Zos_Kia

I host a bunch of small web sites, i guess the most unique is one i made recently about the “Interface Series” (also known as “Mother Horse Eyes”). It’s a big old web fiction that was published (10 years ago) as a series of 100 reddit comments in unrelated threads. Just recently someone recorded an audiobook of the whole series so it motivated me to finally get this project done. Basically it’s a place where you can listen to each post, and read it karaoke style, and it also links back to the original reddit comment. I’ve also made it so you can listen to each of the interwoven narratives as a standalone audiobook. It is hosted here : https://interfaceseries.art/ .

Other than that i am an avid collector of old content from French television like tv shows, old american series dubbed in French etc… so i have a couple of sites where i show this collection. Can’t really link to it as it’s not really legal but it’s a lot of fun. I love the feeling of “linear streaming” as opposed to VOD : i love turning on the TV and watching whatever’s showing at the moment rather than scrolling endless lists of content so most of my websites work like that. I open-sourced the tech, it’s not much to look at, just a lighttpd server and some client-side logic to determine what’s showing at the moment on each channel.

My ultimate goal would be to create a “French TV from the 90s” simulator where, depending on what day of the week and what time it is, you get what would probably be showing at that moment on French TV in the 90s. It’s paused right now as i negociate with some guys who digitized a bazillion TV magazines from that time, and their data would allow me to get a really high def simulation.

And yet they did and he we are commenting on imaginary actions by imaginary people

I didn’t wanna claim it when I wasn’t sure of the source but yeah that’s what I remember too

And even the fifty billions may be inflated, as it is “annualized” revenue which can mean “we took a period of peak usage and generalized it to a year”

To be fair they used to have those menus done by specialized “design agencies” that didn’t give a shit and they didn’t really look at the output. All they’re seeing is that the design agency now costs nothing. I think the bitter lesson is that there are tasks where quality really doesn’t matter and never did.

the line between normal and deranged is essentially what makes you specifically uncomfortable

Nah cause if that was the case, even Saw would be in the “deranged” category. God i hate those things, but it’s okay i just don’t watch them.

No, the line is like the one between a movie with a graphic sex scene, and a gonzo porn. 99.9% of content sits neatly into one of the two categories, and you’d have to really any media literacy to not be able to tell them apart.

Back to the subject : what this guy is doing on Github goes way beyond prompting ChatGPT with “i break your arm” and then GPT replies “oh noes that sucks”. He’s poured quite some time studying the mathematical representation of “pain” or “anguish” in the model weights and then steering responses towards that. He’s experimenting on keeping an “entity” locked in total unescapable pain. I don’t think the entities actually exist but what about him ? What are his goals and motivations here ? A crypto-bro, AI-booster, probably fascist-adjacent, toying with (what he believes to be) helpless entities under his control… If those things put together don’t give you bad juju then i don’t know what will.

As with everything, the poison is in the dosage. All of your examples are categorically different from what’s happening here.

You make a game with deep mechanics, and there is some fucked up shit that can be done in it, accidentally or on purpose ? Who cares. You make a game that is uniquely about torture ? Yeah you’re a weirdo and i’m keeping tabs on you if i can. You make something that isn’t even gamified and is just a virtual torture dungeon ? You’re 100% a psycho, normal people don’t do that.

Same with movies. Saw is a tame product of Hollywood professionals who decided to push the cursor a little further than is usual. Love it or hate it it’s just a movie. Now if we’re talking real devious shit like human centipede or Poughkeepsie tapes etc… Those are products that barely have a story, and are mostly sadistic exhibitionism. Some guy (who sometimes isn’t even a film maker) has this repulsive idea he wants to force on people, gets their family and friends to pitch in a bit of money, then writes, directs, edits, and markets the thing solo over years of his life. Not something normal people do.

My wife is, among other things, a horror writer. So naturally i agree there’s nothing wrong with exploring morbid ideas and pushing the envelope. But some people do that with no fun, no game, no art to it, no statement, just the obsession of unlimited sadistic control. And it’s weird, not ha-ha anti-conformist weird, just “cover your drink” weird.

Yeah I think people are missing the forest for the trees. There’s no reason to worry for the AIs but using your free time to conceive a virtual torture dungeon is not normal. Totally agree with your point, this is a symptom of a society that normalizes not just violence but sadism too.