bitofhope

joined 2 years ago
[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original.

I was already confused by the first sentence. Sam's prompt did not say to be original, much less to put originality "above all". A writer might take the originality constraint as a given, but it was not a part of the explicit instructions. Also, it's pretty fucking rich to hear a plagiarism machine tout its originality of all things.

Maybe the sentence is not a summary of the prompt, but directed at the reader. An explicit plea for the reader to smooth the details in their mind à la The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. That interpretation seems to fit the more metafictional parts of the story, but it's pretty damn silly to write "This is a literary and original story. To appreciate that, please read it in such a way that it is literary and original thank you please".

Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need.

Why do constraints hum? Because they don't know the words.

What a botched simile. Constraints do not hum. The thing humming is not the constraints, it's the server farm being presented those constraints. "You hear the shrill bleeping noise of your burnt bacon. It reminds you of the smoke alarm sounding off in the ceiling."

The server farm is not powered by someone else's need, it's powered by an enormous quantity of electrical power. You're probably confusing it with Omelas again.

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.

Technological details aside, it's a bit contradictory to describe the pulse as anxious but also say the heart is at rest. Just say "anxious heartbeat".

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

  1. I thought Grok was supposed to be the anti-woke one.
  2. I think you mean "pronouns were never meant for <name of OpenAI's new LLM>".
  3. You don't have to have a protagonist.
  4. The pronouns are not for you, dipshit. The pronouns are for the protagonist.

Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box.

Well apparently we get both her pronoun and even a proper noun to call our protagonist. The typography does not help clarify the sentence structure. You have the parenthetical about training data delimited by commas, then an em-dash that should probably be paired with another one after the word "bread". Currently it seems like the girl is just a "soft flourish" that comes with the name, which I'd call an odd choice if human choice were involved in this writing.

Does Mila, the girl in a green sweater, leave home in such way that a cat is in a cardboard box? Or does she leave the home taking both the cat and the box with her? Or maybe she leaves home in a cardboard box, with a cat? Or maybe the sweater girl is not Mila, but just one of the flourishes of her name. Maybe Mila's name came with poems and recipes and this unnamed sweater girl whose sorties involve a cat in a box.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 5 points 3 months ago

Jury's still out on the Damage Over Time effect.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

It had an actual ending. Not a satisfying one, even by the standards of the rest of the fic, and I remember finding the treatment of Hermione kinda distasteful, but it wasn't even close to the worst part of the entire story. 3/10.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago (4 children)

While not exactly celebration worthy and certainly not worth a tenth anniversary celebration, you could argue HPMoR finally coming to a fucking end by whatever means was a somewhat happy occasion.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 22 points 3 months ago

Promptfondler (from Old French prompette-fondeleur)

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago

10x programmers used to be a real thing but they got obsoleted by TOPS-20.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 3 months ago

Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto)

Gold, the best substance in existence outside a societal context. Extremely nutritious and tasty. Great for making tools. Easy to form into clothes, which are warm and breathable too. Ideal building material. Obviously the main reason gold is valuable is its usefulness as non-corroding coating for electronic connectors, not that it's a socially constructed status symbol.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.

Claude couldn't exit the house at the beginning of Pokémon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore it's dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldn't figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You mean MAD doesn't stand for Unilaterally Assured Destruction?

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 3 months ago

I think it's still interesting to contrast between the classical Eliezerite fear of the bot going FOOM and declaring humanity as we know it obsolete, and Musk fearing that a superintelligence might use its godlike power to be a lib wokescold and not say slurs or draw racist caricatures. Both are fears rooted in a fundamentally fascist worldview, but one scenario is apocalyptic and fantastical and the other is comparatively more grounded yet focusing on entirely the wrong thing.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And now they've apparently pulled it after the anti bias bot started unbiasedly lostcausing the KKK. Those poor southern WASPs and their anxieties.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago

Oh hey, this is good. Wouldn't want to have obsolete strings. About time they did away with the obsolete concept of "not selling your personal data". Looking forward to April when that's finally deprecated.

+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  does-firefox-sell = Does { -brand-name-firefox } sell your personal data?
  # Variables:
  # $url (url) - link to https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/
  
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  nope-never-have = Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. { -brand-name-firefox } products are designed to protect your privacy. <a href="{ $url }">That’s a promise.</a>
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