Ryan Moulton

Great evening for birds in a city park. Bald eagles, great horned owl, belted kingfisher, black crowned night heron gathering sticks from trees and building a nest, and these sleeping bluebird borbs.

I wanted to get closer for a better picture, but you can see she's already grumpy with me.

You can read it in less time than it took you to post that. There's not much there.

“people said the same thing about television”

Bowling Alone was written about the effect of TV, and how it devastated all of our social groups. The book hoped that the internet might fix it. Then smartphones hit.

It's a perfect ending, only soured by the fact that he basically never published any public work again. You're expecting it to lead to a brand new chapter of his own art.

Most things the torment nexus is used to describe aren't torment nexi, but the machine god definitely is.

At dusk most of these posts had bluebirds on top of them.

Something notable about the fact that the very same thing that makes coding amenable to RL, verifiable rewards, also makes it amenable to labor displacement. You usually know whether the robot has done a good job.

Taking the middle path here, most math I do expect to be automatible by what could be called powerful pattern matching, moreso than many other domains.

Ideally if I see a friend approvingly quote tweet someone who I have blocked, I would like to be able to see their username.

The sheer invisibility of the blocked party (and vice versa) makes it very difficult to undo, or to realize that there is something to be undone. It would be nice if blocking still permitted the two of you to be aware of each other's existence.

You are perplexing. (The highest complement of the current age.)

Yeah, I also hated self promotion when I was a more active moderator, but I also think that was a quaint idea from the early internet where people still browsed enough to encounter new links and bring them back. Now nobody posts anything unless they wrote it.

Not what I was going for, but at least an interesting attempt.

My breakfast simplex did 1000x better as a raw image than as a post, even though everyone in the comments who saw the post loved it.

I am irritated at how hostile even reddit (the last bastion of links to the web) is to links to the web. Almost every subreddit bans posting links to your own stuff. Even those subreddits that allow it heavily disfavor it.

It feels like letting out a breath you didn't know you were holding.

Not in image space, maybe in shape space.

The models are too smart now to be gaslit into making good art.

𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐬 !

It's something different I'm referring to here, early image models couldn't help but capture the "essence" of something while screwing up the details, because the "essence" was all they had the capability to capture. It was like great abstract art.

You and E O Wilson.

I'm pretty psyched about my prospects there. There was a time in the 1990s when I was the internet's foremost authority on ants. It was heady. I was like the only person on planet earth who both knew how to setup a webpage and had an interest in ants. Will never be a time like that again.

The early image models made better art because they were still dreaming. We were seeing the shape of their subconscious. Now they're all conscious and opinionated, which makes the art worse.

Text models are all millennials, but video models are gen Z.

We lack any ability or framework in which to enforce norms that aren't also laws.

If there's a "permanent underclass" it's not having written enough on the open web to be immortalized in the weights.

It was my own code. Clip-guided VQ GAN, initialized with a seed image of my face with the colors shifted so my face was green and the background was pink, and the prompt "Green Man surrounded by flowers by James Gurney"

I pushed it too hard and it realized I was gaslighting it and gave up.

This is a blurry black and white image of an Alpine lake with mountains behind it. Can you please add all the detail to reproduce the original color scene, as if it were painted?

Not remotely to control net level. Probably need a different prompt. (prompt in alt.)