothing if the costs of dealing with the damage of an unready product go to you while future profits go to the vendor.
There is an epidemic of not answering the questions, because no one pushing this stuff wants to grapple with the larger implications of this being another business’s mass beta test.
Even in the best case for the tech, a lot of very expensive damage is being externalized to the user base.
New Deal and Progressive reforms as well.
They want the horrors of 19th century America back.
Letting Paypal get away with operating an extralegal grey market bank gave us Thiel and Musk.
Yeah. My first thought would be that that’s some woodland creature’s doing.
The Roman empire before that, the Greek empire before that, and on and on.
Great episode.
My “cursed by knowledge” moment in this rewatch was when Owen said Luke’s dad was a “navigator on a spice hauler.”
“Daddy was a drug dealer. Died bad. Let’s not talk too much about it.”
Owen fucking hated Anakin.
I got hit by the "Happy Birthday" mafia at an old job before that con got shut down. The old song rights holders can be the worst.
In the series I read, it’s detective genre but mixed with magic ala Anita Blake and Jim Butcher.
The added twist is that its also a High Fantasy world ruled by evil angels and vampires.
Add in a strong romance focus, and you have a new, while very familiar from multiple angles, genre.
Working on a q&a lecture for a class today: The story of robots is always a story about slavery. The story of LLMs labeled as AI is a story about class, and which humans pay the cost, including the physical toll on their bodies/minds, and the lack of water and electricity, so data centers can exist.
Big part of the problem is that any tech team you bring together is going to be made up of the same people.
This is the culture and why so many products are increasingly unfit for their marketed purposes.
It’s a world where the riches go to geniuses and innovators, so dutifully maintaining your product has zero professional value.
It genuinely is a culture shock to see an engineer “YOLO” a security question.
That used to be the prompt that reliably elicited a wall of text bouncing between technical details and paeans to the company’s dedication to keeping the users and the investors’ investment safe and sound.
