jimmycrackcrack

Yeh I think people like this idea because of a kind of ironic poetic justice since it's those guys who wanted to replace everyone else except themselves with AI, but if you think about how much you hated those uncaring bastards operating like robots just to extract an ounce of profit at whatever the human cost, imagine now actually being a robot. Also, if you ever had to deal with bullshit from those guys and resented having to grin and bear it even though you don't think they're particularly qualified and also know nothing about your job, imagine having to be "managed" by a fucking robot that tries to say patronising encouraging things because it's learned the very best pattern of speech to get the behaviour it wants out of you. Admittedly at least some of the decision making might be a bit more rational, but then every now and then AI gets things totally out of wack in the strangest ways and you'll have to just take those decisions, from a damn machine.

It's also good since it's low stakes. I mean I'd be furious if misidentified after I paid to use the game and but at the end of the day it's only a game.

Did you guys ghost one another or just lose contact? Because I think those are different.

The problem with answering that, is that there's no set standard for the appropriate amount of apathy so really however much there is, that's how much there should be and not too little or too much, that's just how apathetic humans are and there's nothing to compare against for judging appropriate levels. Why are we as apathetic as we are? In my opinion it's pretty similar to why climate change is so difficult to address, which makes sense as apathy is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to addressing it. In general, it's more difficult to energise, co-ordinate and sustain collective human effort on a large scale for issues that don't seem immediate, tangible, easily attributable, physically visible and where the solution and action to be taken isn't simple to understand, or the improvement simple to observe and also reasonably short term (or at least promises to be). Long term, society wide projects usually require more than just an appeal to better nature. People caring, people wanting to help each other, people wanting fairness or kindness or just treatment, as innate desires does work to motivate, but I think tends to work on mostly on the smaller scale, when it's for small in-groups, preferably people we've actually met and with immediate social pressures to reinforce these pro-social desires.

Human beings are capable of complex, difficult, awe-inspiring projects for "good" or "bad" but those tend to involve more diffuse motivations and more immediate rewards/incentives where those motivations are their most removed from the original instigators. Some few people involved might be motivated by altruism or something esoteric like an interest in science or a religious belief, but if their goals involve the masses it's usually going to mean filtering their motivation down through stakeholders, to careerists, money makers and then on down to people looking for subsistence and in many cases down to people who are enslaved and don't want to be killed or harmed and so work.

To top all that off there's the more obvious problem of the difficulty in keeping more and more people in bigger and bigger projects all on the same page about what to do, how to do it, or if we even want to do it. If the important issue you're thinking of is for example inequality, it's going to be very hard to get agreement on what that actually is, if that's even a good or bad thing, how we should deal with it or even if we should deal with it and many of the people in this debate will probably be passionate in their position. Complex "important" issues also tend to involve beneficiaries who would somewhat understandably not want to work against their own interests and so shape their environment to the best of their ability such that the easier thing to do is tolerate the issue making the near impossible mountain of getting human beings together for the greater good harder still by design. This theory maybe has some flaws, depending on how you frame the important issue. If for example the important issue were crime, you could argue that for the most part for most people it's fairly easy to get them not to just murder strangers on a whim or for some petty gain, even racists probably walk through an average day surrounded by people of many ethnicities and cultures but don't generally (with notable exceptions) need to be convinced or induced not to physically harm everyone they walk past and this tends to hold true on a larger scale not just the in-groups as I described, but as a rule of thumb, in my view I think this is basically how we operate. How much we care, how much we can muster courage, how much personal risk or resources or energy we can spare for manifesting ideals is usually proportional to the degree of direct impact they have upon us personally, how close we are to the people affected by an issue and how easy it is to identify and rectify the issue and also how long it will take and how often you'll have to act. I think you could probably draw direct, inversely proportional lines on a scale of how much apathy is shown and a declining slope on any of those measures. I suspect this is from our nature and biological origins, but this is not an assertion I can back up rigorously.

Finally, depending on the issue, sometimes it really is rationally better to tolerate an issue where all the solutions are bad and could make things worse. Tends to be difficult to reach consensus on when we're in such a situation.

Well if we're here seeing the post and responding...guess

That was interesting, it was quite a bit more boring than I expected, I know that sounds glib and immature but it's just when I hear about figures like that whipping people in to a frenzy I kind of assumed there'd be a bit more emotional appeal and a lot more peaks and valleys to the emotional affect. There's definitely times where I see it working, at the very beginning of the clip shortly after the original audio sample it seemed compelling, it's a bit more theory dense than I'd have expected but I guess I tend to forget that that was what he was selling, not just the warmongering he's famous for in English speaking countries.

I think this offered a bit of a window in to what it must have been like, but unfortunately the AI seemed to suffer a bit as time went on, especially accent wise. He started out sounding like a particular variety of English, as in from England in the UK, but with an oddly Australian lilt then briefly dipped in to just Australian without the English then a very long section of being an American which also corresponded to a change in the vocal quality to being more hoarse and broken. I don't know a lot about AI tools but I would wager this might have had to do with limited training data, maybe only that speech itself was used, in fact given the pretty short section at the beginning that said "original audio sample", maybe just that snippet was used to extrapolate the rest of the AI rendition of the rest of the transcribed and translated speech. That would explain why it seems so emotionally homogeneous throughout which probably lessens the charisma that's supposed to have been so famous. Judging by his physicality in that original sample I get the impression that even within the context of raving anger and self righteousness that in reality he imbued his speeches with more variety of tone than we're getting here. It feels like the AI had to do the best it could over a pretty long and dense text of the speech from an audio sample smaller than the resulting output, that might explain the meandering accent too. Also worthy of mention is the part where there's a particularly hard to parse and pretty long sentence that bafflingly leads directly in to a verbatim repetition of that exact same sentence, which definitely sounds like a glitch, I feel possibly like the confusingness of the sentence itself might perhaps be a translation issue as well.

An interesting aspect to me is how the tone and style of the speech, especially in the early section before things start going off the rails feel really reminiscent of an Australian politician called Malcolm Roberts and lo and behold if Hitler had to pick favourites from Australia's current political landscape, I think he'd be making his top ten.

I had one once, here in Australia, in a house my family lived in for a few years. It was novelty as I'd never seen one before or since.I seem to recall thinking it was very useful but for some reason, even though there's really no chance of it happening, I always had like intrusive thoughts of sticking my fingers in there. Also my grandpa stayed with us for a little while and he kept throwing nectarine cores in there which it really couldn't handle even though we asked him not to. It also used to make a deafening noise like the awakening of Cthulhu at rhe best of times, hearing it sound like it was about to spectacularly break was really distressing. I don't know how legal it was to have that thing, they just don't seem to exist here in Australia so it was very odd that this place had it.

I'm from Australia, I haven't seen them for a long time but around the mid 2000s to early 2010s we had products that were like set-top boxes that were variously referred to as PVRs (personal video recorder) and DVRs (digital video recorder). They had digital TV tuners in them and hard drives and would prebuffer paused TV up to a set amount of time allowing you to skip through ads and pause a show as you describe and they usually had more than one TV tuner in them so you could go through the Electronic Program Guide menu and set it to record another show while you watched or recorded a different one. My parents had one and it was great. I guess growing up with Free to Air TV, the novelty and unusualness of consuming media this way and not having to miss the show to get up for tea or not having to suffer the ads and just hitting fast forward still resonates with me even though now the idea of having to watch stuff on a schedule is becoming a weird and alien limitation that shouldn't be there in the first place. Ironically though now you'd have a tougher time evading the ads in some contexts despite watching almost whatever you want whenever you want.

DVRs are great. I don't think they're really a thing much anymore, I guess because of the declining popularity of FTA TV. Is this a feature that's built in to your TV or is it a separate DVR? How long have you had it?

In circa 2001 we were supposed to visit the website for channel 10, the broadcaster as part of an assignment. I can't actually remember what the assignment was that involved going to this commercial broadcaster's website but I think it was supposed to help learn internet research skills. They took us all up to the library so we could use their computers.

This took place in Australia. Everyone assumed the website was www.ten.com, but at the time it was www.ten.com.au. Also at that time, www.ten.com was a porn site. Godamn that was funny. Cracked me up hearing the librarians hurriedly telling everyone in the rows of computers not to visit that site so of course the few people who typed the correct site to begin with or found it through Google immediately went to www.ten.com to check it out because now if anyone saw them they could just claim to have gotten there via the same honest mistake as everyone else.

The cost of this and thousands of other pointless assessments by qualified medical professionals probably costs more than people receive in benefits in the first place let alone the cost of a handful of cases of actual fraud.