Eli Evans

Eli Evans

@elievans.art

Sci-fi & fantasy author, software designer, composer/beatmaker, erstwhile hornist. Indie all the way. Recent widower. This is my real name and face. State the reason for your DM. No paid reviews. he/him https://elievans.art

857 followers1K following2K posts

I voted, and you should, too. If you live in Washington state, please vote against the anti-trans kids initiative (NO on IL26-638). You can text VOTE to 868392 to see your ballot status.

Eli Evans reposted

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

Eli Evans reposted

Turns out the friction of having to learn photoshop was a crucial firewall protecting society from the terrible taste of small business owners

When I first heard about AI being used for menus and advertisements, my concern was largely that it would be used to idealize the food and make it look better than it actually was. At no point did I imagine that restaurants would willingly put out horrific looking images of their food on purpose

Eli Evans reposted

The machine did not "go rogue." The machine belongs to and is the responsibility of the people who own it. Hold those people accountable for their goddamn machine.

Eli Evans reposted

It's piling on I guess, and I haven't seen Digger, but Iñáritu and Cruise are an absolutely apex "cannot even begin to imagine what this person thinks is funny" pairing.

💻: Here, take this funny little piece of artwork. 🧑‍💻: That’s good! 💻: It was made with gAI, which bears a terrible curse. 🧑‍💻: That’s bad. 💻: You enjoyed it before you knew that. 🧑‍💻: That’s good? 💻: The enjoyment is also cursed. 🧑‍💻: That’s bad.

Not that I think this was a successful or entertaining movie by any stretch. It’s a message movie that hates being a message movie and hates its audience for showing up to a message movie. I left the theater thinking, “Well, screw you, too, Alejandro.”

Eli Evans@elievans.art

Do not go see “Digger” unless you are prepared to be intentionally irritated for about two hours.

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Not that I think this was a successful or entertaining movie by any stretch. It’s a message movie that hates being a message movie and hates its audience for showing up to a message movie. I left the theater thinking, “Well, screw you, too, Alejandro.”

Eli Evans@elievans.art

Do not go see “Digger” unless you are prepared to be intentionally irritated for about two hours.

View full thread

Not that I think this was a successful or entertaining movie by any stretch. It’s a message movie that hates being a message movie and hates its audience for showing up to a message movie. I left the theater thinking, “Well, screw you, too, Alejandro.”

Eli Evans@elievans.art

Do not go see “Digger” unless you are prepared to be intentionally irritated for about two hours.

There’s a (meta?) reading of the movie as a call to action on climate, but that reading is undermined the entire time — when it’s not being openly mocked. It’s well-crafted. It achieves its artistic purpose, which is to piss off the audience.

Do not go see “Digger” unless you are prepared to be intentionally irritated for about two hours.

I’m just going to stop saying, “How much dumber could things get?”

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

ED HENRY: This AI race-- SEBASTIAN GORKA: No no no no no no no. Sorry. It's SI. As of this week, it's Super Intelligence. ED HENRY: Thank you for the clarification from the White House

Eli Evans reposted

Replying to @flowerhorne.com

Insisting that LLMs are Not People is not an academic argument about the nature of sapience or free will. It's a rejection of accountability laundering. If non-determinism made machines responsible for their own actions then revolvers used in Russian Roulette should be indicted for murder.

Also, this is their mascot in the lobby about four feet tall.

Eli Evans@elievans.art

Maocai Hotpot Express has two locations, Klamath Galls, OR and Cypress, TX. They need to open up a third location, across from my house. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ www.maocaihotpotexpress.com

Hanlon’s razor, but it’s “never expect the end of the world to be one big fun and cool event when it can be adequately accomplished in a myriad boring stupid ways”.

Dave Willner@dwillner.bsky.social

Certain kinds of smart people tend to have a "sexy apocalypse" problem when it comes to thinking about risk. E.g. skynet turning everyone in paperclips, while bad, is also *kind of cool and fun* at the same time. Where the reality is that most actual disasters are both stupid and disappointing.

LOL somebody in downtown Klamath Falls hasn’t reset their router password (?) and now my phone thinks the AT&T store has moved locations.

Rode the Amtrak from Seattle to Klamath Dalls, OR. Gonna hang out for a few days, take in Crater Lake. Also staying at a ranch outside Bly that doesn’t get cell service. Do some stargazing. Been a while since I’ve been in Eastern Oregon. Like a different world that’s more redneck than Texas.

I’ve traveled from the land of blue dreds and Pokémon tatts to the land of wearing sunglasses on top of your trucker hat. Everyone has a large truck and multiple pony-sized dogs that look like they’re fed on raw venison and gunpowder. The one constant is the waft of cannabis everywhere.

This coffee shop has only one kind of trash. (No recycle. No compost.) But they do have three large American flags, one regular, one gray with a green stripe (military), and one gray with a red stripe (firefighters) — the pride flags of red America. Coffee and bagel was pretty good.

Oh my.

Jonn Elledge@jonnelledge.bsky.social

I have received an email from an AI asking to write about borders for my newsletter, and it is giving me a genuine insight into how AI psychosis happens. it is so difficult not to understand this as "an actual sentient being addressing me" even though it has been entirely honest about being an AI

So much thunder! I’ve grown accustomed to gentle rains here in the PNW, but this morning the sky is so angry it almost sounds like Texas out there.

Eli Evans reposted

""What did he study? “Philosophy and theology. A teacher in high school said, there’s no money in that, and I said: ‘Sir, that’s disrespectful. That’s insulting, because not everybody’s about money.’" he's one of us!

theguardian.com‘I don’t chase the dollar. I never did’: the astonishing hidden life of Mr THe grew up in the ghetto, became a global superstar – then gave it all up. Why did he step away from the spotlight?

Eli Evans reposted

something that wrinkles my brain every time I remember it is the fact that total eclipses are only possible on earth because the moon and sun appear to be the same size in our sky, due to the insanely, astronomically unlikely fluke that the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but 400x closer to us.