Seriously Mike. Seriously Silly.

Old as dirt. Doing photos, modeling badly, bringing toys to photoshoots. Also doing some pen & paper RPGs, steampunk and general sci-fi. And a whole lot of dogs at once.

[seriously-mike]

But what if the supers are like this guy?

...because they are.

And guess what they're most afraid of.

[johnny-depp-is-loved]

this is everything to me 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈💕

[sirpeppercornio]

W dog fr fr

[seriously-mike]

"[UP,DOC]" was a system directory for "User Program DOCumentation" on the WAITS operating system

(src)

Eeeh... What's [UP,DOC]?

[seriously-mike]

Andrzej Kotański

Canto

Człowiek nie powinien spędzać życia w pracy bo to grzech Bóg dał nam Paryż, Wenecję architekturę secesyjną, zegarki i zegary Art deco dał nam poziomki zamglone świty za oknem kawiarni sklepy dał nam Tomasza Manna oraz Prousta a także wrzosowiska Irlandii oraz wymyślił bilard i nastolatki i tysiąc innych rzeczy jak wodospady, Boską Komedię, fajki, wiersze Rilkego, ulice wysadzane plantami na południu, amerykańskie samochody z lat czterdziestych, pióra Mont Blanc, przewodnik po Grenadzie oraz Koniaki Giny Whisky I Bordeaux na pewno nie w tym celu żebym siedział przez osiem godzin dziennie w pracy jak jakiś chuj.

[seriously-mike]

Dalej bracia, chodźmy równo Kilofami ciosać gówno

Znowu mam frazę i nie wiem co z nią zrobić.

Jest to coś jak szanta albo krasnoludzka przyśpiewka, ale jak to rozwinąć, to nichuj nie wiem. Z "Ochujeje Makumba" czy "Jestem Predator" wyszło, a to mi tak wisi.

[seriously-mike]

For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards. There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew. (...) Now, with this tool, I can share what I’m visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team—the production designer, art designer, and cinematographer—for them to build on to enrich cinematic intelligence.

So Martin Scorsese is working with Black Forest Labs and let me tell you, that's a pretty wise choice.

Martin Scorsese × Black Forest Labs

Martin Scorsese has spent six decades bringing stories to life. Now, he's helping us shape visual intelligence as an advisor at Black Forest

Black Forest Labs tech is, with the exception of one or two models, open source. Meaning, it's free, it can be fine-tuned without limits, and it can be run locally, without the need for a gargantuan data center.

It's fairly clunky, sure, and not built with idiots in mind unlike all the Sillycunt Valley stuff, but if I'm using it at home already, uncle Marty can too.

[seriously-mike]

When Hearst hires one freelancer to do the work of dozens, they are saying, "We do not give a shit about the quality of this work." It is literally impossible for any writer to produce something good under those conditions. The purpose of Hearst's syndicated summer guide was to bulk out the newspapers that had been stripmined by their corporate owners, slimmed down to a handful of pages that are mostly ads and wire-service copy. The mere fact that this supplement was handed to a single freelancer blares "Go fuck yourself" long before you clap eyes on the actual words printed on the pages.

-- @mostlysignssomeportents

AI “journalists” prove that media bosses don’t give a shit

In case there was ever any doubt.

They did not give a shit about the quality of this work for the last two decades.

All of them.

The corporate news machine, the music industry, the hacks churning out tons of garbage in the most popular genre du jour on self-publishing sites, the hacks half-assing D&D character drawings and cartoon porn in 15 minutes for the equivalent of a Big Mac, the shitty ad-laden app peddlers, and the list can go on forever.

For these AI boosters, the point isn’t to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person — it’s to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot.

And those now mad about the AI being used by the major players are just upset that after they enjoyed doing progressively worse shit for the last two decades while being too fucking dumb to see the big picture, the major players pulled the rug from under them with the automation of the entire shit-churning process. And let me tell you, I do not pity the fools.

Can it be done any other way? Obviously.

It's not hard to find credible, skilled people who have stories about using AI to make their work better. Elsewhere, I've called these people "centaurs" – human beings who are assisted by machines. These people are embracing the socialist mode of automation: they are using automation to improve quality, not quantity.

When I'm saying I can use AI to deliver something better than someone else also using AI, this is what I mean. The machine works for me, not the other way. I'm calling the shots, I have the vision, and if the machine doesn't deliver despite being battered over its stupid tin head with a hefty stick, I do have manual tools and experience with them at my disposal. One way or another, I will take your stupid-ass idea, turn it inside out and make it fucking sparkle. Unfortunately, most of the obvious disasters deployed commercially are to be blamed less on the machine and its inept reverse-reverse centaur operator (imagine a man with a horse's ass for a head, if you will) and more on their pointy-haired boss:

AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality.

It's curious how this approach lines up with the words of the Pope about who benefits from the tech.

[seriously-mike]

In reality, we should loathe both Altman and Amodei for their natural jingoism and continual deception. Amodei and Anthropic timed their defiance of the Department of Defense to make it seem like its “red lines” were related to the war. I think it’s good they have those red lines, but remember, those red lines do not involve stopping a war that threatens the lives of millions of people. Amodei supports that. Anthropic both supports and enables that. 

A footnote in Ed Zitron's analysis of how much of a fucking Ponzi scheme corporate AI is.

The AI Bubble Is An Information War

Editor's Note: Apologies if you received this email twice - we had an issue with our mail server that meant it was hitting spam in many case

In case you needed any more proof that Dario Amodei is a two-faced cunt.

[rozeoverdose-main]

teoria spiskowa w którą 100% wierzę to to, że wszystkie sklepy kłamią o "awarii" butelkomatów i po prostu nie chcą zwracać ludziom kaucji 🫩 fuck that

[seriously-mike]

E, no, eee, tak.

W ogóle cała ta sytuacja z butelkomatami to jebana farsa, w zeszły weekend kisłem w kolejce chyba z piętnaście minut, bo chłop przytargał cały duży wózek szklanych butelek, puszek i plastików, i dostał za nie prawie 120 zetów zwrotu. Przecież tyle to ja na tygodniowe zakupy żarcia wydaję!

A to co pierdolnął jakiś szmędrek ze skarbówki, żeby zwroty z kaucji opodatkować, to już w ogóle urzędasizm level 2137 milionów. Noż do chuja.

I wszyscy zapierdalają z wielkimi worami jak menele do jedynego butelkomatu w promieniu kilku kilometrów, bo tylko centrum handlowe ma chęć się z tym pierdolić. Miasto kurwa stołeczne.

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[seriously-mike]

This is firmly the kind of Business Idiot-driven AI bullshit that Ed Zitron described recently and that I mentioned some time ago: the only people who can correctly assess AI output are those that the sales pitch claims can be fired to be replaced by it.

[18thcenturythirsttrap]

Petition: Ban the sale and consumption of alcohol in House of Commons venues

I would like the House of Commons to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol within House of Commons venues on the Parliamentary estate.

When recently-elected Green MP for Gorton & Denton Hannah Spencer raised the issue of a boozey atmosphere in Parliament, she was ridiculed by MPs - mostly male - from across the political spectrum. But why the hell, especially during a cost of living crisis, should MPs be able to get half-cut on subsidised alcohol and then make decisions about all our futures?

If you agree they're taking the piss, and you're in the UK, please sign and share this petition - and if you're not in the UK, please reblog for reach...

[seriously-mike]

O KURWA.

And once again Poland is first to fight. Like I mentioned in passing long ago, we decriminalized homosexuality first, in the late 1920s, so almost half a century before then Great Britain, and now we beat them to the punch banning booze in the Parliament. Although only by seven months and a bit.

[seriously-mike]

This religious structure of AI risk brings a sense of certainty, urgency, moral absolutism, and social authority before any empirical evidence has earned any of them. This is how this movement is asking for more influence, money, and control over policy. There are two background reasons: First, AI is a magnet for theological imagination. AI discourse repeatedly returns to ancient religious motifs: creation, forbidden knowledge, omniscience, apocalypse, and salvation. Second, AI doomerism fills a “religious-shaped hole.” For people who left religious upbringing but retain a hunger for a mission-driven community, the AI-risk subculture offers a replacement meaning system.

First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority.

Over the weekend, a clip about “Anthropic thinks it’s building God” started making the rounds.

Yann LeCun just shared this one.

Looks like comparison to the Butlerian jihad from Dune is more warranted than I thought.

Well, I didn't fall for any old bullshit, I ain't falling for any new one either.

AI is not a religious experience, it's not magic, it's a tool and a malfunctioning one at that. If I have to slap its output around using old-school tools like I actually do over and over, I fucking will. Hand me the stick.

[seriously-mike]

However, fine-tuning ChatGPT on individual author’s complete works reversed these findings: MFA-trained readers now favored AI-generated text for stylistic fidelity (OR=8.16) and writing quality (OR=1.87), while college-educated general readers showed even stronger AI preference (stylistic fidelity OR=16.65; writing quality OR=5.42). Both reader groups preferred fine-tuned AI, but the writer-type × reader-type interaction remained significant after fine-tuning ( 𝒑 = 0.021 for fidelity; 𝒑 < 10^−4 for quality), indicating that collegeeducated general readers favored AI-generated text by a wider margin than MFA-trained readers.

Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers

The use of copyrighted books for training AI has sparked lawsuits from authors concerned about AI generating derivative content. Yet whether

Well, shit. After Turing Test for AI-generated imagery, here we have one for literature. While the paper is still being reviewed, it points out a couple of things not only about LLMs and their ability to imitate certain literary styles, but about the market for literature as well:

While Judge Chhabria speculated that the distinctiveness of an author’s style renders works by well-known authors less susceptible to substitution, he observed that market dilution would vary by author prominence. Established authors with dedicated readerships (like Agatha Christie) would likely face minimal substitution, while AI-generated books could crowd out lesser-known or emerging authors, potentially preventing “the next Agatha Christie from getting noticed or selling enough books to keep writing”. Our work suggests otherwise.

In one of Polish cult films, one of the characters states that "he only likes the songs he already knows". Fortunately, as long as the well-known authors are still alive and lucid enough to file a lawsuit, any AI-generated knockoff can be swiftly dealt with, with the things becoming problematic only after a given author keels over and their unscrupulous estate decides to milk the brand name for all it's worth, trying to cook up more titles like they already did using human ghost writers. But looking at the process behind an attempt to raise Moliere from the dead, 450-word excerpts aren't everything. Once the AI corporations start bilking their customers for every last token, which I expect them to ruthlessly do very soon looking at Ed Zitron's predictions, the cost of automated imitation compared to actual per-page rates is going to skyrocket. And since attempts at achieving the same effect using open-source tech bombed according to the researchers themselves, I don't expect the concept to be sustainable.

Our findings have also been independently corroborated by a large-scale blind quiz conducted by The New York Times in which more than 86,000 readers compared AI and human-written passages and 54% preferred AI-generated text (49), as well as independent reporting in The New Yorker where even accomplished novelists struggled to distinguish fine-tuned AI emulations from human writing (50).

I really don't know what to say. Even the thickest Butlerian jihadi fuckwits kept falling for AI-generated imagery in the blind quiz for that, so I'm not really expecting any taste or education from the test group (snobbery and arrogance are another matter). But there were always takers for literary atrocities committed by actual human authors, be it John Norman, E.L. James or Blanka Lipińska, which also explains the popularity of K.C. Crowne and how 81% of KDP's Top 100 fantasy romance books turned out to be AI-generated en masse. But...

If AI-generated works enter the market at substantially lower price points than human-authored works—as our cost analysis suggests is feasible—consumers may select the AI version even knowing its provenance, because the quality-to-price ratio remains attractive.

Now, if you please excuse me, I will be fucking screaming. Just... what in the fuck does that mean?! This is peak Business Idiot thinking, an assumption not as much divorced from the purpose of actually reading books as given a restraining order to stay two star systems away from it. You don't read books just because they're cheap. We've been through this, airport fantasy and Harlequin-brand romance didn't exactly take despite being peddled at rock-bottom prices. I just can't treat this argument seriously.

[seriously-mike]

What do you mean I haven't posted this thing here for NINE YEARS?!

My former flatmate brought this weird-ass dragon plushie home one day, so I had the obvious idea.

[victusinveritas]

Meet Pando, not a forest but a single tree. Every trunk of the Quaking Aspen is genetically identical & connected by a single 80,000 year old root system, making it one of the largest and oldest living entities on Earth!

[foone]

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk through the body of a God?

[carmelia-rose]

@derinthescarletpescatarian

[seriously-mike]

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk through the body of a God?

[seriously-mike]

I don't really hate AI, but the users? That's a different matter.

Just look at this one. You know how some dipshits think nobody's gonna figure out they stole someone else's work if they just flip it horizontally in Photoshop?

Wwweeeell...

While this one looks like it's been half-assed by ChatGPT, there are two noticeable things about it. One if you can read Cyrillic, and Ukrainian in particular, and another one if you know guns.

If you hold an AK-pattern rifle in your left hand, like here, the bolt handle, ejector window and selector switch are facing your body. They would be visible if you were holding it in your right hand instead.

And the sign behind this guy? It's in Ukrainian, and it's mirrored.

AI doesn't do things like this on its own. Someone has to help it using plain old image editing software.

Just how fucking stupid do you have to be? It's ChatGPT, for fuck's sake. It's designed with complete morons in mind. You can grunt at it like a mentally deficient baboon with a severe case of constipation and it'll still return something that you'll like. No great effort required, that's why they built it like that - it has to sell to idiots without taste. If that's beyond you, and you have to download something that another idiot grunted into being and misrepresent it as yours, then I don't even know which insult to start with.

And of course the fucking DeviantArt watermark. This is a new wave of the old braindead "ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL" bullshit predating AI by decades.

[seriously-mike]

So someone's selling those things.

The first thing that is coming to my mind is "Mark Rothko - Untitled (Studies in Concrete Drying)"

I mean, come on. Those things look like Rothko knockoffs, and the dark grey on the bottom half of the first one looks a lot like wet, freshly poured concrete.