#''as the kids say'' they are SO cherished

[youzicha]

Thinking about that that "slop accelerationism" post, and also Scott's AI art Turing test.

I also hope AI text- and image-generation will help shake us loose from cheap bad art. For example, the fact that you can now generate perfectly rendered anime girls at the click of button kindof suggests that there was never much content in those drawings. Though maybe we didn't really need AI for that insight? It feels very similar to that shift in fashion that rejected Bouguereau-style laboriously-rendered pretty girls in favor of more sketchy brush work.

But will we really be so lucky that only things that we already suspected was slop will prove valueless?

As usual with AI, Douglas Hofstadter already thought about this a long time ago, in an essay from 2001. Back in 1979 he had written

Will a computer program ever write beautiful music? Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries"—shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music—but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think—and I have heard this suggested—that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile [sic!] circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.

I think this is helpful in pinning down what we would have liked to be true. Because in 1995, somebody wrote a program that generates music by applying simple syntactic rules to combine patterns from existing pieces, and it sounded really good! (In fact, it passed a kind of AI turing test.) Oops!

The worry, then, is that we just found out that the computer has as complex emotions as us, and they aren't complex at all. It would be like adversarial examples for humans: the noise-like pattern added to the panda doesn't "represent" a gibbon, it's an artifact of the particular weights and topology of the image recognizer, and the resulting classification doesn't "mean" anything. Similarly, Arnulf Rainer wrote that when he reworked Wine-Crucifix, "the quality and truth of the picture only grew as it became darker and darker"—doesn't this sound a bit like gradient descent? Did he stumble on a pattern that triggers our "truth" detector, even though the pattern is merely a shallow stimulus made of copies of religious iconography that we imprinted on as kids?

One attempt to recover is to say Chopin really did write music based on the experience of fighting through the maze of life, and it's just that philistine consumers can't tell the difference between the real and the counterfeit. But this is not very helpful, it means that we were fooling ourselves, and the meaning that we imagined never existed.

More promising, maybe the program is a "plagiarism machine", which just copies the hard-won grief, despair, world-weariness &c that Chopin recorded? On it's own it's not impressive that a program can output an image indistinguishable from Gauguin's, I can write such a program in a single line:

print("https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gauguin,Paul-Still_Life_with_Profile_of_Laval-_Google_Art_Project.jpg")

I think this is the conclusion that Hofstadter leans towards: the value of Chopin and the other composers was to discover the "template" that can then be instantiated to make many beautiful music pieces. Kind of ironically, this seems to push us back to some very turn-of-the-20th-century notion of avant-garde art. Each particular painting that (say) Monet executed is of low value, and the actual valuable thing is the novel art style...

That view isn't falsified yet, but it feels precarious. You could have said that AlphaGo was merely a plagiarism machine that selected good moves from historical human games, except then AlphaGo Zero proved that the humans were superfluous after all. Surely a couple of years from now somebody might train an image model on a set of photographs and movies excluding paintings, and it might reinvent impressionism from first principles, and then where will we be? Better start prepare a fallback-philosophy now.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

another appearance by asia kate dillon as LOS via the 7th moon girl's lab short, "coding" =']

[demigods-posts]

thinking of percy going to school as a small child. learning that some of his peers talk to deceased family members in their heads to cope with grief. and deciding to take the time each night to talk to his father. telling him a funny story of how mom laughed so hard, milk came out of her nose. of how he got a near perfect score on his third grade spelling test. of each time he got expelled from school and how much he knew it made mom sad. of how his stepfather is the meanest bully he's ever met. of how he wished the two of them had more time together so they could share s'mores and stories around the campfire. of how much he grieves the father he never had. and thinking of poseidon sitting in his throne atop olympus. tears threatening to fall at the sound of his son's voice. mirroring the grief of a child he never got to raise.

[forcedhesitation]

I MISSED THIS ENTIRELY MY FIRST TIME AROUND....THIS IS SO DAMN PRECIOUS?!!

[br1ghtestlight]

random late night thoughts on my famous jimmy junior concept (specifically w/ tinimmy)

jimmy jr moved away in his sophmore year of high school because his mom got him accepted into a really good and well respected performing arts school in california. mom moved to california to live with him while he auditioned and studied and dad stayed behind with andy and ollie (they both missed their mom and jimmy jr SOO MUCH but they'd get to visit during the summer and spring/winter breaks)

tina and jimmy jr continued on again off again dating thru 8th 9th and 10th grades but they were always friends so tina took it super hard when jimmy jr moved away </3 she dated a few guys after him but honestly despite being a hopeless romantic she never felt much of a spark. i think she just missed him too much & never got over her first love. she vowed off dating until after high school

she definitely cried everyday for WEEKS when he actually moved away and stopped hanging out with her friend group w/ tammy and jocelyn. she still kept in contact with zeke but he had a pretty busy life at that point too yknow how it is

jimmy jr would call and text with tina and their friend group sometimes but he got really busy w/ school and life so they eventually fell out of contact. the type of middle school friend you only keep up with through their occasional facebook status updates

jimmy jr got his big break and became a famous teenage heartthrob type when he was around 17 years old and he did NOOOT take it well at all lol he got a huge ego and made so many terrible decisions <3 bless his heart <3 maybe he even thought he was too good for seymour's bay or his friends back home even though i think secretly he missed them. basically stopped talking to his family around this time. super weird for everybody who knew him in seymour's bay that he was now famous and totally idolized but he became something of a local legend to their town like "the birthplace of jimmy pesto jr omg" which was probably good for tourism

jimmy pesto's also got more randos visiting his restaurant because they wanted to see where jimmy jr grew up and harass his family basically lmao which jimmy pesto HATED especially since he became estranged from jimmy jr

it probably settled down after a few years when everybody realized jimmy pesto doesnt talk to his son and also he's an asshole

tina was always very proud of jimmy jr even as his friend because she knew how important dancing and attention/fame had always been to jimmy jr and his passion for it (she'd known him since kindergarten obviously!!!!) so she was always cheering him on like yay ^_^ she might attend an event he was doing locally but ngl he did stay clear of seymour's bay feeling like he had unfinished business there he didnt want to think about. tina was genuinely just happy for him & mostly over her feelings for him

she DID buy all his merch even the cheesy shirtless posters that were definitely made for 12 year old girls to kiss at night. she's LOYAL OKAY!!!!!!

because jimmy jr never came around to seymour's bay and avoided the area he kind of got a reputation with the locals that he thought he was "too good to acknowledge where he came from" so their opinion of him is slightly negative tbh. which isnt UNTRUE but it was less about the town himself and more about the people he left behind

jimmy jr found it really hard to make genuine friendships at his new school bcuz everybody was always trying to compete with each other and eventually he just stopped trying so he's been very socially isolated for a long time which DIDNT help his mental health. he never had another close friend like tina or zeke it was mostly just random party buddies and one night stands but nobody he could be himself around :(

jimmy pesto's relationship with jimmy jr in this fic is much too complicated to describe in a tumblr post lol but its very. uhh. they both want the best for each other and jimmy pesto truly isn't a horrible dad. andy and ollie adore their big brother though and they'll always ask him about his fancy life in hollywood when they go to visit

when jimmy jr first became famous there was some slight attention from younger fans directed @ andy and ollie who were like ooooh they're like jimmy jr but our age and single/not famous?? boyfriend maybe? a few stalkers but that pretty much died immediately when they realized andy and ollie are actual literal Freaks <- they never realized this is also true of jimmy jr though!!!!

he is bisexual. he never told anybody he's bisexual and nobody knows he's bisexual but he is bisexual of course. there is no universe where that kid is straight sorry

[todayisafridaynight]

one day ill stop treating aoki like he was a guy i personally knew that died but todays not that day

[shewantsitall]

It's angst on a new level tbh

[yutadori]

sukuna i am going to bite you im going to bite you sooooooo hard i cannot wait for nobara to come back and kill him while everyone films it and cheers and celebrates and then gojo takes the kids out to sushi <3

[lynxgirlpaws]

[sapsolais]

!

[kiingbiing]

-

[didsomeonesayventus]

In regards to last reblog idk i have a lot of works i probably should orphan (and in ff.net's case nuke entirely) but like. Idk man it feels weird and wrong to let go of something i was genuinely invested in and happy with even if it's incredibly cringe like hey i made that for fun i've grown out of it but like. It's still something that made me happy once and i dont want to pretend i wasnt stupid and free and cringe

[sethprotector]

I did think Death was pretty fair tho.

In the final battle, Puss was ready to fight him even with the knowledge that this last life can end at any moment now. He was not laughing at the face of Death anymore. He was looking at his face with respect and resilience. He was in the "come at me I will fight to the very end" mindset but with no trace of bragging underneath.

And Death recognised that.

Even tho he wanted to continue the fight (bc it's no fun at all if he don't have to beat the crap out of a dumbass once in a while), he recognised that and just walked away.

So yeah while I do think he has some pretty petty reasons for trying to kill Puss, he still plays fair inmo. After all he's the corporeal embodiement of death, and if death himself is not gonna be fair, who will? The target audience of this movie, children, need to be reassured about this.

something i haven't seen anyone mention about the Puss in boots: the last wish

there are plenty of stories about someone trying to cheat death, but I don't think I've ever come across a story before where death doesn't play fair either. and the fact that the wolf just casually admitted it? loved it

and the twist is hilarious: you would think that he has some pretty good reason for trying to kill Puss before his time has come, but no. Death just got fed up with watching this dumbass cat waste his lives in incredibly stupid ways, and decided that this arrogant lil bitch needs to get his ass whooped

[kikiswords]

having a friend who tough loves on you / playfully bullies you when ur neurodivergent is a lil tough because half the time im decoding whether they're just kidding or whether they're actually mad at me

[todayisafridaynight]

What’s the moment in Yakuza that made you go “I’m In.” As in the moment that made you obsessed.

there wasnt ever really one Singular moment that made me go 'ok im obsessed now', it just kinda gradually happened and now here we are almost a year later

[the-cooler-king]

Oh yeah..... midnight gospel be hitting.... sitting in my bed fuckin. Crying. Get a grip girl