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We remain alive also in a dead internet
- lysace 11mo agoIs it bad that I ended up just using chatgpt to summarize that text? Is it possible that this is to a large degree utterly pointless textual wankery?
- goopypoop 11mo agoless so than this
- kjkjadksj 11mo ago> Is it bad that I ended up just using chatgpt to summarize that text? This is called functional illiteracy.
- Cheer2171 11mo agoI mean, did you not read the "If you desire the comfort of neat conclusions, you are lost in this space. Here, we indulge in the unsettling, the excessive, the paradoxes that define our existence." disclaimer?
- adamwong246 11mo ago1) yes 2) no
- add-sub-mul-div 11mo agoBefore ChatGPT you might have been able to read and answer questions about a text yourself.
- anigbrowl 11mo agoYes. Also yes, but imho it isn't. Zizek is verbose because he aims to be precise. Sometimes his long-winded sentences generate a reaction of 'so what, everyone knows that' but ime he's often trying to point out something that 'everyone knows' but few have fully thought through.
- gjsman-1000 11mo agoI’ve learned that whenever someone uses tons of big words in long paragraphs, especially if they have a credential next to their name, it’s ridiculously easy for them to BS you.
- kjkjadksj 11mo agoThese paragraphs aren't even long...
- dudu24 11mo agoThis is a non-response.
- keyshapegeo99 11mo agoDisagree, it's making a valid observation. If someone is nominally trying to convince you of a point, but they shroud this point within a thicket of postmodern verbiage* that is so dense that most people could never even identify any kind of meaning, you should reasonably begin to question whether imparting any point at all is actually the goal here. *Zizek would resist being cleanly described as a postmodernist - but when it comes to his communication style, his works are pretty much indistinguishable from Sokal affair-grade bullshit. He's usually just pandering to a slightly different crowd. (Or his own navel.)
- Lammy 11mo agoIs this the future you want? :p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCIo4MCO-_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCIo4MCO-_U
- iaabtpbtpnn 11mo agoThe man is a Continental academic philosopher using jargon that is specific to his field. It is not BS, he is simply discussing topics that are unfamiliar to you. The same could be said of a technical reference manual. Not all ideas fit in a tweet.
- Animats 11mo ago
- ArcHound 11mo agoI didn't have Žižek on substack and HN on my bingo card.. As always, there are good bits connected with mediocre glue. The point about automating the unpleasant parts of activity and losing the very point of the exercise (automatic dildo and automatic vagina, but automatic research papers too!) is a good one. But damn Slavoj, please use some headings, sections and the like. Work with your thoughts more as you claim it's important to do!
- dudu24 11mo agoI'm also losing my ability to tolerate prose without headings, but I think that's symptomatic of this bigger issue.
- lysace 11mo agoI noticed something similar when working with (unlike the post's author, non-marxist, as far as I know) Russian developers who had made the jump abroad (EU). When debating directions, some of them focused on just never stopping talking. Instead of an interactive discussion (5-15 seconds per statement), they consistently went with monotone 5-10 minute slop. Combined with kind of crappy English it is incredibly efficient at shutting down discourse. I caught on after the second guy used the exact same technique. This was a long time ago. I have since worked with some really smart and nice russian developers escaping that insane regime. And some that I wish would have stayed there after they made their political thoughts on Russia known.
- ArcHound 11mo agoWhen you have a 30 minutes meeting with busy people, a single 15 minute monologue might buy you another week to solve your problem. Indeed, very efficient, usually it requires somebody to put his foot down AND a consensus to deescalate immediately. If you have an antidote, please let me know.
- furyofantares 11mo agoI usually scroll a page to see how many headings it has, but I'm looking for the opposite. Too many headings is one of the quickest aesthetic clues that I'm looking at slop, as it doesn't require me to read any of the text. (Emojis and over-usage of bullet point lists are the others I can think of in this category.)
- ouroboros_o 11mo agoChatGPT gave me a great summary of this article
- th0ma5 11mo agoI'm trying to figure out if someone is arguing that this proves the Nazis were socialists that this is published on Substack?
- hunterpayne 11mo agoA nit, the word socialists is actually in the acronym (ie in the name). Fascism actually is a descendant of socialist ideology and Mussolini was a Socialist before inventing Fascism. Concepts of left and right only have meaning in one political unit at one point in time. The axis we use to judge right and left changes from time to time and is different in different places. Also, some fascist policies are similar to policies in socialist societies. And some policies are very different between the two. So the debate implied in your question, like most debates, comes down to the definitions of words. This is why it isn't all that helpful to base political ideologies on history farther back than one human lifetime. The writers often meant something different than you think they did.
- thrance 11mo agoIn what qualities was Mussolini a socialist? Anti-capitalism never passionated him much. Indeed, he had a lot of support from the capitalist class, which he gladly took. Similarly, one of the first things the nazis did upon gaining power, was to arrest all communist and socialists, and make unions illegal within Germany. Your mixing up of the two concepts is wrong and unhelpful. Certainly, the Soviet State was fascist in many aspects. But many fascist states emerge from capitalist economies, with help from the capitalist class.
- krapp 11mo ago>A nit, the word socialists is actually in the acronym (ie in the name). Context, as always, matters. The Nazis were not socialist, they were infamously and violently anti-socialist. The reason "socialist" was in the name was that Hitler wanted to reframe the concept of socialism around nationalist and racist tenets. Hitler himself explained his rationale in a magazine interview[0,1]: “Socialism is the science of dealing with the common wealth. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic... We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.” [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18twsvk/why_did_the_nazi_party_use_socialist_in_its/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18twsvk/why_... [1] https://archive.is/usjmJ#selection-2535.0-2539.363 https://archive.is/usjmJ#selection-2535.0-2539.363
- HelloUsername 11mo agoYou think this article is nothing special EHH! but you are wronk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwDrHqNZ9lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwDrHqNZ9lo)
- lordnacho 11mo agoSo I'm already joking with my friends (who tend to be physically distant, so I don't see them often) that we are just LLMs vicariously writing to each other. I've been talking to these friends for decades now, with digital records. I think someone already trained an LLM on their IM records. How many people do you suppose have two-way LLM substitutes that occasionally write to each other with articles from the news to discuss? There's already services that use this kind of thing to pretend dead people are alive. Now here's the question: are you in some sense living forever? Say you have a number of friends, who have over time been trained into AI, and they live on various servers (it ain't expensive) forever. They're trained as you, so they read the kind of article you would read. They know your life story, they know their history with their friends. They will be interested in the controversial offsides goal in the 2250 world cup final. They are just made of calculations in data centres that go on, forever.
- yapyap 11mo agoYour finite life makes u special. Might as well be a beanplant otherwise.
- doubled112 11mo agoBean plants also have a finite life. Are they special too?
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- grimgrin 11mo agohow many friendships do i suppose are replacing actual interaction with their log informed llms? you could be the first i suppose
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- mise_en_place 11mo agoThe counterpoint is that we must formalize the rights of sentient synthetic beings. The Emergency Medical Hologram gained sentience and was horrified to find his next version was relegated to cleaning ships as a glorified janitor. Whereas he developed his own hobbies, interests, hopes, dreams, and even romantic relationships in the Delta Quadrant.
- adamwong246 11mo agoExcept we will probably go the other direction, taking rights away from humans. Not just your American rights, but rights we don't even have words to describe yet. Like, the right not to have your personal data trained upon, or the right to log off, or to install and uninstall software on a computer you own. RMS was right all along.
- MrVandemar 11mo agoIt's just a machine. Being able to distinguish real life from a television show is important.
- adamwong246 11mo agoAre you so sure that you are not "just a machine"?
- yannyu 11mo agoMore importantly, if your entire existence were being fed a corpus of text and then being asked to regurgitate it on demand, would you be remotely similar to the person you are now? When we take consciousness-capable beings and subject them to forms of sensory and agency deprivation, the results might also have you assume they weren't capable of consciousness to begin with.
- bluefirebrand 11mo agoIt doesn't matter if I'm just a machine or not I'm human, human rights should apply to humans, not synthetics and the creation of synthetic life should be punishable by death. I'm not exaggerating, either. I believe that building AI systems that replace all humans should be considered a crime against humanity. It is almost certainly a precursor to such crimes. It's bad enough trying to fight for a place in society as it is, nevermind fighting for a place against an inhuman AI machine that never tires I don't think it is that radical of a stance that society should be heavily resisting and punishing tech companies that insist on inventing all of the torment nexus. It's frankly ridiculous that we understand the risks of this technology and yet we are pushing forward recklessly in hopes that it makes a tiny fraction of humans unfathomably wealthy Anyone thinking that the AI tide is going to lift all boats is a fool
- cuckmaxxed 11mo ago[dead]
- boomskats 11mo agoLook at all those em-dashes. Et tu, Slavoj?
- OgsyedIE 11mo ago[dead]
- arjie 11mo agoAll right, I get it. The driving impulse for why our societies and civilizations exist is the fact that we are complex beings with desires, emotions, and so on. A machine facsimile built to imitate these things will have no such drive to 'expand' so to speak. The bots talking to bots world is a problem only because the objective is finally for a human to observe the bot-bot conversation and have their objectives changed in some way. It's 'advertising' of some concept. Bot-bot conversations of the form currently possible have no purpose in a world without humans. There is no one to convince. I think it's an interesting idea, certainly, but there is no reason to write it like this. The bits about call centre scamming etc. are sort of pointless. In general, I like when the complexity of a representation of an idea is required because the territory being mapped is complex. I know he's a famous philosopher and all that, but the complexity of his text appears to be sort of like older segmentation models. You ask it to extract a circle from a background and it produces an almost fractally-complex circle-approximation. "What is the object in the foreground?", you ask, and the machine (and here the philosopher) responds "It is a strange approximation of a circle with a billion jagged edges". No, it's a circle.
- lynguist 11mo agoThis makes sense once you understand the definitions of Hegelian an sich vs für sich and Lacanian objet petit a. It might look like rumbling to you but it is a very precise philosophical-technical text that does pure analysis. I liked it really a lot and gained much from it.