it_wasnt_arson

From what I understand, biological systems regulated by sex hormones require one or the other to work at all. For example, you get one pattern of post-puberty bone growth with estrogen, a different pattern with testosterone, and no bone growth at all if you have neither. These systems also have some counterbalancing factor, like your bones constantly being slowly dissolved to keep calcium in your bloodstream, so if you have no gonads and no supplementary hormones, you essentially speedrun osteoporosis over the course of a few years. I’m not too clear on other effects, but a lot of things are downstream of “your bones slowly melt,” and lots of other parts of your body rely on sex hormones to regulate them and will have long-term issues without them.

If you post hard enough, it stops being a debilitating fear of mind-readers and becomes forward-thinking philosophy instead.

Sadly, I think Epic was always the most serious about making sure that every game made by every studio is part of the same cash shop scheme forever, and the most likely to realize that vision in any practical way. It’s the ultimate dream of all the deskilling, destylization, and asset trading built into their engine since UE4, turning the industry standard for games into interchangeable mush made of interchangeable parts by interchangeable workers.

Is it NFTs, or is it what Epic have been aiming for since the peak of metaverse hype, to get the entire industry dependent on an asset store and amount system where Epic takes a cut?

The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn’t really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won’t shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

PETA is funded by the meat and dairy industry to give animal welfare/rights activists the worst possible PR. It’s hard to imagine doing much worse of a job at what they claim to be their goals.

How obsessed can people get with one inconsequential guy for being cringe on the internet?

There seems to be a misunderstanding here, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn’t expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.

Maybe they listened to one of the covers that seemingly obliviously changes the line to “the shrine of your light”

Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.

The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe

In retrospect, the idea that creating a globally accepted alternative to the dollar would come with zero consequences to the system of global free trade it props up might just be the funniest bit of half-baked cryptobro ideology.

I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.

Kind of hard to parse much out of this beyond the author’s personal grievances and missing the point that human effort, whatever proxies might be available to measure it by, is one of the only markers of real value on the Internet. You could have put untold effort into choosing 100 people to give identical gifts to, but if you don’t at least hand-write each of them a card, they’re going to feel rightfully insulted at the apparent thoughtlessness. If you put a single iota of human effort into reading something that took absolutely none to write, you’ve already lost, so everyone is in a defensive posture, but it’s not impossible to work around. Strike up a conversation about something salient instead of using a meaningless stock opener. Show some understanding of someone else’s project and their needs before throwing a solution at them from the back of a truck and complaining that they didn’t put in more effort unpacking it than you did delivering it. It’s an interesting take on spam and the state of the internet, but honestly reads like protracted whining that it takes literally any effort to socially signal that you’re not a shill or a creep, when everyone else could simply put in 16 hours a day of mental effort sifting through garbage to make your life easier.

The playful and wise goblinbot…

Not even two spines, there’s some almost impressive Escheresque fuckery going on with how the page of the book he’s writing in is actually the cover of another? Good to know people “care” about children with disabilities enough to spend extra money on worse textbooks just for them, but not enough to actually read them, I guess.

Yeah, it's upsetting how much I've ended up thinking back to the crap arms race for how casual a plot detail it is, and how much more apt that descriptor is for LLMs than most other sci-fi conceptualizations of AI.

At this point, especially with *Fall,* I think he just has a tendency to pick up and run with whatever cool idea techbros are into at the moment without any real regard for how seriously people take it as a belief, resulting in a bunch of conveniently packaged, reader-gratifying ideological vignettes for said techbros to latch onto as a coherent vision and complete the cycle. I don't think he ever meant to genuinely promote the metaverse or digital money laundering or acausal brain hell or space eugenics, but he seems chronically incapable of mounting a systemic critique of any of his subjects in a style that demands a good guy crypto billionaire, likably clueless cultist, or badass geneticist to outsmart the Islamic terrorists, alien special forces, and conniving cosmonauts and save the day. I do still find it somewhat concerning how many of his plots come down to "80% of everyone are mindless sheeple enthralled by a higher power," though.

I continue to be endlessly fascinated by Anathem, by virtue of enjoying it as a kid for the wacky speculative metaphysics, enjoying it as an adult for the case study it presents in how Neal Stephenson can get you nodding along to a set of faux-lectures strung together by road tripping until he gets you to an obviously false conclusion, and now the fact that The Wick is apparently what rationalists actually believe in, just substituting simulations and reality-hacking for quantum woo and nukes? The Incanter Basilisk can entrap your consciousness by manipulating which timelines your brain is quantum-entangled with coexisting copies of your psyche exist in the multimetaverse and selecting among them to give you quantum immortality 51% attack you into the Matrix, I guess.

So, snake oil but for text.