they're wearing things which extras with no lines would wear in the background in a movie. The things I wear look like, at minimum, a named character.

This is true.

The first time I mentioned "John Wentworth" to someone at Lighthaven, they asked me: "who's that?" I said, "you've seen him around, he's that guy who looks like The Blues Brothers." "Oh."

Is that frame-shift error or those ~6 (?) SNPs previously reported in the literature for anything, or do they seem to be de novos? Also, what WGS depth did your service use? (Depending on how widely you cast your net, some of those could be spurious sequencing errors.)

'Repetition' is certainly a drawback to the ChatGPT style: we have lost em dashes and tricolons for a generation. But it can't in its own right explain the reaction to the SD image, because... 'German Expressionist linocut' just doesn't describe a default, or even a common, output style of any image generative model ever. (That's part of why I like to use 'linocut' as a keyword, and for better or worse, people who might reach for 'German Expressionist' these days typically reach for Corporate Memphis instead.)

It could however be a kneejerk reaction: "oh no, this is a generated image, therefore it is exhaustingly overused and boring [even if it isn't actually]".

So, most LLM RL training would be expected to exacerbate this issue?

I think that it's a pity if people write off my SD page because they failed to understand the meaningful illustration I put effort into creating and didn't, say, check the alt text to see if they were missing something or wonder why such an unusual website would have "AI slop"; and I agree that this may be a case of "things you can't countersignal".

However, I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations. I don't usually write for such readers, and I definitely do not write my Gene Wolfe essays for them!

So unless people can point to something actually bad about the illustration, which makes it fail to satisfy my intent - as opposed to something bad about the readers like being dumb and ignorant and writing it off as "AI slop" when it's not - then I decline to change it.

The image borders are exposed, and the white fade does not work. Compare to the fully functional light mode:

To be honest, I don't like the light-mode example either. I think it's bad to have your text visibly overlapping like that. (If I made an image which I had put .float-right .outline-not on to get the same effect on gwernnet and I saw your 'good' white-mode version, I would be immediately complaining to Obormot about his CSS being busted.) So in this example, isn't a lot of the problem that the UI elements are overlapping so the text is spilling over onto the scales and blocking the wires etc, and the dark-mode merely exacerbates the problem and fixing the core problem would also fix the dark-mode issue?

FWIW, my impression is that while the gwern.net dark mode was a ton of work to create, due to requiring a total refactoring of the CSS and deal with the flash-of-white issue and figure out the correct three-mode behavior, and create tooling like the color conversion script or needing to create InvertOrNot.com for acceptable images, or tweak the syntax highlighting colors to look right in dark-mode... But once we finished paying all of that, the maintenance burden has been relatively small. I have to patch up the occasional image not inverting right and we have to occasionally special case some Wikipedia popups CSS, but it's on net less effort than much of the website (eg. Apple device support, or the local archive system, are perennial hassles).

The gwernnet dark-mode is pretty good engineering work overall. We should've done a design-graveyard writeup to explain not just how it works (non-obvious) but the problems with the more obvious approaches and what problems we had etc. I fear it might be too late to write it now even if we had the time...

I don't believe it is "AI slop", much less that it is "pretty nasty". I consider AI slop to be low-meaning and low-effort generative media which adds little or nothing to the experience

I assume you are referring to the German Expressionism, alluding to Nosferatu (which is highly relevant for at least two reasons), image illustrating the narrator's childhood iceskating in a New England Protestant town in decline due to Dracula taking it over; I generated it in MJ after cracking SD, to sum up the horrifying reality of my solution. I put several hours of thought and effort into the concept and creating it, and got what I wanted, so I think this is just a case of de gustibus non est disputandum. I felt it cleverly visually encapsulated the mood of the horror that Gene Wolfe meant to lurk underneath the harmless nearly-bucolic appearance of SD and enhanced the experience.

So I think it satisfies my 3 criteria: it is not low-meaning, was not low-effort, and adds something. But I don't think this is a good place to discuss it, so I have added a more detailed discussion of that image's process & meaning to my image slop blog post as an example of how I think I get good image samples.

EDIT: I would be curious about the disagrees. What, exactly, are you disagreeing with? Do you think I am lying about the creation process, the prompt, or the meaning? (I would point out that there was already a short version of this description in the alt text, and has been since I added it in the first place c. November 2023.) Do you disagree that the high concept reflects my SD interpretation? Or what?

If you asked me to guess what would be the 'elegant' counterpoint to 'traveling with a carefully-curated of the very best prepper/minimalist/nomad/hiker set of gear which ensure a bare minimum of comfort' was, I would probably say something like 'traveling with nothing but cash/credit card/smartphone'. You have elegantly solved the universe of problems you encounter while traveling by choosing a single simple tool which can obtain nearly anything from the universe of solutions.

Remote seating has its own problems. On my last flight to SF, I almost missed my late-night flight out because I had (very unusually for me) found a more pleasant, quieter, empty gate to make a phone call on, out of eyeshot; and then my flight was delayed twice so the original boarding time flew past; and eventually I got so wrapped up in the call that I let the time slip until a vague nagging anxiety and had to wrench myself out and run in a panic to my actual gate - where fortunately there was still <10 minutes of boarding left. While it took at least 3 problems and I didn't actually miss my flight in the end, it would've been bad because it was probably the last one out that night to SF, and it's the first time I have ever come anywhere close to missing my flight while having actually been sitting at the gate hours before... So it was a memorable and alarming near-miss for me.