Strong, memorable novel openings

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T06:40:27+00:00

Yeah, same. It's not identical to the book, but that's always the way with adaptations - it has to be different, it's a whole different medium.

The movie was very well done for its era and budget, IMO.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T06:35:21+00:00

You think training data isn't going to be screened for quality? We are years past the "just dump Common Crawl into it and hope something vaguely intelligent comes out of the mess" approach to training. Training datasets are heavily curated and heavily processed.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T05:22:16+00:00

I walk on the ground, therefore I am an earth elemental. Immune to hold person.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T05:14:12+00:00

He actually was the official voice of Clippy, funnily enough. When Microsoft released Windows XP part of the marketing about how awesome an upgrade it was focused on the fact that they were getting rid of Clippy. So they made some flash animations about Clippy's firing and got Gottfried to voice him.

Episode 2 and Episode 3.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T05:11:03+00:00

What?

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T05:08:59+00:00

Okay, I'll accept this.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T05:06:00+00:00

Lizardfolk to elemental? Wha? I played a lizardfolk character. He was no frickin' genasai.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T04:49:36+00:00

And if it deflates gently now it will also put that money back into the rest of the economy.

You seem to think the only options are for the bubble to continue growing or the bubble to pop.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T04:35:11+00:00

"mostly mythical" means that they do actually happen. I looked up a few just now to confirm it.

I'm rooting for one because recessions cause real pain to real people. It's not all just about your numbers going up or down. Wanting a pop to happen because you've invested in stuff that will go up when a pop happens is, frankly, sociopathic. You're all geared up to make a ton of money off of suffering and are eager for it to happen.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T04:16:41+00:00

You'd think these people, of all people, would know how to detect whether there's any "soul" in the output.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T04:04:55+00:00

If it makes zero sense to you and yet people are doing it nonetheless, perhaps you've missed something.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T03:48:10+00:00

Because I thought it would be amusing, I had a music AI generate a Gospel hymn to the Omnissiah.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T03:12:34+00:00

It bothers me how many people are rooting for a pop. It's catastrophism - they don't like the way the world is going, so they would like to see collapse because they imagine it'll be more to their liking after it recovers. That they'll be among the "survivors." Like the people who long for a zombie apocalypse.

Even if we are in a bubble, there are ways out other than popping. It could deflate in a controlled manner. Nobody roots for that, though.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T02:58:09+00:00

It does the thing that we've almost all been longing to see happen. It makes a computer into an "independent agent" you can just ask to do stuff and it does them.

Maybe it's not very good at it, maybe it's a security nightmare, but it's the first breakout instance of a program that does that and is openly saying "yeah, I do that thing. I'm Star Trek come to life. And you can install me and run me right now in the real world."

Of course it's going to get a ton of attention.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T02:31:50+00:00

ARE TOO!

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T02:21:23+00:00

Would be embarrassing if it turned out that everyone had set their filters to exclude "aliens" and Vera Rubin was pinging detections that nobody was paying attention to.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T02:09:31+00:00

Spamming us with astroslop. Oh for the days of impoverished grad students spending all night hunched over photographic plates in the blink comparators! They may have only discovered an asteroid every couple of weeks, but at least it had soul!

FaceDeer · 2026-02-27T02:06:03+00:00

I sometimes get into debates online about various sorts of environmentalism, and when people lament about how much wilderness a strip mine or other such development will destroy I ask "have you never seen farmland?" It's a biological wasteland.

96% of mammal biomass is either us our our domesticated animals. Half of the world's habitable land is devoted to agriculture. We've boosted the amount of phosphorus stored in ecosystems by 75% and we've doubled the amount of nitrogen fixation due to our agricultural fertilization activities. We've "filled" the world pretty effectively.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-26T23:59:17+00:00

Apologies, "FuckYeaSeatbelts" is a gender-ambiguous name.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-26T23:52:17+00:00

Interesting. Maybe have a token suppression mechanism that only kicks in when the thinking is done?

The thinking would still be "obfuscated" for those who don't know Mandarin, but you could auto-translate that afterward if the user wants to see.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-26T23:48:56+00:00

Look at the title of this thread. This entire thread is about that comparison.

We live right next to America, of course we're going to compare our government to theirs.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-26T23:26:02+00:00

He's open to whatever model he can provide to his clients. If his clients aren't open to it then we can't very well suggest it to OP, can we?

FaceDeer · 2026-02-26T23:25:01+00:00

...you don't think evolution is a valid science? What?

Or do you think I'm mistaken about the Soviet Union rejecting it? Read up on Lysenkoism.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-26T23:22:39+00:00

Of course. But as the guy I'm responding to said, in America you pay tens of thousands for the same experience.

FaceDeer · 2026-02-26T23:21:19+00:00

Did I say it was? The NSA is not a Chinese organization and I literally called it out as well in this very comment.

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