#cryptobros

Does Spamton actually *believe* in NFTs and Crypto scams? ❌ Nooooooo

Bro literally sees scams as a means to an end. He's an amoral asshole that exploits people's naivety and weakness. The only thing he worships is the NEO body and the Lightworld, and that's only because he thinks it will help him escape his cursed, false reality as a Darkner.

August 20, 2024:

This is so fucking funny.

I read this because of Dan Olson's description of it in his marvelous video "The Future Is A Dead Mall" and I was curious about how the original Metaverse was actually conceptualized.

This strikes me as a very intelligent author said "How can I write the dumbest book possible?" This should not imply that the book is bad! Just like, the Cool Guy mode was turned up to 11 and everything was so awful and gritty and dystopian that it became silly. I laughed out loud. I read introductory paragraphs to my friends. I live-reacted on Snapchat because this story is HILARIOUS and it is played one hundred percent straight. Every character takes themselves soooooo seriously riding around on their little high-tech skateboards through openly racist anarcho-capitalist neighborhoods, spouting barely-comprehensible yet extremely-plausible futuristic skater slang. Masterpiece of hilarity, no notes.

What I will offer a note on, is the weird second half gets wayyy into religious mysticism? Really took me out of it. I didn't care about whatever central mystery the characters were researching. I wanted more big dumb car chases, more "hacker" shit (in this world, "hacker" just refers to... anyone who can code), more pointless Mafia side-quests, more strikingly accurate depictions of today's technology dreamed up all the way back in 1992. In short, I wanted to see more of this world.

Weirdly enough, we didn't even spend a lot of time in The Metaverse™️ for this book being the thing that named the concept. It made it even funnier for me that this story's outside world more closely resembled our real life failed "Metaverses" in that everything was compartmentalized, financialized to the extreme, and governed only by corporations; meanwhile the Original Metaverse was a fantasy of a walkable city with public transportation and no cars. Incredibly insightful social commentary.

I had an absolute blast reading this, and even my friends howled when I read them selected passages in my best Cool Guy voice.

Want to hear another stupid cryptobro story? Of course you do.

Trader Joe’s, the American grocery store chain, is again trying to shut down the popular DeFi platform Trader Joe for trademark infringement, after unsuccessfully attempting to do so last year, according to a recently filed federal lawsuit.

Last year, Trader Joe's (the grocery store) sued Trader Joe (the cryptocurrency exchange) for name infringement and lost.

Why'd they lose? Because the defense explained that "Trader Joe" was actually a nickname used by the cofounder's brother, Trader Joe Liu. Nothing to do with Trader Joe's, the supermarket chain. And the court bought it.

But then they published the news of the win in a company newsletter, loling about how they'd lied in court and gotten away with it:

“With no name for the DEX yet, [we] just named it Trader Joe, after the supermarket,”

they wrote.

When Trader Joe's (the supermarket) prevails this time, which they surely will, they intend to take all profits made by the usurping business plus a hefty cash penalty.

I was thinking about how people often say "Oh, Chat GPT can't write stories, but it can help you edit things!" I am staunchly anti-A.I, and I've never agreed with this position. But I wouldn't have much integrity to stand on if I didn't see for myself how this "editing" worked. So, I sacrificed part of a monologue from one of my fanfictions to Chat GPT to see what it had to say. Here is the initial query I made:

Chat GPT then gave me a list of revisions to make, most of which would be solved if it was a human and had read the preceding 150k words of story. I won't bore you with the list it made. I don't have to, as it incorporated those revisions into the monologue and gave me an edited sample back. Here is what it said I should turn the monologue into:

The revision erases speech patterns. Ben/the General speaks in stilted, short sentences in the original monologue because he is distinctly uncomfortable—only moving into longer, more complex structures when he is either caught up in an idea or struggling to elaborate on an idea. The Chat GPT version wants me to write dialogue like regular narrative prose, something that you'd use to describe a room. It also nullified the concept of theme. "A purity that implied personhood" simply says the quiet(ish) part out loud, literally in dialogue. It erases subtlety and erases how people actually talk in favor of more obvious prose. Then I got a terrible idea. What if I kept running the monologue through the algorithm? Feeding it its own revised versions over and over, like a demented Google Translate until it just became gibberish? So that's what I did. Surprisingly enough, from original writing sample to the end, it only took six turnarounds until it pretty much stopped altering the monologue. This was the final result:

This piece of writing is florid, overly descriptive, unnatural, and unsubtle. It makes the speaking character literally give voice to the themes through his dialogue, erasing all chances at subtext and subtlety. It uses unnecessary descriptors ("Once innocuous," "gleaming," "receded like a fading echo," "someone worth acknowledging,") and can't comprehend implication—because it is an algorithm, not a human that processes thoughts. The resulting writing is bland, stupid, lacks depth, and seemingly uses large words for large word's sake, not because it actually triggers an emotion in the reader or furthers the reader's understanding of the protagonist's mindset.

How it started / how it’s going.