Bulletins and News Discussion from February 12th to February 18th, 2024 - The Prodigal Failson - COTW: Brazil
Bulletins and News Discussion from February 12th to February 18th, 2024 - The Prodigal Failson - COTW: Brazil
Image is of Brazilian chuds storming the National Congress building in opposition to Lula winning the election, on January 8th, 2023, in their remarkably even shittier version of the January 6th events in America.
Bolsonaro, who is in the tragic category of pro-US South American leaders who are so awful and uncharismatic that even they can't get the US to help them overthrow a democratically elected left-ish government, has recently been facing that most elusive of things in this current world order: consequences for his actions. Bolsonaro and his friends have been under investigation by the police, and his passport has now been seized, meaning he is unable to leave the country. Alongside the man himself, the leader of the Liberal Party, Valdemar Costa Neto, has been caught up in searches and investigations. Brazilian Army Colonel Bernardo Correa Neto, a former aide to Bolsonaro, was very recently arrested upon his return to Brazil from the US, as well as another colonel.
From the Hexbear South American correspondent (a position I just made up), @Redcuban1959@hexbear.net:
Lol, they are really fucked. Iirc, this is a municipal election year in Brazil, Bolsonaro can't campaign publicly, he can't promote his candidates. The leader of his party is currently in prison. And even if he is released from prison, they are forbidden to communicate with each other. The high-ranking members of the Liberal Party are pretty much fucked because they can't communicate with each other and getting support from Bolsonaro could be very bad, as left-wing candidates will exploit the fact that Bolsonaro will probably be imprisoned for planning a coup.
The FBI seems to have concluded its investigation into Bolsonaro's money laundering scheme in the US and handed over its findings to the Brazilian Federal Police, I don't think Bolsonaro can even go to the US anymore, or any other country. And it could get even funnier, there is a very small chance of the Liberal Party being banned and all its seats in congress and the senate being transferred to other politicians, many of whom, even if they are conservative, will be much more favorable to Lula's social and economic reforms, as it has been proven that Bolsonaro used the party to finance the coup.
The Country of the Week is Brazil! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
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OpenAI just released actually good AI-generated video. The samples are actually holy fucking shit.
How will this affect disinformation, now that photorealistic videos can now be fabricated from a text prompt?
Also note that OpenAI is now presumably licensing its technology to the US military.
https://hexbear.net/post/1604077
I predict that in the next few months, we are going to see AI-generated videos of completely fabricated atrocities.
I think I'm just going to go full Luddite at this rate
Butlerian Jihad NOW
The sooner the better really, it's only going to get more difficult from here on out
Generative AI is already displacing workers.
A study surveying 300 leaders across the entertainment industry reports that three-fourths of respondents indicated that AI tools supported the elimination, reduction or consolidation of jobs at their companies. Over the next three years, it estimates that nearly 204,000 positions will be adversely affected.
The Concept Art Assn. and the Animation Guild commissioned the report, which was conducted from Nov. 17 to Dec. 22 by consulting firm CVL Economics, amid concerns from members over the impact of AI on their work. Among the issues is that concept artists are increasingly being asked to “clean up” AI-generated works by studios, lowering their billed hours and the pool of available jobs, says Nicole Hendrix, founder of the advocacy group.
“We’re seeing a lot of role consolidation and reduction,” Hendrix says. “A lot of people are out of work right now.”
According to the report, nearly 77 percent of respondents use AI image generators enabling, for example, individuals to upload landscape photos to virtual productions screens or speed up rotoscoping in postproduction. They have applications in 3D modeling, storyboarding, animation and concept art, among other things.
Generative AI displacing workers isn't some future hypothetical, it's something that's already happening right now.
That's what I mean, it's better to do the Butlerian Jihad now while it's relatively new than wait until it's fully matured and using hunter-killer drones to hunt down dissidents (yes I'm aware it's already being used for autonomous hunter-killer drones so we're late to that too)
I understood what you meant. I just wanted to communicate to others who haven't been following generative AI that the year is 2024, and the future is right now.
If you're a fan of butlerian jihads, I encourage you to check out The Algebraist by Iain M Banks. It's a scifi book not set in the culture world. It has some great characters. No spoilers about the AI bit except that people in the story are Not Fans.
The hermit life is unironically becoming increasingly appealing
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People have been falling for screencaps from Arma III for almost a decade. Run one of those through an image bot to clean up some of the more obvious artifacts and cash your propaganda check.
I found it interesting that Israel's AI image production during this whole thing have been pretty bad. They don't need to try very hard to have the baying hogs support them, so why bother with anything advanced or high effort?
Like, I'm pretty sure with their resources they could have AI'd beheaded babies and then just insisted that the photos were real.
It’s because the people they are trying to convince don’t need convincing.
The videos are ok but you've got to wonder how many they threw away to get those few and how much processing they took to compile. My bet is that the average home computer would take decades per minute of useable video.
I'm also betting the prompts they have listed are BS. I would guess they started by generating a single image and then building a storyboard around that image and then making that into a video.
It'll be a year or two till this gets used for propaganda.
These companies literally own billions of dollars worth of GPUs. I don't expect people to be able to make stuff of this quality on consumer hardware anytime soon.
I don't think the prompts are BS. There have been recent efforts for natural language prompting of diffusion models that allow you to use prompts just like that.
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) was taking requests on Twitter a few hours ago, and each video took around 15 minutes to generate.
It would be super easy for them to have prearranged the prompt requests. Even if they weren't pre baked the videos are only 10 seconds long and there would be a team of people running these prompts and selecting the best.
Its OK proof of concept but it is far from public use. Its not some big leap in tech, its a PR drive to push up stock prices.
How is this not a big leap in tech? This is leagues beyond existing AI-generated video products even at their best.
What they are presenting is leagues beyond other publicly available AI-generated video products.
??? So how does the hypothetical secret existence of superior tools make this any less of a massive jump in capabilities?
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You're probably half-right. Those prompts are just the initiating factor. For example the DALL-E 3 whitepaper described how OpenAI uses "prompt expansion," where ChatGPT re-writes user prompts (and more importantly the training data captions) to be much much more detailed then they were at first. So, the pipeline is adding a lot of detail/context, but that can be done automatically. Depending on how the model is trained, it also likely only generates a number of bespoke frames that are then interpolated between in order to improve framerate.
I was talking to an econ/finance professor at a very good university a few years ago, and he was saying that he was going to advise his children to study creative subjects, because the computers wouldn't be able to take that, so in a way, this is kinda funny to me.
Also, we are one step closer to The Matrix. Wearing my Apple Pro Vision connected to my Neuralink, which is showing me the Sora-Matrix while using my body as a living machine in the Amazon warehouse labor camp.
It's kinda funny to me that everyone thought that physical labor was going to be the first to be automated away, but it turned out that creative labor was automated first.
it's so bleak. take my job so I can make art. tech bros have zero imagination for how to make a better world
Damn, it's actually pretty good.
looks like video gamefootage, did they train it on video games and then real footage?
Which ones did you find videogamey? I only found the woman's eye and Lagos 2056 videos to have a videogamey vibe. The others felt like real videography to me, except the cartoon ones, which felt like CGI.
Her feet were sliding pretty bad.
Her feet weren't just sliding, her legs switch places entirely around the fifteen-second mark. Like, left leg crosses in front of the right then takes it spot.
My bloomer prediction:
Millennials and older will fall for every AI-generated video, even ones that are completely shoddy.
Zoomers will be a lot better at discerning AI-generated videos, their ability to discern tempered by their overconfidence in their ability to discern.
Alpha and younger will just not trust video at all.