krapp

Careful, it's against the guidelines to be a cranky geek now.

I can't control how the future judges me, if at all, and I won't let fear of that affect my own morality.

But I don't own other humans as property, so at least I have that going for me.

I've lived long enough to see a distinct shift in what people consider moral and immoral.

And yet you have no issues making moral judgements yourself, as you so often do in political threads. You seem to believe in the absolute moral good of the US and free market capitalism, and the absolute moral evil of socialism and leftism, but you just can't bring yourself to say the founding fathers were immoral for owning slaves. Why? Because maybe in the future slavery might come back and someone might say "That Walter Bright guy didn't even believe in slavery that shmuck, we should tear down his statues forthwith?" Is that really how you think?

I'll leave you with the last word, since you're starting to go in circles. Good night.

Who told what to me?

If you're trying to claim that subjectivity doesn't exist in linguistics I suggest you pick up a book or talk to an actual human. Consult a dictionary. I don't know how to fix whatever you have.

You say that people should be judged by the morality of their times, yet as has been pointed out to you, these men were judged by the morality of their times, and condemned by many for their participation in slavery.

Also, if we must judge by the morality of the times, we must also view abolishing the nobility and separating church from state to be immoral and unchristian. You seem to want to avoid a "modern moral framework" when it would tarnish the reputation of a founding father, but embrace it otherwise. You're not advocating slavery, but you don't want to judge slaveowners harshly.

It's perfectly fine to acknowledge the good that people do, while also acknowledging the evil. Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington all held slaves, and they were all evil for doing so. If we judged past people by our modern standards, they would all be condemned, and if we believe at all in some form of moral progress (which you must, since you bring up American freedom and the establishment of a secular republic as virtues) then we can condemn them all for some things.

Charitably I would assume "historically accurate" refers to things like sets, clothing, etc - even with the inclusion of supernatural elements, an attempt to portray the Odyssey as something Greeks of the time might imagine while seeing the play performed.

It's funny because AI is trained on public data, much of which is based on stereotypes and media which is very historically inaccurate, and all of the attempts I've seen at "history with AI" look right to the layman but fall apart as soon as a historian sees them. Greek myth is particularly bad because it often has to be reframed around recognizable Judeo-Christian morality (Hades being a Satan analogue being one obvious example) and modern anachronisms to be palatable to modern audiences.

The concept is intellectually interesting because it would play with the idea that "the past is a foreign country," but it's exactly the sort of thing you wouldn't want to do with an AI at all.

... that said we all know "historically accurate" more often than not means "no black people," since Musk has literally called Nolan an "anti-white racist" for casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy. Even though the presence of black Africans within the ancient Greek world would have been perfectly historically accurate, and it's a myth with monsters and gods and bullshit.

So what? That doesn't affect the morality of slavery one bit. Subjective and relative moral questions do exist, but slavery isn't one of them.

Likewise, Ben Franklin being a founding father doesn't somehow balance the scales in that regard. The existence of the United States doesn't retroactively make slavery ok.

Slavery was immoral during Franklin's time too, Walter. Many, many people of the time understood this. Even Franklin himself, hypocrite though he was, came around to it.

No it isn't. Again, this is just how language works, the meaning of a word is what people decide it is. And if people have been using a word a certain way for several centuries, then that's how it's used. End of story.

That isn't misuse, it's how language works. "literally" has been used to mean "figuratively" since at least the 1700s. Insistence to the contrary is a modern prescriptivist meme.

https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439

Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs.

For the backend, sure. But HTML is HTML. HTML doesn't have "vulnerabilities" (unless you want to count javascript, which can be updated without changing the HTML) and doesn't have "maintenance costs." Nothing about updating the site for vulnerabilities requires changing the actual layout of the site.

99.9% of Western vtubers do exactly what streamers do, including being charismatic and entertaining, just behind a computer generated avatar. The "lore" and design of their avatar is mostly just aesthetics, a bit of branding and a means of self expression. Japanese vtubers take the kayfabe more seriously but that's because their personas are essentially corporate generated identities and that's their job - but even then their actual personalities inevitably leak out, and their talents become a part of the character.

Regarding the Zizians, I recommend the Behind the Bastards series on them and the rationalist community. People involved with the rationalists will want to distance themselves from it of course, but the series makes a decent argument that the Zizians were simply the result of taking the ideology to its rational conclusion, that there is a definite throughline from one to the other in terms of philosophy and ideals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w

An HTML document is also an interactive application - that's what hyperlinks and forms are. The script tag has been a part of HTML since the late 90s, the original intent was that it supported multiple scripting languages. The distinction between "app" and "document" is a modern ideological quirk, few sites are strictly one or the other.

I have to push against this slightly.

HTML is human-readable and writer friendly. Humans - not even all of them CS students - were reading HTML,JS and CSS on websites and writing it all by hand in text editors for years before the "proper tooling" came along. It really isn't that difficult, especially if you're just dealing with simple websites, doubly so if you're on HN, you probably work with more complex languages on a regular basis.

If you really want to "learn and own a process" and be "100% independent" you should at least be able to understand and work with web languages natively.

Static site generators are nice (I use Nikola) and tools make things easier but but it's still dependency on third party tools if you don't understand or can't otherwise work with the output.

It's a really unfair stereotype to apply to those you're disagreeing with, and I see you do it repeatedly here; characterizing those you disagree with, or the HN community in general, with terms like anti-humanity and anti-human.

I searched my comments, because that doesn't seem like something I would do. It seems I've only used the term "anti-human" twice since I've been here, two years ago in reference to utopianism (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41561281) and three years ago in reference to LLMs and copyright (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195596) and I've never used the term "anti-humanity" at all.

Yes I know there's a transhumanist element and an elitist element in Silicon Valley and among AI zealots. But it's not true of everyone or even many people who have big hopes for AI, and it's not a dominant sentiment on HN, or within YC.

I was answering a specific person about their specific attitude and their specific comments.

Fair game if you want to mod me over that comment, I'll admit I might have gone overboard but It doesn't seem as if you bothered to understand the context of what's actually being said at all here. I'm going to be charitable and assume there wasn't an AI moderator involved, I know you're working on that, if so it might need a bit more debugging.

Most people I see being hopeful about AI are hopeful that it can make things better for humans – better jobs (more pleasant and better paying in real terms), better health/medicine that's more accessible to all, etc.

Again, I wasn't talking to or about most people.

But, continuing to name or characterize your debating opponents, or the HN/YC/tech community in general as "anti-human" is unfair, inaccurate and only serves to poison discussions here.

I have. Literally. Never. Used. That. Term. About. A. Person. If you're going to criticize me, do it for things I've actually done. I show my ass all the time here, you don't need to make shit up.

But comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946901 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928607 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48924340 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337858 are no better. Reducing music to nothing more than a means to stimulate endorphines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48722569) and declaring AI better than 99% of human effort (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302356) and wishing all critics could be branded with a scarlet letter and eliminated from the timeline (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340190), the sheer glee with which they describe the future in which AI puts everyone out of work and the contempt towards anyone who values human effort does read as at least a bit "anti-human" to me.

There. I actually said the thing. Now you can be honest.

But fine. I shouldn't have added fuel to the fire. I'm clearly experiencing the same frustration echelon is, just from a different direction. HN has been incredibly frustrating of late.

@echelon - that comment of mine that you posted was absolutely tame and reasoned compared to some of the stuff you've been posting lately. And it was correct. And I didn't call anyone names. And you clearly agree with my sentiment where AI is concerned. And HN is never going to be what you (or I) want it to be. And I will apologize for my tone and I will dial it back but I think you need do do the same. You need to recognize that people can and do have legitimate criticisms about AI and that the reason you get flagged isn't because of "witchhunts" but because you go on a tilt reading the slightest bit of anti-AI sentiment. If I deserve to be flagged then you do too.

I clearly need to take a break from this place, touch some grass, something.

Sure, boot out the fascists if you feel that is keeping you un-clean. But in so doing, you will establish your own totalitarian-authoritarian personality. The key is not to resist - it is futile - but rather, instead, replace. The solution to any totalitarian order is simply to build another one, right on top.

Oh, that's what's happening here. The only real fascists are the people opposed to fascism. OK.

My bad, I didn't see the game. Made the mistake of answering in good faith. Carry on.

Just call them what they are: totalitarian-authoritarian personalities, whose roots lie deep in the desire to be free of the perceived "filth of others".

The word for that is "fascist."

Activists are terrorists if they're leftist, not white, or not Christian.

Otherwise they're patriots.

I feel like people are being purposely obtuse here. OK. If you want to believe that satire and parody only consist of blindly showing things mentioned in the lyrics in order to imply that these AI generated videos are equivalent in art and skill to what Wierd Al does, I won't even try to stop you.

But most people are going to understand the difference between the two and see that argument for the reach that it is.

I respect this in theory, I do like the premise of hosting your own identity in a simple text format. I think Nostr does something similar, and it's definitely a flaw that AT Proto and ActivityPub don't do the same. But in practice it seems so self-selecting that I suspect the only thing anyone talks about in this community is how great emacs and org social are.

Also obligatory HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889354

The Trump administration did bomb Libya.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/24/politics/us-strikes-libya-tru...

I liked Angela Collier's video essay about the Odyssey[0] (ostensibly about casting a Muppet version but more generally about the issues involved with adaptations in general), where she points out that modern audiences want the Odyssey to be a romance but that just isn't how ancient Greek culture worked. Odysseus and Penelope are nobles, their relationship isn't based on romance or love, it's transactional, it's about the business of entitlement and Penelope is the currency.

Of course this is an issue with adapting all ancient myths - dealing with the cultural dissonance. Odysseus, our hero, on returning home, has his female slaves killed because they were defiled by his suitors, when their bodies were his by right. This is treated as as a virtue, part of Odysseus reestablishing his rightful authority. A modern retelling could explore that dissonance a bit, with the cruel caprice of both gods and kings, and be interesting, but not popular.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdh-sn1Ino8

It's Riding Dirty but it it's about a guy who does anything but.

It's a song about how white people find black culture cool but are themselves stereotypically uncool.

It's a song about nerd culture and celebrating that, wherein a white nerd makes the same kinds of boasts that black rappers do in their music, but about nerd stuff.

It's layered, as any good parody has to be, with cultural references. When Al mows the lawn, he isn't just mowing the lawn because the lyrics say he's mowing the lawn, he's mowing the lawn because that's a sterotype of white people, and the intent is to show how uncool Al is and how unlikely he is to fit into the culture he aspires to. Note that when Key and Peele show up they lock the door on their convertible. This is a joke because their convertible is down and locking it while literally useless is an expression of their frustration with Al's nerdiness, it's also something white people stereotypically do around black people. The candles behind him are arranged like a Pac-Man. Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?

In "Amish Paradise" there's a part where Al sweats profusely. This is both a reference to the hard physical labor employed by the Amish and to the original Gangster's Paradise video.

The levels you're missing are irony, cultural awareness and genre awareness. The context is what makes the humor work.

Most of the "professional" AI generated content I've seen isn't much better than this. It all lacks in the same dimensions, it's all the same sort of mediocre and uncanny. Claiming "it's a tech demo, actually quality doesn't matter" isn't going to cut it when this technology is already replacing actual human professional work.

Besides, several people in this thread have already decided that these tech demos are better than human created music videos. In fact, many AI "artists" already claim generative AI has surpassed humans in every relevant metric and they judge it on the same merits as I do just coming to the opposite conclusion. They certainly aren't waiting until it's "good" to call it art.

So it's entirely valid to point out that this technology is actually bad at doing the thing it's supposed to do.

No one is criticizing the photorealistic video generation. Yes, AI has gotten very good at that, I don't think anyone is disputing that.

At some point you have to move past your astonishment at the technical achievement alone and judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it. Especially when the goal of using generative AI is to remove as many human creators and as much human effort from the creative process as possible, and to have as much "art" be as fully AI generated as possible.

People are criticizing these videos because they aren't good. As "art." Which is a problem if this is what all art is supposed to be become.

Someone must not have told Iran that Trump is the great peace president who ended all wars, united the Middle East and brought about world peace. They really need to get with the program or we'll have to win the war a few more times.

Wierd Al videos are a parody of an existing property. "White and Nerdy" is a parody of "Riding Dirty" by Chamillionaire, but the lyrics are about nerd stereotypes (as an intentional contrast with black culture as presented in the original,) and a great deal of creative effort is put into making those lyrics humorous while also fitting to the original theme. Nothing about Wierd Al's videos are "totally literal," certainly not in the sense of these AI videos, which are "literal" in the sense of "literally showing what the lyrics are describing."

We entered a war in Iran in February.

Few if any of the people playing D&D actually thought they were elf wizards, or that they were doing magic, or communing with eldritch gods.

Meanwhile many if not most of the people who have chatbots as their significant other actually have that relationship, and believe it to be as real as a relationship with a human being.

The former are playing a game for entertainment, and suspending their disbelief, the latter are using a machine to satisfy emotional and psychological needs in ways that anyone would consider harmful, and having their beliefs altered by proprietary commercial software sometimes past the point of psychosis.

As far as I know, it's contested whether Homer even existed as an individual at all. "Homer" might be a collective title for various unknown authors.