spending more than 4 hours building this ... is a choice
it's provocative marketing for the photon imessage sdk/api so probably worthwhile since it's already getting engagement here
Show HN: Epstein IM – Talk to Epstein clone in iMessage
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: Show HN: Epstein IM – Talk to Epstein clone in iMessage
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with lulz?
Well there were victims and they're still around so... A joke isn't funny if you're "punching down"
They don't need to, and shouldn't, use this service. It was not made for them and I doubt sincerely that it was made to harm them.
There were direct victims, but you also forget that the US now has a shared trauma over the handling of the Epstein situation and its systematic suppression, the gaslighting, and anything which continues to fuel discussion is a good thing, until the day that it has been properly addressed.
Re: Show HN: Epstein IM – Talk to Epstein clone in iMessage
#53spending more than 4 hours building this ... is a choice
it's provocative marketing for the photon imessage sdk/api so probably worthwhile since it's already getting engagement here
true, it's fit for a marketing strategy for an unauthorized protocol that is now being turned into a startup I guess
Re: Show HN: Epstein IM – Talk to Epstein clone in iMessage
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
One interesting contrast is in his emails with Noam Chomsky, who wrote in complete paragraphs.
I didn't exactly have the highest hopes for Noam, but holy shit was I disappointed in his character over the past few years. Seems like he's actually a pedophile from his reactions to Epstein related leaks. My interaction prior to that was reading manufacturing consent and saying "yeah, seems about right"
He had a stroke in I believe 2022, and is no longer verbal, so he hasn't been able to give fresh takes on current events such as Ukraine, Gaza, the second Trump term or the latest Epstein revelations.
I remember his Ukraine takes seeming irrationally pro Russia. And somewhat out of character, he electorally supported mainstream centrist democrats.
I think in light of the emails, some commentators have been saying that the bits in manufacturing consent about only acceptable views being published applied to him. He was a token leftist who ultimately supported the status quo.
Whether he was personally a pedophile or merely tolerated pedophiles I don't think I've seen evidence towards. He was certainly a hypocrite, it's disappointing, and a huge stain on his legacy.
Re: Show HN: Epstein IM – Talk to Epstein clone in iMessage
#55I am hesitant to shoot down anyone's work in Show HN but this is deliberate obscenity in service of (I assume) rage baiting. It's all well for art to be transgressive and offensive but if it's not in service of a goal remotely worth having then it's juvenile. Breathing life into a vile monster who remains a contentious subject is just gross and not worth publishing. OP, I think your work on integrating with iMessage…
It's just a chatbot shitpost, it's not that deep
Re: Show HN: Epstein IM – Talk to Epstein clone in iMessage
#56Abysmally shallow. Clearly trained on documents centred upon his legal case and not, for example, of whatever mathematical talents got him a teaching position, allowed him to bluff his way past the likes of Marvin Minsky, and what (if anything) drove his investment strategies.
Obviously it can only be trained on available documents and not the abstract essence of his actual personality, "talents" or what have you. Any attempt to model a human being like this is going to be abysmally shallow, yet for some reason it's an industry unto itself, for everything from dead celebrities to Jesus Christ to lost loved ones.
Ehh.. Two years ago an art student asked me to clone her personality into a LLM bot. It is absolutely possible to do that to some degree, but you have to be very good at describing the profile(s) of the person and have a mechanism that keeps track of different states the bot can be in.
I am not saying we made a convincing human being there, but the result was very hard to distinguish from texting the real person, both based on personality and on writing style.
Since the bot also knew about her commute (API), mensa food (scraped), lecture table (API), events of bars/venues she frequented (scraping) and some local/world news (scraping), latest in niche interests (scraping) even asking current events would yield a convincing conversation.
The hardest bit was actually having it not react in certain situations, when the person talking to it was probing bot behavior, becoming insulting and stop it to play the other persons servant or overly fixating on certain info it got, but we also managed that. Sure you couldn't really have deep insightful conversations with that bot, but quite frankly that matched the student for the most part..
But it takes much more than just feeding the transcripts and prompt it to be like that person.
Re: Show HN: Epstein IM – Talk to Epstein clone in iMessage
#57Abysmally shallow. Clearly trained on documents centred upon his legal case and not, for example, of whatever mathematical talents got him a teaching position, allowed him to bluff his way past the likes of Marvin Minsky, and what (if anything) drove his investment strategies.
Obviously it can only be trained on available documents and not the abstract essence of his actual personality, "talents" or what have you. Any attempt to model a human being like this is going to be abysmally shallow, yet for some reason it's an industry unto itself, for everything from dead celebrities to Jesus Christ to lost loved ones.
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