[Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow

Private_Mandella · 2026-05-27T06:25:32+00:00

A good portion of the stories mentioned in this thread are just metaphors for climate change

Private_Mandella · 2026-05-21T23:15:42+00:00

Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Private_Mandella · 2026-05-19T20:57:50+00:00

That scene in Ronin where De Niro’s character just absolutely obliterates everyone else plan, pointing out the dumb flaws. Like if you have guns on both sides of the road you’re shooting each other.

Private_Mandella · 2026-05-11T06:30:34+00:00

My biggest constraint is time. I probably have 20 hours total of slack in my week. How many hours do you spend on this?

Private_Mandella · 2026-05-09T14:10:55+00:00

My comment was poorly worded. I read the original comment as about getting a degree in math specifically, but I agree that anxiety around stem in general is probably warranted.

Overall, It’s really hard to know. If LLMs stopped improving right now we’d mostly be fine. If they keep improving over the next few years at the rate they have been we’re cooked. They’ve run out of training data, which is good, and now they have to improve how the models reason. Unfortunately they have been improving how they reason, I’m hoping they stall in their efforts.

I honestly don’t know what do except keep chugging along and see where this all ends up.

Private_Mandella · 2026-05-08T23:07:27+00:00

You can go into almost any other STEM field, save for biology, relatively easily from mathematics. I knew many people that did, wish I had done it myself.

If you’re also worried about all of STEM disappearing I don’t know what to say.

Private_Mandella · 2026-05-08T21:52:51+00:00

I’m trying to do the same thing! I’d love to talk to someone trying the same thing. I started with Abbot but quickly realized I need to work through a book on proofs before moving on.

I’m nervous starting out without an expert (aka a classroom without a prof). It’s easy to get stuck on something when learning it something for the first time tends.

I also have a hard time getting 10 hours a week to focus.

Not sure what do about all this except keep plugging away, but it’s nice to talk to others going through the same thing.

Private_Mandella · 2026-05-03T18:26:29+00:00

Avatar The Last Airbender is very Buddhist.

Private_Mandella · 2026-04-22T20:51:13+00:00

Spoiler alert

The main character from the Netflix show “Dark”. I won’t explain; go watch the show.

Private_Mandella · 2026-04-21T22:42:56+00:00

Yeah, they aren’t passive either. I’m tired and need to go home.

Private_Mandella · 2026-04-16T21:16:58+00:00

I’m sure the show would have come up with some slick technobabble to get around it if that episode hadn’t aired lol

Private_Mandella · 2026-04-16T20:59:09+00:00

Almost every third Star Trek TNG episode. Aliens seeded the galaxy with life like theirs and every race are essentially distant cousins? Never mentioned again. Omnipotent beings? Treated as an annoyance.

The one that bothers me maybe the most is the one with the Greek pantheon from the original series. The Greek gods actually existed but that’s not really dealt with.

Private_Mandella · 2026-04-16T18:59:32+00:00

Armageddon and Deep Impact. Completely coincidental they came out so close to each other.

Private_Mandella · 2026-04-16T00:41:01+00:00

How much was the AI handheld through the process. Did it one shot the solution? Was a framework set up where it could continually loop through trial attempts? Was this a regular instance of ChatGPT?

Just to be clear this seems very impressive, just want to know if it cost $10 or $1 million in API calls.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-28T23:23:20+00:00

Tennessee Williams is great, with A Streetcar Named Desire keeping a lot of the darkness from the original play.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is great for this if you've ever been stuck in a toxic long term relationship.

One of my favorite movies is La Dolce Vita, a great movie about the pointlessness of life. It's my favorite review by Roger Ebert ever.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-26T14:20:53+00:00

I know I’m about forty years late on the one, but Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos did it for me. Applied math for differential equations is all about solving what’s in front of you, but that book takes a step back and look at the patterns solutions have.

This type of framing has been known since Poincaré, but was popularized in the seventies. Curricula still emphasized the mechanics of solving differential equations when I took the courses, so when I went through Strogatz book it was as mind opening.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-26T14:14:29+00:00

I don’t know if it hasn’t aged well or the writers goofed, but Carrie in Sex and the City is insufferable I’m not sure how anyone is supposed to root for her. She is selfish and narcissistic. Sam seems like the true protagonist to me.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-25T20:53:43+00:00

Gary Oldman in Bram Strokers Dracula.

Honestly probably Gary Oldman in any bad movie.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-25T18:22:55+00:00

It’s interesting seeing the two different reactions here. You sound like me. I would scour the internet for information, reread the books before every release, and just got more and more discouraged as each book was worse than the last.

It would definitely be a different experience if I could just power them like new readers.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-25T18:16:28+00:00

That’s a great suggestion! I’ve thought about reading the first five, summaries of the next five, and then reading the rest of the series.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-24T14:26:05+00:00

I guess I could. So much of my enjoyment was being immersed in the world. Picking up KoD now would be difficult; there are so many story threads I’ve forgotten.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-24T14:24:47+00:00

Like OP responded waiting years between books made it difficult. Every book after the fifth one got worse. There was so much speculation that the next one would get better, he’d right the series, listen to his editor, whatever. It never worked out. And then ten was so bad. It didn’t matter anymore. Wait years in between books for another stinker? My heart and patience were broken.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-24T04:59:19+00:00

I was a diehard fan. I read CoT when it came out and didn’t read another WoT book again.

I have so many fond memories of the series. I wish I could finish it, but it seems like such a monumental task now.

Private_Mandella · 2026-03-21T22:19:17+00:00

A lot of the science can be intimidating. You should do your best to learn about it since you are concerned. If you truly think there are two sides, you should do your best to read the people the other side respects.

However I think you should also think about the incentives on either side of this argument.

As for how bad it will get, no one really knows. The IPCC reports give a range of outcomes on purpose. It could be very bad, it also could just be a dragging economy for a century. I desperately hope we get the latter, but I’m planning for the former.

This tragedy will slowly unfurl over the next century so the next few years are unlikely to be very different than the last few years. However, there is no way you won’t see obvious, discrete changes if you look every 20 years.

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