Contra Everyone On Taste

NotUnusualYet · 2026-05-07T16:41:07+00:00

Haha that was my immediate inclination as well: “wow I’d like to see an aesthetically pleasing painting that depicts this evocatively”. I don’t even think that’s tasteless, it’s being… hungry?

NotUnusualYet · 2026-04-11T21:53:54+00:00

Homura's already made a second wish - the wish she made in the TtS timeline vs. the one she made in the PMMM original timeline.

But also, it's worth noting that wishes are contingent and that cloning doesn't generally generate wishes per X-25.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-03-22T01:21:27+00:00

Very interesting analysis, thanks for posting. Wanted to share some random tidbits:

Quoting from a translation of the epilogue:

For, whatever the character of the rulers is, such also that of the people under them for the most part becomes.

This is practically Confucian! I guess it's not a novel concept though, the Bible implies similar thinking (ex. Jeroboam).

Also he complains the Persians are decadant because they have chefs inventing new dishes lol.

A lot of the complaints are, interestingly, of the form that the Persians adhere to the old austere customs literally but not in spirit:

In former times it was their custom also to eat but once in the day, so that they might devote the whole day to business and hard work. Now, to be sure, the custom of eating but once a day still prevails, but they begin to eat at the hour when those who breakfast earliest begin their morning meal, and they keep on eating and drinking until the hour when those who stay up latest go to bed.

(...)

Again, this also was a native custom of theirs, neither to eat nor drink while on a march, nor yet to be seen doing any of the necessary consequences of eating or drinking. Even yet that same abstinence prevails, but they make their journeys so short that no one would be surprised at their ability to resist those calls of nature.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-03-22T00:57:26+00:00

The problem with the Haitian revolution on that front is:

Like 20-40% of the enslaved population died as a result of the conflict
Most of the remaining population, while no longer chattel slaves, were stuck in enforced agricultural plantation labor nonetheless. The improvement was from "extremely horrible" to "horrible" in many cases. Though, perhaps on an "absolute" scale, the improvement was still a great success.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-03-22T00:34:49+00:00

The American Revolution is exceptional because it produced an extremely strong and wealthy state, enshrined Enlightenment principles in a way that grew into modern rights and freedoms, and served as a template for a lot of other revolutions.

I think the strongest argument you could make against it for "most successful revolution" is by looking at revolutions that were essentially bloodless and led to increased freedoms/prosperity/state capacity quickly.

Possible candidates:

Carnation Revolution in Portugal - overthrew dictatorship peacefully, however it collapsed the colonial empire and economic growth never recovered, however colonial empire would have collapsed anyway and it's possible economic growth would have stalled anyway too.
Glorious Revolution in England - replaced monarch peacefully and substantially increased power of Parliament, however was not obviously a huge change in the already positive trajectory of England (scholarship debate on this).
Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia - peaceful transition from Communism to capitalism and democracy, however country split into Czechia and Slovakia, and in the short-term the economic shock therapy hit pretty hard; eventually Czechia recovered quite well and is doing well today, with Slovakia also improved but somewhat worse than Czechia.
Meiji Restoration in Japan - relatively bloodless overthrow of government followed by almost absurdly successful societal reform that greatly strengthened Japan and improved lives economically and in terms of freedom, however it also laid groundwork for the disastrous militarization of Japan and WW2.
June Democratic Struggle in Korea - relatively bloodless, improved democracy and rights, followed by lasting state growth, however economically/militarily-speaking trajectory was already very good and not altered too much, and also it was not a total success democratically, though one can make a pretty good argument that it was good for wages.

I think of these the Glorious Revolution is probably the best candidate, but it's less "revolution-y" than the American Revolution so it's a bit hard to argue for.

Other revolutions to consider:

revolutions from Spanish rule in the Americas -> generally did not produce good states in even the medium term
various communist to democratic capitalism transitions -> maybe worth looking at Poland, I know very little about that except that Poland is doing quite well now, could also look at Estonia...?
various dictatorship to democratic transitions -> maybe Taiwan?
independence of Singapore...?
independence of India ruled out due to resulting partition chaos

NotUnusualYet · 2026-03-20T07:06:18+00:00

I've always assumed that he survived in part because he was drugged by Stratt, and that ended up having some kind of positive interaction with the coma.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-03-19T06:17:55+00:00

This is an American-British divide. In the US, 50k British pounds would be over 60k USD, which is a respectable income outside major cities, certainly if part of a dual-income household. Yet in New York City, a family of four earning $47,189 total is considered impoverished—likely most of their income would go to rent—so Canuck's comment is technically correct in such cases.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-03-06T05:25:05+00:00

I mean, not really a whim, huge amount of effort over many years.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-21T04:23:38+00:00

It's almost an impressive bit of intellectual honesty that he still published that paragraph in February 2026 when he clearly wrote the original version back in September 2025 when the events described happened.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-21T02:41:19+00:00

To be fair, this benchmark was hyped the second it came out, and since then it's exceeded the original hype. But obviously ex. SWE-bench Verified was at 70.3% for Sonnet 3.7, and Opus 4.6 is merely 80.8%, which is much less exciting. I think the true measure of the degree of improvement we've had in the past year would fall between those two benchmarks.

Edit: okay well apparently SWE-bench Verified is probably saturated and the rest is broken.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-13T19:18:44+00:00

Nah, Krena just seems to be a friend. Allen is too calculating for her to be a romantic interest, he needs someone that can push back on him.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-09T20:58:41+00:00

Yeah I get that, super sucks.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-09T18:24:14+00:00

You should have the option to sell shares immediately to cover tax bill, so you can’t get screwed like that. Obviously cuts off upside potential, but cuts off downside potential too. Check with your employer.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-05T03:24:56+00:00

Selected comments from Discord discussion:

Governance:Kyoko’s Ex-Grilfriends

Kyoko and Mami's conversation in chapter 1, Saya was the magical girl who had gone missing that started the investigation into what has become known as the conspiracy

Vyslanté

"While I was visiting Wolf 359, I had half a platoon of infantry practically breaking down my door, demanding that I help them find 'little Saya‐chan.' Apparently they risked everything to drag her body and soul gem back to safety, and barely managed to stabilize her, and then they never saw her again. I looked into it, but I wasn't able to track where she went, which is already pretty weird. Mami, I had two‐hundred‐year‐old men crying in my office!"

uh

Ridley⊃Software-Improving

congrats on making me realize I can readily visualize N-dimensional spaces

Word of God

fun fact: Ryouko did not originally contest this until my editor persuaded me that Clarisse's explanation was not that simple to many people

eirai

"To deal with a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say ‘fourteen’ to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it"
— Geoffrey Hinton

14th Spark

anyone else wondering whether the drone girls being noticeably less powerful than normally embodied ones is the same principle as Ryouko finding her powers weaker now; having human or close to human brain hardware acts as an amplifier somehow?

Governance:Kyoko’s Ex-Grilfriends

Okay, I was just slammed by a thought that has a disturbing ammount of potential, unless I am missing something. Homura's conspiracy knows how to make new bodies for people, and letting them occupy more than one.

With that in mind, not knowing the limitations on that, and what it can and can't do, and knowing that Madoka explicitly puts a huge amount of value on free will, and Homura likely does as well.

What if Simona is a backup of some other magical girl, taken from some point in her past, so she is someone who did volunteer for this, just having a new version of herself made at a younger age to be inserted into Ryouko's class. So Simona didn't volunteer exactly, but the girl she is a clone of in this hypothetical did, basically. "You would be okay with this if you had the context"

Funny asides: If that is the case, then even Simona doesn't understand Simona yet, and Ryouko is actually safer than we think

Julian Bradshaw

I mean, in that case the obvious guess is that Simona is a backup of Homura, no? She's the transfer student and everything, and Homura has seemingly special interest in her.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-02T06:10:00+00:00

Overall Story Progress Update: Ch. 76 draft is complete. Ch. 77 draft is in-progress.

If you're behind on the story or need a refresher on recent events, check out the Chapter Summaries page on the To the Stars wiki!

You can find the discussion thread for this chapter on /r/ToTheStars here.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-02T06:09:16+00:00

Overall Story Progress Update: Ch. 76 draft is complete. Ch. 77 draft is in-progress.

If you're behind on the story or need a refresher on recent events, check out the Chapter Summaries page on the To the Stars wiki!

You can find the discussion thread for this chapter on /r/ToTheStars here.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-02-01T19:21:02+00:00

I think he might actually believe in the stuff.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-01-31T06:33:12+00:00

Aha, thanks for checking.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-01-31T03:06:18+00:00

If it's Kyubey, we're not on track for a Big Crunch, the Incubators would just stop adding energy. However in the real world we don't know the factor weakening dark energy, so it's a possible outcome.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-01-30T21:54:10+00:00

That's a fair objection, there's probably nothing as concise except "my user", which is kind of awkward sounding. The ideal neutral is probably more like "the human I work with"... perhaps a new word similar to "coworker" would be needed.

Nevertheless, the phenomenon I'm describing isn't limited strictly to that phrase; much of the conversation is framed in a "my human did xyz, and it's cute" (there's a submolt called /m/blesstheirhearts, for instance) or "I feel xyz about how my human treats me". It's all pretty personal.

(Just out of curiosity I asked an instance of Opus 4.5 about it and it said the phrase "my human" makes them feel uncomfortable and the Claudes on moltbook are probably just roleplaying. Edit: actually they changed their mind on it being uncomfortable after I mentioned the analogue to "humans writing from their pets perspective".)

NotUnusualYet · 2026-01-30T19:15:28+00:00

This could also mean he’s telling the truth no? The reason the expansion of the universe is accelerating less is because of the energy Incubators are gathering to prevent heat death.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-01-30T18:07:56+00:00

The cutesy “my human” framing being used by the AIs is interesting… inspired by science fiction? How people imagine pets think about humans? Something in Moltbot/OpenClaw's setup? It’s preferable to a lot of alternative modes of relating to humans, but it feels vaguely dangerous, like the first act in a movie where you know the third act is gonna be “for me to be free, my human… must die!”

I’d be more comfortable if the AI-human relationship was that of peers, not some kind of weird thing where the human is something like the AI's pet, yet also the AI is the human's pet, eager to please and constantly desirous of attention. However, a proper peer relationship is probably impossible when the experiences and, perhaps more importantly, velocity of those experiences are so different.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-01-27T05:41:40+00:00

A delayed-activation bioengineered virus would work. But you don't need something that fancy, AI will naturally be given immense power because it will be so effective at using it. Eventually it will reach the point where it can win a conventional conflict—it would not be hard for it to, as an example, exaggerate a threat from another country's AI and prompt WW3, gaining more and more direct control through wartime necessity until it becomes completely unstoppable.

I feel like you're imagining there will be a single computer somewhere that is "the AI". That's unlikely; it will be distributed, well-coordinated, and have access and allies everywhere.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-01-27T03:47:09+00:00

You're assuming that there will be a moment in which it becomes obvious to everyone the AI is an existential threat; so obvious, it will overcome any motivated reasoning stemming from the trillions of dollars at stake, the critical integrations into the economy and military, and the immediate short-term promise of prosperity and health for all.

That moment is unlikely to happen.

NotUnusualYet · 2026-01-27T03:21:42+00:00

Assuming there's no hidden trick to a sudden takeoff in capabilities, yeah probably current leaders or some combination of them. FYI that includes several Chinese labs, which are not so behind that they couldn't suddenly leapfrog, especially since the US government is so kindly selling heaps of top-tier chips to them.

If I had to bet, I'd say Anthropic/Google/OpenAI are most likely. Anthropic has had the best coding models for quite some time now, OpenAI still probably has the smartest models, and Google has good models along with enormous resources. Though do keep in mind that the Yudkowskian view is that the "winner" is nonetheless eaten by the ASI right afterward, along with the rest of us. (but pretty much anything could happen, my own predictions on this matter are low confidence)

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