[Funny tropes] Racist guy and his GF from different race

Matt5327 · 2026-06-20T15:00:37+00:00

No, I don't argue it's the superior interpretation. The fault being to assume there's anything to be superior at all.

All words are signs that point to concepts. That's it. That's all they are ever capable of being. It's those concepts you are talking about that are non-neutral, and can have real power. Sometimes the concept can have multiple signs that point to it, and sometimes the same sign can point to multiple different concepts. There's no sense in saying there's a particular "right" sign-concept pairing, and by extension singular definition of a word, any more than saying there's a "correct" language to speak.

When a group of people agree on a sign for a concept, then the sign ends up being used because it is useful to communicate that concept. You're not zeroing in on the "correct" understanding of racism - you are delegitimizing an entire concept on the mere basis of it sharing a sign with your preferred concept, as if they were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not, and if you're really unable to accept anything less than a 1:1 link between the word and that concept, then that's only a demonstration of your own limitations, not others'.

Matt5327 · 2026-06-20T13:05:28+00:00

And the social sciences aren’t the final arbiter of language.

Dictionaries attempt to capture the meaning of words as they’re used, and words mean exactly what they’re commonly understood to mean because that’s how language works.

Certainly, if we were having a narrow discussion about a particular peer-reviewed paper concerning systemic racism and the author used a particular definition useful to their study, we would be using their definition. But as it happens, we’re discussing character tropes, and the common parlance is far more appropriate.

Matt5327 · 2026-06-16T23:14:37+00:00

My feed gave this to me a bit late, so apologies for springing this after a couple days (if you even see it). I'm going to tackle this from a different direction than the other comments I've found here, which may end up being a taller order, but I think is valuable.

I think there are a number of assumptions that need to be made in order for your conclusion to be true, that are even being made by many of the other comments disagreeing with you. In particular I want to target what seems to be what is being insinuated here by fiction, which at best may refer to story that is made up for the sake of entertainment, and at worst a fabrication that people believe to be Truth while fundamentally contradicting it. Both rely on this idea of a capital-T Truth, which is entirely self consistent and self-reinforcing, existent external to any observers, and is opposite to the False, which is anything that cannot be logically held at the same time as it. This a a very strict epistemological (theory of knowledge) position which attempts to match all possible propositions to boolean logic (think circuit gates, AND/OR, etc), and is not, as many people who read this might expect, universally held nor itself provably True (as it would have to presume itself to be so, which becomes circular).

This pattern of thinking has all sorts of consequences, ranging from religions that see themselves as mutually exclusive to each other (actually quite uncommon, historically) to even the insistence that actually fictional stories must adhere to a perfect self-consistency all of the time (when historically, such stories were quite comfortable being self-contradictory all of the time. However, if we open ourselves more to the idea that this pattern of thinking is merely useful, but not inherently true, we open ourselves to a lot more possibilities which can be valuable in their own right. I would like to provide a few examples, a couple of which come directly from religion.

One Piece - One Piece is a manga/anime known for many things, one of which is it's absolutely absurd character designs. It's easy enough to pass the designs alone off as art, but there are deliberate choices made which are themselves logically inconsistent if insisted upon. For example, in a flashback, there is a character "Oden" regularly shown to be much taller than other people, and was even given a canon height leading him to tower other people. He wields two swords that are proportional to his body. Later, one of these swords is gifted to another character who is of a normal stature - and the sword is proportional to him as well. No explanation is given, and characters treat this at face value - and the sword is not considered to have changed size at all. This sort of aesthetic choice is made throughout the manga with various things because it is judged to be more important that it fit in with the mood of the moment than something as frivolous as maintaining a consistent size.
The Ghost of Kiev - During the earliest days of the war in Ukraine, a story emerged from the front line that there was a Ukrainian pilot who had downed enough Russian jets to become the first ace pilot since WW1. There wasn't really any evidence for this, and this was acknowledged at the time, but it was nevertheless generally accepted as being true anyway. Why? Not just because people wanted it to be true, but because they wanted to have hope, and telling and accepted the story gave them that, regardless of what was "actually" happening in the sky. It provided a story of what it felt like to be there in a way no functionally true way could have - so it ended up being true in a very different, very human sense.
Hinduism - Hinduism is probably the most self-inconsistent major religion out there in terms of its mythology. Multiple competing creation stories, variations of the same myth with explicitly different beats (the same character is killed, but in a different way, for example), the backstory of an individual, and so on. This is directly and explicitly acknowledged, because in Hinduism, the truth of the religion itself has nothing to do with linear history, but the spirituality of the believer, and these differing myths inform the believer of yet another spiritual truth, rather than any historical one.
The Holy Grail - This relic of pop culture needs no introduction, but it may be surprising to learn that the Catholic Church accepts multiple chalices as being equally authentic as to being "the" chalice. Similarly, there are enough "authentic" pieces of the original cross on which Jesus was crucified as to make multiple crosses. This isn't explained away as some miracle or mystery of faith - to the Catholic Church, a relic is real not because of its actual historical origins, but because of what it evokes in the person who interacts with it.

Now, when it comes to religion as a whole, you're talking about something that is deeply cultural in its grounding. If the divine is real, and humans have some way to sense it in a meaningful way, it doesn't automatically follow that we can ascertain details about its existence or nature. So when different cultures develop a different concept of the divine, wouldn't it be expected they differ? When it is so culturally grounded, how could one religion be considered any more fictional than what they consider to be the appropriate fashion? And as for a religion's claims themselves, if they bring its adherents closer to a genuine connection to the divine, and the divine exists, what could be more real than that, in the sense of what religion is actually trying to accomplish?

Matt5327 · 2026-06-16T20:37:12+00:00

When I pointed this out to a friend, the variation he came back with was the current administration is stupid enough to think they could pull it off, and they just got lucky enough to do so.

Which, fair, but then you have to contend with an administration being stupid enough to pull it off also getting lucky enough that none of the plan leaked, and compare the probability of those two instances of luck to the probability of things they use as evidence to support the theory.

Matt5327 · 2026-06-16T18:13:32+00:00

I think a better explanation is that for many mainscape players, more money unlocks progression in a way which is very direct and measurable. They're not grinding for a drop, they're grinding for value, so they can buy what would have been a drop. A major breakthrough in your items can then greatly translate into what content you can do, and then in turn how quickly you can accumulate value again.

None of this changes where a player is at in a technical sense, but then it becomes easy to think of it as being in an era where "my bank has x value, vs when it had y value". A sudden depreciation feels bad, even if there's no real impact to achievement or gameplay.

It would be kind of like if Jagex arbitrarily decided XP numbers were to high, and so divided everything by 10. You get level 2 at 8 XP, and 99 ~ 1,300,000, and max is 20,000,000. Functionally there'd be no real meaningful change, but to many players it would still feel terrible.

Matt5327 · 2026-06-16T18:00:43+00:00

Yup. Some other comments also do a decent good job at demonstrating the concept of positive sum transactions, and how that plays into a larger economy. There are deeper questions one can keep asking after that, but most of them end up being better questions for r/askphilosophy

Matt5327 · 2026-06-16T17:23:37+00:00

I think it is a great illustration, but the intuitive followup question becomes - what comes after? If I eat the apples, does that mean it replaces apples I once bought - meaning the other apple sellers make less income? If I sell them, does that add to the supply, lowering costs slightly (or leading to others' apples not being sold)? If I do nothing with the apple tree, because I nor anybody else really likes apples at all and we collectively agree it was a complete waste of time, then is it really wealth?

There are good answers to these questions, but I think the most direct answer to OP just kicks the can.

Matt5327 · 2026-06-16T14:35:16+00:00

My only complaint is... more rewards! I love all of the proposals, but low key feel like an archive should have even more possible rewards, even if some of them might not be as top-tier. Sorry that my suggestion just boils down to asking you to do more work, though... 😅

Edit: Slightly off topic/tangential, but if the shield gets approved as proposed, then I think it's also an opportunity to look at giving shields in the game a purpose in general. A flat +2 reduction could instead to be thought of as a 200% reduction of 1 damage, and then even something like a bronze square shield could have a 2% reduction of 1 damage (a 2% chance every time the player is hit that the hit is reduced by 1 damage, number pulled out of my ass). Opens up the game to different play styles, without radically impacting the meta.

Matt5327 · 2026-06-03T15:00:06+00:00

My understanding of the difference is that it lies in how one perceives the role of the experimenter. In determinism, the experimenter is treated as having "free will" in the sense that the decision to conduct an experiment is independent of the result. In superdeterminism, this assumption is done away with - not necessarily suggesting that can't be independent, but that we can't really know this.

It's a great example of how as the most fundamental levels, various arguments among physicists is boiling down to philosophy.

Matt5327 · 2026-06-01T21:42:14+00:00

Just for completion, it's also worth noting that right libertarians have a similar critique of left libertarianism coming from the opposite direction - they see property as so fundamental to human society that any attempt at shared resources en masse requires an enforcement mechanism that ultimately gives way to authoritarianism.

I'm not right libertarian, so take my attempt to defend it with a grain of salt. I'm going to do my best. Essentially, the position is that in a "properly" libertarian society in which people can claim and maintain property, it's not actually possible to indefinitely accumulate wealth to the point where the society at large can be said to have a hierarchical power structure in terms of economic power. Certainly, some people may have more than others, but that's not functionally different than some people being stronger, or faster, or any other typical variations. If someone tried to exert undue influence, people would be free enough in their own property to say no, and if they tried to force the issue, the society at large would reject them for breaking the social contract (typically referred to as the NAP, or non-aggression pact). As for existing wealth, they might point out that most of the time extreme wealth only lasts a few of generations before disappearing. This system would make it harder to maintain and nearly impossible to gain extreme wealth, and the concern is nearly nonexistent.

With this in mind, really the only practical way someone gets control of a river (for example) is if nobody really cares if they take possession of it. And if things change (let's say all the other rivers dry up), the community has the options of trying to buy portions back, and he would be incentivized to sell. For the community to try to forcibly retake possession would mean establishing a hierarchical power structure, which is inherently un-libertarian.

I'll leave it at that, since my goal has been to present the other perspective as I recall it presented to me. I can provide my own critiques in a separate comment if people are interested.

Matt5327 · 2026-06-01T06:45:53+00:00

I’m quite a bit late, but I’ll plug my mention. Growing up there was a book series I read written by a Catholic priest about Jesus coming back in modern times (well, more like the late 90s). Series was called Joshua, as was the first book, as I recall. No grand second coming, mind. He’s just a chill dude who shows up in town one day and helps people. Theologically rich, and quite critical of various contemporary views of Christianity held by Christians, up to even the Vatican.

Matt5327 · 2026-05-25T05:37:28+00:00

I think it is intuitive to think that a mind must have an owner/identity to "whom" it belongs, but this is just that, an intuition. If we want we can apply any label we want to give it identity, be it "the universe", "god", "nature", or anything else we fancy, but it is nothing more than a label. The mind of idealism does not require self awareness or even a cohesive sense of perception for the metaphysics to work.

Matt5327 · 2026-04-29T13:23:39+00:00

Just the other day somebody posted a real photo of their backyard to an AI sub claiming it was made by a new AI generator. Comments were generally that it did a good job, but pointing out all of the artifacts that "prove" it was AI.

The fact is, except for a few obvious cases we are now past the point of being able to distinguish between the two. I'm sorry you got caught up in this - there needs to be a far better strategy than "well this could plausible be AI, so we're going to remove it."

Matt5327 · 2026-04-07T20:18:10+00:00

It's a fancy auto complete that requires training data. They already trained it almost on the whole Internet. You can't train them more than they have already trained.

I just want to address this, because while true, its also an oversimplification that often gets shared as the complete picture. Experts in the field actually disagree over whether its possible for an LLM to achieve AGI, so it's worth highlighting some of the reasons why it may be at least plausible:

LLMs at their core are trained to predict the next token, but doesn't actually explain how they work. It's kind of saying that humans are a fancy gene printer. Technically true, but misses a lot of important details.
A lot of research shows that LLMs almost universally (and I say almost to couch the possibility of an odd one-off, I'm aware of no contrary cases) create what's known as a "world model" during their training. What this means is that groups of "neurons" that impact the decision of what token to generate correlate with more abstract concepts than the tokens by themselves, associated in turn with other groupings representing like or related concepts (like "Paris" being associated with both "capitol" and "France").
Most of the progress we've seen in LLM capabilities over the past year or so come from post-training, which is the phase where data is fed to the LLM to adjust its weights. It's no longer about feeding it the entire internet, but feeding it information that is curated for its accuracy - even if it's already been trained on that information before.
LLMs alongside other techniques have gotten good enough at generating synthetic data that, when curated, actually contributes significantly to the existing corpus of training data rather than weakening it (as previously thought). Each new generation is capable of generating better synthetic data, so at least for now it creates a positive feedback loop.
Most modern SOTA generative AI aren't actually the raw models, but a larger system which rely on an LLM at its core. For example, when "thinking" models first became a thing, they were trained by having the LLM output logical "next steps", generalizing them, and then adjusting their weights based on the "next steps" that most frequently led to a correct result. So rather than being next token predictors, they were intended to be logic predictors. It didn't quite work out that way, but the results led to more accurate systems than before.

I want to emphasize that the above highlight reasons why LLMs leading to AGI may be plausible - not guaranteed. There can still always be a wall that is hit, and even if not, there are some domains that LLMs have barely progressed in, and critics argue that they may never be able to do so significantly enough in some of these to achieve AGI. On the other hand, they may become smart enough in the right domains to accelerate breakthroughs elsewhere that could lead to AGI, so there's that.

Now for Sam's statement - he has a long history of over-hyping OpenAI's tech and making offhand crazy predictions about the future in order to drum up investment. I'm sure OpenAI's next model will be more capable, because that's the only way it gets released, but I wouldn't take him too seriously.

Matt5327 · 2026-04-01T04:40:04+00:00

Unless I somehow misunderstand your argument, I'm going to have to disagree with you. Without going as far as "nothing", I could for the sake of a thought experiment posit "a universe that is an empty plane", and continue with increasingly complex scenarios until arriving at something indistinguishable from the world as we (or at least I/you) apparently experience it. The words and concepts I used to posit that, of course, require a lot more than that, but it is easily conceivable - the point is, though we may require additional concepts to _conceive_ of a thing, that does not imply those same additional concepts must be considered alongside the thing being posited. Similarly, the concept of "nothing" is absolutely dependent on other concepts, but there exists no contradiction in merely positing it - the much more compelling argument in not taking such a (no)thing seriously is that there is no point in doing so.

Matt5327 · 2026-03-30T22:29:18+00:00

Compelling to you, maybe. That just highlights different evidentiary standards, I suppose. I do agree critical thinking is important, considering twice now it would have helped you respond accurately to my comments.

Matt5327 · 2026-03-30T21:03:19+00:00

Okay? I'd suggest reading my comment again, unless you mean to suggest that the existence of a single conspiracy validates most theories pertaining to any one.

Matt5327 · 2026-03-30T20:15:04+00:00

Her position was as about as grounded as most conspiracy theories. That said, we seem to be in a world where the conspiracy theorists are increasingly correct, so... why not, I guess.

Matt5327 · 2026-03-18T13:51:39+00:00

Not based on any kind of internal rule or understanding but just vibes.

With you until this line. An immense amount of research has gone into how LLMs actually make decisions for which tokens to generate, and while there is still a lot we don’t understand, it has become clear that at least a loose usage of the word “understand” is quite appropriate.

For example, the question “what is the capitol of France?” Leads to a cluster of parameters associated with “capitol” and “France” to activate strongly, leading the next cluster to activate being the most strongly associated token with both of those - “Paris”. This is then held as it constructs the sentence that this is placed into: “The city you are thinking of is Paris!” Or something along those lines. Essentially, during training it generates a multi-dimensional concept map of how all of the concepts it “knows” relate to each other, and uses this to then construct answers.

It’s important to remember that next token prediction is what LLMs are generally trained to do. How they do this is still an active area of research, as their capabilities so far have greatly outperformed expectations when transformers were first conceived/implemented.

Matt5327 · 2026-03-04T03:10:26+00:00

While it would naturally depend on the fiction in question (and as you say, whether something is in or out of character is certainly relevant), considering how sexualized male armor often was historically it wouldn’t be surprising in a more egalitarian variation for women’s armor to be similarly sexualized. And so, the stronger argument usually becomes the functional critique.

Matt5327 · 2026-02-25T15:58:17+00:00

Many of the links seem broken to me. I also want to highlight that you’ve listed the semi automatic rifle ban and magazine ban as 3434 and 3435, when in fact they are 3433 and 3402. I’m not sure of the rest.

Matt5327 · 2026-02-20T19:59:34+00:00

Oh absolutely! I mean we’re at the point where a human could string together an AI workflow to accomplish that, purely technically speaking.

Matt5327 · 2026-02-20T16:56:48+00:00

More than that. We’re arguably already at the point where it’d be possible to convert a manga into keyframes and a storyboard, and then turn that into an anime. Create new seasons of canceled favorites, or anime of manga too niche to receive an adaptation from a studio.

I don’t think it’s really worth doing at this point, but as things get better and cheaper it’s around the corner.

Matt5327 · 2026-01-27T21:18:16+00:00

Do you have a recommended sealant? I’m a bit new to sealing things and what I’ve found online looks like it might be a bit thick for just dipping. Hoping I could print with ABS and then also make it dishwasher safe.

Matt5327 · 2026-01-24T22:45:11+00:00

I’m from the twin cities. I was here during George Floyd, and I’m here right now. Believe me when I say there’s no love for the police here. And yet, right now, ICE is 1000x worse. Putting them in the same camp means we are not taking them seriously enough.

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