fiasco

"I'm saying that, when a communist does it, it's not an atrocity."

If we wanted to mess up scansion for the sake of correctness, "when someone who calls themselves a communist."

One time someone told me that paper money is worthless, so I said, fair enough—I'll take that worthless paper off your hands.

He, uh, didn't take me up on it.

Sounds like an early experiment in artificial neural networks.

The blond side guy was Jared Leto. Edward Norton sure morbed all over him.

And while there's a lot of technical nuance to this, deep learning is nothing more or less than random recombination of its input. The difference between GPT-2, GPT-3, and GPT-4 is how the randomness is conditioned, but it doesn't change the core fact: trying to use deep learning for storytelling would be the greatest breakthrough in cultural stagnation that the world has ever seen.

At least you won't be feeling stagnant, for a while. But I'll answer your question more completely.

Various things have been discovered that have allowed a certain amount of automation in storytelling, but one thing that can't be automated is passion. By automation I'm not talking about "artificial intelligence," I'm talking about—what programmers call "tooling." Movies nowadays are almost always visually stunning, and that's because of algorithmic work in light and shading, character animation, hair simulation. Similarly, there's also a "canonical story" you can read about in a book called Invisible Ink.

The canonical story doesn't tell you how to write dialog, and not surprisingly, dialog has become incredibly weak. On one hand you have capeshit, where characters talk in quips, and on the other The Rings of Power, where everyone talks in weird, deep-sounding non sequitors.

This is what I mean by risk aversion. A lot of beautiful graphics conveying nothing. A lot of electricity used to run computers for no reason at all. This is all very expensive, and expenses have to be justified with spreadsheets.

There are still good things out there, there's still passion in the world. It's just getting harder to find.

When you see him, are you fearful? Are you scared? If you're not, you've been fooled. When you see him, what do you feel?

Yes and no. I generally believe that risk-aversion is a very risky strategy. The greatest threat facing the world is bean-counting MBAs, and they're doing their damndest to destroy culture for the sake of risk minimization.

On the other hand, check this out.

The same is true of DCI Barnaby. Just remember, the copaganda is real.

I guess packaging it with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, that famous book about Lisp, would be too on the nose.

Hmm, probably not. May be worth a shot, next time I get over to the Asian grocer.

It's funny, I live in what one would probably call a small city, population around 90k. The Asian grocer is three miles away, but it's still like, ughhhhhhhhhhhh I need to work up the energy to go.

I mostly drink iced tea, and iced green tea is kind of weird.