mindbleach
@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Raise up the decapitated head of the goddess of love in a flower pot in the charmingly silly Tomak: Save the Earth Regeneration 2 days ago:
@kallidorarho.bsky.social
The author’s brazen fetish, presented with such hedonistic flair and open pride it makes you feel a little embarrassed for needing to hide your own passions behind self-effacing jokes in order to preserve a sense of safe, pseudo-ironic detachment
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 6 days ago:
Yeah imagine if I had the media literacy to describe an establishing shot’s form and function, even if it was borrowed or fabricated. But as someone who’s never seen a movie before, I could never suggest costume and set dressing conveying expectations beyond their literal imagery.
What are you doing?
Yes, professor, how and why I show an elephant will matter more than ‘hey look, an elephant.’ But in order for my intent to matter, when showing an elephant, I do require the ability to show an elephant. A depiction can’t mean anything unless I can in fact depict it. If I just tell you to use your imagination, that’s not a movie, that’s a book.
These tools let you show basically anything at basically no cost. What you want and why is your own problem. The premise, the message, and the edit are still entirely human art. This only replaces the part where real photons bounce off a fake building and look real enough on a sensor. (Or the part where a guy fakes that in Blender.)
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 6 days ago:
Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Do you expect audiences should be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 6 days ago:
Okay, here’s reality from the recent past: some guy recreated GPT-2 for $20. Same size, similar training data, equal performance. The original required VC funding. This guy spent pocket change. That was a year ago. That’s how much efficiency has already improved, for training these models. These assholes only spend billions because it’s exclusionary, and they’re all caught in a dollar auction to see who can lose the gentlest. I’m sorry any hypotheticals about that are incompatible with your moral crusade.
Meanwhile, it does the thing.
That’s not going to change and you kind of have to deal with it. We now have programs that just do what you ask, for any output that’s text, images, audio, or video. They often fuck up in horrifying ways. But they’re usually about what you asked for. Especially if you asked for very little. That’s quite useful where small changes are wildly complex, like ‘make this guy look like another guy.’ The robot won’t do it as good as a team of human professionals, but I don’t have a million dollars to hire a team of human professionals, and I’m betting you don’t either. You can still consider projects that involve making one guy look like another.
That utility is new and it’s not going anywhere.
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 6 days ago:
You’re having a much more contentious conversation inside your head. Please stop projecting traits you’d rather be arguing against, when someone points out, it does the thing it’s for. It demonstrably functions. You could make a coherent moral argument about how it was made - but you haven’t. You’ve railed against an imaginary frothing psychopath, because someone politely described utility.
How it was made is addressable, by the way. It’s fixable. There will be vegan models made from bespoke, licensed, and public-domain data. Will that change your opinion in any way? Or is that complaint decorative?
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 1 week ago:
Literally what are you talking about.
I am describing how video-to-video models are better at ‘change this one thing’ than ‘make up a whole scene.’ It’s not metaphysics. It’s CGI for dummies.
Local models run on the same power draw as a video game, and some can process ten seconds of footage every five seconds. The best use - because ‘change this one thing’ works better - is processing things humans made the usual way. E.g., real actors on cardboard sets, and other things I actually said.
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 1 week ago:
I can barely understand the expectation this will just blow over.
These programs turn whatever you have into whatever you describe… even if you have nothing. If you actually provide an animatic, a pre-vis pass, or stand-ins acting it out, it’ll follow those, and work better. The less you ask for, the more it can do. Its shortcomings keep dwindling and the models keep shrinking. Sora shut down because this tech has moved on to local models running near real-time.
That’s gonna revolutionize Hollywood the way refrigerators revolutionized selling ice for iceboxes.
Disney doesn’t benefit because they have the money to do things the hard way. Most people don’t. So a filter that turns cardboard sets into sci-fi blinkenlights is useful to plenty of people with no hope of securing a two-comma budget. It will let them make art that would otherwise be gatekept by capital. People might excuse any gap in quality knowing the thing otherwise would not exist. And that gap will shrink. Hollywood will find itself competing with manic weirdos, like print publishers who could no longer pick which comics and stories get read.
Cocteau said film will only become art when it’s as cheap as pencil and paper. Digital cameras have brought us pretty close, but you can’t point your iPhone at an incidental space battle. Conversely: Kraus said everyone has a book in them, and in most cases that’s where it should stay. The first wave of popular use here is already rude fanfiction. But the stories the average person can tell, in motion, have now massively expanded. They can’t all be Fruit Love Island.
- Comment on Valve say Counter-Strike 2's reloading needed "higher stakes", so you now dump all the ammo left in a clip when you reload early 2 weeks ago:
Seems like a weird big change to make in what is supposed to be an e-sport, but then again this is a game that deleted the game you fucking bought and replaced it with a sequel.
- Comment on [TheGamer] Invincible VS Has A Bizarre Allen The Alien Condom 3 weeks ago:
Title case makes this fucking incomprehensible.
- Comment on Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash 3 weeks ago:
No no no you’re supposed to reach to the right and stroke the next guy. Every negative aspect of this glorified chatbot’s brief history can be blamed on a volunteer making Windows less relevant. If there’s a single line of Bad Code then the whole thing is ssslop! and that label will surely keep hounding people away from openly using a tool that kinda works.
- Comment on [TheGamer] MTG And D&D Won't Use AI Any Time Soon, Despite Hasbro Boss' Love For It 3 weeks ago:
Found it: XP To Level 3, e.g. How it feels to DM above 10th level.
- Comment on [TheGamer] MTG And D&D Won't Use AI Any Time Soon, Despite Hasbro Boss' Love For It 3 weeks ago:
They’ve already cashed in by becoming Fortnite on cardboard.
Magic’s backstory was always fuzzy background flavor more than necessary worldbuilding, but it had a clear identity. Every card was an evocative glimpse of high fantasy where some magical creations require scale birds. Aaand now you’d have to play that against Spongebob Squarepants and Bilbo Baggins.
- Comment on [TheGamer] MTG And D&D Won't Use AI Any Time Soon, Despite Hasbro Boss' Love For It 3 weeks ago:
Like that D&D skit guy I can’t find.
“The lich casts cloud lightning as a legendary action.”
“Can they do that?”
“This one can.”
Totally forgot that guy’s channel name. Always love the barbarian chucking an entire bag of dice and barely glancing down. “I do eighty-four damage.”
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
I don’t think I’ve said shit about you, as a person, beyond ‘your arguments are bad and you should feel bad,’ with an abundant side of ‘and here’s why.’ You’re getting the toned-down version of reflexive sarcasm at some baffling things you continue to say. By all means, let loose, because blunt honesty might get us closer to sharing the same reality.
I’ve already linked to where I said, content warnings good, age gating bad. You think this should replace all ‘I am 18’ prompts.
I’ve belabored the distinction between freely adopted implementation and any form of state enforcement. Like, there’s plenty wrong with user-agent strings, but even a simple requirement to accurately report browser version would be quietly horrifying. Robbing software developers of the ability to say ‘that was a bad security decision, let’s just not do it,’ is intrinsically fucked.
If you need it restated:
I despise the idea of my own damn machine needing to know my birthdate. Largely, but not entirely, because that points toward verification demands which you agree would be intolerable. The internet should not work differently based on who you are.
I don’t think this law will achieve anything worthwhile, and I’m not convinced you do either. Your defense of it is full of things I would say as condemnation.
I fully expect this to get worse, based on all recent visible trends. Countries are banning young people from using entire categories of website. Glorified chatrooms are asking to see your driver’s license. The last thing a liberated internet needs is more personal information.
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
As if there’s no backlash for those things! No popular culture reflecting the baby boom on January 1st, 1900. No widespread browser plugins to make e-mail nags and sign-in pop-ups fuck off.
As if legally mandatory age reporting is in any way the same thing as haphazard adoption of a Dark Mode flag. Wikipedia’s not even smart enough to make Automatic the default.
On some level, a website named Porn Hub needing an interstitial that says ‘btw, this is porn’ is the original sin of the internet. It’s borne of the same puritanical horseshit that tried banning pornography entirely. It’s not about children. They’re the excuse. This ongoing moral panic uses them in a widespread and not entirely unsuccessful effort to deny adult-ass adults the things that most of them want. This has been happening my entire life, and yours, and is why I cannot respect the hair-splitting insistence that forcing your OS to report your age is - somehow! - totally unrelated, utterly disconnected, having nothing to do with the many conservative governments who want to track every video you ever jerked off to.
For the children.
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
Software freely adding an option to somehow report ‘this user is underage’ is unavoidably distinct from the government mandating any form of requesting, storing, or sharing the user’s age.
Even if you honestly believe there’s no connection to states demanding ID collection before looking at porn - how can you not understand the people recoiling at this? ‘I get it but you’re mistaken’ would see a polite argument. Your apparent bewilderment is inexplicable. ‘Microsoft legally requires your birthdate before you boot up and the internet will work differently based on that’ must be a dark aside in some Cory Doctorow story. How is it our actual reality, which some people think is normal?
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
Or set it based on the amount of legal protections you want on your data
… do you ever step back and wonder if civilization was a mistake?
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
‘This law is fine because it won’t affect child predators’ is a brave argument.
What is it for? You’ve found so many ways to say it’s toothless, optional, trivially dodged. So why fucking bother? Critics seem to agree, it’s a foot in the door for all of the other privacy-defeating efforts going on, now running in protection ring zero. What does this nonsense do, besides set off those red flags? What impact do you honestly expect, versus telling websites to have an ‘18+ only’ click-through?
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
Mandatory OS integration is not separate, optional, or user-driven.
I have explicitly argued against, in itself, for its own sake.
Under the other submission, I am even arguing against age verification in general.
But sure, let’s talk about this on its merits, in a vacuum, like there’s nothing else happening. What the fuck is it for? You endlessly insist it’s super minor, barely an inconvenience, and obviously any idiot can bypass it. That is your defense. If you freely acknowledge all of the other went too far and didn’t work, why is this one worth trying? How is this encroachment on all operating systems not a waste of time, at best?
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
The worst-case scenario is already happening - aforementioned facial scans are not theoretical. Only their scope has been limited, and suddenly we’re talking about legally-mandated age gating at an OS level.
Pattern recognition is a requirement for survival.
Many abuses start small so that people like you will let it happen. Some caveats only exist for you to point to while bickering with critics, and when you’re not looking, they quietly vanish. Others were just empty words the whole time.
This law is not some compromise over widely-demanded change. It would be a pointless intrusion even if, by some miracle, it stopped right here. It will not stop here. Be serious. You lived through last year; you know the general state of everything. These exact companies have been spying on you. These governments sure aren’t stopping them, for some mysterious reason. Scoffing about blindingly obvious expectations is a choice of comforting fantasy over worthwhile argument.
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
If I had to take a photo of my genitals to sign into my own computer, promises against storage or sharing are not addressing my complaints about privacy. Asking my age is a lot less personal - but it’s still information about me, which this object does not need.
‘I’m only okay with this idea because I know it won’t work’ is, just, why are we even talking? What is the function of an argument when you’re not listening to yourself?
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
How many of these websites where children gather and self-identity are created and maintained by paedophiles specifically to prey on childen?
In light of the Epstein files I would hesitate to say that number is zero. Nevermind that most such platforms are smaller than the giants you mentioned. Or that anyone working for or with kid-filled sites of any size could make it incidentally about preying on said kids. Apparently people manage when they’re just anonymous users.
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
On the other hand, setting up a public website/app and trying to lure children to it is expensive, risky, and unlikely to succeed on the modern internet.
Right, when has any website become a platform where kids gather and regularly self-identify?
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
Companies shouldn’t even be allowed to demand more than a username and password, on any machine I could pick up and throw. Making anything beyond that a legal requirement is intolerable, in itself. My age is not this object’s business. It sure isn’t this website’s business.
Stop excusing these intrusions against adult life, for the sake of children who will bypass them anyway. You know they will. You use the flimsiness of this alleged protection as an excuse for enabling it. There is literally no benefit if it doesn’t fucking work. Even pretending the immediate goal is something you should want - this won’t do that.
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
There is no benefit.
You can’t glibly assert that people can just lie, so it’s not a big deal - and then pretend it’ll do the thing it’s for. Which again, is a bad idea anyway, which this approach would not achieve, if it even worked. It’s fractally stupid. It is dangerous bullshit, at every scale.
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
And it stops here. Yeah? Today is the end of history. Nevermind any resemblance to rampant demands for facial scans and government ID, just to use a website; this demand for every computer to be 18+ will never cause problems.
Have you ever taken a hint in your life.
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 4 weeks ago:
This won’t fix that.
we’re talking about providing the option to limit access to mature content, not preventing them from downloading python or using the internet.
We’re talking about stopping adults from using a computer without surrendering their privacy. Whatever excuses you make about that, will not last. This is a flying leap down a slippery slope, and it won’t even fucking work.
- Comment on Team turns DNA into a rewritable hard drive 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Bing Video Creator is now powered by OpenAI's Sora 2 4 weeks ago:
2021: Edge is just Chrome now.
2026: Bing Video is just Sora now.
2031: Xbox is just Playstation now.
2040: Windows is just Android now.
Microsoft… what is you’d say you do, here?
- Comment on AI vibe-coded operating system is so bad it can't even run Doom — Vib-OS can't connect to the internet, browser app is an image viewer 4 weeks ago:
The fact this even almost works remains fascinating. Someone got a full-featured bare-metal operating system to program itself, and it’s halfway between early ReactOS and that Flash game for Windows Really Good Edition.
We forget that computers are for everyone. They’re supposed to be a bicycle for the mind. Needing to rely on existing mature applications, created by teams of experts, is an obstacle we’ve been fighting since BASIC. Anyone should be able to slap together some program that suits their needs. And not just theoretically capable - able. ‘You could learn to do it!’ means you cannot yet do it.
There’s a handful of languages intuitive enough to make people dangerous in matter of days. Until recently, suggesting that English was one of them would be laughable - but now you really can describe what you want and swallow the elephant. It doesn’t work, but it’s alarmingly close, for amateur use of this fiddly tool. The computer literally did your work for you, and people still complain about limitations.
An actual intelligence trained on StackOverflow would look at ‘make me a new OS’ and respond, ‘but why do you want that instead of modifying BSD?’ An intelligence that’s also been trained to avoid backsass would start from structure and complete its own todos. Which some guy claims to have done, for compiling a new language that mostly uses stupid names for things. He’s got the right idea, for weaponizing an LLM into something useful, but that idea is to make it act like diffusion.