This is also how I read it. I actually really appreciate attacking the idea of “white as default”. It’s kind of like how some gamers think representing anything besides the “default” demographic is “political”.

I think this is the more revealing excerpt:

This is the defining irony of white film-making. The more oblivious your film is to matters of race, the whiter it plays. Because whiteness is often exactly that: the freedom not to see race, even when it’s right there in front of you.

Basically, being aware of whiteness makes for less racist movies. There’s nothing wrong with white movies, but it’s wrong when white movies pretend they’re not white, but universal and default. The article concludes:

Instead, our twofold expectation should be this: 1) The industry affords more film-makers of colour the same creative freedoms and commercial opportunities that are now afforded white film-makers, and 2) That the film culture – including the film-makers themselves – develop the confidence, insight and language to discuss and dethrone white cinema.

This does not sound like racist dog-whistling or white supremacy to me.

House sizes have also ballooned. The average home size in 1949 was ~900 sq ft, whereas a new home now is ~2500 sq ft. It was still cheaper, but those homes prices are for a lot less house than people are imagining.

The critic rating is better than the audience rating. I’ve never seen a film with a high critic rating that didn’t have something worthwhile about it. But I’ve seen a lot of audience hits that were garbage.

Seems simple enough to guard against to me. Fact is, if a human can easily detect a pattern, a machine can very likely be made to detect the same pattern. Pattern matching is precisely what NNs are good at. Once the pattern is detected (I.e. being asked to repeat something forever), safeguards can be initiated (like not passing the prompt to the language model or increasing the probability of predicting a stop token early).

Ars Technica has to be some of the most reputable high quality reporting in tech. I got hooked way back when they’d publish twenty plus page reviews covering operating systems.