Pyramids of Mars

People always praise his characters, but they always come across as flat caricatures to me. And he seems to have maybe 10 of them that he just repeats over and over again.

Clive Barker says that the story is him working out his feelings about discovering he’s gay, and his experiences at BDSM nightclubs

Oh, trust me, I’ve had the “right, I need you to do x for the plot”, “well, I wouldn’t do that so I’m not going to” conversation with characters I’m writing.

But, let’s give King the benefit of the doubt and say that that’s how and why he came up with the idea…that’s a reason to have Beverly suggest it. Not a reason to have it actually happen.

Also, if “relating to people sexually” was a consistent character trait of hers, I don’t remember it actually coming up in the novel before that point. It’s been a long time since I read it and maybe she does proposition people often and inappropriately, but I remember thinking that the orgy came somewhat out of the blue, and I’d have thought that if it was the natural conclusion of a theme woven carefully through the narrative more people would bring that up as a defence whenever this topic comes up.

There’s a few replies talking about humans misrepresenting the news. This is true, but part of the problem here is that most people understand the concept of bias - even if only to the extent of “my people neutral, your people biased”. But this is less true for LLMs. There’s research which shows that because LLMs present information authoritatively that not only do people tend to trust them, but they’re actually less likely to check the sources that the LLM provides than they would be with other forms of being presented with information.

And it’s not just news. I’ve seen people seriously argue that fringe pseudo-science is correct because they fed a very leading prompt into a chatbot and got exactly the answer they were looking for.

Okay, firstly, if we’re going to get superintelligent AIs, it’s not going to happen from better LLMs. Secondly, we seem to have already reached the limits of LLMs, so even if that were how to get there it doesn’t seem possible. Thirdly, this is an odd problem to list: “human economic obsolescence”.

What does that actually mean? Feels difficult to read it any way other than saying that money will become obsolete. Which…good? But I suppose not if you’re already a billionaire. Because how else would people know that you won capitalism?

This is a very well-made point which does make a very good case for her actions fitting with her backstory.

However, a) it really only works as a post-hoc rationalisation for the scene, rather than an explantation for why the book is better with it, and b) speaking about consistency and foreplanning is somewhat undermined by the climax of the book being “…actually, it’s a…giant alien spider!”

I certainly hope you’re right. But let’s not forget that when the industrial revolution eliminated a lot of jobs for a lot of people, those people were allowed to just starve to death in the street. It took a full generation before new jobs were created.

Basically what you’re saying is that this time round the wealth disparity is so much worse and there are so many more people living in or near poverty that the entire global economy couldn’t withstand the poorest being out of work. That feels like a weird thing to say that you hope someone is right about but…I hope you’re right about it.

But, I dunno, we’re talking about the same attitude that saw several large corporations try out a 4-day/32 hour working week, discover that productivity stayed the same or even went up…and then went right back to the 5-day working week. The same attitude that sees people seriously suggesting that people who work from home should work extra hours unpaid because otherwise they’ll be able to have the time they otherwise would have spent commuting for themselves.

Also, of course, there’s the fact that a large number of people live in poverty and already can’t afford basics like 3 meals a day, let alone buying take-out, or a TV, or going on holiday. And Jeff Bezos isn’t campaigning to end child poverty even though doing so would enable people to spend more on Amazon.

I really think the only way that we’ll ever truly get something like UBI is if one of two things happen - governments who are genuienly invested in the welfare of their people introduce it, or there is enough mobilisation to put enough political pressure on governments to force them to introduce it. At least there are places that are trialling it, so it’s not unthinkable, but I don’t think the “there will be nobody to buy goods” argument really holds up, because those that that affects already demonstrably don’t give a shit.

Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.

There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:

Tweet 1:

Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT

Tweet 2:

Bro just discovered “thinking”

I downloaded Comet to give it a fair go, loaded it up, and then went “…now what?” Couldn’t think of a single thing i could use the AI interface for.

My personal favourite with Atlas is when he demonstrates searching your history. It takes him longer to type out the command than it would to open your history and search manually, and then it takes It like 10 seconds to find a result, when a manual search would be instantaneous.

The future is here!

Yeah, robots doing drudge work is exactly the future we were promised. It’s just that that’s supposed to allow humans to have more free time to pursue their interests, not die in a ditch from starvation.

If this means you can ask it to pretend to be a busty nurse with a limp, that already exists. If it means that you can say “what’s the name of that video with the busty nurse with a lisp?” and it’ll give you a link, then that’s potential, right there. I can imagine them right now torrenting every porn video they can and getting one llm to transcribe it to create training data for another llm while a third llm does image/scene analysis.

Office chairs are designed to be sat in for long periods. Gaming chairs are designed to look cool on twitch.

You’re a relatively large mammal. Your body is not designed to be productive all the time. It’s designed to have frequent periods of doing absolutely nothing. You’re also a pack animal whose survival depends on being social with other members of your pack.

So, wasting productive time by conversing nonsense? That’s how we evolved. It’s good for us.

The Beatles thing is a myth. Nobody connected to the Beatles has sued anybody over Paul’s Boutique. Most of the samples on Pauls’ Boutique were cleared, especially the most obvious ones.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/pop-hiss/story/2012-05-10/beastie-boys-sampling-in-pauls-boutique-again-in-spotlight

He adds that there are two myths about the samples and licensing on the Beastie Boys’ classic. One is that when the record was first released, neither the group nor its label, Capitol, had cleared any of the rights to the snippets of recordings that they and producers the Dust Brothers used. ‘They and their label were really cautious. They cleared tons of songs,’ McLeod says, citing the ballpark $250,000 figure that’s often reported, and the fact that the Jimmy Castor Bunch had sued the group soon after ‘Licensed to Ill’ was released.

Or, let’s say that it is a utopia and you somehow get in. Congratulations, you now have to spend an eternity with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

I blame google. Seriously.

I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.

But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.

Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.

So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.

It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.

I love how the photo of the inside of the place looks like it’s ai generated

One of the Tomb Raider games was some ridiculous discount on Steam, so i bought it. Cue interminable cutscenes and being given very brief control in order to walk a couple of paces forward before another cutscene. Or, even worse, the game taking over control of Lara for you.

I’d been playing 15-20 minutes - maybe even a little bit longer - when i decided “fuck this”, turned it off and never booted it again. Call me weird but i play games to play them. If it’s been that long and I’ve not experienced any gameplay then I’m not interested.