Curious Human of Earth, Zero Patience for Idiots, Heretic, Misanthrope, Selcouthist, Enigmatologist
The Matrix
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Anyone calling for an AI pause or slowdown:
- Does not understand game theory
- Does not understand incentives
- Does not understand economics
- Does not understand systems
- Has *definitely* imbibed WAY too much dystopian sci-fi and/or MSM twaddle
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Sam McRoberts retweeted
AI Haters in GameDev:
1) Students conned into debt for 'game design school' who think they are an Indie darling
2) Industry pros inexperienced with AI, but want to sound relevant and gate keep
3) Those whose quality of work has already been surpassed and they can't admit it
4) Clueless NPC's who have been told to hate AI
I have absolute sympathy for (3).
(1) and (4) seem to overlap lots.
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Sam McRoberts retweeted
As a person who has made professional art for over 30 years, let me tell you some hilarious shit.
- I remember when artists freaked the fuck out when photoshop and digitizers came out. Digital art was going to ruin jobs for artists. (It didnt)
- I was there when artists freaked the fuck out when video games made the transition from 2D games to 3D games because making 3D art, was going to ruin "art" in video games and making 3D art wasn't "real" art. (It didnt ruin art and it is real art) **Literally knew people personally that quit making games because they hated the transition to 3D.
The thing with "real" artists, is that artists adapt and make art, regardless of the medium and typically don't give two flying shits about what "other" artists are doing because you should be busy just being you and creating what your heart tells you.
Be it on Canvas
Digital 2D/3D
Side of a building
Macaroni Art
Sculpting
Music
Dance
Sports
... or whatever the NEW thing is that comes along every couple of years or so.
If you create - you are an artist. Period.
You do you, whatever that is and let your soul be happy.
Its nobody else's business what that is. The cool thing about art in any form is that its subjective and if you dont like it - don't participate. There is lots of bad art. Lots of great art and everything inbetween.
Don't like peas, don't eat peas. Easy. No one needs to hear about how much you hate peas. That's your problem.
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Sam McRoberts retweeted
Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross on the last time a moral panic cost the world 50 years of progress — and DB2 on why he's not letting this one repeat it.
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And this is an example of why you shouldn’t be blocking AI from hitting your site. It’ll soon be no different than blocking Google, bad for the biz, bad customer experience, just an all around dumb thing to do. Ahem, looking at you @Cloudflare :/
Costco CFO on AI search volume and intent:
"Traffic to our site from AI search grew triple digits for the second consecutive quarter and continues to show the highest conversion rate of all site traffic"
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This!
I was a freelance artist for 7 years. I was well liked, even highlighted in several communities. I started using AI tools extremely early on, before there was any controversy with them. This led me to developing my own training tools and my own models.
Then it was unilaterally decided that AI is evil, and stealing artists work (an entirely unfounded and unscientific narrative, that only serves to benefit companies like disney and adobe who rely on copyright overreach).
It didn't matter that I was an artist, or that my models were trained by me, with content from me and other approving artists, all that mattered is that I didn't go along with the groupthink.
Artists have always been like this. A cult-like mob, that ruthlessly enforces their narrow scope of acceptable thought via social pressure and blacklisting, while claiming to be open and accepting.
They did it for countless art movements through history, countless technologies, and its extremely evident recently with anyone who worked in web3, or now in AI. Zero regard for how tools were used or what content was produced, or the method and reasoning behind it, just blind hatred driven out of fear and the desire to fit in with the rest of their insane crowd.
Their hatred for you (and that is what it comes down to) is not a result of reasoning or sound logic, it is a purely emotional response fueled by fear and tribalism.
Don't bother trying to make these people content, they are an incredibly loud minority.
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Nah, it’ll be both, not either or.
I am not joking when I say this.
Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over.
AI music is now very, very good. You just don't know yet because all AI music circulating today is from ~2-3 generations ago.
Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.
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Sam McRoberts retweeted
When I stilled worked on biosecurity, I first learned about Debug, a Google project to reduce mosquito populations.
Results from their Singapore pilot are now out.
They crushed mosquito populations, reducing dengue infections by 70% in the process:
There is no good reason for mosquitoes to exist in wealthy countries today.
New technologies can get rid of the mosquito species that cause diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; and others can prevent them from carrying those diseases.
worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…
So why do mosquitoes still exist?
In a new article for Works in Progress, Maya Rosen explains how state incapacity and risk aversion led to over a decade of delays and billions of unnecessary bites in the United States.
Oxitec, for example, engineered an Aedes aegypti mosquito in such a way that its female offspring would die before adulthood. Through sustained releases, they showed they could reduce local mosquito populations by 80% or more, in field trials.
They sought approval from the USDA in 2010, which then passed it to the FDA, which passed it to the EPA. In 2020, the EPA allowed them to conduct limited field trials in the Florida Keys. Two years ago, their experimental permit expired, and they still need another review before it can be used routinely. Their proposed field trial in California was withdrawn after public opposition.
Another company, MosquitoMate, developed a technique involving Wolbachia, which also suppresses local mosquitoes. They then spent over fifteen years working through the system before finally receiving commercial registration nationwide in 2024.
It seems that, sometimes, the barrier to getting rid of diseases isn’t technology at all. It’s policy and political will.
New products shouldn’t get stuck in regulatory review for so long, especially if the delays are about basic questions like which agency has oversight over the product, rather than testing for safety.
Though some of those uncertainties were being addressed, the broader changes haven’t materialized. After Biden’s 2022 executive order, the agencies planned to update how their coordinated framework was implemented. But Trump rescinded the order last year.
Meanwhile, the EPA unit that reviews new mosquito control products is still a small office backlogged in reviewing a wide range of products.
Mosquitoes are a policy choice. We can get rid of them. Will we choose to?
worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…
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My first exposure to the concept of an agentic AI companion with net access that knows you intimately was in the Otherland books by Tad Williams in the mid to late 90s. Great books, and cool that we’re finally getting there!
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With this meme format making the rounds, seems like a good time to resurface a podcast episode I did ~6 years ago on business and life lessons learned from playing video games: blog.thegrandredesign.com/p/…
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Bingo
especially after tomorrow, if you are wondering why every tech company is building the same thing...it's because the personal agent is the final product. the final product that you interact with to get you all future products and services, first in the digital world, and then in the physical world.
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Sam McRoberts retweeted
Some of the greatest biological theories of all time predicted not only the existence of a "thing" -- like an ion channel -- but how *entire* biological mechanisms worked. They did so, in some cases, before any direct experimental evidence supported the ideas.
Two of these theories, the chemiosmotic theory and the clonal selection theory of adaptive immunity, correctly predicted how cells generate energy to power themselves and how the body mounts a defense against pathogens, respectively, before any pre-existing analogs were known.
How did these "great leaps" in imagination come about? In our latest @AsimovPress article, the talented @ulkar_aghayeva tells their story.
Chemiosmotic theory traces back to Peter Mitchell, a British biochemist who formulated his ideas without “a shred of experimental evidence.” Mitchell was directly inspired by the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who wrote about flux and change and directly informed how Mitchell thought about ions moving through a membrane.
The clonal selection theory stems from Niels Jerne, who attributed his great leap in imagination to (oddly enough) the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. In a 1966 paper, Jerne explained how he began thinking about antibody formation, writing:
"Can the truth (the capability to synthesize an antibody) be learned? If so, it must be assumed not to pre-exist; to be learned, it must be acquired. We are thus confronted with the difficulty to which Socrates calls attention in Meno (Socrates, 375 B.C.), namely that it makes as little sense to search for what one does not know as to search for what one knows; what one knows one cannot search for, since one knows it already, and what one does not know one cannot search for, since one does not even know what to search for. Socrates resolved this difficulty by postulating that learning is nothing but recollection. The truth (the capability to synthesize an antibody) cannot be brought in, but was already inherent."
The article is interesting throughout. It's inspiring to study how scientists made their big discoveries, even in the face of *extreme* resistance. (Mitchell, for instance, left academia in 1963 and set up his own research organization to continue his work. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1978, vindicated.)
press.asimov.com/articles/gr…
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This is how it should be!!
In recent years, Idaho has achieved one of the most dramatic state-level reductions in regulation ever.
Instead of assuming old regulations should remain on the books, it made agencies justify the ones they wanted to keep. Since 2019, the state has eliminated roughly half of its regulatory code.
New report by @ManhattanInst
manhattan.institute/article/…
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🤣🤣🤣
OMG! 😂 This is such a hilarious and accurate depiction of the great savior of humanity and our AI overlord Dario Amodei! 🤣
Via @nbcsnl of course.
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I’m stoked to see the new Musk movie by @alexgibneyfilm 😁 Will be great for more people to see Muskrat for who he really is: blog.thegrandredesign.com/p/…
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