sc_griffith @ sc_griffith @awful.systems

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614

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2 yr. ago

Fourth episode of our podcast about historical misogynist and bigoted texts, odium symposium, is out now. We discuss classic british racist enoch powell and his “rivers of blood” speech.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/144105193

(it should be available on every platform)

interesting writeup on detecting ai music (newgrounds bans ai content)

https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-moderation/how-to-detect-ai-audio

another analogy might be an ancient builder who gets really good at building pyramids, and by pouring enormous amounts of money and resources into a project manages to build a stunningly large pyramid. "im now going to build something as tall as what will be called the empire state building," he says.

problem: he has no idea how to do this. clearly some new building concepts are needed. but maybe he can figure those out. in the meantime he's going to continue with this pyramid design but make them even bigger and bigger, even as the amount of stone required and the cost scales quadratically, and just say he's working up to the reallyyyyy big building...

well, I can't counter it because I don't think they do know how it works. the theory is shallow yet the outputs of, say, an LLM are of remarkably high quality in an area (language) that is impossibly baroque. the lack of theory and fundamental understanding presents a huge problem for them because it means "improvements" can only come about by throwing money and conventional engineering at their systems. this is what I've heard from people in the field for at least ten years.

to me that also means it isn't something that needs to be countered. it's something the context of which needs to be explained. it's bad for the ai industry that they don't know what they're doing

EDIT: also, when i say the outputs are of high quality, what i mean is that they produce coherent and correct prose. im not suggesting anything about the utility of the outputs

it's probably better for my development as a human being to learn this properly, but it turns out github pages hosting does the letsencrypt process if you check a box in the page settings

further things: one, that’s the first website I’ve made where I wasn’t just plugging into a template, and I’m a little proud of it even though it’s almost nothing. I would appreciate feedback and suggestions

two, a future episode idea I have is to examine what I’m thinking of as “the trustless society.” it’s about the replacing of social relations with legal or financial intermediaries. Those of you who are long time buttcoiners will be familiar with this process. if any of you have specific readings to recommend I would love to hear it. I’ll probably mostly focus on balaji but anyone or anything will help

Third episode of Odium Symposium is out (that’s the podcast I cohost). We talk about Cato the Elder and his struggle against militant feminist action in the roman republic. You can listen to the episode at https://www.patreon.com/posts/crack-sucking-143019155 or through any of the sources on our website, www.odiumsymposium.com

wild article about content scraping nonprofit common crawl

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/common-crawl-ai-training-data/684567/?gift=iWa_iB9lkw4UuiWbIbrWGQv84IP0_-K67yuVC013Fx4

tl;dr they've been faking deleting data upon request (in ways that I find very funny) and their head is noxious even for a tech bro

also is it just me or does SV have a particular gift for perverting the nonprofit concept

I haven't touched image generators and idk how different their products are, if at all. but I think of this as the default AI "illustrated" style. very low on detail outside of the objects of focus, heavy line work, flat, rounded, muted colors

frankly that's the most detailed I've seen it get. usually it's more like this

apologies for just linking to my own bsky post but I'm lazy: https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3m4qjnkeyls23

tl;dr I've gotten a bit suspicious that "AI users will be genocided" posts on reddit are a nazi op

just drop it through a hole in the floor of the floor of the dyson sphere

i see. i misunderstood your previous post, thought you meant that "none of these companies is profitable" is essentially his only conclusion and that you considered it justifiable enough

his conclusions are a lot more complex than "none of these companies is profitable"

i have mixed feelings here. on the one hand, a lot of the article hinges on the suggestion that zitron is somehow concealing that he works with AI companies. i've listened to his podcast, i've read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart. it also devotes a remarkable amount of time to remarks from casey newton and the like, who have nothing to offer the world.

on the other hand, i do find it genuinely repulsive that he'll work with a company like DoNotPay. while it might be hackwork to suggest he's concealing it, I don't like the association whether he's open about it or not.

on the... third hand? when i've read his posts, i've found myself totally unable to evaluate his financial claims. the evidence always seems unimpeachable, i just do not know whether the conclusions he draws from that evidence make sense, so i never cite him. i think a more honest and interesting version of this article, one that went further than trying to insinuate he's an ignorant fraud, would involve collaborating with someone with a lot of financial expertise and examining how rigorous his work actually is. but wired apparently wasn't interested in trying to make that article happen

If these plugs are too much, please let me know: the second episode of our podcast on historical bigoted/misogynist texts is out now. "Woman, thy name is russia."

https://bsky.app/profile/odiumsymposium.bsky.social/post/3m4cjzttdek2f

any of y'all watch a good movie or tv show lately? what was it

my laptop is a budget model from 2016 and it runs xfce smoothly and happily lol. i code on it and watch streams and play slay the spire and all the usual stuff. idk how the stylus changes things but the required specs for doing quite a lot with linux are negligible