THAT'S IN LIKE SEVEN HOURS

y'all better come

The original event mostly caught fire because of the blatant use of AI.

Reality was quite different. It's the cause du jour of the Very Online.

All you need to know about the Supreme Court is in their 2000 Bush V. Gore decision, whereby they say "we're giving this to Bush because we fucking well feel like it, it will never set any sort of precedent, except we know damn well it will, eat it libs."

I'll drop it Monday

Trump in 2016 was a potential. He'd never held office before. He was a protest vote against the political structure of the United States, a savvy billionaire known to the masses through his decisive behavior on reality TV.

Trump in 2024 is a known quantity. He'll be Trump 2020 but still more defiant against norms and rules. He is a protest vote against democracy, a bombastic demagogue known to the masses through his autocratic behavior through four years of holding office.

In 2016 you could tell yourself "maybe this will be better." In 2024 the only people telling themselves that are fascists. And say what you will about the United States, we do poorly with fascism.

My co-worker would bolt a plasma spectrometer with accelerometers on it to a vibration table with some special isolators between the instrument and mounting baseplate,

that sounds so fucking awesome

and we'd shake them with a sine sweep survey starting from like 1 Hz up through, I dunno, 40 kHz or something like that, and a power spectrogram level was input to govern the amplitude around each frequency. JUST like what you're doing with mics? We do it too.

Well what you're doing is ringing out the frequency response, right? You're trying to find constructive modes that are going to fuck you over while strapped in a rocket. You do that with an equalizer if it's sound or filters if it's an electromechanical system. I've linked this before, the eldritch magic starts at 3:35:

We'd already calculated the approximate normal modes of the instrument from 3D CAD models (we used Ansys)

For the record the last time I used ANSYS it was a command-line program that ran on a DEC Alpha.

By the way, at GSFC, they have like a 10 foot diameter gramophone to just blast shit with.

that sounds so fucking awesome

Which has its uses, heh, though perhaps mostly uncommercializable.

You are grossly underestimating the ease with which bad mixes can be produced.

Hadn't heard any AI tunes yet, and figured there was good reason for it. I don't go looking for them, and a really good one would have found its way to me by now if it existed.

The computer music cats have been doing "generative music" for a long time. It's easy as shit and doesn't require an LLM. Most of them are some form of neural network somewhere; "random ambient generator" has been an off-the-shelf product category for 20 years. Here's a free plugin for Kontakt.

Here's a walk-through for Ableton.

Here this is me buying you a virtual drink. Hopefully the taste goes away.

For the record, I am insufferable but I try hard not to be, believe it or not.

Here's my understanding of it -

An LLM trained exclusively on Khan Academy is going to have a nice fuzzy cloud of "wrong answers" and "things to say to wrong answers." A website with a test on it is going to have a hard-coded, verifiable, 100% accurate "right answer/wrong answer" matrix for any test they run.

The mistake is in thinking that the LLM can be trained to grade papers. It's going to give you a fuzzy cloud of "here's the vicinity of the right answer." That fuzzy cloud, however, beats the tar out of "nothing" when we're talking about automated instruction. The solution space of "right answers" and "wrong answers" leans heavily towards correct approaches when the problem is "provide a list of helpful tips to a seventh grader struggling with solving for X in a simple algebra problem" or "how would you instruct a student who is confusing the ordinate and abscissa."

Online tutorials are pretty shit right now and have been since the dawn of acoustic coupler modems. But realistically? AI should be Clippy. AI was born to be Clippy, that annoying thing you can ignore when it's out of its depth but which can do things like "looks like you're trying to make a table out of this data, would you like me to take a crack at it and then you can beat it to fit/paint it to match?"

Just don't let it judge college admissions essays.

...what prompt?

"So I had the most awesome dream last night"

"okay"

"and I'm going to tell you all about it!"

"uhhh"

"actually it's better than that I had an AI hallucinate a feature film full of all the shit that turns my crank and we can sit down together and watch it"

"my my look at the time surely I must be going"

"ehh that's okay you were never my friend anyway besides thanks to CoPilot I can watch Joe Rogan snuff porn all day you can fuck off"

"kthxbye reallyappreciateit"

I'm actually all for this. I'm sure Sam Altman is, too. Consume hundreds of hours of (paid) AI time generating your own special movie just for you. Will he serve your prompts up to the police if court-ordered? Indubitably. Considering how much colocation there is between Microsoft and the NSA, and considering how much information-sharing there is between the three letter agencies, I can virtually guarantee that shit's already rolling. "Hey Copilot draw me some shirley temple DP porn" "no prob fam I'll work on that while you answer the door I think I heard a knock"

Where it all falls down is the nerds assuming that anyone but their incel asses wants to watch custom movies.

I don't care how far back you go, theater of any kind is a mutual experience. It is a social ritual. Find a movie that's super great? TELL YOUR FRIENDS! Find a movie that's overhyped? BITCH TO YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT! Even a fucking DnD game takes at least two people and it hits its stride with four. Table read of a script with two actors? Weird. Table read of a script with a dozen actors? Sell tickets to the audience.

And look. If AI allows you to generate a film for your eight friends? Great. That's awesome. I hope you enjoy the shit out of it.

But it will never fucking threaten Hollywood.

The reason there are no real indie films left is that in order to make your money back these days you have to appeal to the broadest possible swath of humanity. Thats' why it's nothing but superhero movies anymore - it's the spectacle that makes money and the only controversial opinion in superhero movies is 'do you like superheroes.' Anyone of the opinion that superheroes are fascism is gonna stay home so you don't even need to worry about them.

The incel nerd take is "millions of actors will soon be out of work as we all use AI to generate our own custom movies" and holy fucking shit dude that's why nobody invites you to parties. you don't fucking get it and you won't even try.

123 million people watched the superbowl. The playoffs averaged 40m people - still a record. But what that tells you is that 80m people who don't give the first fuck about football sat down to watch the Superbowl simply because of the spectacle. And look.

Let's say I can build you a custom movie for $10. Let's say I can shoot something with actors in it for a million dollars. I make your movie and I profit let's say $9. I make my movie with actors in it and I charge $2. If I can get a 500,004 people to watch it I make more money. The argument put forth by the AI boosters is "well but those half million people won't come to your movie because they're busy spankin' it in their own personal Apple Vision Pro holodecks"

To which I say

the sooner we can make this happen the better, for all mankind.

One of the last smart things Ryan Holiday said was that snark is (A) the coin of the realm online and (B) not useful. By being glib you shut down any opportunity for deeper discussion. "Quippy" is just what you call snark when it comes out of your mouth.

We agree on your first three points. Here's your fourth:

Biden is choosing a side completely, with unconditional support for Israel including vetoing any UN ceasefires and a massive donation of weapons. He is making this simple, by declaring Israel morally untouchable and ignoring the worth of Palestinian lives.

I want you to visit this list and scroll down to October 7, 2023. I also want you to read some of those veto articles that make you so mad and ctrl-f "two state". Because while everyone else is demanding ceasefire and withdrawal, the United States has been pushing for a two-state solution in every proposal they put up. Then I want you to read this Al Jazeera article which is very not pro-Biden:

While the Biden administration maintains that an Israeli incursion into the densely packed city would be a “disaster”, it has said that such an operation would not result in tangible consequences, such as a freeze in US weapons transfers.

But let's highlight what we're sending, shall we?

The proposed arms delivery includes about a thousand each of MK-82 500-pound (227kg) bombs and KMU-572 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that turn unguided munitions into precision-guided bombs, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing unnamed US officials.

there are no good bombs. That said, Israel invented the barrel bomb. There are bombs where you're at least pretending you care about collateral damage and there are bombs where you are telegraphing you do not give the first fuck and when you have a weapon you can target you have to accept responsibility for what you're targeting. When you're throwing buckets of explosive out of helicopters everything's a mulligan.

He is morally culpable in this war continuing and their blood is on his hands.

I think Biden would agree with this.

Our support to Israel SHOULD NOT BE UNCONDITIONAL.

I think Biden would agree with this, too.

We should stop being one sidedly against the Palestinians too.

And it's pretty clear Biden would also agree with this.

_______________________

You started out your argument by saying you were being too quippy, and then proceeded to parse the problem into quips. It's Joseph Kony all over again - twenty million teens watch an hour of Youtube and think they've solved colonialism. What do you mean it's complicated just fucking fix it! is not an acceptable sentiment anywhere but social media and it's so fucking discouraging.

That's not effective altruism and you know it. Power of language - you're changing terms from something simple (pragmatism) to something abhorrent ("effective altruism") because you can't argue against pragmatism while "effective altruism" has no credible defenders.

"The ends justify the means" is the fundamental nature of politics and has been since Sumeria. "It's all indirect and sneaky" is that "standing on the wall" speech from A Few Good Men and has been going back to Sargon of Akkad.

It all fucking sucks. All of it.

It has always fucking sucked. All of it.

Rashida Tlaib is urging Michigan Democrats to vote against Biden in the primary. She should. He is acting in a way that is abhorrent to her politics, her constituency and her way of life. American policy towards Israel has long needed a change but there hasn't been enough momentum. Now? Now we've got a bunch of simps running around screaming "river to the sea" like it's fucking KONY2012 because if you scratch the surface of the problem even a little tiny bit you can't go "Biden is a Zionist sorted."

Kamil Galeev argues that Navalny died because the Tucker interview was such a bomb; Tucker was super-invested in getting Putin to say MAGA talking points and Putin was super-invested in Russian imperialist talking points and the result was neither audience got what they wanted. I guess he beat a rerun of a mind-reading competition?

What do you think the global order looks like if the two nuclear superpowers align under a common fascist banner?

I think this fundamentally misunderstands the facts on the ground:

1) There is one nuclear superpower and eight nuclear-armed nations. Each one of those eight could get up some birds and kill millions. Three or four of them could get shit across an ocean. And the United States could glass them all within half an hour, any day or night, rain or shine.

2) We've SEEN what a Trump administration looks like - careerists leave, incompetents move in, the bureaucracy hems them in and they fizzle out to nothing.

Yet you're out here going "I dunno what Trump would do, besides maybe bomb Mexico" and 'Putin will probably go for Poland and the Baltics." have you been watching the past couple years?

Back in the heyday of the cold war the Western scenario went like this:

1) Russia gets provocative somewhere

2) America escalates

3) Russia crosses the Rhine

4) America fights back

5) Russia takes heavy losses

6) Russia pushes the button

7) We all die horribly

The Soviet scenario went like this:

1) The US gets provocative somewhere

2) Russia responds

3) The US kicks Russia's ass, gets cocky, and lights up a nuclear first strike

4) We all die horribly but not before Russia gets in some vengeance strikes in via failsafed nuclear and biological weapons

I bring this up because "Russia gets pasted" was a fundamental axiom undisputed by either side. And this was based on (1) America's losing of Vietnam (2) America's inability to protect the barracks in Lebanon (3) America's rather dismal performance in Grenada (4) America's lack of excellence in Libya (5) America's disappointing showing in Panama. Able Archer 83 and all that but the last 20 years of the Cold War were an exercise in furtiveness by both sides. Fast forward to Desert Storm and -

Look. Desert Shield was wall-to-wall coverage of "the Elite Republican Guard." Chemical weapons everywhere. Battle-tested, frontline Soviet arsenals. Fourth largest army in the world. The government and press were softening us up for another Vietnam. Common consensus on the invasion of Iraq was we were gonna be Tet Offensiving our way through the mid '90s and we were there for it because yellow ribbons'n'shit. Girl in my chem class was beside herself because her national guard dad got called off to an FOB in Saudi Arabia and she didn't think she'd ever see him again. "How to avoid the draft" became a hot topic of discussion.

Instead? We were in Baghdad in 48 hours. We actually had to slow down because our logistics couldn't keep up with our front line - like, Abrams tanks are faster across open desert than Power Wagons are across paved highways. And then we left because eww who wants to run a place like that?

Black Hawk Down tells the tale of a bunch of special forces who got pinned down in Somalia and ended up getting routed. It also tells the tale of a dozen American elites who managed to kill between 300 and 700 Somalis while they were waiting for rescue. There are things that the American military sucks at - nation-building, garrison-holding, hearts'n'minds winning - but it absolutely does not suck at ass-kicking.

And we have exported the shit out of that.

See this guy?

He sucks so hard that Cary Elwes starred in a movie about it.

That li'l guy entered our arsenal in 1981. Yet here he is, absolutely bodying a late model front line Russian battle tank.

I cannot properly express - I have tried and I fail - to communicate the astonishing level of fail displayed by the Russian armed forces. It is fucking bogglilng. That tank getting held at bay by a 40-year-old chain gun? I have parts of that thing. Fuckin' T90M? That's the most fearsome thing in the world, man! Holy shit! It's not supposed to be rendered useless on the battlefield by a fucking troop carrier.

(So why hasn't Ukraine won yet)

The powers that be definitely want everyone to think they're duty-bound to free Ukraine from the bonds of tyranny as soon as possible so it can be welcomed into the brotherhood of Western European nations. But then, Western Europe has been doing that shit since the Varangians. If you look at US-Ukraine relations over the past 20 years one way to look at it is "man, the US were a bunch of dicks." Another way to look at it is "man, the US sure didn't think this 'democracy' thing was gonna stick." Fundamentally? Ukrainians have been an outsized influence in Russian history going back to the 1700s and from a think tank point of view, the over/under on a collapse into tyranny is an even bet. Not only that but provoking it in the direction of Starbucks and SWIFT gets the Russians really really itchy because Ukraine is pretty much where their good culture comes from so they're super good at pretending that "Ukraine" has always just been an awkward phase for some excessively cosmopolitan Cossacks who don't know their place.

A history of Enlightenment Europe is a history of "buffer states" (Poland, Belarus, Ukraine. Slovakia) soaking up blood so the barbarians run out of juice before they get to Paris. And Europe, and the US, are definitely taking advantage of that, and both Russia and Europe really want that buffer state on their side. Putin bleeding in Ukraine keeps Putin from bleeding in Austria, Biden bleeding in Ukraine would keep Biden from bleeding in St. Petersberg.

But don't for a minute think Poland would go down like that. Poland's got Leopards, Poland's got Abrams, Poland's got K2s. Poland is getting mutherfucking F-35s. The fuzzy, ambivalent circle we drew around Kyiv is a hard, red line around Krakow. Poland got royally fucked by the allies in WWII and fuckin' hell it's a Western nation that spent an achingly long time under tyranny so for once, the West is not being assholes to Poland.

But Ukraine? The Machiavellian move in Ukraine is to let it fucking bleed. I don't like it but I get it. The USSR fell in no small part because of their invasion of Afghanistan and every couple months, the Russians lose more troops in Ukraine than they did in the entire occupation of Afghanistan.

As far as Mexico? C'mon, man.

You know that stupid horse-racing that the press does? "Hey, a Republican hack said Biden's memory is faulty OBVIOUSLY THIS IS A BIGGER PROBLEM THAN TRUMP"? Fuckin' geopolitics are harder to understand and harder to explain and less easy to drum up outrage over. That's why you're out here goin' "two nuclear powers aligned under a fascist banner" as if it was anything other than lazy fanfic.

I'm usually not on the side of techbros, but I do think LLMs and image/video stuff is some of the most disruptive technology to come along in about a decade, maybe more.

True or false: image creation is an area in which you have practice and expertise.

But to be fair, I dunno why deepfakes haven't been more impactful, it's kind of a similar vein.

See, you're going "everyone is an idiot but me." Stop that. It's because if you want the fake to work it has to be carefully crafted to not stretch credulity. "Huh, look at all the Taylor Swift nudes! I wonder if any of them are real!" -no one

Maybe the most exciting thing is the possibility that this will eventually destroy the internet by eventually feeding its outputs back into inputs until the web fractalizes into nesting outrage bubbles interspersed with fake cute animal .gifs.

Here's my gremlin opinion:

Microsoft funds OpenAI because they KNOW it's poisoning Google.

Example: We've been watching Hotel Hell with dinner. One of the games we play is "what happened after Gordon left." This involves a web search - and it's a perfect web search for AI. It's content nobody really cares about, driven by a large mass media exposure with a long tail (the episodes aired in 2012). Now - check this out.

That's an AI-generated website. It's also the top hit for something on Hotel Hell. If you dig into any of the blogs dedicated to "where are they now" reality TV updates you learn the place closed in 2020. If you look on Trip Advisor, you see that the last review was in 2020. But if you look on Facebook, Yelp, Kayak or anywhere else, there's a link farmer with a phone number and an email address who totally doesn't have a hotel but will absolutely take your credit card number! Bing's results aren't much better, but then, Microsoft doesn't make their money from search and never will so fuck search.

Since I'm self-righteous, I'd like to think one of the last things it'll come for is physics and math.

LLMs have no deep understanding, so they'll never come for anything that requires deep understanding. Shit, LLMs have no understanding. How many legs does an ant have? how many pawns on a chess board? These are the constraints that hobble an LLM, they don't make them better, so they're never going to grok that shit. If you need something that knows how many fingers hands should have, you need something other than an LLM.

Like, I tried to make some character art for my game, and it can pull off some handsome faces, for sure more detailed than I'd have patience to draw,

And I think this is key. It's stupid to argue these problems won't be fixed. Give it a year and it'll pull off handsome faces without string cheese anatomy. But who's using that

You're using it for atmosphere and ambience around something where you would have simply done without. You weren't about to pay a human to draw those characters. This is very much like my own use of AI - "Hey Midjourney give me a picture of 'Fear and Loathing in Enumclaw' to share with five friends." One of those friends tried to get Microsoft Copilot to give him a logo for his studio; they were all awful. Three or four of us pointed out that he could get up on Fiverr and do infinitely better. Is that the argument, ultimately? That AI will do a better job than Fiverr? ...cuz... it's more expensive than Fiverr. It should. And also everyone on Fiverr is going to be hella better at using AI to get you what you want than you are.

The tools are always going to have shortcomings, all tools do. Professionals learn how to work around those shortcomings to do a better job faster. To me? Much of this discussion is "ZOMG nail guns are going to put framing carpenters out of business."

LOL

I've been following a few AI artists for a couple years now. They're all really clear about the fact that what they're doing is a wholly different process than traditional pixel-pushing, with different inputs, different outputs and different happy little accidents.

I am honestly and enthusiastically supportive of the use of AI by creative professionals, and I am honestly and enthusiastically supportive of the use of AI by amateurs. Every time the tools get better the world improves. The tedious thing for me is that the techbros REALLY want to make this about the death of the professional class and there's absolutely zero fucking evidence to even have the discussion.

It comes back to that fucking storyboard girl. Yay, you paid $10 a month to get a bunch of dragon pictures that may or may not be associated with a "movie" you intend to make someday. You weren't about to pay a storyboardist anyway, nor were you about to even try to get vaguely good at it.

I've got buddies who make $2k a day storyboarding. I also shoveled about $600 into Frameforge. Between Frameforge, Photoshop and ComicLife I got a half-dozen pages into a graphic novel; it's a lot of fuckin' work. And

A) Microsoft Pilot Girl is NEVER putting in that effort

B) No aspect of Microsoft Pilot, or any AI for that matter, reduces that effort in any meaningful way.

VFX artists have been using AI tools for 20 years or more. Any artist who didn't have to hand-trace a rotoscope line has been using AI in one form or another. I recognize I'm the only person here who knows what "rotoscope" means which is part of the problem - my posse has been doing cutting-edge shit since college because if you wanna see rapid adoption, check out filmed entertainment.

If you look at AI-generated content the obvious place to use it is backgrounds. Mattes have been effectively gone since the early-mid '90s because computers have been able to generate plenty-good-enough backgrounds. AI makes that cheaper which mostly means that the guys who are doing backgrounds are going to do more of them.

Look. It's gonna play out like this. Here, sit with me for a few minutes:

That took Kerry Conran, talented Cal Arts grad, dedicated cineaste, four fucking years to make:

He could not afford better equipment, so he used equipment given him in payment for projects that he worked on, such as desktop publishing of articles. His computer (including the equipment he earned) was outdated and slow. He dropped out of society, and spent all of his free time creating the short, working only enough to support himself and his project. He later remarked that he "had no life", and would sometimes hide under his desk in a fetal position, feeling tempted to give up on his project.

Worked out tho 'cuz after four years he finished "chapter 1", a friend got it in front of Jon Avnet and four years and $70m after that, the world got:

HERE IS WHAT AI IS GOING TO DO

It's not gonna take four years grinding on your own to make Chapter 1 of Sky Captain. It's going to take months or weeks. The skills you use to trick the AI are going to be novel and they will be successful. It will be impressive and those of us who grew up with Steenbecks will marvel.

But it's still gonna take tens of millions of dollars, Jude Law and Angelina Jolie to make it into a movie. Because a bunch of amateurs are always going to be slain by a bunch of professionals. Period. Full stop. No discussion.

And that's the stupidest bullshit about this whole kerfuffle - everyone's all "ZOMFG I can't imagine how threatened some hypothetical professional must feel about this" because they can't imagine some hypothetical professional ANYWAY.

Trust me - if you make your living doing visual FX, you're eagerly watching all this AI bullshit to see if it's capable of giving you a tool to speed up your workflows. And so far, what you see is something that doesn't care how many kings there are in a game of chess and if you look deeper, you're troubled by the fact that none of the people selling this technology sense that's a problem.

Machinima is made by people.

Cutscenes are made by people.

This is a list of every human who worked on Final Fantasy X.

You're extrapolating "400 people worked on this thing in 2000" to "no one will work on anything in 2030" based squarely on your naiive and uninformed conception of the process of creating filmed entertainment. Here, let's play a game: This is the list of people who worked on Snow White in 1937. And this is the list of people who worked on Frozen II in 2019. I think if you compare those three lists in chronological order, you will find that modern animation takes more people, not less, and that the trend is such that all of Los Angeles will be working on Frozen 5 by 2063.

SAG killed AI because the AMPTP wanted the right to scan an actor once and use them as a digital extra forever without paying dues, wages or royalties (just as an aside - "extra" is an uncredited role, so if Frozen 5 has extras, they'll have to come from San Diego). SAG fought this because every star you've ever seen in the theater played an extra for ramen money at some point and without the ramen money there's no Hollywood. You could have Googled that - but then you might have accidentally learned something. Just like what happens if you make an AI show in France - Netflix won't carry it, Canal Plus won't carry it, nobody will carry it because they're all signatories to the same contracts.

In general? If you don't know anything about the subject, and the situation doesn't make sense to you, it's a sign you need to research the subject, not that everyone who knows anything about it is an idiot. I know something about this subject. Animation I've worked on has racked up over a billion views on Youtube. And as you've likely noticed, I'll freely share well past the point anyone else cares. My one word of advice is that if I've made assertions, it's likely because I'm confident in my knowledge of the subject, and that confidence is generally well-earned.

People aren't going to watch AI.

Edison did everything he could to keep actor's names and faces out of his early films. He knew as soon as there were recognizable actors in film, they would absolutely dominate the medium the same way they absolutely dominated stage.

No one is going to watch "AI football player" sell you FanDuel. They're going to watch Tom Brady. Tom Brady is going to cost you $1.5m so why are you fiddlefucking around with a bunch of bullshit AI anything? Set aside the fact that you can't - SAG struck for four months to make sure that every human shown in a Hollywood movie or TV show is an actual human making an actual $125 a day.

Every dumb shit on reality television is making at least $125 a day because that's the contract. Every dumb shit behind the camera (raises hand) is making a fuckton more than that because that's the contract. That contract says "no AI, not anywhere, not ever." So sure. You can watch Skibidi Toilet. But out here in the real world you're going to watch humans filmed by humans.

Your argument boils down to a basic lack of comprehension of an entire industry.

It's visual and obvious, dude. The 1x dog is a nightmare dog, the 4x dog is a fuzzy dog, the 16x dog is a less-fuzzy dog. But the 16x cat still has occasional spurious limbs.

It's obvious that the 16x cat is a sparkly cinematic 4k-lookin' cat but there's nothing in the model to demonstrate that a 64x cat is any less likely to pop an extra leg every now and then. Photorealistic renders of things that can't exist have been a staple since Deep Dream and what's clear is that the cost-per-pixel is linear while the quality-of-massed-pixels hasn't changed appreciably. Further, that accuracy isn't even a consideration - "close-up of a short furry monster kneeling" is of a short furry monster squatting and "can it tell the difference between kneeling and squatting" is NOT a throw-away problem. More than that, it's clearly not a focus of development.

I have enjoyed watching you outline 15 years of SDI in three paragraphs.

My father was tracking satellites during Starfish Prime. Three of the four satellites he was tracking were taken out by radiation belts. The problem with nuclear explosions is they send energy, radiation and particles in Newtonian directions from the point of origin, which then orbit the planet in a Newtonian fashion. Starfish Prime was 1.4MT at 400km and it lit up the Van Allen belts and made some nasty artificial radiation belts of its own. I think it's safe to say that wherever the Russians lit off their theoretical candle, it'd pollute a big chunk of the airspace there for a while.

Most people who looked at Project Excalibur at the time doubted whether LLNL were capable of developing it properly, and they had a blank check. It's a dumb fucking idea. The bugabear of SDI was "how 'bout we just quadruple our decoys" because if the Russians sent up twice as many lumps of shit as they sent up warheads, they double their effectiveness against countermeasures without appreciably increasing their expense or sophistication. The bugabear of the '80s, the R-39 (or "SS-N-20 Sturgeon" as reported in Soviet Military Power), famously carried up to ten warheads. Realistic load-out was two or three with seven or eight decoys.

Meanwhile, there are rumors that the MIRVs in the Topol M are capable of evasive maneuvers but it appears your choices are 3-4 ballistic MIRVs or 1 that can wiggle.

There are almost certainly some algorithmic workarounds that will dramatically improve outputs. You could probably even program a separate AI instance to generate slightly different prompts, which are then fed separately into the video generation prompt, until you get something you like. Then re-train the video AI on its previous videos humans have decided are "good".

You are arguing that if you take the stochastic mean of "mediocre" enough times you will arrive at "excellence" and that's simply bad math. Mixing and remixing and remixing and retraining is all the AI companies have been doing for five years and they're still giving us story prompts like this and going "IS YOUR MIND NOT BLOWN"

I spent 15 years in an industry where gadgets were developed to do the work 80% as good as a human. The end result was that gadget was invariably given to the 100% human. Even now, every AI dipshit techbro out there is coming around to "you need to study prompt training" as in "if you want to keep your job you need to figure out how to trick a markov bot into giving you useful information."

I have no idea how long it took OpenAI to turn "a petri dish with a bamboo forest gorwing within it that has tiny red pandas running around" into that miniature horrorshow. What I do know is that the next step, in the real world, is a producer goes "great, now give them four legs" and the prompt honing continues. The next thing that happens is the producer goes "I liked the old red, bring it back" and now you're fukt because "red" was not a prompt before which means we don't get to cumulatively hack at this thing, we get to start over.

If you're working with a Maya jockey? He's five, six hours into your thing and dollars to donuts, his pandas are quadrupeds. And when you give him notes? They do not obliterate the content you had before. When you're working with humans, you don't have a "pick which of these four interpretations of your idea are the least ghastly" you have a logical progression to completion.

And I think it's extremely naiive of everyone to assume that the whole world will decide two-legged pandas are good enough.

I think we're already finding the asymptote. "10 GPUs gets us 80% there, 100 GPUs gets us 81% there, 1000 GPUs gets us 81.1% there, who wants to throw 10,000 GPUs at this shit?"

OKAY BLUE JAYS

Prompt: Animated scene features a close-up of a short fluffy monster kneeling beside a melting red candle.

AI clearly has no fucking idea what "knees" are.

Photorealistic closeup video of two pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of coffee.

Real fuzzy understanding of "battling" "sail" and "cup" here

A young man at his 20s is sitting on a piece of cloud in the sky, reading a book.

A book with prismatic pages

The whole thing with AI is "do we get points for vibes?" and if you're a booster, the answer is "of course!" but if you actually need to use it for something it's fucking bullshit. Take their goddamn superbowl ad:

"generate storyboard images for the dragon scene in my script..."

sure thing. Here's a bunch of bullshit images that aren't even the same aspect ratio, don't tell a story, are in no way sequential and reflect a child's understanding of 'storyboard!'

I know storyboard artists. I know the best goddamn storyboard artists in the fucking world. Here's what storyboards look like. They're like boards... that tell a story! What's funny as fuck is that a really talented storyboard artist had to draw a storyboard for an ad that not only illustrated (poorly) that an AI could do their job, it spent $7m to do so.

But since Joe Football has no fucking idea what a storyboard is, it's pretty easy to convince him that an AI will do his storyboards.

I don't know that they are. A while back someone did a calc on Twitter where they argued for a median 2 bedroom house purchased with a median mortgage before the pandemic, and a family having a baby and move into a median 3 bedroom house purchased with a median mortgage after the pandemic. That extra bedroom? doubles your mortgage.

I don't care how emotional your purchase right now. We're well outside the bounds of "but I want it."

702 survived Snowden. It's adorable that journalists think that shit has a snowball's chance of going anywhere in this political climate.

"intergalactic nuclear weapon" sung to the tune of

Weee gonna take a SHOT

Our space laser's SOOPER HOT

It ain't HERE it's way out THERE

WILL it WORK? FUCKING NOT

Intergalactic Nuclearweapon Nuclearweapon Intergalactic

I dunno. There's a bunch of shit out there that hasn't moved in 20-30 years. I'm looking at a property right now where the owner has been trying to offload it for 4 years now but they've decided they're not coming back from overseas so they dropped their ask 30%. They're at full gravy on whatever they can get and general consensus is rates aren't coming back down for 18 months. If you wanna do something else you gotta blink.

I'm told that one (1) commercial sale happened in Bellevue last quarter.

And then you got shit like this.

Three things that have reduced my "food sticking" problems almost to zero:

1) get your food up to room temperature before it hits the skillet. It's weird how much of a difference this makes but like, eggs at room temperature in a hot skillet will float on the butter and eggs from the fridge stick like crazy. Fried eggs for breakfast start with a 2c measure full of hot water that the eggs go into while the butter melts. It's all it takes.

2) Screw the non-stick cookware. We haven't owned any for years. And it allows you to

3) Invest in a Lamson Sharp spatula or two. The ability to go "no fucker, get offa there" makes all the difference in the world.