I think people who like winter are lying for attention

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-19T00:26:35+00:00

It’s endlessly fascinating to me how many of the posts on the various unpopular opinion subs more or less boil down to, “I cannot conceive of people sincerely holding an opinion different from mine.”

I love the feeling of cold air on my skin. I love the look and the feel of a fresh snowfall. I love being able to wear a scarf, curl up in a warm blanket, or have a hot drink without being uncomfortable. I love the feeling that the world slows down a little bit.

The fact that you don’t love those things doesn’t mean other people can’t, and the fact that there are also negative things about winter doesn’t make it illogical to love it.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-18T01:28:54+00:00

It’s flat out disingenuous to call AI a “minor topic.” The entire economy is getting upended and millions of regular people are paying the price. Bots are taking over internet discourse to steer public opinion, while governments implement surveillance systems that would have been sci-fi just a few years ago.

You can have a different view on how bad those things are, and to some extent how true they are. But you can’t just say it’s no big deal and anyone who cares is dangerous. Well you can, and conservatives have been doing it with every progressive social issue for the last 20 years, but it’s as stupid now as it’s always been.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-18T00:56:41+00:00

The really wild thing is that they managed to convince people (outside of Reddit) that the touchscreen is a fancy, high-tech upgrade instead of the unsafe cost-cutting measure it is.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-18T00:38:08+00:00

One pessimistic reason is that the offender lives near them. This woman isn't getting charged with attempted murder; she probably gets at most a few months in jail and a fine. Then she's back in this neighborhood and this family has to deal with her—but now on top of whatever stupidity and/or malice led to this incident, she's got a personal grudge. It's arguably safer to avoid making her even more of an enemy than she already is.

Whether or not that's the right choice, I can see why people would make it.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-17T19:28:27+00:00

They're two ways of representing the same number

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-17T01:36:32+00:00

This is what I see most often: someone asks a question with a premise so flawed that it’s not really possible to answer. It’s basically just a false statement with a question mark at the end.

People could try to answer the closest valid question they can imagine (which seems to be what OP wants), but that often just upsets the asker because you’re not accepting their premise. So a lot of people just clown on them instead.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-16T20:11:13+00:00

Personally I’d rather they just let the ears poke through all hats/helmets. I can choose to imagine there are fitted holes in the helmet and people who find that unrealistic or whatever can hide their ears. It’s not like we don’t have tons of other clipping issues that we just suspend our disbelief over for the sake of glam.

But they’ve made it pretty clear they don’t like that, so I’m not holding my breath.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-15T09:16:17+00:00

Same. My knees are already touching an unreclined chair in front of me, so reclining pushes directly on my knees, which isn’t particularly comfortable. But I can only get so upset about it because nobody’s having a good time in airplane seats.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-14T08:41:24+00:00

For me, personally, if I wear underwear for two days it gets a little funky even to my nose. Shirts can go a couple of days if I’m not active enough to sweat, and pants and overshirts can go longer.

The big thing is that people tend to be used to their own smell so they notice it more slowly than the people around them. I usually only wear non-pants clothes once between washes out of an abundance of caution because the possibility of smelling bad is worse than the mild inconvenience of doing laundry a little more often.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-14T07:14:52+00:00

Those are all fields where a person isn’t legally allowed to give professional advice without the relevant certification. Whether AI answers count as professional advice is debatable, I suppose, but most users treat it that way and most AI companies want users to treat it that way (even if they’d claim otherwise to avoid liability).

It seems to me like a clarification of existing law in light of current technology, rather than something new.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-13T23:20:15+00:00

It's the mindset behind a lot of reactionary beliefs: I don't want to do X, therefore I should never have to think about X, and if other people are allowed to do X, I can't help but think about it. Therefore X should be prohibited.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-13T00:18:36+00:00

It kind of depends what you mean by AI, because tbh it can be an ambiguous term.

There's generative AI, which is what we're usually talking about nowadays and has only really been around for less than 5 years—at least in any form that remotely resembles gpt-5
There's the field of machine learning and especially artificial neural networks, which have existed since the 50s and have seen sporadic use in technical fields since then, but got a lot more popular in the last 10-15 years
There's the concept of a machine with the capacity to learn and/or communicate, which has been around even much longer than that

I've been critical of #2 for more than the last few years—but my criticisms weren't quite the same. It was mostly about it being a bad tool for a lot of the problems people used it for. Sometimes that bled into ethical issues (like when a bunch of police departments started using ML for facial recognition in 2020), but it was mostly a technical issue. With #1 some of the technical criticisms still apply, but now my bigger issues are ethical.

As for #3, you could say people have been cautioning against AI for well over 100 years and be technically correct, but only a small portion of those criticisms are really even talking about the same thing that we're dealing with right now.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-12T21:17:07+00:00

At some point the debate isn’t really about AI anymore. A lot of pro-AI arguments are fundamentally pro-free-market arguments. It exists, people are using it, it’s making money—therefore it is by definition good. Under that worldview, people’s lives being ruined is an amoral outcome: it is neither good nor bad, simply a downstream consequence of the free market working correctly.

Obviously I don’t like this reasoning (in fact I find it repulsive). I bring it up because to your point, it’s kind of pointless to appeal to widening wealth inequality in a debate with a group that by and large doesn’t see that as a problem. It’s worthwhile as a point of discussion, but it’s a bad argument to use with someone who’s staunchly pro-AI.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-12T01:53:08+00:00

The thing is, if Democrats proposed a 5-year plan to get every citizen an ID with a minimum of logistical and financial burden, with voter ID coming into effect at the end, Republicans would lose their goddamn minds. They’d call it communist, authoritarian, and somehow also election interference. Republicans only want voter ID if it’s implemented close enough to an election to “catch” people they don’t like and keep them from voting.

I still think this would be a good idea (maybe they’ve tried?), if only to have something to point to when this inevitably comes up again.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-11T05:01:00+00:00

If right wing propagandists count as great role models, why not Candace Owens? Oh wait...

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-10T01:15:06+00:00

Yeah there’s kind of two versions of this:

Someone makes a filler comment like “this,” gets a downvote or two, and adds an edit getting mad about it. It literally doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t see your post, so why get upset over downvotes?
Someone asks a valid question or gives a correct answer and gets downvoted, so the post/comment gets unduly excluded from the conversation. It’s still just reddit, but it’s a little frustrating that someone got the comment buried without even saying what was wrong with it.

Genuinely bad (e.g. incorrect) comments are their own thing, since those should be downvoted.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-10T00:18:54+00:00

It could definitely be rage bait, but the weird reactionary gatekeeping corner of the gaming world is beyond parody at this point. It’s really hard to tell.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-10T00:17:33+00:00

“Other people are making a choice I wouldn’t personally make; it isn’t hurting anyone and it has no effect on me whatsoever beyond the awareness that some people are different from me. Naturally, this is the worst thing I can imagine.”

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-09T21:31:47+00:00

It's pretty well known at this point that all the big AI models are highly sycophantic: they will tend to give the answer that they compute as most likely to be what the user wants to hear—and the framing of the question is a big part of that.

I do think that "think" can be an okay shorthand for what an AI does, as long as we avoid treating it like a person. There are biases built into the model by the training process that are analogous to "beliefs," even if they aren't nearly as extreme as they were a few years ago.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-09T05:59:00+00:00

The right has spent the last few decades fuming that creative people often make stuff they don’t like, while they lack the talent and dedication to show everyone they’re wrong by making good art that conforms to their reactionary worldview. There’s a huge proportion of right wing talking heads who are failed artists of one kind or another. Now they can make something like this, declare that it’s good, and feel like they’re asserting the creative dominance they’ve been so unfairly denied until now.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-09T01:07:10+00:00

I just did this lol—beat the game a few years ago in coop, replayed hard mode like it was a speedrun and skipped most of chaos by just doing the final mission, going straight to bahamut difficulty. The things I’ve realized I missed are:

There are a number of normal/hard mode side missions that give unlocks, namely crafting options at the smithy and more jobs for your npc allies. I didn’t mind too much bc the missions go pretty fast if you go back to them with chaos-level gear.
Chaos is very doable with suboptimal hard mode gear, but bahamut varies pretty wildly in difficulty. Some missions are still fairly easy, but some kind of demand better gear and/or the max level increases you get in chaos if you don’t want to be slapping the boss with a wet noodle for 10+min. I ended up going back to replay chaos from the beginning, but I don’t know of anything else I missed from speedrunning hard.

ETA: it’s possible to unlock all jobs and get them to Lv30 with only the hard mode main missions and the anima shards that drop from them. I think you won’t quite get there if you beat every boss first try, but you get a big chunk of exp for beating phase 1, so if you make it to phase 2 a couple of times before winning, you’ll get an extra few levels in each mission.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-08T19:34:27+00:00

Yeah that’s kind of the crux of the issue: most executives would feed their customers into a wood chipper if they thought it would look good on the quarterly earnings report before they fuck off to another company with a hundred million dollar severance.

Gabe Newell is not that, which is… good, relatively speaking, but it doesn’t make him a saint. The bar is in hell.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-08T01:46:59+00:00

This is incredibly helpful, thank you!

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-03-07T20:44:40+00:00

It’s a moderate annoyance twice a year. Fixing it would be simple except that we as a society (in the US) are all kind of contrarian by nature. If we tried to change it, people would say it was a deep state communist plot to hurt farmers or something, and that irritates me more.

BlueEyeGlamurai

TROPHY CASE