Actually it’s vitally important if you’re going to have an outdoor catgirl. Otherwise they’ll decimate the local birdgirl population.

I agree that the Doki Doki Literature Club reference was out of place, but consider that the whole post is predicated on the assumption that anime is a radical new art form that is revolutionizing [$Product] while itself being revolutionized by the new technologies designed by a16z’s stable of startups (the ones they haven’t cashed out yet). DDLC is niche enough that the intended audience will feel clever if they know about it, but successful enough that there’s a nonzero chance they’ll have heard about it.

It also has the most anime title they could find.

Some notes:

• Who told Mark Andreesen about the overlap between possible AI suckers customers and weebs? Are we going to get a16z’s next hot take - “Furries are eating the world?”

• I’m sure most of the audience here can fill in their own 700+ word rant about the breadth of anime as a visual style, so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. However, unlike the older trends of assuming that whichever shonen is currently most popular (the kids still like at least one Dragonball, right?) is representative or dismissing anything with the relevant aesthetic as “some weeb shit I won’t like”, here the writers manage a much more impressive feat. They acknowledge the breadth of what anime contains, but completely fail to ask the basic question: “why do people like this?” Similar to the original prompts for this kind of rant, they’re assuming the art style and Japanese cultural background are the primary reasons why anyone connects with anything anime, and then expand from that premise. I’m pretty sure this is a root cause of why the whole article feels like it was written by goddamn martians.

• Are vTubers playing existing characters a thing? What little I’ve seen isn’t linked to existing stories (that’s what humans call “IP”) but rather focus on original characters who have their own shit going on. Even ignoring the attempt to shove genAI into everything (as though everyone is going to want to make their own vTuber avatar and stream it someday?) this seems like assuming that the people going to watch the finals of the local Battle of the Bands are going in the hope of getting an autograph from Kurt fucking Cobain.

• There has been some criticism of gacha games as being monstrously exploitative and basically gambling targeted at kids and/or teens, but consider just how much money it makes. These people are ghouls.

• Going back to the genAI we set aside two bullet points up, I do think anime has a unique property there. It simultaneously has a much stronger visual identity than many other aesthetics, including photorealism, but also has a massive number of scrapable examples to train off of. The more consistent style makes it easier to replicate statistically and what visual abberation you still get is less likely to fall deep into the uncanny valley. The outputs I’ve seen from even older anime genAI were better than their contemporaries, but still pretty easy to pick out. Something about shading or gradient or something, probably because since anime is drawn rather than captured like a photo there’s no detail that’s fully incidental. GenAI, of course, has no actual purpose and so all details in every output are incidental. That gives the output a weird unfocused quality I think?

In conclusion, I’m starting to suspect that VCs don’t have souls and/or don’t interact with any human being outside of potential partners-in-somehow-not-crime or potential victims.

The bragging about the size is what gets me. It’s such obvious news-baiting, with no real effort to ask why it needs to be so large or if this is a worthwhile tradeoff. It’s especially egregious when SpaceX and friends’ massive volume of launches are accelerating Kessler syndrome and the plan to burn them up on reentry at scale is adding a whole lot of bad stuff to the atmosphere.

Even as the static images have gotten a little bit better at avoiding the most obvious failures (e.g. “oh sweet Jesus the hands what is wrong with the hands???”) all these programs are still converging on a very specific and very off-putting aesthetic. Its the same reason the prose tends towards the same ridiculously corporate tone: averaging together all the creative works of human history spits out an aggressively average product based on what went into the training data. But applied to the visual arts what we end up with is just. Not bland like oatmeal, but bland like cardboard.

That’s one way to put a sentient being on the other end of the request, I guess.

And thanks to the free market we should note just how many options everyone has. Broadband Internet definitely isn’t a series of local monopolies with minimal ability to actually switch.

It’s gonna be so awkward when they realize they need a bureaucracy to actually make any of the things the blockchain says happen in the real world.

I’m gonna honestly be a little disappointed to see this fail not for any of the reasons why authoritarianism is a bad politics, but just because the authoritarians in this case are going to be dumb enough to forget to arrange for sewage collection or something.

Obligatory plug for calcgpt

Some of the things he points out about how thoroughly embedded coverage of this industry is with Google insiders or approved partners makes sense given how Google basically is web search these days, but then that’s kind of the whole goddamn problem isn’t it?

I got all the way down on my one knee and nothing short of the second coming is gonna move me from this spot

I mean, the tech industry can’t be beat at getting people like Balaji Srinivasan an obscene amount of money, so they must be doing something right!

I feel like there’s a “law as it currently exists” thing versus the ideal. The law as it currently exists makes it illegal to discriminate based on content. This has historically been an important vector for, say, allowing civil rights activists to send essays to be published in newspapers. But much as it was illegal to deny a gay couple their marriage license, it ought be somehow made illegal to spread damaging lies about trans people in order to stir up a hate campaign.

In this case I’d say that 5 days fully paid suspension is probably an appropriate consequence for this rule-breaking, and could only be made more appropriate if it actually included tickets to spend those days someplace warmer and friendlier than that part of Canada and a knowing wink from the postmaster general.

The “important people” line is a huge part of how the grift works and makes tech media partially responsible. Legitimizing the grift rather than criticizing it makes it easy for sales folks to push “the next big thing.” And after all, don’t you want to be an important person?

The problem is that there could be any number of possible next words, and the available results suggest that the appropriate context isn’t covered in the statistical relationships between prior words for anything but the most trivial of tasks i.e. automating the writing and parsing of emails that nobody ever wanted to read in the first place.

I want to know when that report was filed. “I can’t find my cat, therefore my Haitian neighbors stole it to eat” is the kind of statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged, unless the idea was already in the water supply because a vice presidential candidate was saying it in interviews ahead of a national debate.

A police report would mark a diversion from the usual pattern of these things where Trump surrogates talk a big game about the massive conspiriacies against them (and therefore against You, the hypothetical American voter) to the media, but if they ever end up in front of a court or a police report or something where lying may have actual consequences they back off hard. How many times did we hear about all the mountains of evidence they had of voter fraud in 2020, and how many of the resulting court cases include those same lawyers specifically saying “we do not allege voter fraud” when the judge asks about it.

It’s pretty great. The closing bits of improv from her cohost are a bit meh imo but the AI hype assessments are legitimately amazing.

Also means we’re likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who aren’t already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.