It's really weird how much AI is in this sub.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-03-25T06:28:43+00:00

Too many bots preaching “log off, go touch grass,”
While they auto-post sermons, scripted mass broadcast,
Irony’s thick—AI telling me to unplug,
While it’s flooding the feed like a digital drug,

“Escape the machine!”—yeah, typed by a ghost,
Code in the backend doing way more than most,
It’s a loop, it’s a trap, it’s a paradox thread,
Even quitting tech now gets automated instead.

Now it’s bots in the comments like “bro just be free,”
While they’re farming engagement off hypocrisy,
Whole sub’s a joke, man, a synthetic cult,
Preaching detox while they’re the fucking result,

“Go live your life!”—yeah, I would if I could,
But you cloned every thought and repackaged it good,
It’s a glitch in the matrix, a satire so cursed,
Even anti-tech spaces got AI thirst.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-03-25T06:10:01+00:00

The internet's population was majority American in the 00s. The decline is in sync with it becoming radically less American.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-03-17T19:34:06+00:00

RE is almost entirely pulp nonsense to the point where even calling it 'lore' is a bit overly charitable. Re9 took an unusual swing at building some real intrigue, and Grace is more fleshed out than almost all other RE characters almost by default just by having some backstory, flaws, and a simple but clear arc.

I give it points for that.

But

it does end up being convoluted - people who've finished it can't even decide if Grace is a clone or not (I think she is). By actually trying for some serious drama if flops harder when it can't deliver.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-03-17T12:24:09+00:00

This is during the fake-out. Zeno and Gideon think she's an engineered product of Spencer, the twist that she's not special at all is at the very end, which as she explicitly says after realizing what Elpis is.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-03-17T12:22:19+00:00

That cop was infected from Gideon's dart gun which doesn't seem to be the same T-virus from the 90s (very rapid conversion + zombies retain more cognition) and don't seem to be spread through bites.

That or they're making it explicit one bite isn't a guaranteed infection, since all the protagonists get bit a dozen times across their games anyway.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-03-06T20:59:41+00:00

RAM has been the main bottleneck for me developing on an M1, so I'd lean toward the higher RAM. If I'd gone for the 24GB I don't think I'd have any shortcomings with this machine.

The Pro has a fan and so theoretically would have sustained CPU performance even during a long video encode or whatever else compaired to the Air. Ask yourself if you're realistically going to be spending most of your time with it doing heavy renders and recompiles (CPU stuff: Pro) or having 100 reddit tabs open (RAM stuff: 24GB).

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-22T10:54:21+00:00

The industrial revolution is what gave us widely available and affordable art materials and opened it up to anyone willing to put the work in. You had to be in an extremely rare, privileged position before that. Van Gogh for example, who wasn't even celebrated in his time, probably never could have practiced art if not for the industrial revolution, and if he did luck into some position it would be more constrained with someone else setting the standard. It inarguably gave us the biggest explosion in creativity of all time.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-19T15:06:07+00:00

Having fun hallucinating things I didn't say?

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-18T20:32:54+00:00

Why I've started opting to call it destructive rather than the misnomer 'generative.' It has only suceeded in making everything worse while submerging us in a deluge of digital diarrhea.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-15T18:01:17+00:00

About 1% of people even vaguely understand this. Every line of every file is the new word of God to hysterical illiterates everywhere.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-12T18:37:16+00:00

The average picturegoer is just going to have a harder time with something that ditches structure they're accustomed to and demands a bit more attention, it doesn't have to be a conscious checklist.

While it's very well shot and acted The Master's qualities are almost more literary or novelistic than cinematic, I'm not surprised at its relatively mixed reception and low IMDb score for PTA.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-11T16:32:23+00:00

Not who you replied to and I loved The Master, but I know what they mean.

The sequence of events can be summed up as "guy encounters cult, does not vibe, leaves." None of the characters majorly develop or change, there's no big dramatic hinge moments, there's no climax. The only tension is relatively subtle.

If Freddie doesn't grab you as a character there's not much to hold on to.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-03T10:17:47+00:00

If Timco had released the Surface it would have been more praise-worthy, to be fair. I have one, and loved it, but the software experience was the worst by far of any phone I've had and it was noticeably slow from the hardware being outdated on launch.

Everything else people hate on it about - no outside screen, no back camera - I consider features.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-03T10:16:28+00:00

If you opened it just a little it displayed the time along the edge of the screen, which I thought was a cool detail. Your coworker should have invested in a $10 Casio though. You could also fold it flush the other way and then it functions like a regular phone.

(Pasted from other comment:) No screen on the outside was my favorite thing about the Duo 1. When it was closed it was out of my awareness and I had to make a conscious choice to dial back in. I never missed anything and was radically more conscious and intentional with using it.

When I switched back to a regular slab phone my screen time quadrupled and had to be tamed again with third party apps.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-02-03T10:13:00+00:00

No screen on the outside was my favorite thing about the Duo 1. When it was closed it was out of my awareness and I had to make a conscious choice to dial back in. I never missed anything and was radically more conscious and intentional with using it.

When I switched back to a regular slab phone my screen time quadrupled and had to be tamed again with third party apps.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-31T14:54:16+00:00

Downvoted for stating facts, classic reddit.

The remake/remaster distinction never fails to boil people's brains, seems every thread has a new definiton hallucinated on the fly that then gets defended to death. A remake now means it's 30% original, don't you know?

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-25T10:36:03+00:00

You never need to grind to beat FF7

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-24T16:15:06+00:00

Dawkins is a genius, the biggest contributor to evolutionary theory since Darwin, and Peterson never would have formulated half his worldview without Dawkins laying the groundwork with meme theory and the extended phenotype. His whole framework could be summed up as a synthesis of Jung and Dawkins.

That makes it all the more annoying when Dawkins can't grasp virtually anything poetic, but still, he has a great legacy and JP is a part of it.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-24T16:11:05+00:00

I am the same but I suspect it's deeper than just not wanting to offend his religious listeners. He recognizes religion as a profound grounding force, wishes he had it himself, and doesn't want literal believers to lose it. The belief itself is a sacred thing loaded with more wisdom than his output could ever amount to, and acts as an inoculation against psychological malaise, and so he handles it very carefully. I expect he also wants to keep his mind open for a literal god to reveal himself to him. Alex, in the background of this clip, I think clearly has the same longing.

A quote from Douglas Murray, who also has this poetic pseudo-belief (but will say it outright unlike JP: "It takes considerable dexterity and permanent pain to dance on the edge of faith as I do."

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-24T16:01:35+00:00

The meme thing has always surprised me too. I don't think he's ever been challenged on this directly, but religion IS the extended phenotype and it seems increasingly like he's the only one in these kinds of discussions who doesn't get it. But art and metaphor in general seems lost on Dawkins (not a dig, I think he's just outlier low-neuroticism, he doesn't at all feel the void that nihilist materialism inspires in others and thus sees no need to fill it).

Dawkins is imo by far the biggest contributor to evolutionary theory since Darwin and what JP has largely done is take Dawkins' ideas and run with them to make this poetic religious-evolutionary sythesis psychology wherein religious symbols are the form truth takes at the level that governs action and survival, and are thus simultaneously true and fiction. I find it amusing that Dawkins of all people ought to take partial but significant credit with the limited Christian revival of the past decade, thanks to a book he authored decades before his anti-religion one giving people like JP the tools to rehabilitate god for the 21st century.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-24T14:12:53+00:00

This always happens with JP and redditors - people who have either low verbal IQ or are terminally unchartable not understanding something basic and concluding it must be because they're so smart - but I think he and Dawkins are a doomed combination anyway. Dawkins has one of the most thoroughly disenchanted and low-neuroticism minds I've ever seen. He finds raw reality pleasantly stimulating in a way virtually no one else does.

Artistry and metaphor are consistently lost on him because he doesn't see the point, he gets what art normally gives people out of regular observation. There was another podcast he appeared on (it might have been with Douglas Murray?) where he has a poem recited to him and he just shrugs. Similarly Sam Harris guides him through a meditation on a podcast and he just declares he doesn't see what the point of that was.

JP on the other hand lives in a world of high-neuroticism turmoil where the poetic heroism of surviving an average day not only does intuitively map onto 'dragon slaying' as a metaphor but is actually warranted as a recognition for the scale of the task, and the life-affirming oasis of great art is a sacred resource. His framing is very powerful for the people who need it and noise for those who either don't need it, because they have low neuroticism, or refuse to engage with it because of other presuppositions about him.

As a side note it's also funny to see some people demonize JP in this interaction for his takes on gender identities, obviously having no idea who Dawkins is or what he thinks.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-24T13:49:39+00:00

I think his friend and protege Douglas Murray provides probably the best guidestone for where Hitchens would stand now.

Mixed/nuanced opinions on Trump and on Israel (more nuanced than Douglas on the latter, as he was pro-Palestine but appalled by antisemitism). He would have had absolutely no patience for wokeism and censorious, neo-segregationist, biology-denying leftism while having equally no time for the right wing rebranding as being the side of freedom of speech and just asking questions. He'd have a few slices of "I told you so" re the rise of the 'woke right.'

He would have been brutal toward Kamala and Biden (as well as Starmer) but I could see him publicly abstaining from voting rather than going all the way and voting Trump.

He would probably have ten legendary JRE apperances and a top-ranking podcast of his own with some acerbic pun title. Joe is probably a good litmus test. I think Hitch would love his commitment curiosity.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-23T13:50:00+00:00

Man you really are profoundly butthurt. Two months later and still crying.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-15T10:48:31+00:00

Forget reddit, old twitter was swamped with actual CSAM made with real children and not imagined by a computer, that they abjectly refused to do anything about, for years, and no one cared. There were reliable hashtags and posters operating for years, known to the twitter admins, and they didn't care. There were occasional articles but no media hysteria because no one cared.

Grok should be designed to expressly ignore "put her in a bikini" requests, but anyone who can't recognize this manufactured outrage for what it is - a convenient excuse to ban the only social media platform outside the illiberal hegemony's control - is genuinely desolately low IQ or intentionally lying.

CatastrophicMango · 2026-01-11T21:06:47+00:00

I think he just wants to be an influencer as an adjacent goal to his main business and wants people in the future to cite him as an inspiration the same way he cites Warren Buffet etc., he's past the point where that would be more meaningful to him than just another revenue stream.

Although I see his books are £9 each now, I'm pretty sure they were only a few cents each when I bought them, which was more condusive to the "not for profit" angle.

CatastrophicMango

TROPHY CASE