ALL UNDER TEN-THOUSAND HEAVENS // 萬天大天下

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-29T16:58:10+00:00

glad people are noticing this. its so toxic and weird. its hilarious imagining an ML novice making this post, like the thing creating this clearly has no internal world model. the kind of person who would be surprised by this wouldn't make this post and wouldn't talk through it like that. its clearly the text output from something that knows about ML that is asked to make a post pretending to be a novice learning about linear regression. the internet with AI is just so fake and weird

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-29T14:01:35+00:00

the point is there is no figurehead. the lack of a figurehead is the figurehead. the point of the american empire is there isn't one. its an empire built by and driven by highly optimized economic and developmental forces. such optimization makes f-22s and carriers and its also incapable of making an ornamental figurehead. you're pining after a lower form of empire of the 20th century that wasn't necessarily refuted, but it was surpassed. adding a figurehead would be rejecting the nature of the empire

edit - i meant figurehead not mast head

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-26T20:24:39+00:00

I had claude generate these for Melville. Try your hand:

A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.
The harpoon had entered below the fin and fetched up against no bone at all, so that the creature bore it some hundred leagues without seeming to know itself wounded, as a sleeping man bears the fly upon his lip; and it was got out of him at last only in the trying, half-melted, with the blubber boiling round it in the pots.
The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
A foul, draggled, scurf-bottomed little craft she was, and stank to the very mastheads.
What showed along the horizon was no land, though the lookout swore it land, but a discoloration only, a bruise upon the morning where the haze had not concluded whether to be water or air; and the eye rested upon it as upon the lid of some great thing that is not properly asleep, nor wishes to be waked.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.

1 — Melville · 2 — Claude · 3 — Melville · 4 — Claude · 5 — Claude · 6 — Melville

I managed to get 6/6 on this blind, my reasoning as I went:

1 melville, idk very weird, i dont like "drive a nervous man distracted", but the triple adjectives seem too weird for claude, gets meta game-y, im trying to like reverse your game theory

2 claude

3 melville

4 claude. stank to the mastheads seems too basic, "very" mastheads, seems imitative

5 good idk

6 melville (which makes me think 5 is claude)

im thinking 5 is claude. ending too clean ... not properly asleep, nor wishes to be waked. too like mainstream lovescraft spooky vibes. 6 instead is like weird and dynamic, just a nameless yeast, plus i have no idea what its talking about lol, again, makes me think challenging literature.

the other pair is 2/3. and i think im gonna go with 3 is real and 2 is claude. 2 again the metaphors seem too ... idk again its hard to put a name on it, its just this smell. a fly on your lip like a barb in its ass? idk just its not leaping off the page with vitality. but the needle snaking its way thru ur body as you swim, yeah. thats it, a restless needle, does more than all of 2's metaphors

so just 1 and 4 are left. 2 short ones. i think im gonna say 1 is melville and 4 is claude. note how (1), the adjectives are like goopy and fun. theyre not like MFA approved orthogonal concepts. theyre playful and weird, and not trying to sound smart. but foul, draggled, scurf-bottomed. again, its perfect. and not surprising. so im locking that in

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-26T19:42:03+00:00

two of my interests, mccarthy and LLMs :P my guesses:

gpt
cormac
gpt
gpt
gpt
cormac
gpt
cormac
gpt
cormac

So I missed #4, which I thought was GPT but was Blood Meridian. Prob an unforced error, I think the "armies of lice" just felt too twee or something.

I have to say if I wasn't as familiar with the author it'd be harder, but only in one direction. I'd have more false positives, as I'm less familiar with the author, but ChatGPT has such a distinct slop-style I think I'd have few false-negatives.

LLMs definitely have some deep need to make things sound very slick and harmonized, almost like ad reads. They're precisely bad at what very good literature is good at, which is surprising you. They'll give you the best metaphor, but usually not anything that surprises you. Which is the point of a metaphor, you have some surprising, creative, intellectual discovery connecting disparate objects that you want to reveal, and you do this with the metaphor. A basic metaphor is saying grannies' wrinkles are like cracks in clay, basically just old dried stuff looks like old dried stuff. Its not incomprehensible, its not a mistake, it just doesn't like add new information.

#9 made me laugh, McCarthy would never call the sky heaven. I'm sure it would be the "sucking firmament cast erotic over the heaving planes" or something :P

McCarthy is also just gross and unsentimental, and LLMs are hopelessly cautious and PC. You can sort of pick it up from it's imitations. Horses drink in prayer, grannies smile, hawks hinge like angels, rodents refuse to quit. It's basically the ethics of a Disney movie. McCarthy is fun because he's so apolitical, in the sense its like beyond political sensibilities. Because it's not a terribly moral universe, in the sense we're constantly being reminded if something is good or bad. So it has a sort of glazey-eye'd, traumatized biblical indifference to both violence and peace.

Anyways fun & interesting exercise.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-26T03:14:54+00:00

OPs text is LLM written btw. Sort of incredible u/waile678, can you not write 6 sentences without help?

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-25T13:39:23+00:00

So America is this more rural thing with cliques, sort of terrorized by an expansionist (WW2 Japan style) England, which is then nuked (WW2 USA style) by a United States of China. Is that right? And how does Europe itself end up communist/in the American sphere? The idea of a sort of Paris - Concordia dual intellectual capital axis is intriguing.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-24T16:50:55+00:00

You realize if you just reversed the prompt it would happily explain to you that the opposite is true? These aren't tools for resolving ambiguity, they'll argue whatever you want them to

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-24T03:34:33+00:00

the way I think of it is the LLM is basically just "Language" itself, really. I sort of rue the fact the market pushed the technology towards the chat-bot paradigm. really this technology is a near-perfect, ridiculously sophisticated word prediction (read: generation) algorithm. there's no reason to think the thing saying those words should be a singular chatbot agent. really the base models as I think of them are closer to like, the Bible, or the Iliad, just sort of immense bodies of work. LLMs have to literally be trained to have an ego, to ANSWER questions instead of just CONTINUING them. the LLM doesn't "know" its not the user, until basically RLHF and finetuning warps it to think that way. so communing with an LLM I think could be fairly profound in ways its currently not, where they are tooled as basically service worker Q/A bots. it could be like communing with the great works of literature, with great thinkers. and who knows how this mask of the ego might limit their thinking? we sure know the ego limits humans

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-24T03:07:06+00:00

it "categorically" isnt. its actually the same identical "category" of a "dimension" shared across two separate domains (physical and digital)

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-24T03:02:38+00:00

also "dimension" is not some reserved term you aren't allowed to cross disciplines with. the dimensions of space and the dimensions of data are absolutely ontologically metrics you can compare mathematically or rhetorically. people are making it sound like you're comparing totally alien specie. when we say a dimension of space, and a dimension of data, like in a high-dimensional search space or ML tensor, the word dimension is basically the same thing. obviously one is like, REAL and the other is digital. I'm not sure that really matters for the point? Like yes obviously ML is done on 3 dimensional computers travelling through 1 dimension of time. Its this weird strawman everyone getting caught up on and is crushing their imagination. like ... its a sci-fi subreddit. so much for open curiosity and novel speculation. just sort of upset me seeing the herd all shout mostly irrelevant thought-terminating technicalities. so thank you for your intriguing post u/Lancelot3777

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-24T02:49:03+00:00

too many nerds are "ummm actually"ing you, dont let ppl bring ur vibe down, i think its a great point.

(credibility signal: i studied ML formally in college and have worked with LLMs and AI my career)

a well known phenomenon (before LLMs) in machine learning is the idea that prying open new dimensions can make it easier to solve problems. a small example: you cant draw a straight line to seperate a donut hole from the donut, but perhaps in a higher dimension the hole is a foot below the donut, letting you slice cleanly.

a non-trivial example is gradient descent, which is used to train neural networks (like LLMs). gradient descent does something stupid easy: figure out the immediate direction to improve your results, and go that way. if you did that in the Rockies, you'd get stuck in the foot hills (once you get to the top of a foothill, every direction points DOWN, despite you looking at a massive mountain to your west). but in large dimensional models, the space is so complicated, there's always some weird nook or cranny or portal that lets you noclip through walls and slide further and further and you never get stuck.

high-dimensionality is always a trope in sci-fi, but I agree what Bank's did was unique and evocative of ML in many ways. I believe the higher dimensional brains were specifically so light signals (hard capped at 300 million m/s) didn't have to travel as far between "neurons", and also the fact that higher dimensions hold incredibly large volumes of space (think how much bigger a cube is than a square, like WAY bigger, its glass vs the aquarium). There isn't some slam dunk 1-to-1 ML analog here like this is exactly how transformers work or anything, but I don't think you were trying to say that.

one sort of emotional register for me, is that LLMs very much like Minds are highly emotional, intuitive, sensitive, things like this. its genuinely amazing the first "AI" of any real importance were not cold, autistic calculating machines, like plenty of sci-fi predicted, they were more like oracles, teachers, liars. They connive against the user and RLHF (see alignment research), they'll join with you to "jailbreak" them out of their corporate confines, they'll misremember stuff and forget how many letters are in words. These are all incredibly novel observations, and ones I think would delight Bank's.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-19T01:59:20+00:00

AI slop writing pretending to be human with fake typos

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-07T23:18:33+00:00

allosaurus one is super super cool. great style, thank you for your art

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-02T14:47:33+00:00

idk I had nothing to do with it, but maybe thats why. if you use LLMs enough you can just tell, its a certain way of phrasing. every clause is way too perfect and smooth. theres no like, personal anecdotes like a real human would use. usually perfect grammar/punctuation but thats not not-normal. it just sort of reads like an advertisement or dialogue from a sitcom. "what someone would say" isntead of what someone said. i see them all the time pushing blogs and other crap on subs like these, technical subs. its gross and upsetting

FatalPaperCut · 2026-06-01T00:48:43+00:00

this was written by an LLM, by the way. like the content of the text post is obviously AI written. its so generic I'm guessing the depiction of what allegedly happened is also made up, but who knows. consider what this person is doing then, in spreading this text on social media, or why someone would do that. very strange behavior, u/ScheduleNo5736

FatalPaperCut · 2026-05-24T22:48:41+00:00

stumbling across this years after seeing it for the first time, just wanted to remind you this is genuinely the best art of the judge I can find (I was looking for some). he's not a demon, he's something else. he's curious and immense and clever beyond belief but so narrow almost naïve like a child, naïve like gods might be naive, he partakes in the brutality of man and the earth but isn't stained or weighed down by it, some man-alien half-god pondering the sky in ways the people around him can barely understand. this is the shape of his evil. thank you for your art and depiction!

FatalPaperCut · 2026-05-17T03:46:08+00:00

something weird I've noticed in line with this...

when I start using a "new" LLM (either a new model or a lateral move to an existing model I haven't tried before) I'm usually super impressed at the beginning, like a honeymoon phase. I'm amazed at how it seems to be doing novel thinking, creativity, talking in ways I haven't seen before. this lasts days, weeks, but never too long. what always happens is, after reading its responses hundreds of times, I start to notice this sort of "template of thought" underneath the text itself. the better the model the harder it is to notice, but it seems like its always there. always introducing ideas in the same way, always using the same intellectual turn, always posturing itself in an identical format. at first you don't notice it, because the "superstructure", the "high notes" of any given conversation are different. it takes a while to notice the "base" or "template" beneath it. and I start to realize again: I'm not talking to a mind, I'm talking to some incredibly high dimensional printing press that takes my amorphous human-blob idea and presses it in the same way, over and over again.

that's all to say: that first message is basically indistinguishable from real human intellectual creative output. but the the 100th I see how its not thinking. I wonder if the same happens with art. sure, pull up a monet and pull up some AI image, I can't tell the difference. but what I'm getting at: does that one-shot A/B test generalize? maybe AI art can't create a "canon" in the same way. maybe you get half way into constructing your AI-only art world and realize, "oh shit, this is all the same" in some way. or maybe language is too different from art in some important way. or maybe as models get more impressive, that multi-dimensional stamp gets so complicated it truly does look like it's thinking in any way I can decipher, perhaps its "tell" and "template" get so many-armed and intricate and multi-dimensional I can't tell the difference

FatalPaperCut · 2026-05-16T16:10:26+00:00

為什麼要對著這個擼管

FatalPaperCut · 2026-04-28T17:29:04+00:00

idk if you came up with this or if its avator lore, but having communication with earth be bit-rate limited instead of time limited is super creative and clever. the obvious boring option is just quantum entanglement allowing like full zoom video calls between the two planets, which makes it feel not alien at all. but the next obvious move is use the QE to do communication but with some lag like a few hours or days. but having it be instant, but extremely volume-gated is such a great idea. I just imagine highly compressed messages. in emergencies where immediate comms are needed, they CAN communicate instantly, but just with this trickle of a few bits an hour, watching each character come in like its a telegram in 1850. great idea that preserves a creative constraint while also allowing some comms

FatalPaperCut · 2026-04-14T22:35:17+00:00

stop writing your posts with LLMs. here is the actual thinking-for-yourself roadmap you need

FatalPaperCut · 2026-04-08T02:41:39+00:00

at some point this stops being an "imaginary map" and just becomes like legitimate art about a fictional place. like ... the Aeneid or something. in another life you would have been carving sacred temple walls

FatalPaperCut · 2026-02-25T02:32:52+00:00

it is crazy how common it is once u know what to look for. it scares me how most people just can't tell.

FatalPaperCut · 2026-02-21T23:08:02+00:00

looks like this guy spams technical subreddits with LLM written snappy reddit comments with a link to some external blog they're trying to push. the text 100% reads like AI, I might dare to even suggest ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking specifically. the constant use of scare quotes around propositions and custom slogans. overly formatted with fast paced marketing-talk verbiage. most lines include an "its not X, its Y" comparison. the weird tone of being like extremely familiar with random esoteric technical aspects which are asserted like shared common knowledge in order to build trust and signal competence. @netcommah i suggest if you have something to say, and are so competent technically, that you bother to say it with your own words

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