oh then you can ask it to make variations again, wow
lmao i get to see other people's prompts too, somebody is working on "ikea instructions for assembling a human body" lmfao
so they'll then get to choose which one to double down on, make variants of, etc
anyway here's the hindu video game final boss I chose
3. singapore as a neon cyberpunk dystopia
HOLY FUCK WAIT FOR THIS ONE
4. a first person shooter video game in a 1950s neon noir setting
OH MY FUCKING GOD
OH MY GOD
OH MY GOD
this was just DREAMED UP in SECONDS because I ASKED
the world has changed guys, we live in a different world now
imagination is the final bottleneck
5. a FPS in the style of van gogh's starry night
initial prompts on the left, elaboration of 4th on the right
6. a da vinci painting of the baghdad house of wisdom
7. a modern hindu temple made of glass and steel (initial 4 prompts).... I pick the 4th one to make more variants of... I'm trying to rush this for a twitter thread before I go to bed, but if you're patient you can really iterate on this stuff
8. putin crying alone in a russian bar
8a. putin crying alone in a russian bar, upscaled
9. donald trump selling ice cream from his ice cream truck
ok they're redeploying the bot or something so gotta wait for a bit, will continue tmr
a lot of loneliness plays out like this: people accumulate past grievances that they feel have not been appropriately heard. they front-load interactions with this (eg complaining about ex on first date), which makes other people feel unheard. this perpetuates the wretched cycle
a lot of solutions to the loneliness problem begin by finding some way to metabolize the grievances, whether it’s through therapy, or drugs, or art
partial solutions are possible and better than nothing; and most people do live in some state of leaky compartmentalization
how that plays out is you keep it together well enough to not complain about your ex on the first date, but it slips out in a fight maybe six months later, “that’s the thing with you men/women…”
nonpartisan tweets about framing: scrolling through @joebiden's timeline, which i assume is run by his team, i can't help but notice just how many of the tweets are about trump, with pictures of trump, videos of trump. look at trump, think about trump. imagine trump as president
@JoeBiden I remember @HillaryClinton doing the same thing. imagine trump as president. picture trump in the oval office
a critical skill if you wanna walk through the walls of culture, and/or “see the matrix” of social reality, is to de-fixate on who the winners or losers of some social exchange are, who’s higher status or lower status, whose group is better or worse, who’s allied with who, etc
the way to de-fixate is to be curious
curious about the truth, curious about how things look from the other side, about how you might be wrong, about what is or is not technically possible, about what the material constraints are, about what the alternate narratives might be,
this sort of thing ordinarily feels redundant to me to say out loud, since it’s kind of been my natural operating system for as long as I can remember. I’m usually only reminded of it when I bump into someone who doesn’t seem to have access to curiosity
met a couple of different friends yesterday and today for lots of good conversation and I wanna try and remember stuff that came up, so- a thread of kinda disjointed thoughts
one of the most powerful magical forces we’re all in thrall of is how mundane and inert everything appears to be. this is an illusion our minds generate to make things easier to navigate, but it also blocks us from seeing possibilities in plain sight
2. people who are looking for incremental solutions to a problem will often ignore or disregard solutions that eliminate the problem entirely (often requires upstream reconceptualization)
chaos-surfing well requires understanding a buncha things
1. how things appear to me are not necessarily how they are
2. what people say is not necessarily what they mean
3. what is said/shown is not necessarily all there is
4. what is true for me may not be true for you
5. the same words mean different things to different people
6. people often don't even read what is there, they often see a few words and assume what they thought they saw. you can ask them to repeat things back to you and they'll make up completely different phrases sometimes
7. what is salient (striking, important) to me about some situation or conflict is not necessarily what will be salient to you. each of us have had a lifetime of experience that the other doesn't have a lot of information about, and that experience informs what we each pick out
I’ve gotten thousands of DMs over the years from people telling me about their problems. Here’s one interesting pattern/cluster I’ve noticed, which I’d loosely describe as
“anxious self-flagellating ambitious guy who desires greatness but refuses to learn from his mistakes”
they tend to say something like, “I know perfect is the enemy of the good but I can’t bear to do merely good so I keep trying to do perfect and keep failing. how do you deal with not being perfect?” and- I’ll prob have to explain this but the vibe is very similar to-
the question I ask in return is something like, “how do you deal with accomplishing nothing over something? that seems like it would be harder to deal with than failing to be perfect, which is the default condition of all human beings from day 1”