The news of the “AI bubble bursting” make me thing of Hunter S. Thompson (as quoted in the movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas):

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Well, when did you last conquer two villages, hm? See…!

As Stephen Colbert famously said: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Die bittere Ironie ist, dass das Beamtengesetz §63.2 explizit sagt, dass Beamten haftbar gemacht werden können, wenn sie wissen, dass eine Vorschrift rechtswidrig ist und sie dennoch danach handeln. Das wiederum würde aber erfordern, dass eine Strafverfolgungsbehörde die Beamten persönlich zur Rechenschaft zieht und da scheitert unsere Justiz dann wieder…

As the video demonstrates, the creators are part of those “few people” though and so are probably other people showing up in those videos. Many of them care about picture quality and/or what they themselves look like on the screen. They don’t want AI to mess with their videos without neither being informed, nor having any way to influence the outcome.

I remember when Microsoft first attempted to prevent the standardisation of Open Document Format (used by LibreOffice and others) and then bullied its way into getting approval for own OOXML standard. Already back then, supporters of FOSS warned that Microsoft would use the overly complicated OOXML to maintain its stranglehold on users of Office-like software.:

Whenever applicable and possible, standards should build upon previous standardisation efforts and not depend on proprietary, vendor-specific technologies. Albeit, MS-OOXML neglects various standards and uses its own vendor-specific formats instead. This puts a substantial burden on all vendors to fully implement MS-OOXML. It seems questionable how any third party could ever implement them equally well, especially when a standard comes with 6000 pages of specifications without serving its minimalistic purpose.

“A pink acid trip that feels like being slapped by lots of confusingly attractive people” is not that far from my very positive perception of the movie.

No kink shaming please.

These people can help.

It is very telling how much science backlash is rooted in the base desire of the rich and powerful to suppress any speech that contradicts them. It never was about (scientific) truth or facts, it was always about the power to impose their will on others and independent science challenges this totalitarian claim to power.

The hunchback of Madame

Aren’t we all!? 😅

I think… Apart from anyone’s personal reasons, this community is either extremely silly or extremely serious, so miscommunication is somewhat inevitable.

Well, I know some people who would have no problem with that designation.

Since the first messenger who told Tigranes that Lucullus was coming had his head cut off for his pains, no one else would tell him anything, and so he sat in ignorance while the fires of war were blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him.

Plutarch, ~ 100 A.D.

An employee of the Tesla restaurant that pretends to be staffed by “robots”.

Es ist schon interessant, wie solche Gestalten wie Özdemir die Geschichte der eigenen Partei bewußt zu verschleiern versuchen: Brokdorf, Startbahn West, Wackersdorf sind die Orte, wo sich die Grünen als politische Kraft etabliert haben, nicht in den Chefetagen von DAX-Unternehmen.

Oh, it surely is a crappy AI prompt. The point I am making here is that Musk’s aesthetics are stuck in a past. A past when the various elements of the picture were still considered “cool” to a certain degree, but it’s all trite now.

For example, the anime girl in the picture is meant to depict a feature of the Grok LLM, a sexy anime girl chatbot which will slowly wear less and less clothing. Even under the most charitable interpretation, it is cheapest kind of titillation and is no way or form anything new and innovative. Yet Musk puts her in the front anyway. Pretty much every detail in that picture harks back to the past: Cyberpunk atmosphere? We got that for ages! Edgy SuperGrok with a gold chain and a cigar? The look of an R’nB star from (at least) a decade ago!

It’s all been done for a long time and it only shows how much Musk is stuck in a past when he considered himself cool and on the cutting edge of pop culture. Yet it all comes down to Musk displaying how much he is out of touch with current pop culture which has progressed further in the meantime.

It all makes sense if you assume that everything Musk does is intended to impress a 4chan nazi circa 2012.

Because I could not believe it myself, I went and checked and it seems to be authentic. Link to a digital version of the book (the picture appears on page 30): https://kokusho.nijl.ac.jp/biblio/100357933/1?ln=ja

“Concord”'s character designs were definitely the least of the game’s problems, but - of course - it was what the far-right latched onto. After all, they rarely ever engage with anything beyond the mere surface level.