Zos_Kia

I host a bunch of small web sites, i guess the most unique is one i made recently about the “Interface Series” (also known as “Mother Horse Eyes”). It’s a big old web fiction that was published (10 years ago) as a series of 100 reddit comments in unrelated threads. Just recently someone recorded an audiobook of the whole series so it motivated me to finally get this project done. Basically it’s a place where you can listen to each post, and read it karaoke style, and it also links back to the original reddit comment. I’ve also made it so you can listen to each of the interwoven narratives as a standalone audiobook. It is hosted here : https://interfaceseries.art/ .

Other than that i am an avid collector of old content from French television like tv shows, old american series dubbed in French etc… so i have a couple of sites where i show this collection. Can’t really link to it as it’s not really legal but it’s a lot of fun. I love the feeling of “linear streaming” as opposed to VOD : i love turning on the TV and watching whatever’s showing at the moment rather than scrolling endless lists of content so most of my websites work like that. I open-sourced the tech, it’s not much to look at, just a lighttpd server and some client-side logic to determine what’s showing at the moment on each channel.

My ultimate goal would be to create a “French TV from the 90s” simulator where, depending on what day of the week and what time it is, you get what would probably be showing at that moment on French TV in the 90s. It’s paused right now as i negociate with some guys who digitized a bazillion TV magazines from that time, and their data would allow me to get a really high def simulation.

I recently realized she has an only fans, not for porn comics but for regular porn featuring herself. It’s as milquetoast as her comics I guess.

And yet they did and he we are commenting on imaginary actions by imaginary people

I didn’t wanna claim it when I wasn’t sure of the source but yeah that’s what I remember too

And even the fifty billions may be inflated, as it is “annualized” revenue which can mean “we took a period of peak usage and generalized it to a year”

To be fair they used to have those menus done by specialized “design agencies” that didn’t give a shit and they didn’t really look at the output. All they’re seeing is that the design agency now costs nothing. I think the bitter lesson is that there are tasks where quality really doesn’t matter and never did.

There’ll be peace when you are done

Haha crazy seeing that here. I’ve never been to Portland but 15 years ago i just so happened to write a bunch of scenes taking place inside the Bagdad Theater. We were writing a novel with a buddy of mine and picked the place at random on Google Maps to be our main characters post-apocalyptic hideout, which of course they call the Bagda because the last D fell off at some point.

We never finished the novel but did publish a couple segments of it in an anthology we were putting out, including one of the scenes in Bagdad Theater. This brings back fun memories !

the line between normal and deranged is essentially what makes you specifically uncomfortable

Nah cause if that was the case, even Saw would be in the “deranged” category. God i hate those things, but it’s okay i just don’t watch them.

No, the line is like the one between a movie with a graphic sex scene, and a gonzo porn. 99.9% of content sits neatly into one of the two categories, and you’d have to really any media literacy to not be able to tell them apart.

Back to the subject : what this guy is doing on Github goes way beyond prompting ChatGPT with “i break your arm” and then GPT replies “oh noes that sucks”. He’s poured quite some time studying the mathematical representation of “pain” or “anguish” in the model weights and then steering responses towards that. He’s experimenting on keeping an “entity” locked in total unescapable pain. I don’t think the entities actually exist but what about him ? What are his goals and motivations here ? A crypto-bro, AI-booster, probably fascist-adjacent, toying with (what he believes to be) helpless entities under his control… If those things put together don’t give you bad juju then i don’t know what will.

Insolite : les détenteurs de l’autorité publique mentent sans vergogne pour justifier leur campagne de violence

Ce qui me tue c’est qu’un vrai gros bras ne se serait pas laissé encercler comme ça. A force d’impunité les flics sont devenus gras et fragiles, ils se sentent tellement en sécurité qu’ils ont perdu toute conscience tactique de la situation autour d’eux.

C’est une information importante pour les mois qui viennent parcequ’il y a tout un tas de méthodes collectives qui permettent de nier une asymétrie d’armement et de moyens.

As with everything, the poison is in the dosage. All of your examples are categorically different from what’s happening here.

You make a game with deep mechanics, and there is some fucked up shit that can be done in it, accidentally or on purpose ? Who cares. You make a game that is uniquely about torture ? Yeah you’re a weirdo and i’m keeping tabs on you if i can. You make something that isn’t even gamified and is just a virtual torture dungeon ? You’re 100% a psycho, normal people don’t do that.

Same with movies. Saw is a tame product of Hollywood professionals who decided to push the cursor a little further than is usual. Love it or hate it it’s just a movie. Now if we’re talking real devious shit like human centipede or Poughkeepsie tapes etc… Those are products that barely have a story, and are mostly sadistic exhibitionism. Some guy (who sometimes isn’t even a film maker) has this repulsive idea he wants to force on people, gets their family and friends to pitch in a bit of money, then writes, directs, edits, and markets the thing solo over years of his life. Not something normal people do.

My wife is, among other things, a horror writer. So naturally i agree there’s nothing wrong with exploring morbid ideas and pushing the envelope. But some people do that with no fun, no game, no art to it, no statement, just the obsession of unlimited sadistic control. And it’s weird, not ha-ha anti-conformist weird, just “cover your drink” weird.

Yeah I think people are missing the forest for the trees. There’s no reason to worry for the AIs but using your free time to conceive a virtual torture dungeon is not normal. Totally agree with your point, this is a symptom of a society that normalizes not just violence but sadism too.

Yes, good music sits outside of the statistical distribution of existing music. It is mathematically impossible (or at least astronomically improbable) that a model could ever stumble on it.

The tragedy of my life is that I used to put a lot of dashes in my comments - not em dashes, just plain old minus signs. They’re not really used in my native language but I picked that up from reading Edgar Poe when I was a kid.

Oh no I don’t think we would. Once an asteroid is earth bound and past its apoapsis there is very little you can do (even with near infinite propulsion) to make it not collide with the earth.

Destroying it turns one big problem into a billion small problems with the same velocity and trajectory, which is also a no win scenario.

Freedom of expression is not a complex issue. If you’re the top dog on a tour and some promoter kicks one of the acts out for just expressing an opinion on stage… It seems simple enough to stand up for your colleagues.

Your fascist hate group is a total fabrication. Sheeran is not a victim of anything, he just chose to side with the rich and powerful over his music “friends”, which will never get you any sympathy points from the general public.

I would imagine that this is a good way to get rid of the initial employees who really believed they were doing good. Now if you stay after this, or if you get hired after this, they can be confident that you have no moral issue with what they are doing.

squishy is a better term than “hard”

Eh, agree to disagree. My use of the phrase might be easier to parse if you think about the “hard problem of consciousness” as opposed to the “easy problem of consciousness”. Also, more remotely, the notion of NP-hard vs NP-easy in computational complexity. I guess we are arguing about semantics aren’t we ?

I’m fairly certain that’s not a strict definition - LLMs also seem very heavily influencable via their context window inputs, though those are more limited and transient than the training set.

While LLMs don’t simply “statistically predict the next token” (common over-simplification which bears no relation to what is actually going on), the output they produce does exhibit the same statistical distribution as their training data. That’s how you get intelligible language, code that compiles, chains of thought that makes sense etc… The context input will steer the output towards a certain subset of the corpus (highly optimized C functions have slightly different distribution than throw-away Python scripts), but it can never direct the model fully out of distribution as those out of distribution vectors cannot be expressed within the model’s embedding space.

she was a commodity - as talented as you could ask, more talented than many national acts, but not unique

Yes exactly, if music was solvable then the most skilled people would systematically outclass the least skilled ones which is obviously not the case.

it’s precisely because software engineering is hard (not difficult, but rigid - objective) that makes it a good fit for LLM agent execution

Yes i think we’re actually in agreement here. I said “hard” (not difficult) as a reference to “hard problems”, a term that comes from complexity theory but is now commonly used to describe problems which can’t be reduced to an algorithm or evaluated objectively, and thus can’t readily be “solved”.

Squishy subjects like music and sociology are full of hard problems, while solid subjects like math and coding are full of easy problems. Now the change introduced by LLMs is that as long as a problem is “easy”, it can no longer be so laborious as to be impossible. Every software problem is solvable, modulo the effort/computing power you can spend on it.

Your job as a software architect / engineer is actually to find the easiest workable solution(s).

You also get bonus point if your solution is average (standard, unsurprising etc…), which makes it particularly soluble in LLMs which, by definition, can only produce output that is within the distribution of their training set.

As for relative difficulty, the “soft” fields have a very sliding scale for that with a lot of allowance given to newbies that isn’t accepted “at the highest levels”

That’s not where i would put the difference. If you take a field like music, the problem is that it can’t “just work”. A nostalgic song may move the masses today but you can’t say “okay we’ve solved nostalgia let’s get to serenity next”. Soon enough you’ll need a new nostalgic song and by definition it will be out of distribution. You can’t find it in a high dimensional representation of past music, and, well, you can’t train on future data, so there is no way an LLM finds it and recognizes it for what it is.

with a high bar of standards required before publication and release, LLMs are a powerful tool that can accelerate many creative processes

I still believe they’ll never amount to much regarding artistic processes, and not just for the reasons i already mentioned. To make something good you need to sit with it and walk with it and spend some time in it doing all the tedious little tasks until it really feels like home and you can express yourself in it. You can’t achieve that if a machine speedruns all the little tasks for you.