Castle Magus

Oh, wow, that Spider-Man thing Woolie mentioned is real. It just wasn't a Spider-Man comic. It was a She-Hulk comic.

I'm just linking to the blog, even if the comic associated with it (being part two of the previous comic, as implied by the title) is pretty cool so far.

Mainly, I just want to post this for Tycho's words about recent AI bullshit. And by that I mean I just want to copy and paste Tycho's words here, those relevant to the whole AI thing, anyway, because I mostly agree with them, without feeling a need to elaborate or anything. Besides, I've already posted about this shit.

(Links and italics are his [well, except that I inverted the italics below].)

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( Behind a cut, of course. )

I post this mostly not for the thing itself, which is kind of stupid, but for one of the comments under it.

One of the best descriptions I've seen in a while, not of LLM/AI itself, necessarily, but of people's reactions to/acceptance of LLM/AI, is this:

"So often, the response to AI is 'this isn't useful for [thing I do] because it lacks the human creativity and ingenuity necessary to [do the thing that I do]. But I bet it would be really useful for [thing I don't do or know anything about but wrongfully think is mindless work devoid of creativity].'"

I will elaborate on that a bit. If one says that wholesale use of AI is "okay" for creating large swaths of code (or, indeed, entire, whole-ass programs/applications), because coding is "mindless work devoid of creativity," then that's the equivalent of saying that it's okay to use AI to create large swaths of prose (or, indeed, entire, whole-ass novels), because writing is "mindless work devoid of creativity," or saying that it's okay to use AI to create larges swaths of lines/colors (or, indeed, entire, whole-ass drawings/paintings), because drawing/painting is "mindless work devoid of creativity." The former is just as ridiculous and untrue as the latter two are.

I'm not even saying that you can't use AI or AI-like tools at all for these things. If a webcomic creator, for instance, wants to use a copy/paste tool to reuse backgrounds they've already drawn once, instead of drawing the same thing by hand repeatedly in every panel, that's fine (as long as it wasn't a LLM that generated those backgrounds for them out of whole cloth in the first place). If a writer has a recurring phrase that some character says in their book that they have set up to autocomplete when they start to type it, rather than having to type it out in full every time, that's fine (as long as it wasn't a LLM that generated said character and/or their recurring phrase out of thin air in the first place). I'm just saying treat "AI used for 'coding'" with the same respect/disdain, as the case may be, as you do for "AI used for 'writing'" or "AI used for 'imagery.'" Don't simply dismiss out of hand the "AI used for 'coding'" bit, just because you may not like/understand/do coding work yourself.

As for the article/blurb itself:

No, "AI code is" not "different from AI art and writing." What I don't want is AI code slop in the games, and that comes from outsourcing programming to gen AI. The only actual difference is that AI code slop isn't as readily visible in the end result as the AI "art" and "writing" slop is, but that just makes it actually even worse and more insidious, honestly.

"In a sense [Tim Sweeney] isn't wrong," First of all, Tim Sweeney is fucking wrong, because him saying that Steam should get rid of the AI tag is asinine. I'm in favor of there being more information available to the consumer, personally, not less.

"but is there a difference between using AI for coding compared to creativity?" Second of all, as the comment to which the above comment was replying, in agreement, also said: "Coding is creativity."

I, too, cannot wait to be able to run out and buy my own Torment Nexus.

And yeah, that story about the Krafton guy is yet another nail in the coffin of my interest in Subnautica 2 or any other game made/published by Krafton, sadly.

Regarding the headline question (which comprised a disappointingly small slice of the above video, even though everything else they talked about was still pretty great [in a horrifying and terrible way]), Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a couple of recent strips about that very topic. As the alt text for the first one said: "Of all the AI concerns, the one about wanting to replace management with algorithms is the most monkeys-paw-ish." On the one hand, I'm not sure if I agree with that assertion, because human CEOs can be some of the vilest motherfuckers on the planet, but on the other hand, LLMs are really not that great at a lot of things that LLMs never should have been tasked to do in the first place.

"Homestuck the animated pilot is finally here! We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we at SpindleRoo enjoyed making it."

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So, as with the teaser for the pilot, I missed the debut of the pilot itself until a week later, i.e. about 20 minutes ago or so.

I'm not sure I like how uber meta it is. I mean, Homestuck could be super meta at times, too, but even for Homestuck, that shit was meta way out the ass. Like John trying to mute the narrator and Dave explicitly calling out the title drop and shit like that. Not sure if want.

Also, it kind of seems like they're really speedrunning through the first arc of Homestuck. That's actually fine, however, because a huge amount of the first arc of Homestuck was just John dicking around in his room doing whatever random shit the reader-supplied prompts told him to do, back when that was still a thing before being abandoned. And it probably makes more sense to introduce the other three main characters right at the start, rather than waiting until like forty or fifty episodes in before doing so, which probably would have been the case if this thing had been (will be?) more faithful to the comic. There is an awful lot of chaff that can be cut during the webcomic-to-animated-series conversion process without the animated series becoming bad.

Dave didn't sound like how I heard his voice in my head, but I could get used to it. John, Rose, and Jade were fine, though, and based on that one line from Karkat at the end, that could work, too. (EDIT) Wait... John was voiced by Toby Fox? As in the dude who made Undertale and Deltarune and also a shit-ton of music for Homestuck? Hell, that's awesome. (/EDIT)

When that cover/remix of "Showtime" kicked in when John and Dad started to fight, that was pretty fucking sick. (Dad is probably my oddball favorite character in the comic. All versions of him.)

And the teaser for things (e.g. trolls, lots and lots of trolls) to come at the end was pretty cool, too.

Overall, I didn't hate it. If this actually does become a real series and isn't just a one-off, I'd absolutely watch it.

(Also, apparently the official Homestuck website is finally back again? Makes sense, since it would have been super shitty for this pilot to come out and then people trying to read the original only finding a bunch of broken images and shit.)

A post on The Daily Cartoonist.

It's about ICE, Project 2025, the government shutdown and, generally, as it is most times, about how Donald Trump is a worse-than-worthless puddle of diarrhetic fecal matter masquerading as a banally evil human being.

A post on The Daily Cartoonist.

"<embedded video>

"We might wish that, instead of that funny little green guy, our visitors were Klaatu and Gort, who wouldn't stand for any abuse, but instead we've got that anonymous food delivery guy, who didn't wipe out the bullies with a cosmic ray but, rather, provided the world with a real-life laugh."

It wasn't a laugh, though. Having not seen or heard about it before now, I watched that shit on tenterhooks and was relieved that the guy got away. It would have been far less funny if the Trumpanzee Gestapo had actually caught him.

...

"The other day, Dear Leader said 'Am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening?'

"The answer is that if all you watch is Fox, then, yes, you're watching things on television that are different from what's happening.

"That might be okay for some down-and-outer, but it's not only foolish but irresponsible for a world leader. Competent presidents not only absorb multiple media but receive a briefing packet each morning to sum up anything they may have missed.

"And they read the packet. And they don't get up bored and wander out of the room while they're being briefed.

"That's not funny, because (A) he's messing around with our nation and our people and, (B) as Dan Froomkin points out in that linked article, it sure sounds like the old fellow is slipping another cog or two."

A post on The Daily Cartoonist.

A lot of it is a bunch of portrayals of Trump's address to the United Nations, all accurate in their own ways.

"Mike normally streams on Twitch, but he is back this one time to discuss The Haunted Mansion and other spooky Disney stuff with James!"

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That "and More!" in the title there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Still, it's a pretty interesting video.