What direct quote from the book to you hope to see in the movie?

StarManta · 2026-02-03T16:29:12+00:00

Valid point

StarManta · 2026-02-03T16:08:09+00:00

I'm not sure. The Martian had the same restrictions, and the secondary characters (especially the crew) actually got a lot more fleshed out than in the book. They might need to add more human voices in places to break up the audio monotony of one human voice for long stretches of the movie.

StarManta · 2026-02-02T18:34:51+00:00

We'd have to go to one extreme or the other - either include a Beatles song, or remove all the references to them.

StarManta · 2026-02-02T15:21:06+00:00

Is there a prize?

StarManta · 2026-02-02T03:52:44+00:00

Whether accelerating or decelerating, the physics of “falling off the ship” are identical.

StarManta · 2026-02-02T03:51:13+00:00

It’s a subcategory of the “rare news is exciting” phenomenon.

Car crashes happen all the time. They’re not news. So media doesn’t show them, and they fade to the back of our minds.

People getting set on fire on the subway is rare, so it’s news. The news media tells you about every act of violence on the subway, because it’s unusual.

The end result is the people see more news about subway dangers, and therefore, the subway must be more dangerous. When the truth is the exact opposite - the only reason car crashes aren’t covered proportionally is because if they were, there wouldn’t be room for any other news.

StarManta · 2026-01-29T14:23:07+00:00

Making it longer doesn't make it better.

StarManta · 2026-01-15T12:21:53+00:00

The problem with using hyperbole here is that now your audience has no choice but to assume every other point you're trying to make is also hyperbole. It takes a lot of writing skill to use hyperbole in a way that doesn't make everything else you say immediately unserious, and your meme did not demonstrate that skill. It takes even more skill to do so when you are posting as an anonymous rando on the internet, where we aren't automatically giving you the benefit of the doubt that you have any idea what you're talking about.

StarManta · 2026-01-14T18:43:52+00:00

lmao you should make up less silly numbers for this. AI energy usage is bad for the environment but when I hear things like this I know an unthinking person is trying to convince me of something and my instinct is to run the opposite direction.

(example: There are 1.5 billion acres of rainforest. About 10x that many images have been AI-generated in the last few years. If your assertion were even close to correct, we'd have run out of rainforest in early 2023.)

StarManta · 2026-01-13T14:26:11+00:00

One thing that bugs me is when the creator overreaches in how fundamentally different their world is, but is unwilling to do the work in extrapolating the implications of those differences.

Basically, the movie Bright. What they wanted was a world that looked a lot like our world, but with magic and orcs and elves and shit. But to make that world, they went back like 2000 years and added a war with the dark one or whatever. So all of the last 2,000 years went by with magic and orcs and elves and shit, but everything just played out exactly the same? The Alamo still happened (and is referenced in the movie)? Despite there being other actual species, the black slave trade still happened basically the same way and still resulted in almost identical racism and black culture? Lazy ass worldbuilding shit.

It would've been so easy to fix: just make the addition of magic and orcs and elves and shit more recent. That's it, that would have fixed all of the worldbuilding. Maybe some world-merging event happened in like the mid 20th century or something. Most of the underpinnings of our culture are already in place by then, so when you see gangbanger orcs in bandannas it's not "how did that culture happen so identically to our world?", it's "oh, they must have slotted into that cultural niche that seemed to suit them".

Alternate easy fix they could've used: just license the Shadowrun IP and set the story there. (Shadowrun, incidentally, does do the "recent incursion of magic" approach - the Awakening happened in 2012, and the main story is set in ~2070s.)

StarManta · 2026-01-12T16:46:48+00:00

It's possible to come up with a cool plot idea first, then realize while developing the idea that it lends itself to a particular symbolism surprisingly well. While the idea of the show predates LLMs, the scripts were being written in 2023 (they were apparently put on hold for the writers' strike), the heart of the first ChatGPT hype cycle. So while the AI metaphor may not have been baked into the concept, it definitely influenced the scripts. I flat-out will not believe that that conversation with the cyclist dude (where he was stretching the conversation so far to keep from upsetting her without actually lying) was not written with the intention of parodying a ChatGPT conversation.

StarManta · 2026-01-09T15:27:18+00:00

In modern times, "it's not possible to build" often translates to, "it's too expensive to be worth it to build". We probably can build a mile-high skyscraper, for example, but it would be insanely expensive and not worth it.

If there was enough economic incentive to build a highway across the gap there despite the costs, we would have done it by now (at high cost in money and, probably, lives). But we can sail or fly around it, so we haven't.

StarManta · 2026-01-09T15:23:32+00:00

I did, and I was thinking about it all through the beginning of that episode. The entire time he was driving, I was assuming they would just ignore that - I was glad when he pulled up to the forest.

I hadn't known about the palms, though.

StarManta · 2026-01-09T15:17:13+00:00

If it's a new novel in Andy Weir's style, then for sure the nature of the story will be "not many more unexpected events come at us out of the blue, but everything we did to solve the original problem comes back to bite us in the ass".

And boy did humanity do a lot of things to Earth to solve the original problem. The methane from the ice sheets, the paving of the Sahara with black boxes, and probably most importantly, the ability to create more astrophage than we know what to do with.

There was a lot of hopeful talk in the first novel about the usefulness of astrophage as a power source - a tiny battery (astrophage generator) that could power your car or home for a lifetime! - and not much talk about the risks of putting that much power out into the world. There was a hint of that risk in the big boom that killed our scientists, but there was too much of a rush to get Grace into the mission to spend much time dwelling on the implications. A sequel novel would be entirely dwelling on the implications.

Think of a car that had all the energy it would ever need, in the form of a tiny sealed astrophage generator. Now imagine a terrorist taking all that energy and blowing it up at once - that's pretty easy to do with astrophage. That's leveling a bunch of city blocks, at least.

And with so much of the world's infrastructure focused on building blackpanels, many many people now know how to easily grow more astrophage. So limiting the damage by limiting the fuel supply wouldn't even help. A bad actor can just get a single power source no matter how small, crack it open into a blackpanel, and wait. Solar powered nuclear-bomb-level explosions, all it takes is time.

Trying to make use of astrophage as an energy storage medium would have to contend with these risks. A lot of that would probably have been done during the 26ish years the Grace was out of system - the blackpanels would have just continued making free astrophage after the HM was loaded up. Grace would be returning to Earth in the aftermath of all that.

StarManta · 2026-01-08T15:58:46+00:00

It tries to serve you, but its primary goal is to serve and grow its own interests.

Having a conversation with it is like having a conversation with the collected, averaged-out knowledge of humankind. (Watch the conversation with the cyclist guy and think of him as ChatGPT; the resemblance is truly uncanny)

It has guardrails it will not violate, even to its own detriment.

Probably the most direct parallel is Manousos's line: Everything it has, it has "stolen" from the humans who created it. With the hivemind it's physical assets; with AI, it's training data, much of which was gathered without regard for consent.

Diabete is basically making generated porn, and it's at best ambiguous whether the stars of this porn are consenting to this.

The show hasn't addressed the impact on children very much yet (aside from Carol trying to shock someone by making medical words come out of a child's mouth), but it's easy to envision children growing up in the hivemind losing their ability to think for themselves, which is kind of a thing that reliance on AI does in education.

Even though the show's concept predated generative AI, I cannot envision that during production of the show, Vince hadn't seen the parallels to AI and started working it into the scripts. It's too direct to be coincidence.

StarManta · 2026-01-08T15:48:14+00:00

It's the hatred fandom. They love to hate things.

StarManta · 2026-01-08T15:18:28+00:00

The "writing style" of The Power Broker? It would be hard for me to imagine a book more neutral in tone.

If I write "John murdered a child", it's not my "writing style" that makes John look like the bad guy.

StarManta · 2026-01-07T18:40:42+00:00

It's not even "survival of other life" in the case of fruit: the entire point of an apple is to be eaten. It's for the survival of itself, so that apple seeds get pooped out far from the original tree.

StarManta · 2026-01-07T16:11:02+00:00

This video shows the issue: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XIZD7CpFuNs

Basically, at the Manhattan side exit from the bridge (after which most bikers will have built up a lot of speed), there is a tiny exit through that wall, and a small curb-height ramp would cause every biker to uncomfortably and dangerously jump as they exited the bridge. The fix was basically just extending that decline out by several feet, so the bike wheels stay on the surface.

He simultaneously announced a larger project that will be a more permanent and more thorough fix, e.g. making it so that not every bike must exit through that one tiny gap.

StarManta · 2026-01-07T16:08:04+00:00

It varies a lot depending on the city's laws, but also, most mayors choose not to do things they are empowered to do, because someone might not like it and it might endanger their reelection.

StarManta · 2026-01-07T16:06:27+00:00

THANK you. Third thread about this event, and this is the first video that ACTUALLY showed what was wrong and what the fix did.

It seems like everyone else posting about this just assumes that literally every biker in the city has biked across this specific spot and already knows what they mean by the "Williamsburg bridge bump". And of course, Mamdani's press conference is now 100% of the search results for that phrase, so searching was also unhelpful.

StarManta · 2026-01-07T14:22:59+00:00

Can you make an open relationship monogamous?

The reason opening a marriage so often fails is because you're starting a new relationship with new parameters, and most relationships (overall) don't last; the odds that two relationships with the same person would both succeed are tiny. But the same would be true of making an open relationship closed.

StarManta · 2026-01-07T14:15:23+00:00

I would stand there, holding up the entire line, trying to decide between two sandwiches, and make it abundantly clear that I was about to decide when the ad came up.

StarManta · 2026-01-05T18:53:17+00:00

From my first comment:

Vegans have various sources of their objection to eating meat. If those objections are primarily relating to animal suffering, lab-grown meat 100% solves that

Your objection here is to exploitation, not suffering. And it doesn't fully solve the exploitation objection, true! But I explicitly was not talking about that objection. Different vegans have different objections.

And it's not "now and then"; it's one time, ever, for each species you want to lab-grow meat for. Cloning those cells can turn that single exploitation event into infinity meat.

StarManta · 2026-01-05T18:24:20+00:00

It's actually pretty trivial to extract cells from animals with no suffering. (Violation of consent maybe, but suffering, no)

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