YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

What are we going to do today, Sam?

The same thing we do every day, Diddy. Try to convince them to let me play League of Legends again.

I would wager that, more than the costs of serving these API calls, preserving the opacity of the resultant network is probably part of the advantage these companies get from locking down their APIs. Given how much flak they already get for the mental and social damage done by social media and Twitter specifically, I suspect they're very happy to preserve as much of the black boxiness as they can so they can point to the value users get and their ad revenue and say that all the costs are unfortunate coincidents rather than central problems with the paradigm.

No, see, if they chose anime that would at least represent an investment in the creation of something however questionable it's overall value for the level of resources involved.

Instead they see anime as a thing people like and are trying to link their existing AI and crypto concepts to it in order to bouy their public perception and get a halo effect going.

They're not choosing to put that value in anime, they're hoping to use anime to make the things they did choose seem more valuable than they are, because otherwise they made horrible choices and won't be given as large a share of society's surplus output to use on the next thing.

This was the woman who took over during Sam Altman's temporary removal as CEO, which we're pretty sure happened because the AI doom cultists weren't satisfied that Altman was enough of an AI doom cultist.

Yudkowsky was solidly in favor of her ascension. I take no joy in saying this as someone who wants this AI nonsense to stop soon, but OpenAI is probably better off financially with fewer AI doom cultists in high positions.

I mean there are definitely some brain rotted crypto bros who would buy shares at face value because it's totally gonna go to the moon guys

How are you holding them accountable when one of them is still going to be in power? You're just sacrificing one of the few concrete mechanisms you have to actually make things better. Yeah, a Harris victory doesn't mean immediate victory in the fight against this atrocity, but a Trump election does mean defeat.

Actually it's vitally important if you're going to have an outdoor catgirl. Otherwise they'll decimate the local birdgirl population.

I agree that the Doki Doki Literature Club reference was out of place, but consider that the whole post is predicated on the assumption that anime is a radical new art form that is revolutionizing [$Product] while itself being revolutionized by the new technologies designed by a16z's stable of startups (the ones they haven't cashed out yet). DDLC is niche enough that the intended audience will feel clever if they know about it, but successful enough that there's a nonzero chance they'll have heard about it.

It also has the most anime title they could find.

Some notes:

• Who told Mark Andreesen about the overlap between possible AI suckers customers and weebs? Are we going to get a16z's next hot take - "Furries are eating the world?"
• I'm sure most of the audience here can fill in their own 700+ word rant about the breadth of anime as a visual style, so I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. However, unlike the older trends of assuming that whichever shonen is currently most popular (the kids still like at least one Dragonball, right?) is representative or dismissing anything with the relevant aesthetic as "some weeb shit I won't like", here the writers manage a much more impressive feat. They acknowledge the breadth of what anime contains, but completely fail to ask the basic question: "why do people like this?" Similar to the original prompts for this kind of rant, they're assuming the art style and Japanese cultural background are the primary reasons why anyone connects with anything anime, and then expand from that premise. I'm pretty sure this is a root cause of why the whole article feels like it was written by goddamn martians.
• Are vTubers playing existing characters a thing? What little I've seen isn't linked to existing stories (that's what humans call "IP") but rather focus on original characters who have their own shit going on. Even ignoring the attempt to shove genAI into everything (as though everyone is going to want to make their own vTuber avatar and stream it someday?) this seems like assuming that the people going to watch the finals of the local Battle of the Bands are going in the hope of getting an autograph from Kurt fucking Cobain.
• There has been some criticism of gacha games as being monstrously exploitative and basically gambling targeted at kids and/or teens, but consider just how much money it makes. These people are ghouls.
• Going back to the genAI we set aside two bullet points up, I do think anime has a unique property there. It simultaneously has a much stronger visual identity than many other aesthetics, including photorealism, but also has a massive number of scrapable examples to train off of. The more consistent style makes it easier to replicate statistically and what visual abberation you still get is less likely to fall deep into the uncanny valley. The outputs I've seen from even older anime genAI were better than their contemporaries, but still pretty easy to pick out. Something about shading or gradient or something, probably because since anime is drawn rather than captured like a photo there's no detail that's fully incidental. GenAI, of course, has no actual purpose and so all details in every output are incidental. That gives the output a weird unfocused quality I think?

In conclusion, I'm starting to suspect that VCs don't have souls and/or don't interact with any human being outside of potential partners-in-somehow-not-crime or potential victims.

The bragging about the size is what gets me. It's such obvious news-baiting, with no real effort to ask why it needs to be so large or if this is a worthwhile tradeoff. It's especially egregious when SpaceX and friends' massive volume of launches are accelerating Kessler syndrome and the plan to burn them up on reentry at scale is adding a whole lot of bad stuff to the atmosphere.

When I read your intro it reminded me of my reflexive response when companies complain about how it's impossible to operate profitably under some safety or privacy regulation: gee, that sounds like a great opportunity for someone to innovate.

As for the piece itself, I think the point is salient and interesting, but I think the manifesto style makes it feel more strongly asserted than persuasively argued. That's not a bad thing, and makes for a very strong picture, but leaves me without a lot of commentary other than "oh that's a really interesting way of framing the problem". Leaves me interested in reading the full piece tbh

Even as the static images have gotten a little bit better at avoiding the most obvious failures (e.g. "oh sweet Jesus the hands what is wrong with the hands???") all these programs are still converging on a very specific and very off-putting aesthetic. Its the same reason the prose tends towards the same ridiculously corporate tone: averaging together all the creative works of human history spits out an aggressively average product based on what went into the training data. But applied to the visual arts what we end up with is just. Not bland like oatmeal, but bland like cardboard.

Company Z:

Oh God. I worked as an NSE with F5 for seven years and had the opportunity to join dozens of "oh God everything's fucked" calls, and autosync was a factor in the majority of them. I'm not sure why you would want half-finished virtual servers pushed onto your active production devices, but damn if people weren't doing that all the blasted time.

That's one way to put a sentient being on the other end of the request, I guess.

And thanks to the free market we should note just how many options everyone has. Broadband Internet definitely isn't a series of local monopolies with minimal ability to actually switch.

It's gonna be so awkward when they realize they need a bureaucracy to actually make any of the things the blockchain says happen in the real world.

I'm gonna honestly be a little disappointed to see this fail not for any of the reasons why authoritarianism is a bad politics, but just because the authoritarians in this case are going to be dumb enough to forget to arrange for sewage collection or something.

Obligatory plug for calcgpt

Some of the things he points out about how thoroughly embedded coverage of this industry is with Google insiders or approved partners makes sense given how Google basically is web search these days, but then that's kind of the whole goddamn problem isn't it?

I got all the way down on my one knee and nothing short of the second coming is gonna move me from this spot