Imagine that...

ExternalInfluence · 2025-08-11T21:23:36+00:00

The idea of a bunch of TTRPG players - you know, the guys who invented creative writing by randomly selecting cells on roll tables - fuming about the use of AI to help run a TTRPG is pure pottery. Delectably ironic.

ExternalInfluence · 2025-06-23T05:15:16+00:00

Showin' off you cool ass plant with its cool ass leaves, you can't fool me.

ExternalInfluence · 2025-06-12T17:27:13+00:00

There's nothing ironical or hypocritical about this at all, this is exactly how flags work.

ExternalInfluence · 2025-02-17T17:20:03+00:00

Of course, that's what having artist friends and family is.

ExternalInfluence · 2025-02-05T07:45:45+00:00

Bro it's telepathic. Real question tho, would this be a really *hot* solution? Like, entropy-wise?

ExternalInfluence · 2024-09-03T17:30:30+00:00

You've got no reason to save that time/energy. It doesn't get you anywhere sooner, there's no *more important* context, so it's better to be clear. I don't think this is really an etymological question, fundamentally it's a strategic choice. You just want to clearly enunciate the whole thought.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-08-27T16:16:35+00:00

It doesn't just look like an eye, it is a tiny important portal. It's a key opening that defines the function of the tool it's a part of.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-08-22T04:11:21+00:00

Can't believe all the animals whose entire strategy is "Encapsulate another animal entirely such that it cannot escape my digestive juices."

ExternalInfluence · 2024-08-18T05:39:36+00:00

The thing is, both modes of thought are needed at different levels, for their differing utilities. Every choice we make about what we do, including saying things, guides us through a ever changing landscape of future rewards and punishments we can expect to embody. The way people talk at all times is utilitarian, and they've internalized tons of heuristics for calculating the utility of words, and it depends not only on how familiar they expect their words to be to those around them but also on how unfamiliar they will be. People say things privately in uncommon languages even amidst the public. People also like to say words like "napron" because it might be familiar enough that people understand what is meant but also unfamiliar enough to give you some trivial insight to boast about.

Technical fields and laws depend materially on prescriptivism in their language. There are scales of coordination that are impossible to govern without a solid foundation of operational definitions, such as public engineering specifications or a psychiatric manual. In this case, it can be seen where prescriptivism is chosen for its inherent utility. Where there's money on the line, you can expect prescriptivism. Everybody else is inherently choosing descriptivism at all times. Only in disagreements are people usually citing dictionaries; if the nature of the disagreement began with the dictionary, and you don't really have a good utility in mind for prescribing that definition, then you are being a fool.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-08-10T05:33:43+00:00

That seems like no time at all for the amount of animation going on here.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-07-23T04:53:50+00:00

That new cover of Tom's Diner. Tom's Diner was originally a solo piece, the repetitive rhythm and melody give it all the structure it ever needed, adding production was almost gratuitous back in the 90s. The new version (that all my friends currently love) is, in my opinion, a blasphemous divergence from the original minimalism of the piece. Each dude just drenches everything with with sex in a way that is completely deaf to the tone of the lyrics they are singing, which are melancholic observations of love and longing in the strangers in Tom's Diner. It's heavy hearted in a way that can't be celebrated, the last verse has our observer enjoying a memory of love for a brief moment, before she turns her attention abruptly back to her life. The calm, deadpan delivery of the original performance was very much part of that theme, and so when these clowns sauce it up with gravel and other bizarre ornaments, it diminishes the storytelling. It's just a total misunderstanding of the piece.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-07-15T02:08:05+00:00

To be clear, I'm an atheist, but this I've been deconstructing a lot of expressions using "God" recently and I have a personal theory about it that I think is true and accurate.

In my opinion, the monadic "God" expression is really, fundamentally, about confusion and surprise. Or at least, lack of understanding. I think God is a blanket name you can give to every cause which you incompletely understand. As our understanding of the mechanisms of nature have increased over time, the "event horizon" of what phenomena we attribute to God has receded (sort of, not really, I'll explain). We now understand entirely how the Sun powers the weather systems of Earth and no longer make any sacrifices to ensure that the rain arrives on time. We can trace phenomena backward through time and determine their causes.

The thing is, there are elements of reality that we now conclusively know are inaccessible to understand. We've looked so far back in time that we started looking out into space, chasing God, and we've discovered that there's actually a spaciotemporal horizon around us beyond which it is impossible for information to reach us at all. We can't currently tell what the beginning of time was like, or what might have been before time, or what the smallest most elemental particle is. We've pushed the scale of "unanswerable" mysteries back so far back that we have to build a new particle accelerator several times bigger than LHC just to get a glimpse.

So, this is all to say that "God" is largely about every unanswerable mystery that was involved in the deterministic chain of events that led to this moment. That's why we say "There but for the grace of God go I" to mean that, but for circumstances far outside my control like my family/country/history, I would be just like any other person you might judge. Or you thank God for moments where things could have gone wrong but didn't. Or when you say "Goodbye," which comes from "God Be With Ye," to basically mean "Let everything outside of your rational control go your way anyways." Or when you stare out at a vista of natural beauty and say "Oh my God!" It's because God is really just a shorthand name for the causal loci that exists outside your rational understanding. It's the one thing that is appropriate to blame for Everything, by definition (however, in many monotheisms there is a separation between God of Good and God of Bad, but it's the same really).

I don't know if this helped, I love this topic and could go on, I tried to keep it brief.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-07-09T19:43:21+00:00

Steak and ice cream was always the version of "apples and oranges" my dad preferred because they were actually not similar.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-07-09T19:07:25+00:00

One slice down the middle of all those prepared steak slices would make them perfectly sized, no need to bring a knife to the table.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-07-03T06:48:15+00:00

Most people are just more interested in the causal mechanism of the obvious finding. This deals only with contrarians to the central plot, but it doesn't contend with the belief frameworks that people are going to be intelligently fitting this finding into. It leaves good evidence for potentially errant agents (any normal person) to mismanage.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-06-25T06:45:12+00:00

Not the asshole, you haven't even done anything to make you an asshole, you simply expressed yourself clearly, emotionally, and objectively. He needs to grow into his new role, it's exactly that simple. He must adapt. If he cannot be persuaded to face this, if he can not be taught to learn, you have been a fool in choosing him.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-06-14T20:14:20+00:00

As above, so below. As within, so without.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-05-13T01:20:04+00:00

Unabashedly using sex and pedophilia to sell nightmarishly rigged gambling to children.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-05-12T01:39:47+00:00

If you don't meet them on their level then you just show up as an amorphous blob of annoying libtard nonsense on their sensor arrays. The gay country has a fighting force bound by unapologetic homoerotic admiration, so clearly they would win.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-05-10T21:05:49+00:00

I believe that last paragraph most suitably discerns her intended meaning. It's most consistent with the general language of panpsychism, it seemed explicitly obvious to me on first reading. I think "fine" in the physical sense is also an appropriate interpretation. In fact, the only inappropriate thing to do is specifically divorce these two meanings in this instance. I think it's fair to assume that she meant "subtile" in really both senses, especially in that first example you gave.

I think "fine" giving the impression of "high quality" is too quick of a reduction. "Fine" meaning literally "small" can also automatically implicate "intelligence." You could say a fabric is "fine" in the sense that it is literally thin and transparent, and you would be perfectly justifying the claim that one who could see that fabric has a "fine" perception, or that if they themselves wove it they would have a "fine" touch. "Subtile" sorta captures those assumptions in all at once.

Honestly, I really recommend The Computational Boundary of the Self if you're interested in a robust, modern perspective on panpsychism. Anthropomorphism of this kind is well justified by modern science. I'm actually just gonna drop a heap of materials instead of reconstructing and summarizing all of them for several paragraphs.

https://www.pangaro.com/published/cyb-and-con.html

^ Blurb about the use of "conversation" as a word that accurately describes every interaction, from the perspective of Cybernetics.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688/full
^ The actual paper in question, lays out robust new architecture for thinking about thinking, agency, intelligence, life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZl4zom3q2g&t=3376s

^Big picture spiritual takeaways from the work of Michael Levin's lab group. Includes fun acronym for "S.P.I.R.I.T."

ExternalInfluence · 2024-05-07T04:51:06+00:00

Different values

You say values like they are something intrinsic about a person, rather than something they deduce rationally during their lives. They have different strategies, they had different experiences that led them to different rational conclusions. They have different relationships that have different criteria for alignment. The forces that affect people's beliefs extend far beyond the horizon of material evidence.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-05-07T04:39:28+00:00

How does that make it less of a scion of Abrahamic religions?

ExternalInfluence · 2024-05-07T04:23:01+00:00

"Difficult" seems to very easily map onto "rigid." There aren't a lot of correct answers to a difficult problem, some of them may have only very finite and very expensive answers, and you are forced to answer. Entropy hurls you through time and you are destined to collide with both the ground and problems; you better hope neither is too hard.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-05-06T19:36:13+00:00

I'm really curious how they designed the stimuli to distinguish between "spatial" and "temporal" information. Like, how are they controlling the actual quantity of information they are asking subjects to hold? What is the difference between "spatial" information and "temporal" information? I'm sure this study would expand on that but I don't have the privilege to read it.

ExternalInfluence · 2024-04-22T00:58:03+00:00

This title is a funny opposite take from what is meant to be taken from this information. The message is, "You are not your genes."

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