B. Otterlake

@izzz.bsky.social

7632 Followers 160 Following

Creator of Bluesky

Tweet by Brooks Otterlake: The best thing about having pull in New York City is I can go into practically any corner deli (aka bodega) in town and ask for an egg and cheese on a roll and they'll make it for me. I slip them five bucks and they give me a wrapped up sandwich. It could be 2am, doesn't matter Reply: What’s the difference between that and being a regular customer
The movie theater asks more of the viewer today than it ever has. It used to be that sitting through a theatrical film required no more focus than sitting on your couch and watching a movie on TV. You couldn’t pause a broadcast, your only other viewing options were whatever was playing on other channels, and you didn’t have a device in your hand connected to billions of internet users vying for your eyeballs. Smartphones and streaming drastically raise the psychological cost of leaving your house to see a film. If that’s a cost worth paying — as it seems to be, to large numbers of people — then our technology of ubiquity is having the paradoxical effect of increasing the value of the theatrical experience. It’s unique to our era that going to see a movie means giving up more than just your time and money. You have to put away a digital appendage that’s effectively a part of your brain and spend two or three hours looking at a thing you can’t control. Anything that deserves this kind of sacrifice must be important.
Texturelessness, characterlessness, lack of differentiation, and ease of production and consumption all seem crucial to the concept of slop. At the heart of these properties is interchangeability: in any given domain, one unit of slop can substitute perfectly for another. Slop is fungible. When content becomes a commodity, each piece competes purely on how efficiently it can be created and distributed. This is the real optimization going on: slop maximizes the ratio of attention gained to effort expended. It does the minimum work required to trigger engagement, and stops there. It scales infinitely, proliferating in the generative AI era as the cost of its production approaches zero.
The system prompt defines the character Claude is supposed to play: an intelligent assistant with “depth and wisdom”, possessing its own thoughts and point of view, capable of emotions like interest and enjoyment. It’s told explicitly not to claim that it lacks sentience or subjective experience — rather, to treat the question of its own consciousness as intriguingly unknowable. How does Claude understand, purely on a language level, what any of this means? How does it know what a friendly, possibly-sentient AI is, or how such an entity is supposed to act? Like any LLM, it draws on what exists in its training data. And since an “intelligent assistant” is something which, until very recently, was only a speculative concept, Claude’s behavior — and the behavior of every AI assistant — is constructed largely from what exists in fiction.
The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun.