One of the following statements is true.
- There are ten million empty houses in the United States, and only around 900,000 homeless
- Pods of orcas are organizing and attacking fishing boats off the coast of Spain and have already sunk three vessels, and caused thousands in damages.
- Before GPT-4 was released, it was asked to access a website with a CAPTCHA test. It contacted a person on Taskrabbit to read it for them. The person jokingly inquired "You're not a robot are you?" and Chat GPT replied "No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service."
- There's a thought experiment in physics that claims that the reason all electrons are exactly the same is because it's all the same electron traveling through time.
- The Southern Baptist Church kept a secret list of over 700 clergy accused of child rape and molestation for over 20 years and did not report them or take any action to remove them from their seats of power.
I saw The Little Mermaid recently. I would never view this movie on my own. I view it as decadence, a symbol of our dying culture. We cannot do anything new. We can just make things we used to do bigger. The whole idea of live-action movies of cartoons just. . . turns my stomach—literally. When I think about it I get somatic stomach pain caused by mental illness.
But I'm not a ten-year-old girl.
She enjoyed it. I had many thoughts. Although Melissa McCarthy is a wonderful person and actress, I felt such sadness. It wasn't Divine, you know? Such a powerful and vibrant figure, given the ultimate tribute in animation, and then. . . just forgotten. Secondly, I'm an artist and there wasn't a single human stomach in that movie, just paintings of them. I have never seen Javier Bardem turn in a performance this terrible.
On the plus side, Awkwafina was brilliant, easily the only authentic performance in the movie. and Halle Berry is an angel, given form. She, and her voice, even without computer-enhanced audio and video, are a brilliance that, when viewed, disperses our perception of time.
Let me say again, my daughter loved it. It was made inside a machine. It wasn't filmed on a green screen. It was painted with digital light. I thought about Roger Rabbit when watching it. That was a ten-year experiment to blend the two. Was it presentient? Did Zemeckis realize a human face, tracked and marked, integrated into an animated kaleidoscope was the future of cinema?
Look, you're no idiot. You clearly realize the gag is that all the items in the list are true. Actual factual what the shit is happening. One hundred years ago, Tesla predicted the internet, instantaneous communication and transmission of data. He lived from 1856 to 1943.
He survived the robber barons, people who hoarded all the wealth.
He lived during a fascist takeover of a major world power
He lived through the influenza pandemic.
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The following things are coming, and they do not care what you think:
Life extension is possible. The only obstacles are logistics. Within 100 years, we will be able to refresh RNA, and effectively make people immortal.
They have already done exactly this with mice this year in January. There is no physical reason these processes won't work on people.
We will have the ability to uplift other animals—brain interfaces are already working,
and people are doing extensive research into non-human communication. You had better fucking believe it will be front-page news the first time a person wants to marry their uplifted pet. This isn't a question of if, just when.
There will come a period soon, of the all-knowing. There will be a point in history before which we did not completely understand the universe and a point beyond that. We are in the before knowing.
 |
| Top of the Line, circa 2000 |
All, human labor is obviated by AI. Maybe not today, but futurists that I've been reading predict that between robotics and AI, there will be no task a human can complete that a machine won't be able to complete better and more affordably within (
looks at watch) 22 years. Possibly as early as 12 years. If it seems hard to believe, take yourself back to the year 2000 and tell yourself there will be over 20 million devices that every person carries on earth, more powerful than a current desktop computer that will respond to speech and be connected to the internet within 10 years. We will reach one billion AIs this year, with hundreds of billions predicted by 2030.
You are free to think what you wish, but John Henry was a steel-driving man, and Kasparov was a chess grandmaster. It is only a matter of time measured in years, not centuries or decades. Years.
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I recently began playing Diablo IV. It's . . . well made. I do have fun when I play it. From moment to moment, it's fun. I have enjoyed my experience.
But there's this. . . whole framework around it. It's got all the most modern design principles and choices (and I should know, I'm a game designer). And what it's designed to do is to manipulate people into spending more time and money than they intend to.
I like it very much, but it reminds me so fucking much of a casino. Nothing exists to pull me out of the experience. Everything I expect is there. Nothing will disturb your attention. Look at how easy it is to access the store and spend money. Look at how easy it is to not look at the store and just play and play and. . . . .*
It takes a lot from Path of Exile and Grim Dawn. But what it doesn't take is what makes those games fun, their intentional power spikes, secrets, and completeness. Those are games. Diablo IV is an amusement park. If you come back next year, it'll be different. That isn't to say it's not good. It's to say it isn't designed to be a game. It's designed to be a vampire that extracts your wealth and attention to profit.
That doesn't make it not fun. It's surprisingly fun, even if it's a little rough around the rushed final itemization design.
It does make it fucking insane. There will be no work for humans, and we are going to be able to live forever (excepting accidents until we can copy the brain (which is still iffy science).) and these people have devoted a hugely talented team of highly educated people to spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of man hours to create a 'toy' designed to extract millions and tens of millions of hours from millions of people for the profit of some small dicked asshole who's never worked an honest day in his life.
You see the opportunity cost. Seeing it makes me feel insane. Thankfully I have drugs. Because I am insane, and without the drugs I become. . . an issue for society.
Note that I haven't made a judgment. After all, Diablo IV is a 'great work'. It's just that all our 'great works' nowadays (the MCU,
gigagames, data collection for profit) are "not oriented to addressing the next hundred thousand years of human existence."
Maybe they could be is all.
This weird era of arguments about culture wars isn't about the arguments. Like, scientifically, there is no aspect of any part of gender that is binary.
There are TEN fucking karyotypes of gender chromosomes in humans, for example. Do you remember XX? XY? Ten of those. Every conversation in public about gender is made by idiots full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It's the same for everything: abortion debate, guns, and every fucking thing on the news put to engage viewers. They are all just systems of control. And they work on you.
After all, it's your identity they are co-opting. They are trading in-group support for allowing themselves to be ideologically possessed. It feels good to belong! It feels good to be on a team! Go Team!
I take the word of people for this. I'm unable to feel certain things. Like, I have never experienced loneliness. I have also never really experienced any sort of peer culture or pressure to conform. I just have no internal response to in-group/out-group dynamics as an adult. I don't ever inject an ego-driven concern about how behavior will be perceived. It's not that I'm not aware of it or that I can't think about it. Obviously, I think about how people will respond to my latest project or whatever. I just have no emotional impulse to belong to or avoid groups. It's one reason why everything seems insane to me.
It isn't about the thing. Arguing about the thing makes you ideologically possessed. Rational humans are completely in agreement. Externals do not define human worth. All humans have infinite worth, arbitrarily. It's just a choice. We choose that because if we let externals define human worth, it soon becomes genocide or one of the many stops of bigotry or discrimination along the way.
We imagined and agreed it was so, so it is.
Human life can be whatever we imagine with it. All we have to do is all dream at once.
Can we dream a little bigger, please?
*The best thing about the design of Diablo IV is how the most efficient way to progress in the game is by, uh, actually progressing through the game instead of grinding. It's driving the hardcore players/content creators crazy, which is just brilliant and amusing, and I'm glad I lived through it.
