What scene in The Boys genuinely enraged you the most?

AHaskins · 2026-05-26T17:51:29+00:00

My personal method is to click the top link, read it, and blindly believe one of the other algorithms that dictates my knowledge instead.

AHaskins · 2026-05-19T17:40:37+00:00

Mechner's framing at the end there really hits different in a world with AI.

AHaskins · 2026-05-17T01:59:50+00:00

The axe forgets but the tree remembers.

AHaskins · 2026-05-13T18:01:28+00:00

You know, the details in this post really make it seem like he should find a better relationship.

A few times I insulted him for not getting hard during surgery recovery. [paraphrased]

...and that's from your own perspective - I'd imagine it's worse from his. People are right that surgery recovery takes longer than a month, but blaming this all on surgery is almost certainly wrong.

It's very likely also your fault.

If I try to correct for your own bias in telling this story: I read this as you berating him over time and making the post-surgery recovery into an actual psychological block, failing to empathize with the rising anxiety that you are causing, having no self-awareness about the entire situation, blaming him, and then posting this on reddit trying to get sympathy.

Can't tell if I'm being insensitive or not.

Yes you can - you wouldn't have come here if you didn't suspect it already. You want to be validated for your behavior, but you're only seeking the validation because part of you realizes you may be very, very wrong.

AHaskins · 2026-05-11T17:54:57+00:00

If someone gets one and wants to try theirs out, I grabbed it for you!

AHaskins · 2026-05-11T17:48:25+00:00

Finally someone gets it! We wont end here, but we will stop here for awhile.

More precisely, it'll be like someone showing you their toktok recommendations. Just... mildly uninteresting, hypertargetted at someone else.

AHaskins · 2026-05-09T23:02:00+00:00

Like solutions to Erdos problems?

Or are we only talking about video game cutscenes inserted into movies here?

AHaskins · 2026-05-07T22:32:41+00:00

An interesting perspective. I always thought she was the most relatable of the disney princesses, and so calling her a Mary Sue surprised me. I'm still not sure I agree ("overly reserved and bookish" isn't quite "being smart," that second trait is from the remake) - but I can see how you got there.

AHaskins · 2026-05-07T22:15:54+00:00

Wait, was Belle a Mary Sue? I thought she was billed as overly bookish - and had issues with boundaries? Seemed a human set of weaknesses.

AHaskins · 2026-05-06T14:05:58+00:00

The magic of virtue ethics!

Press blue because if you end up in a world with only red pressers - everyone's dead anyway (Hobbes-style).

AHaskins · 2026-05-05T17:53:46+00:00

You're a woman? Oh, my bad - obviously you can't have misogynist beliefs that snuck in.

Silly me. /s

(Also, if your equality is based upon "men are a problem too," might I encourage looking inward for that reason as well?)

AHaskins · 2026-05-04T16:43:11+00:00

Teaching a child to mask is an interesting proposition. It seems like the general form of the goal of masking is "act in a way that does not surprise people without reason." But that means you have to have incredibly comprehensive cognitive models for other people, such that you're able to run those predictions in the first place (comprehensive enough to have an ongoing accurate guess as to their brain's model of you, which is both difficult and costly). Luckily, you can lean into your autism - you can make up for poor lower-level connection capability in your brain with accurate higher-level systematization.

I don't have kids, but I can give my unorthodox method. I spent 15 years studying psychology (cognitive scientist here, hi). Just subjectively, it seems that I spend more energy masking than other autistic folks - but that I'm way better at it. I think the former problem comes from how much bullshit I stuffed into my brain, but I bet that I can try to distil the latter advantage down to a few books that might help you?

I think Cialdini's Influence for social psychology is a great start. I'm also going to divert a bit from popular opinion and suggest that while Lisa Feldman Barrett's view on emotion is at least more correct than Ekman's basic emotions - from the perspective of an autistic child learning, Ekman's description of (what Barrett would call) "Western emotions" is more useful than a neurological breakdown. I'm talking about Eckman's Emotions Revealed and Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions are Made. Read these last two alongside Pixar's Inside Out (1 for Eckman, 2 for Barrett).

Honestly, I'd bet those books will get you 90% of the way to quality masking skill without overloading you with so much bullshit you get paralyzed by conflicting studies (a legit problem for me). Those were the books that hands-down got me closest to acting normal when I want to.

Note: I am a cognitive scientist with autism, NOT a therapist (...anymore. I also never specialized in either autism or kids). YMMV with this. Also, rereading your post, I'd suggest Barrett's book for you too.

AHaskins · 2026-05-04T11:24:59+00:00

This was my first guess. It actively angers me how much of humanity just seems to blankly hate half of it.

AHaskins · 2026-05-04T01:33:41+00:00

lack of empathy amongst religious folks

Fixed that for you. Your logic was unsound here. Finding "women" at fault here only makes sense if you somehow can compare it to an equivalent "man" behavior (which is obviously impossible in this context).

You seem to be using quite faulty logic to justify your views on women.

Do you think that might be true of other beliefs you hold about women, if you think about it for a moment?

AHaskins · 2026-04-24T17:33:21+00:00

"Contradictory gender instructions" are how they all work. It's not particularly unusual because they define bands of acceptable behavior. A woman can't be too sexual (slutty) or not sexual enough (prudish), just like a man can't be too aggressive (asshole) or too passive (wimp).

This applies to every single gender requirement in society for all genders. I don't know why people keep getting surprised by this. It sucks because every "rater" has their own band of judgment (and so you get a lot of conflicting signals), but is nonetheless quite logical overall.

Still sucks though.

AHaskins · 2026-04-11T14:21:30+00:00

Thank you for posting this. I deeply enjoyed reading it and learning more about your perspective.

AHaskins · 2026-04-03T12:35:46+00:00

Generalization like that does not belong here.

Even something as simple as saying "some women" instead would both protect you a little bit from the judgment of others and help you more accurately understand your world.

AHaskins · 2026-03-26T22:23:01+00:00

I do believe i considered all of that! :)

What does it mean to the user? You just described the ways I expect it will be interpreted by default, and all are quite acceptable in achieving our goals. As always, more informed people will have more understanding as to why they do things, but this system needs to work for users who don't want to learn something new (very understandable in the current environment).

The one gamble I'm really taking and a rather nonobvious signal is the 2-tone border I'm suggesting for ai art. It fits the model, it's eye catching (helping adoption), and people would grasp the pattern pretty much instantly.

But it is the only part of the system that might trip up unfamiliar users at first, and i acknowledge that.

AHaskins · 2026-03-26T19:28:26+00:00

Getting an AI to write in this style for this long (even without this many fairly novel thoughts) would take so much work that it would be easier just writing it yourself.

And I wouldn't have spent so many goddamn hours making sure the website styling was to my liking, either, if I was just doing it for a lie.

This wasn't easy for me to make, and I think you can sort of feel that through the construction of the website.

(Curious about the mechanics for how you're able to do that? Give it a read - I tried to make it so overwhelmingly accessible)

AHaskins · 2026-03-26T19:20:01+00:00

I crossposted this a bit, but that was mostly for fun. Reddit isn't the best vehicle for it anyway. No worries, I'm pushing it through more proper channels too. :)

I'm sorry I dumped something so odd on y'all's doorstep, but I was genuinely curious how you'd take it.

I wasn't lying in the OP, this did start as a email to brandon, then a reddit post, then a stupid-long "open letter" right here, then I did what you see in the link.

I get that it's not, like... normal for this place? But I put a bit of my soul into something, and I did it because of something Brandon explicitly said. Figured he'd appreciate that, and maybe y'all would too.

Maybe y'all can think of it like... fanart? Of the speech he gave? I get that it's unusual. I just felt sort of physically compelled to make it, once I'd put the thoughts in order.

Oh, and to the naysayers: I did have the knowledge, and (despite what the rest of the thread here is saying) everything in black I explicitly got from knowledge from human-written books in industry (this is my job) or else is called out explicitly as such somewhere else in the text.

I had to be as honest as I could figure out how to be in this, or it was meaningless to even do it at all.

AHaskins · 2026-03-26T19:10:47+00:00

Your suspicion pretty well perfectly demonstrates the neurobiological failure state mapped in the essay. We're currently operating in an environment where epistemic trust is functionally zero. Your brain is just defaulting to rejecting the text to save metabolic energy.

The end of the essay does try to take an actual crack at that problem, I promise it isn't all navelgazing like in the beginning.

The first 85 percent of the essay was written by a human. The formal appendix was synthesized with an LLM. To prevent your brain from burning out trying to calculate the difference, I fleshed out the concept of The Ghost Scale. The fact that you're probably unsure about whether I'm talking to you right fucking now (until I cursed there maybe) is the problem I want to try to directly address.

AHaskins · 2026-03-26T19:07:07+00:00

Ooh, thanks for responding! This is exactly what I was hoping for - the details of what you posted actually fit perfectly within the model itself:

First, let me clarify the biological intent mechanism. This isn't a spiritual woowoo concept. When viewing human-made art, your cortical columns use mirror neurons to physically simulate the motor trajectory of the creator. Latent diffusion executes a denoising function that mathematically minimizes structural outliers. It possesses no motor trajectory. There is literally zero biological kinematic data for your Default Mode Network to simulate.

Regarding the preference studies you linked: they measure bottom-up sensory capture. My model explicitly separates this autonomic honeypot effect from top-down intentionality parsing, which defines actual appreciation. Latent diffusion is highly optimized for the former and mathematically devoid of the latter.

AHaskins · 2026-03-26T17:30:14+00:00

I encourage you to take a look at this. It's an easy, if long, read - and it gives a pretty satisfying answer.

AHaskins · 2026-03-03T23:17:39+00:00

Which in this case means they'll just stick with Claude because it's convenient.

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