It's always depressing yet eye-opening to hear the opinions of people at the grassroots. The average citizen of America truly is so unfathomably dumb. Even the lower class of the 1700s probably had better critical thinking skills. We might even be setting all time records here.
- Posts
- 1
- Comments
- 403
- Joined
- 1 yr. ago
- Posts
- 1
- Comments
- 403
- Joined
- 1 yr. ago
If AOC is cancelling events it's because of fear of retaliatory action on the right, but NBC won't title it in such an honest way.
Also, "one is even vowing to carry firearms" lmao. I'm all for people's right to bear arms, but it doesn't protect you individually from an assassin. What, if only Kirk had a pistol on him, he could have whipped it out and shot the other bullet in half before it hit him, like the fucking Matrix?
We need to start badgering our local politicians to remove this shit. This is one area where local action could feasibly make a big difference. If a few towns start becoming "flock dark zones" then the network, and value prop of the company, as a whole loses efficacy.
Also, I suspect there would be bipartisan support for this among the people.
- Jump
3 fired FBI officials sue Patel, saying he bowed to Trump administration's 'campaign of retribution'
Soon our government will consist only of MAGA loyalists and cowards
I love that Seinfeld says this stuff because I've always felt he was unfunny, smug, obnoxious, and basically I've just always hated him for no reason. Now he just keeps supplying reasons, and finally I can say I hate this fucker without being judged too hard for it
This is fucking funny.
So many people on the left were like "it's good that we at least call things what they are now", and now we hear this?
Yeah I know more than a few people fitting that description. But I do believe things can turn around. It's less likely to make converts of people who already have that mentality, but things can resurge among new people and I think there's a real movement there with tech literacy.
While I agree with your conclusion about the garageband loops vs the Bach, I think that the skill was coincidental, not essential, in the superiority of the Bach piece. It's not the fact that Bach was more skilled that makes his piece better. It's simply the case that his skill made it easier for him to discover a better piece. It's something useful for him, but as people who experience his art, it's not what the art is about. If a toddler happened to accidentally mash out the same piece on the piano at home (yes this is unfathomably unlikely), it would still be an equally amazing and timeless piece - despite the fact that no skill whatsoever went into it. All that the artwork is, is contained in the artwork. Everything else is extraneous context that we may derive some other additional value from, but it is not essential to the art in itself.
Agreed. Obviously mega corporations suck, but AI as a technology does not NEED to be unethical. It sucks that because people want to hate on mega corps (rightfully so) they feel justified in tacking on any flawed argument they want to against AI.
People have issues separating out complex bundles of issues into their separate threads and dealing with them individually. It's much easier to keep it all jumbled together and pass judgement on the whole lot. It's lazy thinking, which is ironically contrary to the virtues so frequently espoused in these arguments.
Furthermore, like you said, many people have strong opinions on the issue despite not really having any understanding of the philosophy of art, history of art, or the technology itself. It boils down to the same sort of layperson's gibberish that gives us other bad takes like "abstract art isn't art, my dog could paint that!" or "this performance art is just a tax evasion scheme!". It reveals the tastelessness of the accuser. It's extremely frustrating that these people always present themselves as true art enjoyers, when in fact they are not.
It reminds me of a time I was at the symphony, and the opening piece was a very avant garde one. It displayed wonderful chromaticism, really emotional chaotic passages, clever balancing of orchestral timbres...I study and compose classical music, I know music theory quite deeply, and for me it was a lovely piece. When it was over, this old lady next to me, all dressed up, complained that "that was just noise, not even music", and got all indignant about the bastardization of art. I'm sure she would have said the same thing at the debut of Rite of Spring, which she now undoubtedly "admires" and upholds as a masterwork. I would be surprised if she could name the notes of the key of C major. Yet it is precisely her lack of knowledge which gives her such a narrow view of the art she imagines herself to be a connoisseur of.
Same exact phenomenon as I've complained about before on Reddit, with its endless art-boner for any realistic "impressive" pencil sketch, over something that is equally technically impressive and more emotional, but in a way they are too unknowledgeable to appreciate.
It's just the way of art, I suppose.
Here's my reason for it. Let's suppose that I have set a xylophone up outside near a rocky cliff face, and one day, some rocks fall loose from the top of the cliff and strike the xylophone in such a way as to coincidentally produce the melody of Bach's Prelude in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Is this melody any less beautiful, less artistic, because it was not produced by a human? Does it really matter whether the xylophone event happened before or after Bach's writing of the Prelude? If the xylophone event happened first, would we say Bach's authoring of the melody was superfluous?
Consider this: there are 8 notes to a major scale, and so this means that there are only 32,768 possible 5-note sequences within one octave to make a melody out of (more if you count the timing of the notes, but the point remains). The possibility space of melodies is already implicitly formed by the medium. When Bach writes a 5 note melody, we say that he has created a melody - but we could just as well say that he discovered one of the pre-existing 32,768 melodies of 5 notes.
This paradigm is true in visual arts as well. We can start with a small example: imagine a community of pixel artists making black and white pixel art images on a canvas of 32x32 pixels. Or you could imagine them as weavers of rugs with up to 32 weaves in and out in both directions, if you'd rather a low-tech example. There are a HUGE number of possible ways to choose to color in these pixels even just black and white. But the number is still finite. Now let me ask you this. Have you ever made visual art before? If you have, you probably know how the blank canvas full of possibilities quickly narrows down to constraints as your composition comes along. "If my figure is posed like this, I can't show both the elbow and wrist, unless I use a strange perspective...", "if I give them black hair, it darkens the composition too much and doesn't look as good, but maybe if I add more light it could work..." Etc. What is it that you're doing as an artist? You're narrowing down the possibilities, from the HUGE possibility space of the blank canvas, to narrower and narrower "acceptable" configurations according to the criteria of the goal you have in mind.
Now suppose instead that I was doing really constrained pixel art - black or white only on a 3x3 grid. In that case there are only 512 possible artworks to be made. In that case, we COULD lay out all 512 of them, and just pick the one we like best. But if we were not very smart people, maybe we couldn't figure out this trick, and we'd have to use our artistry to explore the 512 possible canvases one by one. We can imagine an artist eventually choosing configuration #371 as their artwork. They probably won't think of as though they've chosen configuration #371, they probably will think of it like "I have come up with this new arrangement of pixels on the 3x3 canvas" - but in reality all they did was discover a possibility that has already existed since the beginning of time. Either way, I hope you and I agree that this person's pixel art, despite being small and likely pretty boring, is still ART. It's a work of art, although maybe not a great one. Now if I have a computer do the same process - explore this latent possibility space according to some criteria, finally selecting one possible configuration - and let's say the computer also selects #371. Are we going to say this is not art? But this would be paradoxical! It's the same image the artist made! Anyone who is familiar with the notion of "the death of the author" will see this is quite the same sort of principle. And if the computer happened to select #371 before any human did, would we then accuse the human of having "copied" the computer? Clearly not. This line of thinking, to me, is a strong one to defend AI images as possibly being legitimate and original art.
As an artist, you cannot create a new possibility within the medium. You can only actualize a possibility that has always latently been implied by the constraints of that medium. This is why many musicians and artists often talk about "finding" a melody or "finding" a vision. They find it because they are searching. They are searching their own unique path through that massive possibility space. The possibility space is too large for us to just simply look at every possibility and pick the one we like best - so we have to explore it, choosing at every moment which direction is best to step towards next, based on what we've got so far, and what we think we've learned about the shape of this possibility landscape over our experiences as artists.
The skill that it takes to produce something is a horrible, horrible metric for what makes something good art or not. There are artworks that took tons of skill but are boring, bland, generic, emotionless - all the things you don't like about AI art. There are artworks that took next to no skill but stand out as powerful, great works that resonate with everyone.
Skill is a proxy used to judge art in place of having developed taste. The purpose of art is not to show off, to flex your skill, or demonstrate technical superiority to others. This is a very sad, utilitarian, economic view of art that I beg you to reconsider.
I love how some people criticize Kojima for beating you over the head with unsubtle themes, but then the other half of people are like "this game made no sense so I deliver packages and then people talk about ropes a lot and why are there hands everywhere"
Edit: just adding this on, of course Kojima is trying to reach as many people as possible with his art, even those with poor media literacy. But it only just occurred to me how that in itself is so reminiscent of Sam pushing to connect people, even the ones who are remote or obstinate.
Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting... almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source
This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts...
Did anyone actually watch the clip? Am I going crazy? It's like 20% boos and 80% applause. Very misleading title IMO.
Fucking hilarious quote here:
"It's a bit like that movie The Matrix, where the agent can jump into the nearest person and immediately be good to go. We're a little bit like that—but we're the good guys," he added.
Oh yeah so it's kinda like the terrifying dystopian surveillance nightmare where people are oppressed at all times by an omnipresent, invincible, untouchable outer force that compels them to unquestionably follow the path laid out for them in life by their masters. But like, in a good way!
I had recently heard about that service for the first time and I do think it's a good step forward. But like you said, being properly walled off is a big miss w.r.t the ideal vision of Internet culture. I think that's why I like the idea of server bill crowdfunding (same model that Lemmy instances use basically). Some people need to step up and pay for it, and once a threshold is reached, the content is publicly available for all. But it's not like the people who pay are martyrs, since of course if nobody pays then the thing is lost entirely.
For a video hosting service, I feel like paywalling features is a good compromise, too. Once the bills are covered, everyone gets to enjoy ad-free, unsponsored videos... something along those lines would be preferable, at least to me since I feel like the openness of the internet is a great component to what makes it such a special place. Not that I mind private internet spaces either. I think both are important. So I think Nebula has a place in my personal utopian internet landscape too lol
Yeah no denying YouTube is particularly hard to replace, hence why there's been nary a competitor even after all this time. I think paying for server upkeep could be a model that ekes out a victory...it would be drastically cheaper to users, and would come without ads or any of that other annoying junk. Ultimately someone needs to pay the bills, so it's not like I even blame YouTube for making you choose between ads or subscriptions. It's just when they push it further than that, always further, forever further and further...
Nah, fuck Bernie for this.
And who was it that was undermining that? Charlie Kirk.
And what if you can't convince people of the correctness of your ideas because they don't care about correctness, they only care about hating you? What then, Bernie? What if they keep pressing forward in complete denial of all logic and facts? I suppose that punching a Klan member is cowardice? I suppose when people rise up against oppressors it is because they are cowards? He's right that it MAY be cowardice that leads to violence. It may also be absolute obstinate stubbornness of the other side. What do we call that?
Ah, I guess that's why you, as an official on the political spectrum, are so convinced that it is evil. What a charming coincidence. What about the chilling rise in violence targeting thousands of normal people, perpetuated by Charlie Kirk? If I order my lackeys to execute someone, do we say I'm not a murderer? Do we say I was merely exercising my free speech? What if I constantly depict John Doe down the street as the root of all evil? When someone else kills John Doe, am I truly blameless? Stoking hate to get other people to kill on your behalf, now that's political cowardice, Bernie.