cyril focht

"landmark study" proving a thing that you can figure out by
*Checks notes* having a baseline understanding of how ai works.

"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense

I love seeing other small essayists who decide to keep it up as a hobby, even without attracting a bigger audience because those are usually the same people whose growth you can actively see in their writing or filmmaking.

In an Internet landscape where vitality and mass consumption are The Thing, there is something compelling about making things for the Internet with a small audience.

More often than not I have to remind myself of that because view counts in the hundreds are also really discouraging.

Most of the videos I've put on YouTube took a year to make and almost all of them have just gotten a couple hundred views. I wouldn't have kept it up if I wasn't compelled by the craft, but even for those who are and still put it down despite that-I get it.

if you are interested in having a deep relationship with art of any kind, you owe it to yourself to start engaging with it the way Stacey describes here, you will have a much better time with every piece you come across and learn a ton in the process

2.1 Lenses, Not Boxes I wondered whether this section was necessary, but games discourse seems to repeatedly find itself adrift in questions of whether _ counts as a _. We have seen the question repeatedly: Do games count as art? Do games without goals count as games? Is The Sims a game? Are hypertexts interactive fiction? Are Twine pieces literature? In fairness to the researchers cited here, all of whom I respect immensely, many of these sources pose or imply the question rhetorically. Still, the necessity of such a framing frustrates me. "Is _ a _?" is, in my opinion, a fruitless question. The question can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and it often serves as either a provocation to espouse politics or as a cover to institute gatekeeping. Its agenda is usually opaque to onlookers and bewildering to those trying to advance the field from across disciplines. We should be thinking in lenses, not boxes. It is always more interesting to ask "If we think of _ through the lens of _, what do we learn?" We know it is more interesting to ask "What do we learn by considering Tom Stoppard through the lens of poststructuralism?" than to ask "Is Stoppard's work poststructuralist?" And while some works may be more or less fruitful when examined through different lenses, sometimes the most unlikely pairings of lenses and objects are the most rewarding. Certainly any of the questions above would be much better served by reframing them in this way.

Wow we’re having “games are art” discourse again! Just gonna leave this here.

From my dissertation:

good

Once again perfect for the culture! No one has any idea who invented spickles (all-sport pickles) but we all marvel in horror at the ubiquity of such food crimes

I need to share this with all the other hike guides I'm working with this summer

No you cannot determine which drugs are safe and effective with machine learning. You cannot. It will not work. People will die.

YouTube video by Cyril Focht Rigging Elections for Fun and Profit

Link here
youtu.be/PuLzZ-oO4Us?...

New video on YouTube, making a return to longform content! As with every election, conspiracy theories have been floating around the internet about the 2024 election being hacked in trump's favor. What's plausible? What's bunk? And what concerns does it raise about modern elections?

reminder that in most cases what it outputs is something that convincingly resembles an answer to someone who doesn't know enough to produce a correct answer. it produces answer shaped text, is easily nudged to give a different answer, like a fortune teller trying to figure out what you want to hear

That we continue to persist at all is a testament to our faith in one another.

This has exactly the same energy as my students who call me "Dr focht" even though the first thing I say every semester is "hi I'm cyril, don't call me Dr because I'm not"

Clearly paid zero attention to the very first thing I said, and I assume not a thing since

This is so weird to me because my takeaway from that announcement was that you weren't already on hrt

When it's not house of leaves, you'll find infinite jest in it's place

Directly downstream of recasting college as a work credential than a site of learning.

This is spot on, re chatGPT cheating in college. A lot of the moral panic aspect focuses on the tool itself, as if that's the entirety of the problem. And while it isn't great, the widespread usage is definitely a symptom, not a cause, of wider rot in what the education system does to students.

@squidtips.bsky.social made a whole video a while ago about his choice to do that

And you still wrote something! Just having it on the page means you've got something that will be easier to work with later when you come back to edit

When I'm hitting similar slumps, I try to remind myself that even if it doesn't make it into later drafts, it's still helping to think through my direction. When I don't like it there's a reason I don't like it and I can dig into that.

Ofc sometimes it also helps figure out what direction not to go

The “ceasefire” was an inauguration PR stunt.

When you practice such that the everyday becomes divine, sometimes you theology gets tangled enough that the showerhead looks like G-d

Update: Ohio has happened to me. It is Ohio and therefore this situation does not deserve to be phrased normally, I'm going to bed goodnight

This thought makes sense in the context of the road trip I am currently on, but I've now decided it's funnier if I don't explain so fuck it I guess

Fuck toll roads, I'm determined to make it into Ohio tonight out of sheer spite!

As the name implies, most disinformation is false, but not necessarily. Factuality is orthogonal to the goal of disinformation.

The goal is to charge powerful emotions and wedge social divisions. Framing does that at least as much as factuality.

I'm doing some writing on disinformation right now, and the most important take away is not necessarily that we should be more critical of false information (even though we should)

It's that we should be more critical of how that information is affecting us.