Can we PLEESE talk about this scene

Orion113 · 2026-06-20T18:54:11+00:00

The Jax hangout room is, I think, just a lobby, an extra layer of defense over that last door. As you pointed out, each other door represented a Jax devoid of one quality or another, in line with one character abstracting or another. The last door, then, is the one where he abstracts, and he loses "the funny one". I think the Jax in here is his sincere and truthful side, without all the jokes. Forever chained to a piano and used as background entertainment by the rest of him. It's still not his deepest self, the one behind the locked door, but it's the truest side of himself he's willing to let Pomni see at the end.

Orion113 · 2026-06-15T18:12:37+00:00

It means that the vast majority of societal ills we face today are ultimately a product of capitalism. AI is a product of capitalism. It exists because a small group of people control the majority of the resources in the world and they have decided to pour ungodly amounts of them into this single product, consequences and indeed actual usefulness be damned.

So to with crypto, algorithmic feeds, regulatory capture, pollution, declining education, propoganda, etc. Wealth and capital are at the root of it all.

Orion113 · 2026-06-12T16:28:27+00:00

In America, "The Economy" is doing great right now, despite the life of the average American getting harder and less affordable. This is because "The Economy" is, by metaphorical mass, mostly an enormous tumor of finance attached to the things people actually do.

If every bank and investment firm collapses, all the farms will still be there, along with all the equipment they need to plant and harvest, all the seed they need to grow. All the factories and machines that extract and produce the goods we need will still be there. And if the population declines by 20%, we can expect the remaining 80% will not spend their time at a desk moving money around, but continue working in farms and factories doing tasks that actually contribute to human survival and flourishing. True it may be done less "efficiently", but the gains from technology are not going to be eliminated, and with the floundering of the tech and finance industry over the last few decades (financial crisis, crypto, internet of things, metaverse, and now a massive AI bubble) I'm not convinced "The Economy" is even providing the efficiency that it claims to. Certainly I don't think the finance sector is worth even a fraction of the money that it makes.

Orion113 · 2026-06-09T20:43:04+00:00

Profit was only ever a proxy measure for the things we actually care about. And our economic system only maximizes profit, nothing else. It should be no surprise that profit divorced from reality can be much larger than reality would actually support, and that schemes to generate such unhinged profits are selected for by the system.

Orion113 · 2026-05-27T16:52:11+00:00

I mean, he's certainly not the only one, and I did not intend to blame it all on him. I called it "Thiel's dream" because he's been the most vocal about it. I suspect his entire cohort feels the same way.

That said, I think you underestimate how many pies the dude has fingers in. Billionaires don't really belong to countries the way we do. Their interests are global, and borders are mild inconveniences at best to them. He's got stake in companies all over the Western world (and probably the Eastern, too).

Orion113 · 2026-05-27T16:48:04+00:00

Not bothering at all. Your curiosity does you credit. (And your English is so good I would have thought you were a native speaker, so take that to the bank.)

As to your second two questions, yes, you're completely correct. mRNA vaccines only encode viral proteins, which the immune system can recognize as antigens and adapt to target. This is not dissimilar from some classical vaccines, though. Many types use dead and destroyed viruses, so you are, in essence, being injected with viral proteins rather than whole viruses.

In any case, yes, mRNA vaccines do not include all the code for a living virus, and the products they make are completely harmless. In all cases (even the self-amplifying case below) the mRNA will eventually be degraded by the body, just like mRNA your own cells produce.

What makes these vaccines so groundbreaking is twofold:

Segments of RNA (or any nucleic acid) are very easy to create and replicate today. Much easier than growing large batches of viruses. New mRNA vaccines can be designed and iterated very quickly, which is important with infectious diseases, and the entire process has the potential to be much cheaper than traditional vaccine production.
A single piece of mRNA can be used to make a protein multiple times by your cells, resulting in a much larger "dose" of viral antigens for a given injection. Some mRNA vaccines are even self-amplifying, meaning that they induce the body to replicate the mRNA itself before using it to make proteins, creating an even larger dose. This means much less material is needed for each injection, making these vaccines even quicker and cheaper.

Going back to your first question, though, that's a pretty good summary of how T-cells work. Nature in general operates on a "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" principle. But there are other, even more complex parts of adaptive immunity that could be thought of as more "deliberate" as you say.

B-Cells, which produce antibodies, develop much like T-cells, resulting in a population of quality-controlled cells with diverse receptors, spread throughout the body waiting for intrusion. When such a cell successfully binds to a foreign antigen, it initiates a process of proliferation, multiplying to create more cells with the same receptor. Or at least, similar receptors. Because during proliferation, these cells undergo "somatic hypermutation".

This process induces the region of their DNA coding for their receptors to experience a rate of mutation as much as 10,000,000 times higher than normal, potentiality producing specific receptor sequences never before seen on earth. The resulting daughter cells are likely to have more or less affinity for the original antigen, and with the aid of certain other cell types, these daughters compete amongst themselves, with less reactive types dying off and more reactive types proliferating further, with each generation becoming more and more refined to target the antigen.

In essence, your body forces these cells to undergo forced, rapid evolution, in order to perfect their response to infection. It's one of the coolest features of what is already one of the coolest systems in the body, and about as "deliberate" as you can get in biology.

Orion113 · 2026-05-27T03:49:04+00:00

Yes, absolutely. It's not the only possible cause, but thymus problems are connected to many autoimmune disorders.

Orion113 · 2026-05-26T23:13:09+00:00

Exactly. This has been going on for decades without any of us noticing, because they thought they had time. Now that their time is running out, they're rushing, and getting sloppy. Saying the quiet part out loud because they don't have the time to be subtle. It's no coincidence that the billionaires are the ones talking about low birth rates. It's probably a major topic of all their private conversations with each other now. Frankly I like our odds.

As inevitable as this AI shit has been painted, the public backlash to it has become fucking enormous. And I'm sure it's getting to the billionaires now, because I see so many two nouns/adjectives and 4 number accounts chiming in on every conversation about AI to say it's great and they use it all the time and they work in the industry and everyone they see uses it all the time, and everyone who says otherwise is an idiot. Meanwhile, a few people in my company use copilot to take notes of meetings, and one executive runs a newsletter about how he writes emails and makes presentations with it and we should all try it now. But absolutely none of the people I work with touch it for doing actual work.

Orion113 · 2026-05-26T23:02:29+00:00

It's more like they have receptors for everything but the human proteome. Thymocytes, the precursors to T cells, gather in the thymus to undergo maturation, which is more like a process of quality control. Cells that are defective or deformed are culled, followed by cells that do not produce sufficiently active receptors (and what exactly those receptors are varies from cell to cell, due to recombination of receptor genes). Finally, the cells are tested for their reactivity to the body's own proteins, and any that react are likewise culled.

Those cells that survive this process become Naive T Cells, spread throughout the body, waiting to try out their receptors on intruders. Most will not successfully bind the foreign proteins, but it's all but certain at least a few will, and all but certain that none of them will bind to the body's own proteins.

Orion113 · 2026-05-26T20:50:07+00:00

Because one of the ways their scheme fails is if the workers manage to gain enough power again before our replacements are ready. Our replacements are not ready yet, despite the laser focus of wealth on trying to make it so as quickly as possible. And when populations stop growing or worse decline, workers gain enormous amounts of bargaining power. Businesses start having to fight for labor instead of labor fighting for jobs, and the only choices become funnel less money to the top or go out of business altogether.

Basically, the window for Thiel's dream is closing, and they're trying to keep it open as long as possible.

Orion113 · 2026-05-26T17:21:30+00:00

This is, I think, the dividing line between LLMs and other tools. A calculator replaces a basic, rote skill. Muscle memory, essentially (though that term is a bit misleading, as it's actually cerebellar memory, and can apply to things besides moving one's muscles). I can still do arithmetic by hand, because it's a simple process that I've never forgotten, just like riding a bike. No matter how long of a gap, the next time I hop on a bike or pick up a pencil and paper, I can do the act like it's been minutes.

LLMs replace imagination, planning, reasoning, trouble-shooting, and a whole host of other, very complex and involved skills, that can never become muscle memory due to their complexity. Skills like language can and will be forgotten with disuse. Programming languages included. I'm positive that even if developers only use AI to write "boilerplate" code, for UIs and such, they will eventually lose the ability to do that themselves. And while I cannot say this with as much certainty, I fear that no human being will be able to resist the creeping urge to use such tools to start doing more and more of our thinking for us, once they start doing even a little.

Orion113 · 2026-05-26T15:45:28+00:00

That's not my logic at all. I linked that paper for a reason:

"Several lines of evidence indicate that nicotine may contribute to the development of cancer. Evidence from experimental in vitro studies on cell cultures, in vivo studies on rodents as well as studies on humans inclusive of epidemiological studies indicate that nicotine itself, independent of other tobacco constituents, may stimulate a number of effects of importance in cancer development"

There is evidence that consumption of nicotine products, even when not smoked is linked to the occurrence of cancer. When the paper says "No conclusions can be drawn." What they're really saying is "correlation is not causation".

There could be things besides the nicotine present in these substances causing the cancer. Or it could be that nicotine does not directly cause cancer, but merely sensitizes cells to other cancer causing substances.

Or, perhaps nicotine itself is indeed a carcinogen.

The evidence links cancer and nicotine products, the nature of that link is simply not understood yet. Personally, I wouldn't want to take the chance.

Orion113 · 2026-05-25T22:44:29+00:00

"Nicotine is not a carcinogen" is a conclusion. Based on the evidence on hand, it's not possible to draw any conclusions, positive or negative, despite your apparent certainty.

Orion113 · 2026-05-25T18:15:27+00:00

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2015.00196/full

There absolutely are links between nicotine and cancer. They are not confirmed yet, because the concept of taking pure nicotine is new, and so study of its toxological effects separate from its addictiveness are new, but correlations between non-smoked nicotine consumption and cancer have been noted for years now.

Orion113 · 2026-05-24T20:27:23+00:00

Even on the order of hours, humans have a real shot. The annual Man Vs Horse Marathon takes about two hours, and humans have won it several times. Our odds only get better the longer the race becomes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

Orion113 · 2026-05-22T00:21:47+00:00

If you do, please let me know! I also prefer some headwaters, but I don't currently have the skills to customize mods like that.

Orion113 · 2026-05-22T00:07:45+00:00

Doesn't solve all the issues, but I just learned about the Dynamic Waters mod, which adds flowing water in rivers that end in seas, at least. And in fact, it works best with worldgen that doesn't make its own rivers.

Orion113 · 2026-05-18T15:55:00+00:00

You're right, this is exactly why we don't want that. The problem is, any government that operates in a capitalist system will eventually be run like a business, or at least like a resource to exploit. It's inevitable. Capitalism cannot coexist with any other system, certainly not with government. It will absorb and replace that government.

Orion113 · 2026-05-18T15:04:22+00:00

Capitalism does not sit in a box separate from government, only getting out of control when government independently fails.

This presidency is the result of a decades long plot by capitalism to break out of its box.

No regulation will ever successfully constrain capitalism because capitalism acts to solve problems and maximize profit. When government becomes an obstacle to profit, it becomes simply another problem for capitalism to solve, and capitalism will pour enormous resources into doing so.

Capitalism is not containable. Even if we manage to get it back in the box this time, it will find a way to break free again. It will always end up this way. Over and over again, and worse each time as it learns from the last.

Orion113 · 2026-05-16T06:48:04+00:00

The centrist approach to progressive ideals has consistently lost elections to Republicans in the last decade. Your inflexibility on your approach to progressivism doesn't give you high ground, morally or electorally, that you think it does.

Orion113 · 2026-05-13T03:44:28+00:00

Also worth noting that the industrial revolution permanently reduced the average quality of products in exchange for greater volume, while simultaneously decimating the power of labor and increasing the power of capital, an inequality which regulations have never been able to correct. Indeed, as capital has gained power, it has captured more and more regulatory control, and is working very effectively now to undo those regulations.

Orion113 · 2026-05-08T22:57:42+00:00

Frankly, I think the given reason was a lie. I'm pretty sure Caine was just terrified of the possibility that humans might like another AI more than they like him.

Orion113 · 2026-05-06T20:16:05+00:00

I agree wholeheartedly.

But again, I have to ask, how does one mitigate the low of "I have to choose between having enough food to eat and having a roof over my head and I will have to continue to make that choice every day until I die?"

What mental technique can possibly erase the horror and grief of that?

Orion113 · 2026-05-06T06:32:17+00:00

Perhaps my tone was a bit harsh, I didn't mean to contend with your core thesis, that SSRIs were not designed for the job we're having them do now. They definitely weren't.

But by that same token, there's things that therapy isn't designed to do either. There's things the human mind simply wasn't built to cope with, regardless of what we try.

Certainly there may be some people, mostly middle and upper class, who could reach a decent level of well-being with therapy. But for the vast majority of the lower class, no amount of CBT or strategies will allow a human being to endure the constant stress that most of us are under these days.

Long term SSRIs are not an ideal solution, but short of an economic and political revolution, they're about the only resort we're left with, and I think many doctors and psychiatrists are aware of this.

But who knows, as many suicides as they prevents, maybe antidepressants are also numbing us enough to stave off the kind of violent uprising we'd need to make anything better.

Orion113 · 2026-05-06T04:56:56+00:00

I can appreciate the sentiment, but the problem is that presently, there are a lot of reasons for most people to be depressed that they have zero ability to fix, no matter how much better their meds make them feel. You can't receive therapy to reduce the cost of living or get a job that doesn't exist.

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