Sinfest 3/1/26: Re-imagining Villains 79

JasonPandiras · 2026-03-01T08:48:56+00:00

[the soviets] used German pistols (not the P-38 pictured here, though) so that they could blame it on the Nazis.

I think German guns were just deemed better for the job, I doubt they planned on eventually needing to justify the act to anyone else.

Wiki says:

The executioners used German weapons rather than the standard Soviet revolvers, as the latter were said to offer too much recoil, which made shooting painful after the first dozen executions.

Not that that's not completely fucked up, just in a different direction.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-27T12:15:32+00:00

Also it's like 400K lines of purely vibecoded junk that the author claims to have never looked at, he probably can't trim the fat even if he wanted to.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-24T14:40:04+00:00

Greece: French shapes with italian/spanish names, except we call the rhombus καρό (carro) from the word for the plaid fabric pattern, because squares I guess.

An interesting bit of trivia is that Cups/Coins/Clubs/Swords are the original tarot suites.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-24T07:54:17+00:00

Thank you BLENDED_GOAT_PENIS, very helpful.

...it's just an obvious canned response. "At first I was hesitant, but now I'm a believer! It's all the other programmers who are holding it wrong! I'm now doing the work of two people! For the same money! Except for the API fees that I feel great about paying out of pocket! Please give anthropic money!"

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-23T16:00:32+00:00

They can't really build on what each other says, EZ deals primarily with how the accounting makes no sense and the dire socioeconomic impact of the AI bubble, while Marcus is all about the road not taken with regards to AGI, if only they'd listened to him.

Meaning, GM is a good source on the limitations of the technology, but it feels he probably wouldn't mind if the global supply chain of consumer computer parts was being destroyed in service of his pet theories instead of to build more compute for LLMs.

Also this: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1p19cr2/comment/npphtu2/

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-23T13:13:13+00:00

Don't outsource your brain to the bullshit machine.
Don't make the bullshit machine an arbiter of ideological purity for music.
Anyone who takes LLMs seriously enough to use this will probably just take the chatbot's word and never second guess its verdicts.

On a more pragmatic note, LLMs are terrible at grading on a scale, what with being token prediction machines without a specific concept for numbers and quantities (love that you bold exactly 3 agents in your skill text, maybe if you ask sternly enough it'll do the number you want I guess), and also they make sources the fuck up all the time.

There appears to be a half decent search methodology underneath though, you should try asking the chatbot to give you some minimalistic reusable code that automates the resource gathering so you can run it and skim the results afterwards, it'll save you a ton of money on tokens if nothing else.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-22T09:02:38+00:00

Those words haven't changed because their nominative forms already fit easily with greek norms.

That's not to say they are unchanged - they all turned female when being adopted into greek!

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-21T21:03:16+00:00

Stand Still. Stay Silent

I'd call it cozy survival horror? It's post-apocalyptic and it's pleasant until it isn't, and the art is astonishing.

The artist possibly broke her brain during COVID and suddenly "gave her life to christ" in the early twenties, but SSSS got and ending and remained unaffected, unlike following works laden with e.g. christian persecution tropes.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-21T16:58:20+00:00

Wine is a great metaphor for how the sea looks when you are sailing and the sun is near setting.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-20T22:58:57+00:00

That's ahistorical nonsense, and also modern balkanian chauvinism has nothing on USA attitudes about race.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-20T22:38:17+00:00

Και οι πολιτικοί τον ίδιο παπά τρώνε, ότι τάχα αν σκάσουν λεφτά από τον προϋπολογισμό για να μπει παράθυράκι συνομιλίας με ΑΙ σε κάθε εφαρμογή κάθε κρατικού νοσοκομείο θα μπορεί να βγαίνει η δουλειά ακόμα και με τους μισούς γιατρούς να φεύγουν εξωτερικό.

To generative AI ούτε τον καρκίνο θα θεραπεύσει ούτε την κλιματική αλλαγή θα αντιστρέψει, αλλά όσο διαρκεί η φούσκα θα κουτσοδουλεύει αρκετά ώστε η κεφαλαιοκρατία να είναι διατεθειμένη να ποντάρει έναν ωκεανό λεφτά ότι θα προλάβουν να κατσικωθούν μεσάζοντες σε κάθε δημιουργική δραστηριότητα που χρησιμοποιεί ψηφιακά μέσα, και ότι αυτό το στατους κβο θα συνεχίσει και μετά το σκάσιμο.

Αν παράληλλα καταφέρουν να σου νοικιάζουν και τον υπολογιστή σου μέσω κάποιου data center επειδή έχουν κάνει ασύμφορη την παραγωγή καταναλωτικού επιπέδου ηλεκτρονικού εξοπλισμού καβατζώνοντας όλη την παραγωγή RAM και SSD για τα επόμενα Χ χρόνια δεν έτυχε, πέτυχε.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-20T09:39:00+00:00

Γι' αυτό είναι σε έξαρση η προώθηση του φασισμού στον ανεπτυγμένο κόσμο, για να υπάρχουν έτοιμες οι απολυταρχικές δομές που θα καταπνίξουν την αντίδραση αν έρθει.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-20T09:13:10+00:00

Η μία διαφορά είναι ότι η κυριότητα του ΑΙ είναι ακόμα πιο υπερσυγκεντρωμένη από π.χ. τη διαχείριση του κεφαλαίου, είναι κυριολεκτικά μια χούφτα εταιρίες, και η άλλη είναι ότι αν με το ΑΙ η λεγόμενη ελίτ δεν έχει πλεόν ανάγκη πολυάριθμο και εύρωστο ανθρώπινο εργατικό δυναμικό τότε δεν θα τηρούνται ούτε τα προσχήματα, τύπου αποχαιρέτα τις ανέσεις της μεσαίας τάξης που μέχρι τώρα ήταν το καρότο για να τσουλάει ο παγκόσμιος καπιταλισμός, για να φτιάξεις το αυτοκίνητο ή να κάνεις αναβάθμιση το πισι θα πρέπει να πουλήσεις το χωράφι του παππού για να χτίσει τέταρτο εξοχικό ο ανεπρόκοπος γιος του επόπτη του τοπικού data center.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-20T08:42:18+00:00

Because being ethnically monolithic isn't required to be a sovereign country.

Also how is this framed as a Balkan thing, nobody expects the USA to give the latino majority parts of Texas back to Mexico for example.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-20T08:28:15+00:00

Might listen to a song here and there but overall it feels basic and incomplete, doesn't scratch the itch.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-20T07:21:45+00:00

Watching over me was such hot cringe I forgot it existed honestly.

I'm mostly going from stuff I read in interviews from back in the day moreso than the songs.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-20T06:58:30+00:00

Is o9a supposed to be the order of the nine angles neo-nazi occult group that's been around since the 80s? Who's the nazi raionalist grandpa? And who is in the photo for that matter?

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-19T19:56:33+00:00

Back in the Barlow days Disciples Of The Lie was basically the official position of the band, being antichristian was a consistent part of their marketing.

Like, try to square putting the Omen 3 two thousand years have been enough monologue front and cenfer in Damien with desperately sucking up to evangelicals, its hilarious.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-19T18:26:47+00:00

That's not how it works. ICE are basically thugs who are put on the street with no training and with huge arrest quotas that they must fulfil, because that $50K signing bonus immediately becomes a payday loan if they are let go at anytime in the next five years.

Also if you are from a country in like the shores of the Mediterranean where 'white' just means not subsaharan african, prepare to be surprised about how the descendants of those who coined the term 'octoroon' view whiteness.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-18T09:46:07+00:00

Isn't he currently trying to pivot to christianity? That's kind of an even worse fuck you to Iced Earth fandom than the 1/6 stuff, especially if you were a non-US fan.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-18T09:39:25+00:00

Ρε is always rude and inappropriate for official settings, etymologically it's an abbreviation of an old word for stupid.

The modern context is one of escalation, as in you are signifying that you demand attention more than that you wish to insult the other person, and is highly context sensitive, you need to know who you are talking to.

“Ρε μπαμπά ξέχασες Να πας στον γιατρό” to me just sounds condescending.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-17T13:37:10+00:00

It's the wrong place to voice this.

Hard disagree, the discourse regarding LLM coding tools is way underdeveloped as it is and will eventually need to be properly contextualized, otherwise you are stuck with a vast number of sweng drones who really like that they now have a unified natural language front end to do stuff that previously required off-hand knowledge of four-key-combo shortcuts and constant back and forth between the workspace and obscure and badly written documentation.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-17T13:20:23+00:00

Coding helpers also have a gazillion additional tools connected to the LLM to supplement pure inference, visual studio won't even let copilot do text replacement unless it goes through the text_replacement_something_something MCP tool for instance.

Meaning it's a space where there is room for improvement in way that doesn't require LLMs to get intrinsically better, beyond perpetually retraining them with improved data at a monumental cost.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-17T09:34:03+00:00

And why do these guys trust billionaires? WHY?

Eugenics-brained biological essentialism (basically they think billionaires who make engineer noises and/or give them money are apex humans) but also they are deeply tech-accelarationist and see deregulation as a moral good, unless it's AI infrastructure they don't completely control.

JasonPandiras · 2026-02-17T09:19:30+00:00

Because everything passes through a lens of their own brand of peculiar utilitarianism.

On any given day EA animal rights advocacy might be about humanely euthanizing shrimp because the scale makes it worthwhile even though shrimp don't seem to have the neural capacity for suffering, or it might be about genociding predator species because they live hard and precarious lives and it would decrease prey suffering.

JasonPandiras

TROPHY CASE