Superman fought Nazis and the KKK.

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I guess, but they never come right out and say that.

The story behind the blink tag is so ridiculous.

At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. … Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.

I see a lot of white dots in the sky.

Those are called “stars”.

OnlyFans isn’t charity.

I wasn’t aware that was a book, and it’s apparently a Lawrence Krauss book, not a Richard Dawkins book. If I read it, maybe I’ll find out that Dawkins is now a right-wing Christian, but somehow I doubt it.

“Considering the conversation between Alice and Bob on page 73—”

“Um, sorry, that’s incorrect, it’s a ‘representation of a conversation’, not a ‘conversation’.”

I know this phrase gets used a lot, but you must be fun at parties.

I mean, the plot follows the Campbellian “Hero with 1000 faces” storyline to a T.

That’s a pretty funny thing to say since the whole point of The Hero with a Thousand Faces is that all these hero stories have elements in common. Lucas was just explicitly using that book as a source.

What’s far more obvious is a big chunk of A New Hope was cribbed from EE “Doc” Smith’s book Triplanetary (where the Darth Vader character is named “Roger”…which is far less impressive). I’ve heard that Kurosawa’s movie The Hidden Fortress has a lot of the same plot, too.

That’s why I was already shaking my head when I read “Please explain number 2.” Dude, war is political.

Lucas isn’t great at naming stuff, though.

You don’t need tone for sarcasm, because it can be inferred from context. Check out British (“dry”) sarcasm.

Announcing your sarcasm is like explaining your joke. If you need to do it, you’ve failed, and it falls flat. At that point, it’s better to just not be sarcastic in the first place.

I mean, the entire video is covering his right wing grift book.

Which book is that?

I guess 58 minutes in would be a place to start if you really are opposed to the whole thing.

Yes, I’m opposed to watching 4 fucking hours of “here are the gripes I have with Richard Dawkins”. I have better things to do.

What structure does it have?

If there are two people talking in a fictional book, are they having a conversation, even though the two people don’t actually exist?

LOL. That video is over 4 hours! Could you just timestamp the relevant part?

It isn’t just a matter of gullibility. People with mental illnesses have wound up with full-on delusions and some have even killed themselves after a chatbot convinced them to.

And yet, “having agency” is how they are advertised. That’s what the term “agentic” means. AI instances are called “agents”! That’s part of the marketing.

It’s easy to handwave this away as “people are stupid”, and there’s certainly some truth to that, but the reason why people believe that LLMs are agents is because tech bros have spent a lot of money to get them to believe that. That’s also why they spread the myth that LLMs are potentially dangerous because they could become conscious and kill all of us. It helps to spread the myth of LLM agency. Of course they can’t become conscious, because that isn’t how things work. If LLMs are killing people, it’s because somebody put an LLM in front of the kill switch and they wanted to have plausible deniability. That is perhaps the most pernicious thing about LLMs: people using them to avoid responsibility. “It isn’t my fault! The bot did it!”

Oy vey, memes? No, that was terrible, too! Zero predictive value, and nobody can even define what a meme is. That’s why I’m glad that it got adopted as a term for in-jokes propagated through the Internet. The original term was just pseudoscientific nonsense. The analysis that got me onto this track was from Ward’s Wiki:

Memes are described as elements of culture, but culture is nothing but a broad generalization of large numbers of individuals. So it seems memes are to be treated as Platonic ideals, the essence within expressions that merely constitute their vehicles. No such essence is empirically accessible.

If you really want to rage, there’s a subreddit called r/myboyfriendisai, which was somehow even worse than what I was expecting. I can’t fathom how self-absorbed you have to be to get AI to simulate a love interest for you. There are some pretty absurd lengths that they go to do this, too.

The structure is a conversation even when who you’re talking to isn’t sapient.