Grzmot's recent activity
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Comment on The dead economy theory in ~society
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Comment on It's not just X. It's Y. in ~humanities
Grzmot Link ParentThe things I've noticed a lot in its "reasoning" portion: "Let me reconsider" and "Now I've got a clear picture".The things I've noticed a lot in its "reasoning" portion: "Let me reconsider" and "Now I've got a clear picture".
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Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech
Grzmot Link ParentYou can also just lie down on a couch and imagine it. Saves a ton of time.You can also just lie down on a couch and imagine it. Saves a ton of time.
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Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech
Grzmot Link ParentYou could just write it yourself.I would like to read the complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Pale King, or an actual good ending to Game of Thrones.
You could just write it yourself.
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Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech
Grzmot LinkA wonderful essay from a truly upset writer.‘We’re not just a catering company, we’re a full-blown flavour movement. Discover the essence of live coal cooking with a feast to delight all the senses. Where smoke meets soul.’ Each continued in this vein for several hundred words. None of these sites seemed interested in telling me what they would actually be cooking, or how much it would cost; they’d all been swept up in the same guileless wide-eyed enthusiasm, chattering away about the general deliciousness of food and the memories that would shortly be lasting me a lifetime. The more I clicked around, the more I started to panic. There was nothing, no human voices anywhere, just thousands of versions of the same cheery demon. Am I alone out here? Something’s happened to the world; it’s all gone flimsy. Reality is a scarce resource. If I hired one of these companies, would anyone actually show up?
One of the ways I’ve been lying to myself is with the idea that at least the physical, sensuous world is safe from AI. [...] Which is a nice idea, but obviously we’re long past that point now. We share this planet with an alien intelligence, and the sensuous world is buckling around it. You can no longer pretend that the thing is just a stochastic parrot, or a fancy autocomplete, or a weighted average of everything that already exists. Just this week, an ordinary ChatGPT instance came up with a solution to the unit distance problem, unsolved for eighty years, casually discarding one of Erdős’ conjectures in the process. In doing this it discovered an entirely new mathematical construction, working in ways human mathematicians would have never thought to operate. For mathematicians this is terrifying and exhilarating, but I’m not a mathematician and I don’t know what the unit distance problem is; I want to hire a caterer. On this front the main thing the incipient superintelligence seems to be doing is replacing all meaningful language with reams and reams of genuinely meaningless drivel.
AI is a bad writer, but that’s not even close to being the whole problem. Let’s say it wasn’t. Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.
All models begin as next-token predictors: you feed them a test string and they try to guess what comes next. [...] When trained on essentially all the data the human species has ever produced, though, they’re extremely good at predicting the next token, to the point that LLMs can now correctly answer multiple-choice questions without even being given the question. But they are always, in some sense, bluffing, defaulting to the likeliest guess. This is why you can still ask an AI to tell you about the scene in VS Naipaul’s Dashed Against the Rocks in which a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and it’ll tell you that ‘what matters in Naipaul’s handling is not the event’s cruelty in isolation, but its emotional flatness and the sense of mismanaged modernity,’ despite the fact that there is no scene in Dashed Against the Rocks where a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and also no novel by VS Naipaul called Dashed Against the Rocks. Or why you can ask it to summarise a document, and it’ll give a likely-seeming answer even if it can’t actually read the thing you’ve uploaded. The reason it’s so hard to get AI to stop hallucinating is that it’s permanently hallucinating. Its whole existence is one long lurid trip. Most of the time, the AI’s hallucinations bear a spooky resemblance to reality. But what they speak is the language of angels, in which, like the chirping of birds, there is neither truth nor lies.
A wonderful essay from a truly upset writer.
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If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
77 votes -
Comment on 'The Boys' has ended. What are your thoughts? in ~tv
Grzmot Link ParentIt's a pretty apt way to put it. Ironically enough Butcher was the only person thinking at that level and they didn't have the balls for him to execute his plan, probably because in true IRL...It's a pretty apt way to put it.
Ironically enough Butcher was the only person thinking at that level and they didn't have the balls for him to execute his plan, probably because in true IRL Vought fashion, they wanna keep the door open for more spin-offs.
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Comment on Why I love the Witcher books in ~books
Grzmot LinkDisclaimer: this is original content! By me! :D I wanted to do something positive post Far Cry 5, because FC5's story still upsets me. I wanted to do something minimal, and keep a tight focus on...Disclaimer: this is original content! By me! :D
I wanted to do something positive post Far Cry 5, because FC5's story still upsets me. I wanted to do something minimal, and keep a tight focus on not just a piece of art, but just one aspect of it.
This is not a review of the witcher novels or the typical video essay where the entire plot is summarized and criticized. I wanted to leave room for anyone interested in the books to still have a reason to read them, so I focused on one thing only.
I hope you enjoy!
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Why I love the Witcher books
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Comment on 'The Boys' has ended. What are your thoughts? in ~tv
Grzmot Link ParentAny fanbase can get toxic fast, especially when it's a whole subreddit obsessing over the same thing. I think it's even worse for The Boys. They had a legitimate problem with rape denial so much...Any fanbase can get toxic fast, especially when it's a whole subreddit obsessing over the same thing. I think it's even worse for The Boys. They had a legitimate problem with rape denial so much so that the mods added a disclaimer to the side-bar that yes, Becca was in fact raped by Homelander.
I think the moder iteration of the internet, fueled by algorithms, only makes this worse in general. It's so easy to build a following as a creator by just relentlessly shitting on media and from there it's only a small step into right-wing ragebait grifting.
Like Annie and Hughey naming their kid Rose. Like Rose got murdered, they didn't just break up.
I think her name was Robin, but that's irrelevant. I agree with you that people getting enraged about that is insane. They're even calling her Hughey's ex, which is like, not true. She died while they were in a relationship. There's so many legitimate criticisms to be levied against the show and season 5 in particular, and these guys pick the one that's completely irrelevant to the story and also actually okay? It's so weird.
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Comment on Project Glasswing: An initial update in ~tech
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Comment on 'The Boys' has ended. What are your thoughts? in ~tv
Grzmot Link ParentOh so you're telling me Frenchy's eulogy that was like 5 minutes of non-stop asshole jokes didn't fit the scene? Wow! Shocker! Who could've guessed?! (Not the writers) It was so tiring. They...Oh so you're telling me Frenchy's eulogy that was like 5 minutes of non-stop asshole jokes didn't fit the scene? Wow! Shocker! Who could've guessed?!
(Not the writers)
It was so tiring. They really overshot it with the crass humor.
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Comment on 'The Boys' has ended. What are your thoughts? in ~tv
Grzmot Link ParentYeah, I get it. We sure love it when sexual assault is hilarious coz it happens to men. /sYeah, I get it.
We sure love it when sexual assault is hilarious coz it happens to men. /s
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Comment on 'The Boys' has ended. What are your thoughts? in ~tv
Grzmot Link ParentIt's definitely a slide down the entire time. If you managed to get away, you didn't lose much.It's definitely a slide down the entire time. If you managed to get away, you didn't lose much.
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'The Boys' has ended. What are your thoughts?
Warning: this post may contain spoilers
I was pretty disappointed by the entire fifth season. The show has been floundering after season 3, when it was clear that the natural climax of the story was post-poned because they couldn't handle a show without Homelander.
There's a number of issues that I have with S5, starting with the pacing. The episodes are paced incredibly weirdly. We spend a lot of time on things that, given the show is in its last season, really shouldn't be the focus. New B-side superheroes are introduced and take a lot of focus away from the core protagonists who's stories we are supposed to be finishing up. There's a whole haunted house bottle episode. There's a 5 min sequence of two new villains sniffing each other's asses because they're animal themed in the penultimate episode. The consequence of this is that the actual climax is incredibly rushed and dealt with in all of 30 minutes. There's a whole storyline that's introduced with a stronger superhero drug that makes you immune to the virus the Boys are cooking up to kill Homelander, and he takes it and then within 2 episodes they just find a new dumb way to kill him. It reeks of upping the stakes without a good reason.
Another issue is how cheap everything felt. There's a distinct lack of set-up shots and extras. Most of the time, it's named characters sitting in a closed room, talking at each other. If there's action, it's just a fist fight with maybe some dry-wall punches. The entire climax of the show is confided to a single room's decor getting torn to shreds and that's while evil superman is getting killed. There's a chase sequence in ep 2 which made me laugh out loud because of how stupid it looked. In this high stakes situation it's just people jogging down roads.
I do feel for the show because for something written pre 2024, they got outpaced by reality on the satire. But that doesn't absolve you from dogshit dialogue that cannot stay away from crass words and sex jokes. All the time. S1 was raunchy and gory at times, but it was timed well and balanced out by genuine, normal conversation. The word fuck loses all it's fucking meaning if you fucking put it in fucking front of every fucking other word. Ignoring even that, the writing still sucks from start to finish.
I'm happy it's over and that I can let this franchise rest. I stuck with it because S1 was really good. I'm sad that a show which had such a clear through line from S1 onwards with the Boys killing their way up the Seven was turned into, well, whatever happened in seasons 4 and 5.
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Comment on My wife releases her 5th book today! in ~books
Grzmot Link ParentBeautiful put and so real.It's never been easier to publish your book and it's never been harder to get that book noticed.
Beautiful put and so real.
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Comment on My wife releases her 5th book today! in ~books
Grzmot LinkAs a writer, though I've never written a whole book, major props to your wife! Even the "simpler" books are a ton of hard work that people don't appreciate, because a lot of folks imagine writing...As a writer, though I've never written a whole book, major props to your wife! Even the "simpler" books are a ton of hard work that people don't appreciate, because a lot of folks imagine writing as "just sitting down and typing away".
Congratulations!
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Comment on Startups in Berlin in ~finance
Grzmot Link ParentI agree with all of this as well. The sentences didn't flow very well.I agree with all of this as well. The sentences didn't flow very well.
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Comment on Startups in Berlin in ~finance
Grzmot Link ParentThis will sound harsh, but if you're looking to build up a blog for a niche audience like English speakers in Berlin, then you need to do better reporting. The posted article doesn't offer any...This will sound harsh, but if you're looking to build up a blog for a niche audience like English speakers in Berlin, then you need to do better reporting.
The posted article doesn't offer any insights at all. It just claims that London was supposed to stop mattering due to Brexit and Berlin could've stepped in, but didn't. The proposed cause of this is that Berlin start-ups don't care about marketing, making money, or working hard. There's no personal anecdotes, no interviews, no nothing. It's words on a page putting down a vague feeling, surrounded by AI generated images and offers to advertise on the site. For your core audience, it won't offer anything new. If this vague feeling matches reality, then people in Berlin working in the start-up space will already know this. For everyone else, reading this without personal experience, it doesn't offer anything personal to latch onto.
I don't want to accuse your text of being AI generated, because I like to believe that there's a person I'm addressing this criticism to. Even then, the post is indistuingishable from the million SEO blogs spewing out content that doesn't matter as much as the ads being shown around it.
I think there's a few discussion around the benefits of AI, and even a couple users here who believe that it has upsides, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone here that finds those upsides in generating articles.
I commend your desire to do something new and try how it goes. Tildes can be a harsh audience, so if you want to succeed here, you need to start with good text. AI images are going to detract from the text that is supposed to stand out.
Good luck.
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Comment on What I learned building my first custom water loop in ~comp
Grzmot Link ParentNot an expert either, it's just common advice to not mix the two because of galvanic corrosion. I guess the electrical charge is optional?Not an expert either, it's just common advice to not mix the two because of galvanic corrosion. I guess the electrical charge is optional?
Aside of the pictures, which the author already acknowledged as a mistake, this is an excellent read.
Idk enough about early leftist history to disapprove what he says of Marxists, because I feel like lobbing them into the same pool as the USSR, which was an empire with leftist paint on feels a bit off. There's not a tenet of Marxism that requires gulags. That being said, gulags did exist and for the argument the author wants to make, it's sufficient.