My SN is an anagram of my full name ;) My first short story collection arrives in 2027. Follow here for news and release updates on each story.
Tucson, AZ
Joined December 2011
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arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
I was trying to explain last night why Zelda Ocarina of Time is such an interesting phenomenon to me. You can revisit your childhood home or return to your hometown, but time doesn’t wait for anyone. The people have changed, the places are different & eventually you have to accept that you can never experience those things the way you did when you were younger. Video games have always felt different. You can return to your childhood games years later & it’s all still there. The same places, the same people, the same music, the same details you remember from childhood. Nothing has moved on without you. I think that’s what makes it so emotional. Life keeps moving forward, but the worlds we grew up in remain preserved exactly as we left them. The real world doesn’t let us go back, but sometimes the worlds we grew up in let us feel like we never had to leave.
Long rant I know but I don’t feel like I properly worded how I felt on stream last night so if you read this whole thing, thanks :) I hope you have a game as special to you as OOT is to me 💚
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Wow. Now that’s a Ghostbusters costume!
Source: reddit.com/r/ghostbusters/s/…
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
As a 40-year-old man, I try to understand why celebrity deaths hit me so hard. I am a grown man. I have built a family and a community I love. Surely the deaths of people I have never met or interacted with shouldn’t affect me to the point of grief.
Today, when I heard of Sir Patrick Stewart’s passing, I realised something. It’s not just the person. It’s the moment they came into our lives.
For us millennials, TV and cinema were a very different experience. It was mass media at its truest.
Today? We live with different algorithms and feeds. My wife follows celebrities and influencers I have never even heard of, recommending Netflix shows that never even pop up on my “you should watch” feed.
But growing up?
Catherine O’Hara was everyone’s mum.
Robin Williams was everyone’s Mrs. Doubtfire and Mork.
Anthony Bourdain was everyone’s guide to food.
Matthew Perry was everyone’s Friend living next door.
Hayden Panettiere was the cheerleader we all wanted to save.
And Sir Patrick Stewart was everyone’s Captain.
We saw them at the same time, on the same channels, at much the same ages.
This grief we feel is a collective one. We grieve the characters we shared our time with, who made their way from screen to heart. We grieve that time we no longer have, and the childhoods we can’t quite recreate for the next generation.
And perhaps the largest grief of all? The feeling that the last pieces of our inner child are fading away with every loss.
These people helped us understand the world. Their stories make up the mosaic of our souls. They shaped our understanding of right and wrong, and of what the world sorely needs right now… empathy.
I don’t know what lies ahead of us.
I just know that I must boldly go.
Let’s, together,
Make it so.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Miyomoto's response to why AI is good is so eloquent I am honestly impressed.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
I've never commissioned an artist because I've never been able to justify the expense. I've always used whatever tools were available to create things for my own projects. AI is simply another tool in that toolbox.
You're not losing a commission from me. That commission was never going to exist.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas hands his 21-year-old son a check for $10,000.
"Okay. You're on your own," Kirk says.
Michael looks at the check. "That's great, Dad, but I still have two years of college tuition left."
Kirk doesn't care. The lesson has started. The bank is closed.
For the next 30 years, Kirk Douglas proudly brags to his other children and everyone who would listen: "Michael never asked me for another dime. I gave him that money, and that was it. I made him a man."
He believed his extreme tough love had worked perfectly. Until Michael finally sat him down three decades later.
"Dad, you remember those beautiful, soft Italian leather suitcases you bought me for Christmas back then?" Michael asked.
"Yeah," Kirk smiled.
"Well, I found out that each suitcase could hold exactly 22 kilos of marijuana."
To pay his tuition and survive his father's brutal lesson in self-reliance, Michael became a drug smuggler. He moved product across the country using the exact same bags his father bought him.
Society glorifies tough love. We are told that cutting the safety net and applying maximum pressure is the only way to build true character.
But when you push someone to the absolute edge, they don't always learn the moral lesson you intended. Sometimes, they just learn how to survive by any means necessary.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about AI entertainment.
People are being told they shouldn’t enjoy a video once they discover it was made with AI.
Think about that.
You laughed. You were entertained. You watched until the end.
Then someone told you how it was made, and suddenly you’re supposed to hate it.
Since when did enjoying something require approval from people who didn’t enjoy it?
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Anti AI people are so ideologically captured they're turning into the monsters rhey thought they were fighting
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Every time AI masters something we thought required intelligence, we are forced to ask whether it actually did.
We spent centuries believing that chess required genius. A machine won in 1997, and within a year we stopped calling chess the pinnacle of human intellect. We moved the line.
We said creativity was the line. Then machines started composing music, generating images, writing poetry. We moved the line again.
We said emotional intelligence. Empathy. Understanding context. Then people started preferring AI therapists because they were more patient, less judgmental, and available at 3 AM when the human ones were asleep.
Every time the machine crosses a line we drew, we do not conclude that the machine has become human. We conclude that the line was never where we thought it was.
And we redraw it.
This has been happening for thirty years and almost nobody has stopped to ask what it is actually revealing.
Most of what we called uniquely human was not. It was just complex. Complex enough that only a biological mind could perform it, until something else could.
This should feel like a loss. Strangely, it is the opposite.
Every time we discover that a trait we thought was essentially human turns out to be something a machine can do, what remains becomes more precise.
We are not shrinking. We are distilling.
For centuries we defined ourselves by what we could do that nothing else could. That definition was always unstable, because it depended on nothing else ever showing up that could do it too.
AI is stripping away every capability that was never actually ours to claim. Not to diminish us. Because those things were never what made us human in the first place.
What is left when you remove everything a machine can replicate?
Not calculation. Not pattern recognition. Not memory. Not even creativity in the generative sense, because machines can generate.
What remains is that it matters to you.
A machine can compose a symphony. It has no need to. It can write a letter of apology. It has nothing to repair. It can plan a future. It does not have to live in one.
Stakes require something to lose. And having something to lose requires being alive in a way that is not a metaphor.
Every previous definition of humanity was a list of abilities. AI is burning through that list and showing us it was the wrong kind of list.
What makes you human was never what you can do.
It is that you are the one doing it. That it costs you something. That the outcome lands on your life and the lives of the people you love and the world you have to wake up in tomorrow.
A machine can produce the answer. You are the one who has to live with it.
That distinction does not shrink as AI gets more powerful.
It is the only thing that grows.
AI is not taking what makes us human. It is the first thing in history forcing us to finally figure out what that is.
And the answer was never a capability.
It was the fact that we are here at all, with something at stake, in a life we did not choose and cannot repeat, trying to do something that matters before it ends.
No machine will ever know what that feels like. And no machine needs to.
That is ours. It always was. We just could not see it clearly until something came along that could do everything else.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
I shared this earlier, and the anti-AI crowd immediately started attacking it.
“How would AI know the exact colors if it wasn't trained on the original movie?” 🤡
PLOT TWIST: The color version you were criticizing was the ORIGINAL animation.
The black-and-white pencil version you praised for its “human touch” was AI-generated. 💀
The art didn't change. Only the label did.
The results are in.
The Ariel pencil test was made with #AI.
The color version is the original movie footage.
I left both versions unlabeled because I wanted to see how people’s assumptions about AI would affect their judgment.
While some of you spotted it right away (I even left a few clues, like the incorrect peg holes and random annotations), the majority of you criticized the color version thinking it was AI and praised the pencil test believing it was #GlenKeane’s original work.
That’s the bias against AI I wanted to highlight. People were pointing out supposed AI flaws in the original Disney animation, while praising the AI-generated pencil test for its human touch.
If you preferred the pencil version, you can still prefer it. The video hasn’t changed. Only what you know about it has.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Ok. Screw it. Time to lob a grenade.
The same indie devs whining that their non-existent moat is disappearing because of AI are the same indie devs who ran around the industry for two decades making things like GDC insufferable with their BS... Well, GDC is dead. Their moat is dead.
There are true creatives who now have the greatest new tool in 30 years, since the diffusion of internet access, at their disposal to tell new stories, create new forms of entertainment, and do it faster and cheaper than any of us thought possible even six months ago... All of this opening the door for voices that wouldn't even get interviews at big companies to break out and disrupt things...
And then there are the indie dorks with their "no AI" stickers peddling some high concept sidescrolling dogshit platformer about their lost blankie... People who say they care about elevating folks but who are more than ready to call a kid using AI to make something fun a slop merchant with their gatekeeping. These dopes were never actually creative to begin with... they just wanted people in bars to think they were cool.
This isn't all indie devs, btw. But spend enough time on here and you will see exactly the kind of folks I'm talking about.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
You aren’t creating anything the AI is!
Is what I keep seeing people say.
Fine.
The Ai is creating it but I’m directing it, making the decisions, coming up with ideas and telling it what I want.
So I guess anyone that uses Ai to create is now a Director instead of a creator.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Nailed it.
Human voice actors. Human writers. Human composers and musicians. They could have used AI for that, but they chose humans.
Yet because they used AI visuals to cut costs, haters dismiss the entire production, including all the human work that went into it.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Reality check for mathematicians and doctors:
The purpose of 'math' is not to keep mathematicians employed, it's to solve problems and advance humankind's quality of life and understanding of reality.
The purpose of medicine is not to keep doctors employed. It's to prevent and relieve suffering caused by disease.
Yes, it's important that humans understand all the math and all the medicine.
But if AI can figure it out first, holding it back to protect the egos, prestige and income of the mathematicians and doctors is literally the opposite of the purpose of each field.
It doesn't matter who (or what) figured it out.
Just that it works.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
So, to summarize, 900 mathematicians signed a letter basically saying "stop AI from doing math so that our jobs can stick around."
But for anyone who spends more than 5 seconds thinking about what unlocking the equivalent of a billion Fields Medalists would do for humanity, the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs.
Math abundance will help solve chips, medicine, fusion, and numerous other things that will improve the lives of billions, and save millions of lives.
I mean, there was a 0% chance of OpenAI (or any other AI lab) slowing down, so it's a moot point anyways.
But it just seems extremely selfish.
arhythmutopia 👾 retweeted
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
$ANET Andy Bechtolsheim says AI has made optics demand about 10 times bigger in five years and the industry is only at the "very beginning"
"So I guess I don't need to tell you that AI has been driving this incredible increase in demand for high-speed optics, which is probably now 10 times bigger than it used to be five years ago..."
"And what I want to talk to you today is that we're not at the end of this journey, but rather the very beginning. There's easily another order of magnitude increase in bits needed for the next generation kind of data centers."
"So what I want to talk about first is what's happening at the data center level, and how we as an industry have to get together to solve these problems of this very rapid and high demand growth as fast as possible, since AI can't wait."
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For full set of takeaways to Andy's AI Datacenter and Optics lecture: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
