gaseousagent.bsky.social
Fire Protection engineer, general media consumer and opinion-haver.
He/him
247 posts
39 followers
24 following
Active Commenter
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He's genuinely skilled when it comes to stage and musicals. The problem is, that's all of him. He is the pinnacle of a theater kid. I expect when he's stressed or sad he unironically sings relevant musical numbers and does choreographed dances alone in his home, because theater is in his soul.
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Same reason I can't watch Dr. Stone. The way the women are drawn is so off-putting to me, I can't stay engaged.
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Working through it, what an excellent, quite short, video!
Thanks, as always, for making great content. Your point about Cinta and Vel is incredibly salient. We exist in a world with history, and for a show that was otherwise so aware of history, it feels like a weird oversight.
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This season of Real Househusbands of the White House has been a bit of a rollercoaster.
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Humans are so unprepared to deal with something that is very effective at pretending to be human. It's not in a fun horror movie way, though. Imagine 2001 but HAL is just talking and can't control anything, one guy just convinced everyone it's HAL when really he cut corners and the ship is crumbling
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I do always think that's a funny note in some cases like this. Allegations will be like:
1) abuse of followers
2) millions in financial crimes
3) was once a Christian progress theorist
4) harassment and assault
Like, I get standing for your philosophy, but these aren't on the same level
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People just want to believe the dumbest shit. AI is so much more fun when you convince yourself it's NOT just a probability machine puking out the most statistically likely assortment of characters.
Not to say that it's not impressive sometimes, but it's not what some people pretend it is.
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Nearly impossible standards of parenting such as: not abusing your children, respecting your children, or changing your opinions based on facts.
Imagine what it must be like to be inside the author of that piece's head. The echo must be incredible.
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To expand, I think this kind of results-oriented mindset is harmful to education and science generally. When Newton identified gravity it wasn't because he was seeking a way to slingshot ships out of orbit. But the discovery eventually let us do that. The benefit discovery is often intangible.
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I think the shift from "college to become a well-rounded thinker" to "college to become a better worker" is a bad one. The idea that college is only useful to gain specialized labor skills and shouldn't be for anything else is malignant.
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Let's just start calling it what it is: a perm. "Man, I remember my dad had a perm like that, glad the look is coming back."
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He went on Jubilee and proceeded to make 0 coherent arguments and actively avoided confronting any points. He got called out for making his definition of God and Christian meaninglessly broad and responded with world salad to essentially every question. It was honestly embarassing to watch.
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It's 3:00am, Elon rolls over on the couch, slowly rising out of his K-hole. His bleary eyes fall on a broccoli-headed boy playing Balatro on his phone. Through dry lips Elon murmurs "we have to tell them... White genocide.. Grok..." Broccoli boy nods, reaching for his Alienware laptop.
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I do think she's foundational in the fact that her inherent hypocrisy and systematically, intentionally baseless beliefs are endemic in the modern right that followed her.
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As someone raised conservative: Ayn Rand was heralded to me (despite neither of my parents having read any of her books) as this glorious, irrefutable genius of anti-commie philosophy. Imagine my surprise at what slop the books actually were. I'm not surprised so many people give a shit.
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Anthem is the only vaguely readable book by her. I tried to slog through Atlas Shrugged and oh man, what a boring, horribly written book. Not to say Anthem is any good, but it's short enough that you can finish it and not feel like you wasted weeks of your life, only a day or two.
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I'm not going to argue that traditional art isn't more valuable than AI, I agree with you on that. I just took issue with the idea that AI is inherently more energy intensive than other methods. OP would likely have spent more energy doing things manually to get a passable concept piece.
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Your computer doesn't know the difference between this and the Oblivion remaster. That was my main point.
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Yeah, this got me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out the energy demand of Photoshop, which seems opaque. Ultimately I do think learning some basic art program skills is worthwhile, and don't generally like AI image gen, I just took issue with the energy use argument.
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As an aside, I also overstated the amount of AI time required. The OP said it took them 15 seconds to generate the image. I'm pretty decent with Clip studio and could make a better quality image than that, but not in 15 seconds.
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Laypeople wouldn't have any idea how to approach making these changes, let alone making them look good. I agree doing it manually would look better, but saying that doing it manually is easy is way off. You might think it's easy because you have experience, but a lot of people don't.
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I understand what you're saying, however art programs also utilize your GPU. I expect that 20-30 minutes or so of high-intensity usage for AI generation is essentially going to wash out with several hours of image manipulation via GIMP from an energy use perspective.
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What I meant is that text is easier to track. You can stop reading at an in-text or footnote and read that, then come back. You can also go back and find exact sections and references. That is a lot less intuitive to do with videos, in my opinion.
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This is a great point! YouTube is way, way more accessible. I wish there was an easier middle ground, yenno?
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I'll bite the bullet and disagree with this. When I want to learn about something, I watch a YouTube video. When I want to know something, I read books. Videos are great to get into a topic, but they are hard to source effectively and I inherently trust them less.
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Big Jamie Loftus energy from this dog, tbh.
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I wouldn't be surprised if most of them had someone in mind weeks ago. The late pope wasn't doing too hot.
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Hey, this moonshine account is brand new and has only commented on threads related to this topic, just a heads up. They may just be stirring up shit.
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I pull items out of my pockets one by one, attempting to combine them. I chew a piece of gum and attach it to the end of a stick. I return it to my pocket, presumably for later.
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Gotcha. like there's implicit misogyny in the fact that people are talking about it at all? That makes sense, thanks!
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As this is connected to my post, I figure it's in reference to me at least in part. As a guy, I definitely have internalized misogyny that I'm unaware of. I felt like I was doing some casual baking about why someone would write a post this way. Happy to be called out on what I'm missing.
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It just feels weird, like, she could've just said "platonic cuddling is cool". Were people telling her, shocked, "but men get boners!" ? What situation or interaction prompted her to post this, I think is the main question. Obviously we don't know, so I was sort of just taking the piss about it.
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I still think it's outlandish that he's an alt-right maniac, but this does validate disagreements I already had with points he made in the video. My guess is he was sloppy with vetting sources, which is disappointing.
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Thank you for this, this is basically what I was asking for. I haven't had the chance to dig into his source list myself, and this is a good start. I do still think Alex's final point is valid, and wonder if he had started with that idea and used compelled reasoning to find sources to support it.
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Yeah, and that's really my position. I'm not aligned with Alex on AI, but some of the things being said need to be a bit more concrete than just some loose connections, yenno? I think the main miss of his video was his lack of engagement with material issues and blurring of material and philosophy
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We're extremely off track. The first comment I responded to was saying Alex was a fan of Curtis Yarvin. That fell back to "he gets arguments from Aiwars and likes Coffin" which has fallen back to "his arguments are similar to ones from these subs". See why I'm not compelled so far?
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My point there is you're not really providing evidence of anything. You're attacking something we both agree is bad, and then just assuming that applies to Alex as well. I disagree with some of what Alex said in his video, but a lot of what people have said about him so far has been unfounded.
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No need to be a jerk. That isn't a convincing argument to me. He did exactly what you just did, which was grab some screenshots as an example of people being cruel on the internet. And he interviewed researchers. Regardless, being wrong isn't evil, and his end stance is far from pro-corporate AI.
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Why the cheeky gif? I'm trying to earnestly engage with you on this. If Alex is doing shady shit I want to know, because it would affect my opinion. But vague gesturing at people and places that aren't connected to him isn't evidence.
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Is this Alex posting these? Yeah, I know some people are shitty.
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The top new post I saw when I looked a few hours ago was actually a post saying "harassing people for being anti-AI is wrong" with several comments agreeing. Regardless, that's not evidence that Alex is involved in that. I don't disagree there are some real bastards on the internet.
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He is relatively consistent imo. Again, the end of his video was more like: "covering our ears and eyes will only let corporations steer the regulations to their benefit." Which, despite points he makes that I disagree with, is overall a valid take. And no, but people do exist who value ethics.
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I guess it's the implication. If I was platonically cuddling or something and the worst came to pass, I'd move away or adjust my body so it's not the other person's problem. I guess I read it as her actively noticing the situation, which felt weird.
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An accusation that someone got paid to say something is a pretty big claim, do you have evidence for that? As an aside, I'm a certified professional engineer, my certification affirms the promise that I won't abandon my principles for money. Some people actually do value things other than money.
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Sure, but if you engage with Alex's content I think you'd understand why I find it hard to believe that he suddenly turned into a shill. His end takeaway is "we need to drive AI regulation ourselves and not let the right and corporate interests steer it." That doesn't really cry corpo shill to me.
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You can send them to me directly if that would make you more comfortable. I'm not into AI and haven't taken part in those communities. You understand why I can't just take your word for it, right? You're making pretty dramatic claims.
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Okay, so you've got evidence of both of those things, yeah?
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I understand you're frustrated with Alex and disagree with him, and that's cool, I disagree with him on this too. I think those are some pretty bold claims that deserve evidence before we start making some major claims about him, though. Being wrong isn't evil.
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Alex is trans, the accusation that he supports Yarvin is nuts. He might have some takes on AI that aren't popular, but the implication that's he's somehow secretly an alt-right techo-fascist is completely unfounded.