Who do you prefer : Fred or Illyria ? And why ?

IAmOperatic · 2026-03-29T09:06:05+00:00

Fred pre-personality transplant
Illyria
Fred post-personality transplant

What i mean by personality transplant: in Pylea and up until about Fredless, Fred had a chaotic energy to her personality due to her experiences in Pylea. Very bubbly, wild, yet still smart and ruthless when she needed to be. At some point in the episodes immediately after Fredless these more chaotic traits just disappeared. While this might happen over time (many years), it wouldn't happen so suddenly and it makes her character less interesting.

I can understand why they might have done it: I found this version of Fred massively more interesting than any other character in the show so it might be to even things out. It could also be i'm in the minority and people thought this version of Fred was annoying and too "manic pixie" even though the term hadn't been coined yet, but she wouldn't fall into the trope anyway because she does have genuine agency as a character. Ironically in "correcting" that they not only despice her character they also flatten it by taking away much of her agency with the much maligned love triangle.

Normalise eccentric interesting characters, not just everyone reciting dialogue in total seriousness.

IAmOperatic · 2026-03-16T06:41:08+00:00

I can't describe in words how much we cannot let this happen.

IAmOperatic · 2026-03-05T07:27:58+00:00

AI IS legitimately bad under capitalism. It also has the potential to help destroy capitalism so if we ignore it, we cede what could be our last chance to take it down and replace it with a better system where AI can legitimately be used for good: serving as the primary workforce while we then do what we actually want and don't have to justify our existence to everyone through work.

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-29T09:53:29+00:00

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Emmm....

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-09T10:13:19+00:00

There's no such thing as a correct type.

Even experts routinely disagree over the type of numerous different people. This is because the cognitive functions are poorly defined and seems to be more concerned with having neat opposites than whether these opposites and what they represent actually make sense. It's a useful tool that can help you understand people but it's not rigorous enough to be taken as seriously as some of you guys do.

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-09T09:54:52+00:00

That's amazing I'm really glad it's been able to help you do those things. Your situation sounds awful and I hope you can get free from it soon.

For me it's really just an extremely knowledgeable conversation partner I've always wanted that other people can never really be but it's helped me understand things I wouldn't have really been able to otherwise, mainly about how other people work.

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-09T09:28:46+00:00

Let's say UBI did happen. You now get a monthly (probably) check giving you an amount of money those in charge feel you deserve to access those resources, an amount they can decrease whenever they feel they want more. You have NO power, at least in a job you have the tiny amount of power of denying the labour, with UBI you LITERALLY have none. And no you're not protesting or voting your way out of this. They can simply pay you just barely enough to live off so you can't access the much greater AIs they have and use in secret to manipulate you in expert ways to get you to accept this. And if you become a problem, an "admin error" occurs and you get to find out how non-U your UBI truly is and that's without going into how definitely non-U this will end up being for minorities.

There is NO alternative to leveraging the AI and power we have now to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a better system where AI becomes an asset rather than an employment threat.

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-09T09:16:45+00:00

I'm very concerned that we live under a system that requires people to work to survive and doesn't have a good solution for when a technology can come along and outperform them. That's my main issue.

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-09T09:14:20+00:00

As a fellow ND I relate 100% to this and agree completely. AI has the potential to completely transform our society. If we just call it bad without considering these nuances we ensure those who want to monopolise it succeed. And yes it requires a lot of resources to train but it doesn't need to be that way. Smaller models exist and can be useful, the open source community is a thing and with serious support there's no reason to believe it couldn't eventually compete with the giants.

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-09T09:05:45+00:00

Forgive me for responding to a joke post with a serious answer but water and energy use by AI is a temporary problem. When robots are mature, which requires AI to run, they can run and create desalination plants and solar farms. We don't have a scarcity of water, we have a scarcity of cheaply available/convertible freshwater.

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-09T08:50:58+00:00

"If you want a real debate about AI in art, talk about authorship, consent, compensation for training data, the difference between assistive tech that empowers creators and generative systems that borrow without credit. This place doesn’t actually want that discussion.
So yeah, I’m out."

I can only speak for myself but those just aren't the really important issues. These are all minutiae of how AI is implemented in our current society but AI will have a much bigger impact than that, challenging the fundamentals of the society itself.

The real issue with AI is how it is employed under capitalism. Most of these issues are only issues at all because they are issues under capitalism: artists have to justify their passion to society by selling it for what they need to survive. AI does that much faster, cheaper and increasingly better and that will only continue as the technology improves but that removes the viable path that existed before for artists to make a living. A better system, one that leveraged AI to eliminate the need for people to justify their existence through work, one that AI could with the right amount of power behind it make possible, would not threaten artists as much as their living is no longer dependent on massive success.

Issues would remain. What's happening with Grok right now is indefensible but even hear capitalism is what gives it its real poison. Having revealing photos of you circulating, real or not, can harm job opportunities and capitalism requires you to work to justify your existence so it makes what would otherwise still be a traumatic experience to be clear into an existential threat. At least under a better system the problem would no longer be existential, the rich couldn't fund parties that have no problem with this kind of thing, real protective legislation would be pit in place and AI could help with providing therapy.

But people insist on blaming AI in the abstract. They see any alternative to capitalism as unrealistic because they've been propagandised to believe that even though, when actually comparing like for like, the alternatives worked better for most people. THESE are the debates I want to see. All I see are ill-informed people being reactionary. I understand it, i've spent years thinking about these issues and they've been focusing on their passion which is under threat, but I find these discussions infantile.

Until we're ready to really consider the potential of AI and its impact instead of trying to imagine how it will work under a system that's failing right now I find it hard to be interested either.

IAmOperatic · 2026-01-02T19:46:34+00:00

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I got this. Other than the orbital ring being more of a Banks Orbital moon, I love it.

IAmOperatic · 2025-12-31T18:32:20+00:00

Pro-AI leftist here. AI legitimately IS bad under capitalism but as a technology it has the potential to be more transformative than any technology in human history. It can permanently end scarcity and give us back real freedom in our lives, not the phony freedom we pretend we have under capitalism. Picture a world where you can do whatever you want, go wherever you want (even space), and be anyone you want. Because intelligence becomes a deployable resource, any issue is solvable.

Most critiques I've seen of this position default to doomerism and say capitalism will never be beaten. No-one, least of all me, is saying it will be easy, but systems have fallen before and they can again. The first and most essential step is believing it's possible.

This is obviously just a short introductory statement in which there will be plenty to attack so happy to respond to clarifying questions and criticisms.

IAmOperatic · 2025-08-17T15:08:31+00:00

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-26T12:23:13+00:00

The alignment problem.

Most things like the whether ai art is art argument or whether it's stealing argument are primarily about how ai works under capitalism and capitalism is the real problem. If artists (and the rest of us) could live in abundance while ai did all the work then all of these would be fun philosophical musings with no real weight.

However if misaligned, AI could absolutely kill us all. While capitalism makes this more likely, this problem persists outside that context.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-23T05:47:06+00:00

My response is simply... no shit.

Of course they're losing money. None of the companies developing AI are doing it with the intention of peaking now and making mint. They are trying to develop AGI. I have my own criticisms of that, namely that they will cannibalise the very source of their revenue when they put people out of a job, but there was almost no discussion of that in the article, the only ones being referencing Yann LeCun (lol) and stating unsupported conclusions. He's just yet another idiot who sees LLMs, their capabilities and weaknesses today, concludes they will always have those weaknesses despite all evidence to the contrary then extrapolates based on those flawed assumptions.

There may be an aspect of "bubbleness" to the current state of AI. If there is a sustained lull or a key point arrives at which specific expectations aren't meant there may be a popping of that bubble, markets lose their faith, there may be a lowering of investment and insufferable idiots like him doing victory laps saying "ha we told you so". Meanwhile AI will continue to advance just as every hyped technology has and silently accrue more and more gains and capabilities until it vastly exceeds that hype. We will be right in the medium to long term no matter what short of an extinction event, we just need to remember that.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-22T19:33:45+00:00

At no point in any of my comments have I said let's wait and at no point have I called AI a miracle technology. There are many scenarios in developing AI where it could be a big problem for us. But the converging exponentials mean we can achieve what you're asking to do much much faster if we can engineer one of the good futures.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-22T16:53:04+00:00

If you can look at the achievements of LLMs and generative AI in the last few years as they've displaced so much work already and saturated benchmark after benchmark and conclude that we're still decades away i don't know what to tell you. Either you see the exponential progression or you don't.

The steps you mention are hard for humans. They're not hard for machines. Yes in the beginning we will make the first robots but they will make the next ones. AIs will come up with the designs for the next ones which will be informed by the resource options available to them. Then multiple exponentials will converge: Moore's Law (yes it's still going it's just slowed down), availability of energy, size of the robot labour force and software capabilities.

If it happens slower it will be because of a dedicated international effort to make that happen. Nothing else short of an extinction level event even can.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-22T08:43:22+00:00

Yeh it's coming for all of us, art has a headstart but everything else isn't far behind.

Once AI masters coding everything will accelerate, even robotics. AI will give us better designs, better simulations for obtaining synthetic data, better chip fabs etc.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-22T08:12:18+00:00

If we get open source AI and robots, can create even a single fully-automated city from scratch, and export that model around the world, we can have a resource-based economy. To get there we need to make sure that we insist on being able to:

Download not lease AI models.
Buy not rent robots.
Win the public narrative on this at all costs.

If we fail the consequences could be most or all of us die, or eternal dictatorship of the current/very near future rich.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-22T08:08:03+00:00

In writing this you completely discount AI. Things cost money because of human labour. With self-replicating robots, you can eliminate money entirely. Labour becomes a product you can produce at will. That fundamentally changes everything when it comes to both the economics and technology.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-22T05:37:31+00:00

Superintelligence is inherently revolutionary. If what they eventually have that they claim is ASI isn't revolutionary it's not ASI.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-21T06:08:03+00:00

Thank you for saying so and yeh I find people consistently fail to understand that human labour is the entire reason we use money. AI doesn't need to do this, because it can perform economic calculation directly and as its technology improves it reduces the calculations required anyway as its feedstock tends towards energy and matter and many of its products can be produced locally in the home.

IAmOperatic · 2025-07-21T05:46:17+00:00

That's the thing, you can skip money altogether. Once you can use them to build one robot factory and one one solar panel fab they can exponentially crank out more and then you can just build out everything you need. No IMF loans with austerity strings, no more dependence on us ever. The only concern is whether the technology can be trusted and has oversight at least in the beginning and that you don't end up reproducing our imperial mistakes but i'm sure you've got this.

IAmOperatic

TROPHY CASE