There is no doubt the creator of that short had a creative experience though. Why shouldn’t a dilettante “play” at film directing using shortcuts? And the work as a whole is clearly not stolen, but unique.

I’d kinda would love to see that AI short remade now, with a prompt “make this as as shitty video that was produced by an amateur and his friends, without professional actors and no production value” haha.

Well, economics always enters into it.

Is that short I linked content or art? It cost time and money but it’s vastly less than what it would take to create traditionally. Without AI, that guy might never have been able to create that, the “the sake of his soul”. I want “working people” to be able to give it a try with whatever tools, including AI. Become directors or authors of “holonovels”. AI allows for a new type of art medium.

There will always be content or slop. Always people who just want to sell garbage or people who want to be creative and think they can but are no good. But the tools empower both. A lot of content on youtube is scary garbage, like even before AI there was stuff that genuinely made me horrified, but that is an issue with moderation and not listening to the demands of the community. But there is so much amazing videos too which wouldn’t have been possible or found an audience without the platform and the tools (e.g. cheap video cameras, video editing software).

PS: I do wish for standards or regulations so it’s clearly marked which parts are generated and which parts are human made.

Yeah the value of art is that it can express or show things about the world that are hard to express in words. And we desperately need a new way and clarity about the failure of the old ways, because that is what leads to the cynicism and hopelessness. So either keep politics out of it and produce harmless entertainment, or have a bloody brilliant take on politics that provides actual artistic value.

I quite like superhero movies as escapism, like a fantasy world where clear definitions of good vs evil exist. But I can’t stomach biopics or docudramas that mix this fantasy with real world propaganda, like some nostalgic fantasy about US politics or journalism any more. It feels like they all want to recreate the beautiful fantasy of Sorkin’s “The White House” or the classic thriller take of “a bad apple in a good system” but today that is a dangerous lie.

I only watched a cam-rip and stopped after Louis Lane “interviews” Superman which was painful to watch. The typical reporter tearing and deliberately misrepresenting or framing things in the dominant world order, every question a cut and propaganda criticizing people who disagree. It was kinda gaslighting, like “why did you attack our ally unprovoked?! Also some people are saying you’re an alien spy!”. Instead of asking questions to get the truth, they are loaded questions that can’t be answered without making yourself look bad.

What a total failures as a character introduction and makes her instantly an unlikeable removed. I mean holy shit is that bad storytelling. Or is that just me? If that is what you think a reporter should do, then don’t do it as a friend / girlfriend, and if that is how you see the world that you are not worthy of being the girlfriend of a hero like Superman. Because in my opinion you’re one of the villains in real life.

I do suspect this plays into why some people disliked superman. What people seek in these troubled times is strength. And they hate what tears strength down, seeking to control or subdue it or put it in it’s place in the proper order of things. They want someone to break things because deep down we all know the path we’re on right now leads downward (economic inequality, enshittification of products, appliances and services, climate change and environment, rising tensions, news and social media, post truth world). The people voting aren’t entirely wrong in just wanting to see the world burn.

There is a quote which I don’t know where it came from or remember well: “The samurai valued strength above anything else, because that is where all other values flow from”. Or differently: “The samurai believed that strength was the foundation of all values, as it enabled them to uphold honor, loyalty, and discipline.”

But our liberal world order sees strength as something that has to be separated, atomized, means tested and distributed into channels to control. Controlled by laws, bureaucracy or better yet, the dictates of capitalism, because it’s oh-so-efficient. I suspect right wingers like Homelander not because he’s a corporate product, but because he breaks out of that and goes rogue, and also rejects the “we must not kill anyone and obey the laws or we will be like the villains!” bullshit.

The cult of personality or hero worship represents a desire of people that someone comes and fixes all this shit and cuts through the red tape. Someone who has strength and the courage to use that strength, despite all the clever fucking shitty arguments and conventions to the contrary. Because we’ve heard it all before and it sounds so good but it’s clearly not working. Superhero movies are supposed to fulfill that wish and grand escapism into a world where our problems are magically solved. But recent movies (Marvel) failed to do that, instead pushing the failed real world fantasy of a liberal world order into the movies. Like the common trope of Washington and the government being fundamentally good and working well, except for a few bad apples, and as soon as you get the proof and give it to the good people or the newspapers, everything works out fine. Which is a painful reminder that it doesn’t in real life.

I suspect the “reactionary backlash” is not just about racism, it’s about the rejection of the distraction of identity politics - that if we only lean in more, if we accept different cultures, everything will be fine - because that is just distraction from the continued neoliberalism and disaster capitalism. But breaking things and bringing things to a head is also an opportunity - accelerationism.

These are just by jumbled thoughts on how this reflects on our culture war. Again, I haven’t watched the movie or read any of the right wing critiques, only seen the “liberal backlash to the backlash”. This controversy in itself is rather predictable and pisses me off. Like it’s a distraction in itself, a pair of two anger memes that complement each other perfectly are tossed into the ether to continue to keep us occupied.

Also after I stopped the movie I read some (serious) reviews and it’s also just a shitty movie.

Oh no, the secret plot of the tankies for world domination has been unmasked!

No you can’t, economics won’t allow it. Can you turns a novel into a comic or an anime or life action tv series? Creating good art or entertainment doesn’t just require some brilliant creative idea, but specialists who work together on things, using expensive specialist equipment. Youtube and cheap video cameras allowed for an explosion of individual content creators to create shows, replacing things like e.g. cooking shows, or shows about building or houses or traveling or gardening.

With the right AI tools you could replace a lot of that. Obviously at a lower maximum quality. But we are already being fed corporate entertainment slop. There will be a lot of AI slop, but a few people will be able to turn their ideas into reality even if it’s not quite “Hollywood quality”. This short currently seems the best example. And the tools will only get better, and the medium will expand.

When VR headsets came out (oculus, vive) there was a lot of talk about VR movies. I suspect that only with AI tools will we be able to have the creative freedom (= low capital costs) to do things like that.

You’re projecting. Every accusation is a confession.

Emotion > Facts. Most people have been trained to blindly accept things and cheer on what fits with their agenda. Like technbro’s exaggerating LLMs, or people like you misrepresenting LLMs as mere statistical word generators without intelligence. That’s like saying a computer is just wires and switches, or missing the forest for the trees. Both is equally false.

Yet if it fits with the emotional needs or with dogma, then other will agree. It’s a convenient and comforting “A vs B” worldview we’ve been trained to accept. And so the satisfying notion and misinformation keeps spreading.

LLMs tell us more about human intelligence and the human slop we’ve been generating. It tells us that most people are not that much more than statistical word generators.

Maybe more like someone reading you a book while you can ask questions or give feedback. And maybe instead of just watching pictures / illustrations, you could also describe your own imagination more detailed or give some rough sketches and create your own illustrations to the text. Like a modding feature for books and you can share the mods with other readers.

What if we invented drugs that allow you to enjoy any content 1.5 times faster?

I imagine in a few decades we might have AI media. You could read a web novel with a fewer or a lot of pictures, or read it as a manhwa / webtoon, or as an anime, or as a virtual reality 3D experience that is semi-interactive. And you could give instructions to shorten or expand it, or even diverge in the plot a little, or change the characters. More like the holodeck with a VR headset.

Found out after install you also need to install Npcap.

The real psy-op was the billions they made along the way

“Baskets” is an excellent documentary series about becoming a clown (jk)

Basically when I look for new hardware, I always look at specs. And it’s so easy to get sucked in by “oh this is a little bit more expensive but has 20% more performance!”.

Evil, Scary China Refuses To Passively Let Us Encircle It: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – Caitlin Johnstone

That’s a pretty good article explaining it. The funny thing is that the US media is always framing China as the aggressor. But one look at that map, like with your real eyes, not the crazy eyes, should show you the US is way out there on someone else’s doorstep and who the aggressor is. That’s just geography.

Personally I don’t think China is going to invade Taiwan unless things escalate further. For example, the Russian perspective on the Ukraine is that the US supported the regime change through the NED, helped far right elements overthrow the democratically elected regime and then supported their stance to ban Russian language, oppress Russian speaking populations in Ukraine and supplied them with massive amounts of arms and intelligence. All of this is true historical fact. And in that situation even the chief of NATO Stoltenberg publicly said that Russia launched a “preemptive war” in response to this quasi-NATO membership right on their doorstep. If the US does the same with Taiwan, China might invade. That particular gabit is rather unlikely to succeed in Taiwan though, and Taiwan is far less dangerous to China than a hostile well supplied Ukraine is to Russia (only like 500 miles from Moskow). The smart play for China if that happens is to play rope-a-dope until the US gets tired. Kinda what Iran is doing about the numerous provocations and acts of war against them.

I can’t stand the look of Windirstat lol.

I use explorer++ now because it can show subdir sizes. Unfortunately performance suffers quite a bit because of no caching and unsmart file system lol. Maybe linux has this basic and essential feature in it’s file explorer.

+1 for using space sniffer. It’s the best of such apps I’ve found. Unfortunately doesn’t seem to get updated any more.

I was thinking of the Gemini (protocol) - Wikipedia but a bit more elaborate, and yeah I’m not sure how far text compression can be pushed. But I think LLMs could be useful and help reach a critical mass of being able to download and store tons of articles.

Torrent V2 and other official extensions Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items allow some ways to do this. Like hosting a youtube channel and updating it with new videos, without any new network protocol. Well theoretically since this isn’t yet supported well in torrent clients or lib.

I’ve been thinking how this would work for a while but it’s kind of frying my brain haha. Like a “P2P version control database” that is truly open source. For articles and blog posts, but also for metadata for manhwa, movies, tv, anime, books etc. Like anybody can download and use it and share, edit, fork it without needing to set up some complex server. Something that can’t be taken down, sold or if abandoned someone else can just pick it up and you can merge different curated versions and additions easily.

You’d basically want a “most popular items of the past X time” that almost everybody downloads, and then the whole database split into more and more exotic or obscure items. So everybody has the popular stuff but also has to host some exotic items so they don’t get lost. And it has to be easy to use and install.

But the whole database has to be small and compact and compressed enough that you can still easily host it on a normal HDD. It the current times with economic and political dangers lurking this would be a crucial bit of IT infrastructure.

I believe everyone can, it just takes practice and is only relevant for 120hz games. Or VR.