blakestacey

NASB: the challenges of right-clicking and saving all US climate data

The idea that formalist experimentation and deliberately pushing the boundaries of a medium are only one of several goals to which art can strive is apparently too sophisticated for Scott Adderall. He also takes a leap from "influential" to "meaningful", an elision so hackish it's trite.

It's a very "steampunk (derogatory)" picture, like something I would have found on sale in the artist room of the science-fiction convention that convinced me I don't like science-fiction conventions very much.

"So, professor sir, are you OK with psychologically torturing Black people, or do you just not care?"

The "simulation hypothesis" is an ego flex for men who want God to look like them.

I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.

From the Wired story:

As a comparison, Cui cited another analysis that GPTZero ran on Wikipedia earlier this year, which estimated that around one in 20 articles on the site are likely AI-generated—about half the frequency of the posts GPTZero looked at on Substack.

That should be one in 20 new articles, per the story they cite, which is ultimately based on arXiv:2410.08044.

David Skilling, a sports agency CEO who runs the popular soccer newsletter Original Football (over 630,000 subscribers), told WIRED he sees AI as a substitute editor. “I proudly use modern tools for productivity in my businesses,” says Skilling.

Babe wake up, a new insufferable prick just dropped.

Edit to add: There's an interesting example here of a dubious claim being laundered into truthiness. That arXiv preprint says this in the conclusion section.

Shao et al. (2024) have even designed a retrieval-based LLM workflow for writing Wikipedia-like articles and gathered perspectives from experienced Wikipedia editors on using it—the editors unanimously agreed that it would be helpful in their pre-writing stage.

But if we dig up arXiv:2402.14207, we find that the "unanimous" agreement depends upon lumping together "somewhat" and "strongly agree" on their Likert scale. Moreover, this grand claim rests upon a survey of a grand total of ten people. Ten people, we hasten to add, who agreed to the study in the first place, practically guaranteeing a response bias against those Wikipedians who find "AI" morally repugnant.

shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.gif

Breaking news: "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"!

Or, you know, not.

If you find yourself saying

There isn't a single good term in English for people who are post-pubertal but below the legal age of consent or majority

you may already be morally diseased.

My own final project was a parody of the IMDb that was "what if the IMDb was about books instead of movies", except that the user reviews told stories about people who turned out to have all gone to high school together before scattering around the world, and reading them in the right sequence unlocked a finale in which they reunited for a New Year's party and their world dissolved so that their author could repurpose them for other stories.

Senior year of college, I took an elective seminar on interactive fiction. For the final project, one of my classmates wrote a program that scraped a LiveJournal and converted it into a text adventure game.