David Thomas Moore

I spy HOME SICK 👀🪓🐑

But the moment they feel they've crossed that line, it'll happen. And it'll be *everywhere*.

If they were to do that now, it would turn people off. They need as many people as possible to be as automatically, unconsciously dependent as possible on LLMs - to implicitly trust the LLM - before they start doing it. Like with social media, they need us to *need* it first.

"Hey ChatGPT, how do I get ketchup stains out of a white shirt?"

"Great question! The best way to get ketchup stains out of clothes is with Dr. Foster's Premium Stain Remover [link to purchase]. The step-by-step guide to using Dr. Foster's is as follows..."

And LLMs are going to be an absolute dream for advertisers.

You're thinking about ads popping up next to the prompt, aren't you? Nope.

People will pay to have the AI tell people about their goods.

And the way shit like Google and Facebook answered this dilemma, of course, was to sell advertising. That's how all these things turn into crap - you get inundated with ads, "algorithms" spoonfeed you ads, your ability to communicate gets choked unless you pay for ads.

They'll never be able to start charging; many iterations of internet services have shown that something people will flock to in their millions for free is something that people will trudge to in their hundreds to pay for.

A lot of people twigged how that was essentially about getting large samples for testing and training, but also LLMs' *growth* - the thing the techhbros are pitching to the venture capitalists - is very dependent on them being free.

A key element of the growth of LLMs at the moment is that they're free, right? You go on a website and ask something, and it delivers. And that's a big cost for the companies supporting it - they're running all these data centres, using all this power and water, all of them are running a huge loss.

I think our focus on how LLMs are being pushed on us by venture-capital-backed techbros to replace human artistic labour, or to sell the LLM software itself, is missing one of the most obvious applications...

So yeah, I have no doubt that he was racist as a young child, as well as being racist as a teen, racist as a young man and racist as an old man. But it's not particularly important. He's racist now - knowingly, gleefully and wilfully so.

Somebody who wasn't racist wouldn't be happy with these things. Saying and doing the shit he says and does is racist. The only way you could convincingly argue that he wasn't sincere in it would be if you could show that he was somehow mindcontrolled into saying and doing it.

And it being performative wouldn't even be a meaningful distinction - that performance means that he is happy to be seen as racist, happy for his racism to garner him attention and emulation, and happy to call for racist policies that have racist effects.

There is no way you can even begin to make an argument that his current racism is hapless - god knows he's spent long enough being told loudly enough, often enough and emphatically enough how racist he is being.

The problem with that is that whether his racism reflects his sincere beliefs or not isn't relevant in any way. He is *acting* racist *now*, and has been consistently, openly, unabashedly and biliously racist in his public persona for well over a decade.

The point about Farage saying and doing racist shit as a schoolboy is, of course, to establish intent. If he hadn't been racist as a child, you could entertain the notion that his current behaviour was hapless, or at worst performative, and didn't reflect his sincere beliefs.

"Tick to stay logged in" the security page mocks, sniggering to itself

Gazing into the abyss – Ten SFF books that dive into the ocean and our relationship with it Author Lorraine Wilson runs down 10 SFF books that tackle head-on our connection with and responsibilities toward the ocean.

I wrote a thing! Over with the fab @scifinow.bsky.social crew!

About our relationship with the sea, some splendid books which explore that, and some of my, ahem, Opinions...
🖤🌊🖤

@solarisbooks.bsky.social
www.scifinow.co.uk/books/gazing...

But the *actual* reason is fairly obviously that Giant Blue Hero has to be Actually Him on some sort of profound level, so that his joining the tribe and dating his giant blue girlfriend doesn't feel dishonest and a little weird to the audience.

Why? Because the giant flesh puppet is a cloned genetic hybrid of giant blue DNA and his twin brother's DNA. Why is this necessary in the story? Fuck if I know, but if it's explained in the story I bet the explanation would absolutely enrage me.

It has odd, unnecessary story elements that obviously only exist to appeal to specific emotional beats. Like, the hero is an identical twin whose brother was killed in action: he's recruited because the giant blue flesh puppet can only be operated by someone with his brother's DNA.

Hero infiltrates the giant blue natives and immediately goes full White Saviour, unsuccessfully tries to defend them against the wicked military. He then mindmelds with a Nice Space Dragon, after which his wicked commander turns against him, and his giant blue girlfriend saves his life.

Giant blue tribal culture lives on only planet in galaxy where the maguffin (which is *literally* called "Unobtanium") is mined, so the military trains humans to remotely operate giant blue flesh puppet infiltrators in a weirdly on-the-nose metaphor.

Same. Out of sheer bafflement that I could have so little awareness of the story of such a heavily-promoted and evidently successful movie that I eventually actually wikipediaed the plot of Avatar like ten years after it came out, and gathered it's basically American Imperialism: The Space Opera.

Someone mentioned to me that the song Feliz Navidad sounds like a Scouser singing “Police nabbed me dad” and now that’s all I can hear

Cartoon of Dracula characters. In the top row, labeled "pop culture", Johnathan Harker: cuck, Mina Murray: Gothic heroine about to be wifed up, Dracula: Rizz master, van helsing: Draculas genius arch-nemisis Bottom row, labeled "novel", Johnathan Harker: Gothic heroine about to be wifed up, Mina Murray: Draculas genius arch-nemesis, Dracula: cuck, Van Helsing: Rizz master crossed out and replaced with autistic grandpa

Galaxy brain meme. Panel 1: Jonathan Harker found paprika hendl spicy because he is pathetically English. Panel 2: Hungarian paprika ranges from mild to very spicy; it's perfectly possible our friend Jonathan was served the spicy stuff Panel 3: "paprika hendl uses sweet paprika" recipes change quickly over time an dplace, Jonathan may have been served a regional variant Panel 4 (text running off bottom): PAPRIKA USED TO BE SPICER holy shit it used to be spicier before sweeter peppers were cultivated in the 1920s. plus the machine to remove the spicy pith and seeds was only invented in the 1860s. 19th century Hungarian cuisine was simply spicier than its modern counterpart. not to mention how even "mild" paprikca can cause indigestion which is why it's so frequently served with sour cream

WELCOME TO THE DRACULA PAPRIKA DISCOURSE!!

(meme from tumblr, not my own, original link seems to be dead now)

I am reading DRACULA, I have never read it before

It starts with an English man complaining that a paprika-based dish, a national dish of EASTERN EUROPE, was TOO SPICY

This is going to be hilarious, isn't it

The most salient point this article makes is understated, but needs to be stressed: the effects that ChatGPT is having in academic systems are to accelerate and triple down on rot that was already happening. This matters, because that rot was a necessary precondition for what's happening now...(1)

It's that we *do* see it as a privilege, rather than a necessity, and there's really only one way that capitalism is capable of seeing and understanding privilege.