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• Post #4366148

  Commander has become the most popular way to play Magic largely by default. The Spikes make 60-card a miserable experience for the casual player, Booster Draft requires you to pay money literally every time you play, Cube depends on having a very invested player as a friend, and don't even get me started about putting chase bombs in Jumpstart packs. What's left but Commander? If someone ever figures out a way to play that's more accessible to noobs and casuals, its time in the sun wi...

• Post #4150847

  Serious Finance People: A green transition would require way too much investment and cause way too much economic dislocation, it's completely unrealistic, we have no choice but to keep drilling for more oil Also Serious Finance People: We're throwing trillions of dollars at AI nobody wants because we can't tell the difference between a business prospectus and a science fiction novel

• Post #3814515

  Nuclear advocates be like "Nuclear will be a way better option than renewables once we have the small-scale cheap-to-build reactors that can't possibly melt down and reuse their own nuclear waste that don't exist yet but are definitely physically possible and economically feasible, we need to go with the realistic option"

• Post #3417579

  I am getting sick of this conflating of every case of "computer use algorithm" into the single gelid blob of "AI" making it impossible to have a productive conversation on the subject When people say they're "against AI", they usually mean certain specific things. "Image generators displacing human-made art" and "LLM summarizers and chatbots being shoved into every software and website we use regardless of our preferences", maybe with a side...

• Post #3323857

  I have a new patron-only post up on Patreon! BIG THINGS are coming, including for free members, and YOU could be part of the action, so why not join today? https://www.patreon.com/xauriel/posts/june-2026-patron-160485187 #AmWriting #SciFi #ScienceFiction

• Post #2820584

  Conservatives: These lefty lunatics want you to believe there's six genders! Also Conservatives: Please take very seriously this chart I have prepared of the different kinds of males there are. You will note that each of them is denoted by a letter of the Greek alphabet, which makes it Scientific

• Post #2820583

  Woke up to an argument on here about whether the treatment of trans people in the US technically constitutes a "genocide". And I'm like, there are more important things you could be discussing right now, folks, like maybe how to stop the trans genocide from happening

• Post #2820582

  Arguments against AI: - it's built on stolen creative labour - it's terrible for the environment - it's putting tons of people out of work - it's de-skilling people at a frightening rate - it's inducing literal psychosis - everything it creates is crap Arguments in favour of AI: - it's here whether you want it or not, better get on board before you get left behind - don't you want to stick it to those snooty, arrogant artists? - it might...

• Post #2820581

  Have to say, I'm digging the Vivaldi experience so far. The amount of customization options is ludicrous; I'm sticking to a pretty Chrome-adjacent configuration for now, but just having to consciously think about it is making me deliberate about the way I use the web in a way I haven't in years. I've played around a bit, connected my Proton account, set my default search engine to DuckDuckGo (huge improvement), and I put a to-do list widget on the home page, which...

• Post #2820580

  My new computer keeps giving me a helpful notification whenever I plug and unplug my headphones from the aux jack. I'm like, bro do you think I don't know I did that

• Post #2067893

  So! Had my first AI interview today, for a remote creative writing tutor position. I cut off halfway through; the thing was creeping me out, basically asking the same question over and over again in different language with obviously no understanding of what I was saying. If this is the future of employment, I want no part of it. I'll forage for berries in the fucking forest before I do that again.

• Post #1329835

  Capitalism does not "create new technology". *Workers* create new technology. Capitalism creates DRM, walled gardens, spyware, and subscriptions for heated seats

• Post #1324543

  Within just the lifetime of the baby boomers, less than a century, we've gone from "a barely-literate factory worker can own a home and support a family" to "better get a college degree if you don't want to end up working at McDonald's" to "even a degree won't support you now, take a trade seal IDK" to "AI is going to replace even skilled workers and we have literally no plan for the economic dislocati...

• Post #1141466

  - The scientific corpus is being infiltrated by mountains of fake bullshit studies - The codebase of every software product is transforming into unstable spaghetti - We have at best added a massive mental tax to our ability to tell fake from real - We are training a generation of people out of the ability to exercise every brain function we can conceivably automate This is the world we bought when we demonstrated our willingness to throw writers and artists under the bus. The arts are the ca...