i used (and use, until the shutdown) cohost as my primary social media site. i’m not surprised, but i can’t say it hasn’t been disappointing. for all the issues it has (and it did have a lot) it was pretty much the only site that felt somewhat cozy to use for me. stings quite a bit

there were bits and pieces that made me feel like Jon Evans was being a tad too sympathetic to Elizer and others whose track record really should warrant a somewhat greater degree of scepticism than he shows, but i had to tap out at this paragraph from chapter 6:

Scott Alexander is a Bay Area psychiatrist and a writer capable of absolutely magnificent, incisive, soulwrenching work … with whom I often strongly disagree. Some of his arguments are truly illuminatory; some betray the intellectual side-stepping of a very smart person engaged in rationalization and/or unwillingness to accept the rest of the world will not adopt their worldview. (Many of his critics, unfortunately, are inferior writers who misunderstand his work, and furthermore suggest it’s written in bad faith, which I think is wholly incorrect.) But in fairness 90+% of humanity engages in such rationalization without even worrying about it. Alexander does, and challenges his own beliefs more than most.

the fact that Jon praises Scott’s half-baked, anecdote-riddled, Red/Blue/Gray trichotomy as “incisive” (for playing the hits to his audience), and his appraisal of the meandering transhumanist non-sequitur reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as “soulwrenching” really threw me for a loop.

and then the later description of that ultimately rather banal New York Times piece as “long and bad” (a hilariously hypocritical set of adjectives for a self-proclaimed fan of some of Scott’s work to use), and the slamming of Elizabeth Sandifer as being a “inferior writer who misunderstands Scott’s work”, for uh, correctly analyzing Scott’s tendencies to espouse and enable white supremacist and sexist rhetoric… yeah it pretty much tanks my ability to take what Jon is writing at face value.

i don’t get how after so many words being gentle but firm about Elizer’s (lack of) accomplishments does he put out such a full-throated defense of Scott Alexander (and the subsequent smearing of his “”“enemies”“”). of all people, why him?

I didn’t read the post at all

rather refreshing to have someone come out and just say it. thank you for the chuckle

and furries, for some reason

An opinion is still an opinion no matter how widely held it is.

why did you even bring up your one artist friend’s opinion if you’re just gonna be like “well actually that’s just YOUR opinion” when i disagree

yet I still refuse to call it art.

Duchamp wants a word

And then we have people who are attacking any use of ai images that are willing to call it “AI Art”…

good thing i, me, the person you’re responding to, isn’t those people. makes me wonder why you even brought it up in the first place

I believe that you believe that.

i also believe you’re deliberately trying to be as insufferable as possible, so be sure to add that to the bizarre collection of things you think i believe while you’re at it. or better yet: don’t

Would you rather have a dozen back and forth interactions?

these aren’t the only two possibilities. i’ve had some interactions where i got handed one ref sheet and a sentence description and the recipient was happy with the first sketch. i’ve had some where i got several pieces of references from different artists alongside paragraphs of descriptions, and there were still several dozen attempts. tossing in ai art just increases the volume, not the quality, of the interaction

Besides, this is something I’ve heard from other artists, so it’s very much a matter opinion.

i have interacted with hundreds of artists, and i have yet to meet an artist that does not, to at least some degree, have some kind of negative opinion on ai art, except those for whom image-generation models were their primary (or more commonly, only) tool for making art. so if there is such a group of artists that would be happy to be presented with ai art and asked to “make it like this”, i have yet to find them

Annoying, sure, but not immoral.

annoying me is immoral actually

as someone who only draws as a hobbyist, but who has taken commissions before, i think it would be very annoying to have a prospective client go “okay so here’s what i want you to draw” and then send over ai-generated stuff. if only because i know said client is setting their expectations for the hyper-processed, over-tuned look of the machine instead of what i actually draw

happy to see the draft get fleshed out. good writeup

with how much of a revolving door of covert white supremacists lemmy is, i can imagine it’s hard to boot them out faster than they come in. just federation things

they really are just sitting around the campfire telling the exact same shitty spooky story, back and forth, forever, aren’t they

what if we simply took the output of the easily manipulated word salad generator and parsed it into instructions for the computers that are in charge of all our communication to follow

Well over a year ago it was actually useful. […] And it just doesn’t come up with interesting stuff any more.

i have to admit i’m deeply curious what outputs you considering interesting enough for twenty bucks a month

I don’t think emojis should be the place to have a socio-political discussion.

have some entirely non-political emojis:

🗳️: BALLOT BOX WITH BALLOT

🇹🇼: FLAG: TAIWAN

🇵🇸: FLAG: PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

🗽: STATUE OF LIBERTY

🤡: FACE OF “NON-POLITICAL” PERSON

i couldn’t resist

at least when this rhetoric popped up around crypto and GameStop stocks, there was a get-rich-quick scheme attached to it. these fuckers are doing it for free

And yet, my opponents in discussion

good gods you’re going to be the most insufferable kind of person, aren’t you

You aren’t going to convince me of anything

this was a bit of a given

bet you also think the climate cost of cryptocurrency is also a failing of the energy sector to deliver clean power to the innocent sweet little industrial-scale mining tycoons, don’t you

you do an excellent job of writing. several times reading this i had to mentally delete paragraphs of explanations for some of the rationalist thoughts and ideology because you have described it perfectly in just a sentence or two.

shared this with some of my in-tech-but-skeptical friends. you deserve a bigger audience

thinking “typewriter monkeys”, but maybe that’s too literal

…gods i miss n-gate

“rat furry” :3

“(it’s short for rationalist)” >:(

What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn’t be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.

wait sorry hold on

in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors

so what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this, if the overwhelming majority of people already agree that far-right “news” sites like the examples given are full of garbage and shouldn’t be cited?

Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others

ahhhhhhh David made fun of some rationalist you like once and in turn you’ve elevated him to the Ubermensch of Woke, didn’t you