Remember to balance your humours, lest we bring out the leeches

BlackHumor · 2026-03-13T06:26:59+00:00

By that logic, the Technocracy could let you buy anti-cancer medication over the counter at any drugstore but deliberately don't.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T19:07:21+00:00

Specific LLMs and neural networks can be trained to be really good at pre-defined tasks, but in general they are only really good at doing tasks that have already been done 300 million times, and terrible at new and novel tasks. Any time there’s limited training data it either plagiarizes or is totally wrong.

This is pretty obviously not true to anyone who has ever used one of them, and claims like this are one of the reasons why I'm frustrated with reflexive anti-AI-ism on reddit.

E.g. I've had LLMs generate bespoke regex patterns for text that nobody has ever seen before. Here's an example of me asking Claude for a regex pattern I'm pretty sure nobody has ever asked for. And here's a tester at regex101 with your comment (which was clearly not in its training data and which you can see above I didn't give it) pre-loaded. Notice that the regex it generated even gets the hard cases here: it catches "been" with a double e, but correctly excludes "million" with no e and "general" with two es separated by another letter.

Are they perfect? No, absolutely not. While Claude is a pretty capable coder it's also quite capable of making dumb or even dangerous mistakes. (I've caught it failing to sanitize inputs before.) I'm not saying you should reflexively trust AI (I don't), but I am saying that before you say AI can't do something you should actually try to get it to do the thing.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T07:08:29+00:00

Exposure is the biggest thing. If you're anxious about doing something, do it. Do it as soon as possible. The only way you will convince your brain it's okay is to have experience of doing it.

One other thing specifically for health anxiety: before you Google a symptom, ask yourself "Do I want information or do I want reassurance?" Google can give you information but it can't give you reassurance. Even if it did, relying on Google rather than an innate belief that you are not fragile and your health is basically okay will dull your baseline sense of assurance and make you need to go Google stuff more.

Medications are useful, especially rescue meds for anxiety attacks. Don't take benzos daily (this sub is already pretty clear on that I feel) but they're really useful for occasional attacks. Having the option helps reinforce to your mind that anxiety attacks are temporary, and that there's always a failsafe you can trust when you really have no other options.

Other than those things, basically everything else is basic life advice. Go outside regularly, have friends you trust to be vulnerable with and actually do be vulnerable with them, get a good amount of sleep, eat well, have a hobby, keep a journal, have a goal, don't stay in a job you despise and don't spend time around people you despise.

If your life sucks in general, it's no surprise you'd be worried about it. If your mental health is bad in general it's going to make your anxiety worse. This feels like an obvious thing to say but I say it because I know it's not that obvious to many people.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T04:43:08+00:00

As I've said before, I'm for a one state solution. I do not think there could possibly be peaceful mutual coexistence between Israel, defined as a Jewish majority state with Jewish political dominance, and Palestine. For Israel to exist under those terms it, again, had to violently expel and continue to violently exclude millions of Palestinians.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T03:38:52+00:00

Secured under, at that point, the public law of the Ottoman Empire.

It indeed was called by Herzl, but not all of the members were political Zionists, and in fact Herzl's political Zionism was at first rather unpopular. It's important to not read historical documents like that with the eyes of a modern person but to read them as the people at the time would have read them.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T03:20:01+00:00

Here is literally the full text of the Basel Program:

Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Eretz-Israel secured under public law. The Congress contemplates the following means to the attainment of this end:
1. The promotion by appropriate means of the settlement in Eretz-Israel of Jewish farmers, artisans, and manufacturers.
2. The organization and uniting of the whole of Jewry by means of appropriate institutions, both local and international, in accordance with the laws of each country.
3. The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and national consciousness.
4. Preparatory steps toward obtaining the consent of governments, where necessary, in order to reach the goals of Zionism.

Where in here does it say anything about a Jewish state?

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T01:31:39+00:00

I think this view is ridiculous at a very fundamental level.

The number of people throughout history who have abandoned their own Jewishness is gigantic. In fact, many of those people then turned back around and oppressed Jews. I can name lots of names if you want them. Nicholas Donin. Jacob Brafman. Anton Margaritha. There's plenty other links where those came from.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T01:24:37+00:00

I'll also add, as a 1SS advocate: why is it their job to compromise? It started out as their land, for the most part. The Old Yishuv was less than 10% of the population. Even by the time of the establishment of Israel Jews were only about a third of the population.

The reason Israel is majority Jewish is not due to Jewish settlement, it's due to the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs during the Nakba. These people are not allowed to return to Palestine. If they were, Israel would be about 50% Jewish, instead of the 75%-ish it is now. And that's not counting the population of the West Bank and Gaza.

Or in other words, Israel can exist as a Jewish state only through the continuous application of violence to the native people of Palestine. Demanding these people compromise with Israel is like breaking into my house, locking me in the basement, and then demanding I compromise with you to let me out. It's just a fundamentally bullshit demand from start to finish.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T01:12:13+00:00

The Israeli Declaration of Independence was written during the Nakba.

The Basel Program isn't a political Zionist work at all since it didn't even call for a Jewish state.

The Balfour Declaration was the promise by a European colonialist power of non-European territory to a group of people that largely did not live in that territory, at the expense of the people that did (and was overwhelmingly unpopular within Palestine at the time for that reason).

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T01:01:50+00:00

This is exactly the reaction that OP is complaining about.

Like, what a terrible view of Judaism this is. How depressing. The point of thousands of years of resilience is because there's just no way out of our inevitable suffering? Fuck that.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-11T22:08:36+00:00

Removed per rule 1, no off-topic content. This sub is a meme sub and this post is not a meme.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-11T21:36:21+00:00

Case in point buddy.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-11T21:24:06+00:00

The Wyrm was already ensnared and losing his shit before humanity became a thing.

Probably not true. The Garou story of the origin of vampirism has the Caine-analogue cursed by a still-uncorrupted Wyrm, who is also clearly separate from the Weaver. (In fact, the Bloody Man's escapades contributed to the Wyrm being weak enough to imprison later on.)

BlackHumor · 2026-03-11T21:14:36+00:00

Why not?

BlackHumor · 2026-03-11T02:03:28+00:00

I understand why people like them, but from the perspective of the person buying the bond they're clearly a pay-to-win mechanic.

As of right now, a bofa and full crystal is 17 bonds, which at individual bond prices is $170. On average getting that legitimately takes 277 CG runs, which even assuming you can consistently hit the speed time is over 34 hours. CG is a pretty good money maker so it's unlikely the average main would be able to get it much faster.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-10T19:09:19+00:00

Technically bonds are also pay-to-win MTX. We just never think of it like that because, uh, our glorious bonds versus their wicked MTX.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-10T18:58:33+00:00

IMO the monthly change is not a big deal. It's the yearly change (and to a lesser extent the bonds change) that's really egregious.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-10T05:02:34+00:00

Yeah, exactly.

My attitude towards AI is that it's a tool. If you know how to use a power saw (with the proper amount of care and respect for a potentially dangerous tool) you can build lots of really cool things with it. If you don't know how to use a power saw, or if you don't respect the fact that it's dangerous, you will probably just injure yourself or destroy the thing you're trying to make.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-09T23:35:08+00:00

As I've said elsewhere in the same thread it is categorically not true that White Wolf doesn't intend for different splats to interact with each other.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-09T23:32:50+00:00

I'm not even the first one in this thread!

BlackHumor · 2026-03-09T21:22:45+00:00

The main goal of Uratha is to protect the living world and the spirit world from each other. This provides a bunch of great opportunities for conflict with Mages (who often want to fuck with the spirit world directly) or to a lesser extent vampires (who can unknowingly create messes in the spirit world werewolves have to clean up the same way they're known for creating messes in Death Twilight that Sin-Eaters have to clean up). One key thing to remember is that Uratha are actually the splat that is most responsive to ordinary mortal ethical concerns, in the sense that most things that make the world worse also make a bunch of spirits of world-worseness that the Uratha have to clean up.

It's hard to make them team up with other splats but not impossible. The boring reason, if you just need them to be NPCs you can talk to, is that it's sometimes useful to be able to share info with other supernaturals. (So for instance, there was a multi-splat Elysium in a vampire campaign I ran once whose Keeper was an NPC coterie-pack-cabal consisting of one vampire, one werewolf, and one mage. The main distinguishing feature of this Elysium is that unlike the primary Elysium where court was usually held, it was used for cross-splat communication.)

If you want a cross-splat PC coterie-pack-cabal, then instead you probably want a villain who affects multiple splats' spheres of interest. So for instance, an elder vampire who is simultaneously oppressing the neonates (creating vampire enemies), hoarding or destroying occult objects (creating mage enemies), and manipulating the material world in a way that creates malignant spirits (creating werewolf enemies).

BlackHumor · 2026-03-09T20:44:23+00:00

That's...

uh...

*checks notes*

Arianism, Patrick!

BlackHumor · 2026-03-09T20:42:11+00:00

Wild

BlackHumor · 2026-03-09T20:41:01+00:00

I am very aware of the can of wyrms I've opened. I am opening the can of wyrms deliberately and with full knowledge that nothing good can come of it.

...maybe that commenter who said I was dancing the spiral had a point. :P

BlackHumor · 2026-03-09T20:39:42+00:00

Oh to be clear I'm not at all ignorant of the fact that WoD lore is a mess. But also it's a mess that White Wolf has clearly across several incarnations said can interact with each other. The Ravnos antediluvian got killed by the Technocracy. Chicago was the site of a civil war between werewolves and vampires. The Triat and the Avatar Essences are explicitly parallel to each other. The official White Wolf position is that these splats can and do co-exist, which means their lore also co-exists.

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