- > I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
Exactly my impression. I tell people there is no real news in the United States, only gossip style reporting of information one can do nothing about and has nothing to do with them. If the reporting it political, it's in 4th grade language and a second grade mentality. News in the United States is talking to children.
- I'm creating a college / corporate seminar level class with a 3D animated host and instructor. Each lesson begins with a brief animated intro, which the student then reads their lesson afterwards, and then there is a chatbot that understands that lesson that engages with the student afterwards. The course will have about an hour of 1-2 minute videos in the end, and because they are an animated "professor" it is then possible to create other ethic versions, and other language versions easier than otherwise. And for the curious, that hour of final in-use video will be sourced out of somewhere around 8 hours of final video; these video AIs are fine and dandy for short content, but when working on longer form media the consistency issues grow to Godzilla sized and really become the most consistent issue: trying to keep the likenesses of the characters, and the environment from drifting over time.
- Video AI acceleration is tricky, where many of the currently in use acceleration loras and cache level accelerations have a subtle at first impact on the generated video, which renders these accelerations as poison for video work: the AI's become dumber to the degree they can't follow camera directions, and the character performances suffer, the lip sync becomes a lip flap, and the body motions are reduced in quality, and become repetitive.
Now, I've not tested TurboDiffusion yet, but I am very actively generating AI video, I probably did a half hour of finished video clips yesterday. There is no test for this issue yet, and for the majority it is yet to be realized as an issue.
- Okay, here's the thing: this is creating revenue, this is fascinating literature for a huge class of armchair scientists that want to believe, want to play with these mental toys, and are willing to pay for the ability to fantasize with ideas they are incapable of developing on their own. This is ordinary capitalism, spinning revenues out of sellable stories.
- You mean this? https://youtu.be/5gzvhNquXRs
- This smells a lot like "Script X" - a 90's era collaboration between IBM and Apple, but for end-users.
Back in the early-mid 90’s Apple Computer and IBM and I seem to remember some other tech nonsense peddlers formed a joint venture (I'm not looking this up, all from memory), with a name something like Talagent, forgettable.
But their product was supposedly this uber-duper new non-language that was going to completely take over software development. Named “Script-X” it starts with each programmer defining the language they want to use, the syntax and whatnot of the language itself, and then they work in blissful joy writing code in the style they prefer to write code.
I cannot believe they actually managed to create a joint venture, mount a huge industry PR campaign, and start selling this utter shite without thinking this pure idiocy through…
No two programmers working on the same project could read one another’s code. The developers spent a large amount of time changing their minds’ on the specifics of the “optimal language they wanted”, which caused previous work to be incompatible to the language and that programmer who chose to change their programming mental model. Not a single project using their Script-X shipped, it was a total and complete failure.
I was at Philips Media while this was taking place, and being a little software language author myself, I watched this playout with dismay these participants could be so short sighted.
- It is really too bad that "Slack" (the application) is the antithesis of "Slack" (the SubGenius philosophy):
In the satirical Church of the SubGenius, Slack is the ultimate goal: a state of blissful, lazy freedom from work, responsibility, and societal pressure, achieved by rejecting "Normal" conformity and embracing conspiracy, self-delusion, and "Bulldada" (bullshit) to attain personal liberation, money, and effortless success, with the mustachioed avatar J.R. "Bob" Dobbs as the ultimate guide to this spiritual laziness. Key Aspects of Slack:
Anti-Work/Anti-Conformity: Slack means escaping the "compulsive urges" of modern life, like working, saving money, and trying to be "normal".
Effortless Achievement: It's the ability to get what you want (wealth, status, love) without effort, often through bizarre, pseudo-occult means or by exploiting the system.
Conspiracy & Weirdness: Slack is tied to uncovering hidden truths (aliens, conspiracies) and embracing abnormality, separating believers from the "Normals".
J.R. "Bob" Dobbs: The iconic, pipe-smoking, suited figure is the living embodiment of Slack, a shortcut to financial heaven and a life of ease.
"Hour of Slack": This is the name of the SubGenius radio show, broadcasting their anti-establishment message and teachings on achieving Slack.
How to Get Slack (According to the Church): * Join the Church of the SubGenius and pledge allegiance to Bob. * Use "Bulldada" (bullshit) and "Morealism" (more bullshit) to overcome problems. * Learn "occult technology" and incantations for financial power. * Reject mainstream pressures and embrace your inner weirdness.
Essentially, Slack is a satirical take on the American dream, promising ultimate success and happiness through utter laziness and rebellion against the very systems that create the need for such a shortcut.
...and it being "the season" - if you live in any city larger than 30K, look for an announcement of the "drunken Santa pub crawl". That is a global annual event the SubGenius put on every year, where mobs people in Santa outfits swarm bars for a 24 hour period, often over a hundred Santas.
- 20% to 25% of the cowboys were Black, and that aspect of history has been erased. Hollywood, propagandists and media's efforts to glorify, White wash, and profit off the American West Frontier has 100% distorted our history. It was much closer to this "the past was not cute", and then add in rampant corruption, criminal and religious criminal activity and you art starting to get there.
We are a propaganda nation, far better at it than any other on Earth.
- People don't learn history, and I'm not talking about the wars and battles BS that they use to glorify going to war. I mean real history: biographies of the lives of real and ordinary people. Not the history makers, the people that lived through and had the mind to record their lives for prosperity.
Case in point, this notion that the past as "more real" and the present "more fake"... the amount of fake doctors, fake medicine, religious revivals that were actually fleecing entire towns into destitution was out of control. The "wild west" it truly was, and the law was owning a gun because everyone was desperate.
- Nowhere do I claim that such a "golden past" existed. I am saying that the critical skill of communication to convey information, to gain information, to learn via one-to-one communications is rapidly being lost. It is not respected by education, it is not taught, and it is truly one of humanity's greatest skills: conveying understanding. Which has the side benefit of teaching one one how to identify illogical speech.
- Somewhere, I am not the historian to say, teaching people the basics of an education, that being “reading, writing and arithmetic”, failed to recognize the critical role that communications play in everything people do, and try to do. That phrase ought to be “reading, writing, arithmetic, and conveying understanding” because that would include why one reads and why one writes, and connects that to the goal of conveying an understanding you have to others. However, this is the root issue.
General society being generally poor communicators is caused by this lapse in our understanding of education. The understanding that the purpose of an education is to both use it and to help others understand what you may and they do not, as well as understand how to gain understanding from others that they have and you do not.
Because we do not teach that an education is really learning how to understand and how to convey understanding in others, the general idea of an education is to be an owner of a specialized skill set, which one sells to the highest bidder.
This has caused education to be replaced by rote memorization. Which in turn created a population that is only comfortable with direct question and answer interactions, not exploratory debate for shared understanding. This set the stage for educators, nationwide, to teach students to be databases and not critically analyzing understanders of their vocations.
Note that the skills for conveying understanding in others, additionally carries the skill how to recognize fraudulent speech. Which, as of Dec 2025, is the critical skill the general population does not have that is potentially the death of the United States.
When a population of people do not have an emphasis on critical analysis, but rote memorization, as the basis of their education that then creates a population that has heightened sensitivity to controversial lines of reasoning, lines of reasoning where there are no clear answers. Life itself has a large series of mysteries based on faith, religion being chief, which in a population that is comfortable with debate to convey understanding is perfectly safe to engage in discussions about mysteries within these areas requiring faith. But a society that is not comfortable with such discussions, one that thinks debate’s purpose is to "win, at all costs" then such discussions are taboo. They get shut down immediately. When people cannot debate to understand, but as a combat, learning is not accomplished. And useful critical analysis skills are not taught.
I have no idea if such a national situation can be manufactured, but I believe this is where we are at as a nation. We no longer produce enough adults with developed critical analysis skills to support democracy. Democracy depends upon an educated population with active critical analysis capabilities, a population that can debate to a shared understanding and accomplish shared goals. That foundational population is not there.
This can be fixed, but it may take more than a generation. Our educational system needs foundational revisions, which include additional core subjects, chief of which being how to communicate and convey understanding in others. Which lies at the roots of our demise, this lack of this basic skill.
- It's all about prestige, which in my opinion is the #1 driver of human motivation.
- I have an ongoing and endless debate with a PhD that insists consensus of multiple LLMs is a valid proof check. The guy is a neuroscientist, not at all a developer tech head, and is just stubborn, continually projecting a sentient being perspective on his LLM usage.
- My wife, as a teen, had the job of being Vince Guaraldi's chaperone / guide for a series of concerts during the 70's. She's got great stories of hanging out and partying with his people.
- You have forgotten your child mind, Peanuts speaks fluently in the mentality of 7 year olds. It resonates childhood logic and contradiction. It's a masterwork of literature, as that child mindframe would not survive written as traditional prose, but is perfectly suited to a 4 panel comic strip.
- I've pitched to VCs a lot, and you touch upon a key aspect: they really lack imagination, and are extremely prone to group think. These days, I tend to think of VCs - the people - as frat boy bullies that never grew up.
- The scheduled hype cycles have AI+genetics turning each form of life into a programmable platform after robotics.
- Oh, they've got drugs there, don't worry about that...
- Me too, 6 schools by 7th grade, with 3 city moves. I unfortunately had a stutter, which made forming friendships harder, I basically gravitated to the outcasts. And I read a shit ton; by the end of 4th grade I was finishing the entire classic section of the high school library. Reading way over my head, I joined an adult book club and had my first introductions to serious intellectual debates; which really put a distance between my same age peers and my interests. My stutter did not really get under control until my mid 20's.
We are not given any factual and material information on business activities in the nation, which is what the nation is actually doing. Who (as in companies) are gaining, are losing, and how is this economic conflict manifesting for their consumers and employees? None of that reporting is performed, the population is too shallow minded to even understand the discussion. Where are the local economics news that graduates to county, state and region with actionable numbers and not pointless no-ground reporting like "the stock market has trading volume of x trillions" <- useless information.
We get sports and entertainment news, which is not news, not really, not at all.