• 7 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • Might be semi-related: the german aerospace/automotive/industrial research agency has an “AI Safety” institute (institute = top level department).

    I got a rough impression from their website. They don’t seem to be doing anything that successful. Mostly fighting the unwinnable battles of putting AI in everything without sucking and twiddling machine learning models to make them resilient against malicous data. Besides trying to keep the torch of self-driving cars alive for the german car industry. Oh, and they’re doing the quantum AI bit.

    They’re a fairly new institute, and I heard rumors they’re not doing great. Maybe the organization resists the necessary insanity to generate new AI FOMO at this point. One can dream.


  • I was going to shitpost that Trump is the least neo-colonial president cuz he cut all foreign aid, but I realized I kinda believe that unironically. I’m in the anti-death-and-suffering camp of course, but a hundred kinda self-serving national aid programs might just not cut it.

    (This might be inspired by the Merz government planning to roll the special development aid office into the foreign affairs ministry, partly to tie it more strongly to national interest.)

    Maybe we need to bring back the UN bigly.



  • I’m interpreting your phrasing as you believing that the non-profit “taking over” is somehow good, because profit motive bad presumably. But regardless of incentives, everyone involved is trying to flood the world with slop by incinerating cash and processors on industrial scales.

    But so far the cash incinerator has been running on speculative financial products issued by a club of esoteric computer scientists trying to awaken the robot god. Investors are slightly uncomfortable with this, so Sammy boy is trying to offer them a more traditional vehicle to incinerate their cash (while indulging in his personal profit motive a bit).


  • You’re certainly hitting some nails on their heads here. The normalisation of AI is absolutely happening, mostly because the buttons start showing up on Google/Microsoft/etc. products with massive market share.

    Also the manlyman blogs bitching about beaver hair brushes. I was looking up safety razors in german (“Rasierhobel” btw, totally unaware of that until now), and Wikipedia was referencing one such archived blog, bitching about pig bristle brushes being “drug store” garbage. I might still get one. (The razor that is, not the brush. Spray on foam will do for me.)

    Not so sure about the scythe/mower thing. My battery powered mower & motor scythe slap. (Stihl btw)








  • goofy shrugging

    be me, super genius autodidact

    be deeply moved by the prospect of defeating death with technology, write some sick prose about it because am eloquent as fuck

    proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by contributing to a school of thought that justified a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also by inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses

    mein face when



  • First I thought “Oh jeez, what a wall of text” but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.

    I don’t think callling genAI output “not art” is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That’s kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.

    But I also share your sentiment about “AI artists” pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of “not artists”, because that’s what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.

    And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.