#epic con 2023

[skaliver]

Epic Con 2023! Пришёл с фурсьютом. Да, в самом фурсьюте было жарко и вентилятор не работал, но, по крайней мере, погода позволила мне остыть, не снимая его. В конце концов, Epic Con мне понравился. Возможно, в будущем я рассмотрю возможность заняться косплеем.

[annastukov]

Вот и прогремел Epic Con 2023!

Мне посчастливилось присутствовать оба дня и пообщаться с разными интересными людьми.

В воскресенье я решила создать образ лисы-лаборанта (или кицунэ-лаборанта, как хотите), даже поборола страх и вышла на сцену в гостево�� дефиле! 🦊🧪

Отдельно хочу отметить замечательных косплееров по моему горячо любимому Apex Legends:

🧪Каустик - Vitaliy Joiner

🐺Лоба - King Zabor

Вы большие молодцы, ваши образы - результат кропотливой и упорной работы, я это уважаю, и вам от меня низкий поклон.

Надеюсь, мои небольшие подарки будут вам напоминать об этих замечательных выходных! 🦊

И надеюсь, что мы ещë увидимся!

[sharwynka]

О фестивале

Трям!

В июне в Санкт-Петербурге выдался жаркий (прим. автора: "жаркий" читать с иронией, поскольку мы там окоченели) Epic Con 2023, в котором мне довелось поучаствовать волонтёром на стенде по Геншину. И-и-и, на мой взгляд, получилось неплохо. Времени на подготовку было немного, новость оказалась внезапной, но за неделю удалось кое-что сделать. Что-то, чем мне хотелось бы поделиться.

Во-первых, это карточки с крио магами бездны (приложены выше)

Во-вторых, раскраски по Геншину (получилось негусто), зато с чувством. Ребята, подходившие к стенду, могли либо начать раскрашивать и забрать листы с собой, либо начать раскрашивать, а затем оставлять и другие могли подхватывать и раскрашивать по-своему. Порой рождались довольно интересные цветовые палитры х))

Примеры того, как ребята раскрашивали на фестивале (не могу не поделиться!):

маги бездны:

Люмин и Итэр:

В основном, конечно, ребята рисовали сами на заданную тему: "Что испугает или порадует крио мага бездны". Так что было много Кли и Дилюка.

Например!

[wehatepaparazzi]

[soulmates-for-real-tranquility]

[jellybracelet]

Johngirls stay winning

[ronenrubinsteinsource]

Ronen Rubinstein with the organizers at the Epic Cons pop-up event in Chicago, Illinois - July 22, 2023.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[j-nipper-95]

2024 in review

Thanks for the tags @artsyunderstudy and @nausikaaa

Wow. 2024 has been ... a year.

I've spent this last year flip-flopping between periods of intense creativity and intense burnout. I've barely posted anything on here, and even less over on AO3, but I have been writing, and the plot gremlins have been working overtime when it comes to planning out where the WIPs are going.

Object permanence and keeping timelines straight in my head are things I struggle with, so I can't remember exactly when I actually achieved any of these things, but I did, and that's all that matters.

Huge thanks as always to Ashton for the incredible artwork in this fic, and for the beta help along with my editor Zoë, @cutestkilla and @iamamythologicalcreature

I posted one chapter of The Trails We Blaze, my 2023 @carryonthroughtheages fic, which is a SnowBaz/The Road to El Dorado au.

Simon and Baz have been through a lot together. Growing up as criminals on London's streets; surviving the Great War; dealing with a lot of repressed feelings. But after their latest con goes wrong, they're left with nothing but an ancient map, a signet ring of unknown provenance or value, and promises of a city that doesn't even exist.

Thrust into a world of adventure with danger at every turn, they're forced to decide how far they're willing to go for a myth, a fortune, and a chance at love.

This fic is going to be a real labour of love and I have big plans for it going forward. If you haven't started it yet, here's what to expect:

adventure across post WW1 England, France, and Spain

exciting action

political machinations

idiots in love pining for each other

epic romance (when they eventually get their shit together)

I know roughly how this is going to end, and I have a first draft up to the 'It's Tough to be a God' sequence (if you know the original film), but I'm currently trying to rewrite a large section of that draft. Discovery writing has been a massive learning curve for me, but I'm excited to get back to this fic and the characters.

Again, massive thanks to Ashton for the stunning artwork of Lauren. I never stop geeking out over the fact I get to call this incredible woman my friend, and that I get to actually look at my chaos gremlin MC anytime I want!

Most of my time writing this year has been spent on approximately the billionth rewrite of my original novel, A Survivor's Revenge.

I am desperate to get this story into the hands of readers, whether that's though trad or indie publishing, and so far I've had good feedback from my editor and alpha reader on the previous draft. But me being me, I couldn't leave it at that.

So now I'm rewriting the book and completely changing the way it's written. The shift from 3rd person/past tense to 1st person/present tense has finally got things moving in terms of developmental edits; the plot flows more smoothly, character interactions and growth are coming more naturally, and for once the villain motivations and plans are becoming clear! Praise the chaos gods.

Lauren Atkins is many things. Student. Daughter. Friend. But at her core, she’s a survivor. And she has one thing on her mind … revenge.

For the lovers of genre spanning sci-fi, morally grey main characters, full spectrum queer identities, and found family, A Survivor’s Revenge will have you asking, how far are you willing to go to protect the ones you love?

I went back and looked at some super old drafts of ASR a couple of months ago; after a conversation with my alpha reader decided to reinstate an old plot line that I'd shelved, and I am super excited to get back to this one. Lauren has become even more morally grey since I last handled this plot line, so things are going to get very bloody very quickly.

So the last two months have been spend sporadically rewriting this behemoth, and I'll be continuing that into January. Originally I was doing this as part of the PaWriCo writing challenge, but I don't think I'll manage to finish the full draft by the end of January. Currently it's sitting at 27.3k words, and if I wanted to hit par I should've been at 65.2k. So, likelihood of hitting 100k by 31st January is minimal.

This little floof is largely the reason for me falling behind.

Benjamin has been back in the vets consistently since the end of November for scans and surgeries, and now for an ongoing infection following the most recent surgery. It's safe to say my nerves and wallet are strained to the maximum, but he's 100% worth it.

So yeah. 2024 may not have been the most productive year for writing, but things have been happening behind the scenes, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to share more in the new year.

I've missed interacting with people on here, I'm tired of just lurking. This chaos gremlin is back, baby!

Tagging (sorry if you've already done something like this):  @aristocratic-otter @blackberrysummerblog @bookish-bogwitch @cutestkilla @emeryhall

@hushed-chorus @iamamythologicalcreature @ic3-que3n @ileadacharmedlife @letraspal @orange-peony

@shrekgogurt @skeedelvee @theearlgreymage @you-remind-me-of-the-babe 

[moonlight-1108]

-Algunos datos sobre mí(y mi oc):

1.-Mi color favorito es el morado. 2.-Si tuviera que decir algún personaje de los que e creado que sea mi favorito…definitivamente Félix(realmente me agrada su personaje) 3.-La criatura morada que está en el dibujo se llama Moonlight y mi Oc se llama Starnight(de ahí es que proviene el" M/S") 4.-El "0811"es por mi fecha de nacimiento. 5.-Mi LBP favorito es el 3(Sí,con todo y sus bugs,para mí es el mejor >:D)aunque también me gusta el LBPK. 6.-Nunca haré un dibujo selfshipping,por qué?simplemente no me gusta eso(Siempre espectadora)…TRANQUILOS!!yo respeto a quienes les gusta y algunos dibujos me parecen lindos. 7.-Por supuesto que me gustan los temas de astronomía,creo que lo dejo muy a la evidencia en los dibujos de mi Oc(y mi oc en sí) 8.-Sí,soy de México. 9.-Perdón si tardo mucho en actualizar,aveces no tengo ganas de actualizar(simplemente mi cuerpo está cansado aún sin hacer mucho)y cuando quiero,estoy ocupada :,,D. 10.-Mi primer acercamiento al fandom del Lórax fue "Biggering"Durante el auge que tuvo nuevamente el fandom por ahí de 2022-2023(Recuerdo estar navegando por youtube y me salió la canción,quede impactada por épica canción,así que investigue más y…aquí estoy). 11.-Cuando me uní al fandom del Lórax,me quise hacer la "Única y especial,que yo no enamoraría del Once-ler"…AQUÍ ESTOY :DD solo duré con eso unos meses y termine adorando al chico que destruye ecosistemas. 12.-Ahora con el tema de Superjail,pues…Estaba en Wattpad y me pregunte;Por qué no buscamos historias de Once-ler?,no puede ser tan malo(Primero,wtf,encontré algunas interesantes y unas…),encontré una historia de Warden-ler,me adentre pero no sabía quien era el Warden,así que investigue….Y AQUÍ ESTAMOS!! 13.-Por supuesto que me gustan las canciones de Will Wood,mi favorita es la de -Main character-Me encanta,es una canción interesante. 14.-Mido 1.70 cm 15.-Por supuesto que odio a la madre de Once-ler y al papá de Warden(son unos monstruos):DD.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-Some information about me (and my oc):

1.-My favorite color is purple. 2.-If I had to say a character that I've created that's my favorite…definitely Felix (I really like his character) 3.-The purple creature in the drawing is called Moonlight and my OC is called Starnight (that's where the "M/S" comes from) 4.-The "0811" is for my birth date. 5.-My favorite LBP is the 3rd (Yes, with all its bugs, for me it's the best >:D) although I also like the LBPK. 6.-I will never make a selfshipping drawing, why? I just don't like that (I'm always a spectator)… DON'T WORRY!! I respect those who like it and some drawings seem cute to me. 7.-Of course I like astronomy topics, I think I make it very evident in the drawings of my Oc (and my oc itself) 8.-Yes, I'm from Mexico. 9.-Sorry if it takes me a long time to update, sometimes I don't feel like updating (my body is simply tired even without doing much) and when I want to, I'm busy :,,D. 10.-My first approach to the Lorax fandom was "Biggering" During the boom that the fandom had again around 2022-2023 (I remember browsing YouTube and the song came up, I was shocked by the epic song, so I investigated more and… here I am). 11.-When I joined the Lorax fandom, I wanted to be the "One and only, that I wouldn't fall in love with the Once-ler"… HERE I AM :DD I only lasted a few months and ended up adoring the boy who destroys ecosystems. 12.-Now with the Superjail topic, well… I was on Wattpad and I asked myself; Why don't we look for Once-ler stories? It can't be that bad (First, wtf, I found some interesting ones and some…), I found a Warden-ler story, I got into it but I didn't know who the Warden was, so I investigated… AND HERE WE ARE!! 13.-Of course I like Will Wood's songs, my favorite is the one from -Main character- I love it, it's an interesting song. 14.-I'm 1.70 cm tall 15.-Of course I hate Once-ler's mother and Warden's father (they are monsters). :DD.

[gloomgoria-cos]

Cloud (Kingdom Hearts ver.) - Ohayocon 2023

this cosplay is so much fun! i wanna get a better cape eventually!! feat my friend as Zack and a few other epic cosplayers from that con <3

[thedragonqueens]

Danielle Rose Russell - IWFF, epic cons, December 1st 2023

credits

[wehatepaparazzi]

[theclassymike]

Leo Howard at Epic Con 2023.

[ronenrubinsteinsource]

Ronen Rubinstein via Instagram Stories - July 22, 2023.

[daniellecamp]

DANIELLE CAMPBELL at "I Was Feeling Epic Again" con. on Apr 15th, 2023