Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾

TechnoOptimist

Founder Directing Games

Former Story Artist The Lego Batman Movie. Human centric AI. Abundance for all.

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

We need to stop imagining that these aren't bald faced dogwhistles.

[Kalshi @Kalshi]

JUST IN: House Democrats say Elon Musk is on their "list of targets" if they win the midterms

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@CommanthaBiden hi

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

The "Simpsons is still running" meme is one of the funniest memes of the 21st century.

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

“The Simpsons” was a beloved animated sitcom that ran for ten legendary seasons and concluded in 1999. The show was celebrated for what was widely perceived as a near perfect run that wrapped before it wore out its concept and overstayed its welcome.

Creator Matt Groening and showrunner James L. Brooks famously decided to bring the show to a conclusion after experiencing the negative audience reaction to the season 9 episode “The Principal and the Pauper,” in which it was revealed that the school’s principal was actually an impostor who had stolen the real Seymour Skinner’s identity. Brooks did not want to sully the show’s legacy by doing a bunch of weird episodes as the franchise slid into mediocrity and cultural irrelevance, so the writers and cast decided instead to go out on top and end things on a high note.

However, because of its centrality in 90s pop culture, a long-running Internet joke is to pretend “The Simpsons” is still on the air, a premise that gets more absurd and deranged with each passing year. If this show were still producing new episodes, it would be in its 38th season now, and most of the voice cast would be in their 80s.

The joke is to imagine how distorted this charming show would have become if it had been stretched out to more than 800 episodes. Comedy posters on “weird Twitter” used to try to top each other by making up terrible ideas for what modern episodes of the show might be like.

For example, a viral 2012 tweet imagined an episode where Lady Gaga helps Lisa Simpson with her self esteem. In 2019, popular shitposter Megan Amram originated the premise of Bart Simpson becoming a men’s rights activist to protest a gender-swapped reboot of “Itchy and Scratchy.”

But perhaps the most elaborate Internet “Simpsons” joke was a 2017 YouTube mockumentary “The Problem With Apu,” in which the comedian Hari Kondabolu ironically pretended to be offended by the charming and innocuous convenience store owner character Apu.

Everyone thought this was hilarious, especially since the show had been off the air for nearly two decades when the mockumentary was released. So, Twitter ran with the joke by pretending to “cancel” Apu, and the viral gag memorably resulted in the character’s voice actor, Hank Azaria, recognizing the meme by promising never to perform the character again, which everybody thought was really funny since Azaria had been retired for years.

Now, nearly a decade later, fans are pretending that the show — which has now been off the air longer than most people tweeting about it have been alive— has brought back the “cancelled” character with a new racially-appropriate voice actor.

I actually don’t think this is that funny, and I kind of think the gag of pretending “The Simpsons” is still airing new episodes has overstayed its welcome, a mistake the actual show “The Simpsons” would never have made.

If you haven’t seen this 1990s classic, which — and I cannot emphasize this enough — ended after 10 seasons in 1999, you can watch all the episodes on Disney+ (except the one with Michael Jackson that got pulled from streaming).

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@icreatelife I am so sorry for your loss. My condolences

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@SergeantXOF Shakespeare is the Samantha of dusty old phrases

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

For those who don't understand the reference, Shakespeare was the Kanye West of writing plays.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Johann Sebastian Bach is the Shakespeare of music. Best there ever was.

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

Honestly I'm with you in terms of giving people transparency. I even went as far as to build a "human only" social media site at one point.

I guess I was being needlessly antagonistic, but my take is that people should make things with whatever they want, but trust and disclosure is also important.

I don't tend to like AI when it's used for deceptive purposes, including pretending it's "hand crafted". But tend to appreciate "AI native" content when it's not trying to usurp human creativity.

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

As with all commie coded collectivist ideas, what's stopping you from siezing the means of making your own platform with your own hyper-restrictive set of rules?

[Syphotic | Steel Command @SyphoticART]

What if @valvesoftware just outright banned AI art in games on it's platform?

Apart from Tim Sweeney bitching about it on twitter, what are the downsides?

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@Zanzibased I'm going to win them over, you'll see

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

A tail must be an amazing thing for getting rid of nervous energy

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@DP_LTS @SyphoticART I like him now because he seems rather good faith

[Helen @HelenfegusonogG]

In history class, I never understood how “advanced” civilizations could collapse. It just didn’t seem plausible.

Anyway, I’ve seen enough. I get it now.

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@sainimatic unsorted
unsorted 1
unsorted 2

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@Clavuncular Hard to pick the difference, but it really is a game of millimetres

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

Solid state photonic inference.

Next.

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

Elon Musk says a chip for space should run hot, since raising the temperature 20% in Kelvin cuts radiator mass in half, and that a multi-trillion parameter model does not care about a few bit flips

“Well, I guess you want to design it to be more radiation tolerant and run at a higher temperature. So roughly, if you increase the operating temperature by 20% in degrees Kelvin, you can cut your radiator mass in half. So running at a higher temperature is helpful in space."

"There’s various things you can do for shielding the memory, but neural nets are going to be very resilient to bit flips. So most of what happens for radiation is random bit flips."

"But if you’ve got, like, you know, a multi-trillion parameter model and you get a few bit flips, it doesn’t matter. Heuristic programs are going to be much more sensitive to bit flips than some giant parameter file. So I just design it to run hot. And I think you pretty much do it the same way that you do things on Earth, apart from make it run hotter.”

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

Sounds good. So why would you want steam to adopt a policy that's going to be detrimental to them longer term, given that the majority of game studios already use AI in some capacity, and the delineation between "good AI" and "bad AI" is increasingly subjective and immeasurable...

When you could just start your own platform and capitalise on the demand within that niche?

[nightvoid 🔮 @nightisnigh]

If you can’t do your job without AI, you just suck fucking ass

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@KinetikLite "We used advanced AI technology to make 3D models look hand drawn so we wouldn't haven't hire traditional 2D animators, tweening artists, line artists and colourists...

...also we didn't stop hiring anyone"

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@SyphoticART I also notice you didn't respond to the question.

If it's such a viable business model and in such demand, it's a no brainer. You wouldn't need protectionism.

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

@SyphoticART It's always refreshing to find out that people are delusional across multiple dimensions.