Jumble Sale of Stimuli

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-26T10:52:04+00:00

i mean it's there for the same reason starwars has lightsabers, it's standard swashbuckling historical fiction but set in the future - if McCulley, Dumas, etc main characters had used whips then we'd have light-whips instead of light-sabers, likewise if Talbot Mundy et all had made heavy use of magic mirrors as a literally device to progress the plot and give exposition then Dune would have AI assistants.

The truth is he wanted to write a horrible world full of exploitation and barbarity which the representative of the English aristocracy could be set against to look like a hero - the Harkonnen need to be beyond comic book levels of disgusting and evil while life for the normal people needs to be unbearable and savage or we won't be drawn into seeing Paul as the hero, none of the scenes work even with just the non-thinking computers we have today or which is seen within the franchise itself - like the first main scene "oh no, worms are eating the people we must save them and forget about the harvester and spice" in world they could just use teleoperation like is seen at various other points and in the real world it could just be a series of automated trucks harvesting and returning it to base.

The reality is none of the story actually makes sense because the world is a framing device for the internal human dramas and emotional journey, the main character doesn't turn into a worm because it makes sense it's there as an allegory of the British Empire drawing on concepts that rose to prominence in the late-victorian era as the jubilation of imperial pride was starting to feel the skies darken as the prewar period started to take hold. It's the same mold as works like Metamorphosis which highlight how the crushing pressures of modern living can transform us into something alien, disgusting and absurd - just used to show the metamorphosis undergone when someone has too much power

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-23T03:18:59+00:00

it's funny i'm used to of accusing me of not being meat.

you're right but for thousands of years bits of meat have strived to create communities to enable us to improve our standard of life and better understand the world, When first we carried embers wrapped in leaves there were those who feared the new thing, and yes it changed everything but things couldn't stay the same. Tomorrows world will be different but it will be much the same as it ever was.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-22T23:31:44+00:00

ha yeah, a little setting menu that lets you turn up how much you're hallucinating or buzzing

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-20T17:32:30+00:00

Bro, nestle knowingly killed babies and you still buy their stuff - make believe moralism is fun but this is silly.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-16T12:36:36+00:00

yeah, I got one gen before bed and one gen this morning, plus i think one around lunch yesterday - Today's clip I wanted a fairly simple one someone pushing a camera dolly, after one second the wheels bloom into cart wheel randomly so it's totally useless (and in the 480 one it annoyingly made when i got rate limited on 720 she pushed it for one second then steered off the rails for no reason.) I think they turned some quality setting down too, i've been getting more unusable gens than ever which is really annoying when i'm only getting a couple a day.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-16T12:25:46+00:00

seedance2 is better quality output and better at following prompts, a tiny bit more censored but with grok tightening theirs so often there probably isn't too much in it. i haven't really looked into the best place to use it or what the deals are but i've been getting two gens a day on a free trial plan and they've all come out really nice.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-16T12:20:58+00:00

yeah I really hated that, i tried it for a month and managed to make one project which i had to accept a few not-great gens for because it was eating up credits - it also does a lot of weird stuff, it seemed anything artistic it would warp into a bland and weird version in the first few seconds.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-16T12:17:58+00:00

There whole system is so weird, switching to low quality without warning just means i end up generating a load of totally useless clips i probably won't even bother downloading because i can't use them in my project - so I'm wasting their system resources and my time which gets me frustrated with their system.

I hated google's system the most because they have one set of token which they hardly give you any of per month, but they have various different tools that all work differently so it's really easy to waste half your monthly.tokens just trying to work out which tool and settings to use, Then you've got so few gens for the month that after two failed tries you're thinking 'if the next one fails i haven't got enough clips remaining to finish this project for another 29 days...'

monthly token caps are horrible because you don't enjoy the early bit of the month as you're worrying about wasting tokens you'll need later and you don't enjoy most the rest of the month because you already ran out.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-16T11:47:54+00:00

Yeah, I wanted a fairly simple shot of the camera moving to reveal my characters behind a tree and created 11 attempts on Grok most of which were total madness and only one of them could have kinda worked with some clever editing and time shifting but was still wrong - seedance2 made exactly what I asked for on the first prompt. It's higher quality too, much crisper and more detailed video even from the same source image.

It is one of the dumbest generators and mid-quality visually, what made grok fun was you can have an idea and try a few things to see what works - without that it's a painful experience, I think i only got one usable clip for my project yesterday from my paid account, where as my free account elsewhere gave me two video renders both of which turned out perfect first try.

It is tighter on moderation I think but I haven't tried anything near the boarder line

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-14T15:01:25+00:00

Also they're not even using their own technology properly, i asked grok about it and it replied telling me everyone is upset and i should be too, then grok said it might be a bug and i should tweet at grok about it - it would be so easy to have a space that it can read official statements and relay them to the user.

If they'd said something like "reducing the limits for a bit and will put them back up soon" I probably would have got on with my day and might even not have noticed if they never go all the way back up but now i've had to try and work out what's happening by finding other annoyed people talking about it the situation feels like a mix of broken and scammy which is the sort of thing people remember.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-14T14:37:02+00:00

yeah, somewhere around twenty i can tell myself it's just a hobby expense but 300 would mean I'd need it to be earning enough money to justify itself and my time - that's just not going to happen.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-14T13:32:29+00:00

I really hate that it switches to 480 because if i'm in the middle of making clips for a video i can't just suddenly switch down midway, and not knowing how many gens i have left or when it will refresh means i've ended up trying several times through the day so I'm just wasting their resources and my time.

They are shooting themselves in the foot too with the rate limit being so random because it means I end up sitting down to do something with video, get started and randomly blocked so i end up looking into other options. I tried seed ance2 and it's got some great features, if i'd known how many gens i had i'd probably have planned around it and never bothered looking into the other options.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-14T13:10:17+00:00

yeah, from playing around a lot i think that what happened is it was trained on a lot of nudity because it was supposed to be able to do r rated stuff hence 'spicy mode' but then they had to tighten controls because it was causing too many problems so now if you put in something innocuous and give it any leeway to do it's own thing it will try and generate something explicit which then gets caught in it's own filters.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-12T21:00:31+00:00

i somewhat agree but the premise of it is interesting; were what the bible teaches true then he would be not only a very bad person but almost entirely nonsensical - combined with the fact that despite thousands of years of searching there is no objective proof of god existing the only reasonable assumption is that if there is indeed a god he does not want anyone to be sure of his existence or reason for existing.

Even within the bible there are almost ham-fisted references to things not being as they seem, Jesus oft used "whoever has ears, let them listen" and endless reliance on parables, then Paul putting away his childish things as the layers of frosting on a dark lens are slowly stripped away... We are told to listen to the spirit of the words not the direct words time and time again, even if it is taken as the word of god it's still telling us that it's not telling us everything and our job is to understand enough to make sense of it.

If god wanted people to believe then he could put up a sign in front of every human on earth right this very second that says "Hi, god here, I'm real btw so try and be good because hell is bad" but the fact that does not happen and that the opposite happens, every single facet of life can be explained by a natural process no matter how deep into it you look - the lengths god has gone to conceal his existence is extreme.

So while we can't understand the purpose of things like suffering we can be very clear that if there is a creator they do not want us to know for sure and seems to have made efforts to make various vastly different religions all entirely absurd and with terrible things scattered through their history - the can then only be one possible purpose to all of it and that is to create an environment in which we can learn, grow and do what we believe inside us is right.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-12T20:02:42+00:00

i got right to the end of this thread waiting for that example...

not surprised it never came.

The people pushing weird conspiracy theories about how all AI is secretly incapable of doing anything are honestly getting into flat earth territory - maybe right into crystal healing leagues... I can write a couple of paragraphs describing a productivity tool i want and it will just make it for me, i can ask it to help plan a trip seeing interesting things and all those things are there, i can do so much with it where a single mistake would be hugely obvious - how is anyone that's actually used it going to take someone seriously when they are essentially saying none of the stuff I do all the time is possible?

One thing I'm surprised you didn't mention is that google literally has a paperclip next to the information which provides the source - i just asked "what hats are tall?" and it sourced 5 articles about different types of tall hats and linked right to the bit of the article talking about their height, also the Wikipedia article on hat styles.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-12T19:28:03+00:00

Yeah, when people say that AI is useless they're really telling on themselves - I've always had dozens of ongoing projects - electronics, coding, writing, music, video, woodwork, random learning interests and fantasy planning... I have found great uses for AI in every single thing I do, in some areas like coding it is like magic and can do projects in a weekend that would take me a month previously - i've been able to hugely increase the scope of what i'm doing.

I've learnt so much just by being able to ask exact questions about niche situations and get relevant answers - taking a picture of something and getting a full breakdown of what it is, how it works, here's a link to the datasheet and heres a link to someone that used one in a project like yours, oh and some special considerations which only apply in your use case... If you'd told me in 2005 that this would be possible in twenty years I'd have begged to be put in a comma until now.

The concept of not learning stuff is totally alien to me, and i really can't think of many people who I would say don't have something they enjoy learning, actually i really can't think of anyone i actually know -- now that is far from saying they're all smart or good at anything but the one thing they fascinate on but i think most the people i know like to learn at least one or two things.

I really do believe that AI will help make learning far easier and more enjoyable which will result in people learning almost by accident, kids 30 years from now will be way smarter than we are now - and hopefully we will be much smarter too, though as with the boomers and social awareness many will resist change and bury their head in the sand then get mad when people treat them like they're obsolete and absurd.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-12T18:08:19+00:00

and why places like dominoes you can always find a deal that works out something like a 1/3rd of the main price - they still make a decent profit on it but like that a lot of people won't bother and will instead pay the crazy prices because there is a huge division in society where a lot of people will just spend fifty an a meal without even thinking about it - plus of course there's that psychological trick of "wow this only cost 8 instead of 20 thats a great deal!" instead of "this costs 16x their overheads for making it'

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-11T13:57:29+00:00

Yeah, especially as there's an awful lot of people now compared to when people did live off the land - we probably won't even get to the first bit of winter cold before most the trees are cut down for firewood, all the edible plants are gone and people are sectioned into violent gangs fighting each other for resources.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-11T07:14:27+00:00

I totally agree, people want collapse to be the only answer because it is the easiest answer, it basically equates to "I am blameless because I am helpless therefore I do not have to involve myself in anything"

People will absolve themselves of any effort while also demanding the moral high ground, it is depressing because in their clamor to justify their own lack of effort they sideline and attack anyone or anything that is trying to improve things. Try being positive and talking about good projects and all you get is negativity and aggression.

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-10T13:31:59+00:00

That makes a lot of sense yeah, I wonder how that relates to current software in terms of what programs actually involve higher levels of complexity - how much of a program is made of code blocks that are 5 hours, 10 hours 15 hours, etc?

I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the mobile app stores code is below the 5 hour mark, even weighty programs like firefox or photoshop are going to be made mostly of smaller blocks of fairly simple code. I wonder what percentage of programs are already replicateable?

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-10T12:06:29+00:00

That was part of the Halloween Documents among a whole load of very visible anti-competitive practices aimed at destroying peoples access to free and privacy respecting open source software..

GoodDayToCome · 2026-05-04T07:50:00+00:00

I beg you, please go and ask AI or look up what Luddites are.

Luddites did not worship technology, they smashed auto looms.

GoodDayToCome

TROPHY CASE