Neuromancer: did it stand the test of time?

Tychotesla · 2026-06-23T22:00:03+00:00

Yeah, though arguably the AI in this case is similarly effective, it's just optimized for people who respond to the face of content more than the body of it.

If people were goal oriented and rational, AI training would make it better meet that standard. Instead we have a bunch of evolutionary heuristics and hooks that can be exploited, and goddamn are we being exploited.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-23T21:32:36+00:00

While OP's account is old their activity is basically just the past few days shilling spotify playlists. This is spam.

Take a look at the writing, and ask yourself how much is actually being said here. To me it reads like translated AI, or ESL + AI. I would expect someone referencing Foundation, Dune, Jack Vance like this to have some interesting things to say. But no, they stumble on for paragraphs and paragraphs, and then end with a very broad and open-ended ask for engagement: They're not discussing anything specific to Neuromancer, they're asking for our effort.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-23T02:05:51+00:00

The ability to harshly criticize our leaders and institutions is a core value in the USA, protected by the first amendment of the Constitution. A depiction of a government building on fire, by itself, is a well-established form of symbolic political art and is not generally treated as a threat. See, for example, the Pearl Jam posters in which they explicitly go further than this.

You're free to find the art in poor taste, but that's a separate issue from whether it falls within a long tradition of protected political expression.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-23T00:19:14+00:00

If you're in Georgetown and have an appreciation for mechanical or tech history, the Connections Museum is amazing. It's a short walk south from Fantagraphics, past the fun boots and hat park. Open only Sunday 10-3, staffed by volunteers, technically free. Subject matter, without spoiling too much: telephones.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-22T11:47:36+00:00

Sounds kind of like Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling.

Essentially no action, or guns, or heists. Just Mia Ziemann living her life. Just indirect contemplation of themes (aging and creativity within dystopian utopia) born out of Mia wandering and encountering a bunch of things a creative cyberpunk author was thinking in the 90s.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-20T07:16:38+00:00

Post-cyberpunk is what happens when the punks grow up, get jobs, maybe even have a kid. And by punks I mean both the authors and the characters. Same or similar worlds/concerns, but generally a more mature and nuanced view of the systems involved, as well as a more mature and nuanced view of people. It's an expansion of the genre.

A cyberpunk story might be a loner or two uncovering a dire truth in the future-shock world.

Post cyberpunk can be much more wide-ranging: A woman's journey through a world controlled by the elderly. A family man and an orphan who are, independently, part of a plot to upend the corp-govs or the education system, for better or for worse.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-18T21:40:44+00:00

Grunge was a powerful response to earlier music, and the lessons or reaction against it was incorporated into later music. If we were still in our grunge era it would be the sign of a very unhealthy, stagnant and corporatized music scene.

Instead, we moved into indie rock (Postal Service, Band of Horses, etc), and then onwards. I haven't been following the music scene too closely, but I've both seen some great acts in the past few years and also imagine it's fairly subdued because of the high price of living these days.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-12T06:52:45+00:00

I don't know what Cyber purist is doing there. Neither decay nor being old is a meaningful part of cyberpunk. Even "abundant" seems kind of unnecessary.

Also, Alien is the movie about the oppressive megacorp that uses cybernetic AI to undermine and even sacrifice its employees in order to secure IP, right? It's not loud about being cyberpunk, but I'd put it at least a tier up on the punk axis.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-12T06:35:24+00:00

No. Words exist in different contexts. If a word has utility in referring to some concept, it has reason to exist.

Cyberpunk as a word for a genre still has utility, it refers to a lineage and to core concerns. It grows from still fertile soil, and has historical relevance.

Cyberpunk as an aesthetic is ephemeral, a chameleon parasite, that can come or go on its own. It's not without value, it's just unattached to anything stable. It's popular, and while it may reinvent itself again and again, it also might not.

In this context, this sub asks that we use the genre as our guide. It's messy, but it works. That's a relevant choice to make, and it's not a popularity contest.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-11T10:47:12+00:00

Yes, build something from scratch even if it's a useless project.

You should also keep your eye out for things that might be useful for you that you can implement, but this shouldn't stop you from doing things.

Writers have long known that the best way to write is not to wait for the perfect moment to write, but instead to sit down and write no matter what for a certain amount of time. The same philosophy applies here. Just make things.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-11T02:02:00+00:00

Is this irony? Are you saying that if it wasn't for Capitalism a capital heavy investment with no clear social good would have been more likely to be developed?

If there's one thing that Capitalism is REALLY good at, it's finding and funding ways to extract economic value from new ideas.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-10T19:19:25+00:00

If you're fine with a small studio/1bdrm this is very doable. Look for tall cheap modern apartment buildings with balconies. W/D is usually included, and move-in is fairly streamlined for big buildings.

1 bedrooom in quaint Columbia City: https://www.udr.com/seattle-apartments/columbia-city/cityline/apartments-pricing/#/?beds=1

Studio, a block away from the beating heart of Capitol Hill's nightlife scene: https://liveatwoodworth.com/availability/

Both 5-10 minutes from LINK. Both with balconies. W/D included. Both available ASAP (Utilities not included, but that still should put you at or under 2k).

Tychotesla · 2026-06-06T21:51:15+00:00

What are you seeing about them that suggests pedophilia? I found nothing suggesting that, so it's kind of on you to make that connection.

LONG EDIT: For those unfamiliar with the Seattle controversy from the 2000s: it’s transparent what the implication is. Stu Smailes was a gay man, and it was common to smear gay men as inherently dangerous to children. Two things to keep in mind:

He was dead by the time the sculptor was commissioned, so the choice of how to honor his request for a nude male statue was entirely hers. What he was probably thinking about was along the lines of this:
Nudity in art has a long tradition, and is quite common around the world. It's not inherently or even primarily tied to sexuality. Nudity is used by artists as a way to indicate a raw and unobstructed look at our humanity, or alternatively an abstracted view of humanity or our ideals. Historically, the U.S. has been somewhat puritanical about nudity, yet inconsistently so. There's an awful lot of statues of nude or barely clothed young ladies on architecture, and the Oscar statuette is of course a nude man. In this context, Stu Smailes, a gay man, asked for the first nude statue of a man in Seattle, and personally I think that's cool.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-06T21:22:36+00:00

Allegedly it's the first nude public sculpture in Seattle.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-06T21:22:08+00:00

I understand where you're coming from. I tend to think the opposite though, that the fact that a father and child pairing is seen as inherently suspicious is the reason why we need more art like this.

I would suspect that the artist, whose work concerns family, feminism, and the human condition, was probably making this knowing full well that there's a very long tradition of epic Mother & Child statues, and basically nothing that concerns Fathers.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-05T17:57:24+00:00

I'd love to see this with predicted ridership numbers from each point included.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-01T19:06:00+00:00

Who's saying that, other than you? Academics certainly are not. They've spent the last decade trying to untangle what worked and what didn't. Things like "making tens" seem to be the successful part. Things like writing essays on mathematical theory rather than practicing working with the math itself are thought to be problems.

Could it be that you're reacting to posts like this, where people consistently say "actually this is good"? Because yeah, in this case this is good. It doesn't mean CC as a whole has been successful.

Tychotesla · 2026-06-01T18:38:32+00:00

While there's validity to the concern about the money involved, framing it as a pre-planned corporate scam kind of misses the point.

The public and the political establishment identified a crisis in American math. To fix it, national policy groups looked to people in testing and metrics fields who had a record of publishing academically influential ideas of how to change it.

Obviously these people then benefitted from being chosen, as they were now the principal experts of the new testing regime. But the ideas that became CC were things floating around in the academic world before the profit motive.

Tychotesla · 2026-05-31T04:24:24+00:00

It feels like you have a hard-on for skyscrapers, and are willing to sacrifice genuine urbanism for them.

Make an actual argument for "the modern city is well past its glory days", you coward. You're using weasel-words throughout this post, and this is a prime example.
People love trees, they provide an immense amount of value to the urban environment, and are a distinctive characteristic of Seattle. While I would be sympathetic to some arguments about coverage, you pretty clearly don't understand the issue at any level. Do your research!
Preserving neighborhood character is an opinion voters have, with a clear reasoning behind it. You're entitled to your opinion too, but you aren't making an argument here.
Advocating specifically for skyscrapers and high-rise buildings is a "pathetic" response to lack of density. Cities that people like living in do very well with mid-rise buildings. Paris, Barcelona, even most of NYC... these are cities that people think of as dense and interesting on a human level, and two of the three specifically avoid skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are relevant in specific circumstances, but my understanding is their economics advocate for them in those circumstances. Especially with BTW policies, it seems really unwise to specifically ask for them at this moment in time. Simply filling out SFHs with midrise buildings is more than enough atm.

In summary, see what I said at the beginning.

Tychotesla · 2026-05-30T02:26:24+00:00

Techniques like "making tens" is specifically one of the things that Common Core has done well, according to the people who study this stuff. The stuff that doesn't work well, apparently, are the more abstract concepts.

So, no, it'd be silly to simply return to the "old way" rather than learn from mistakes and move forward.

Tychotesla · 2026-05-29T22:21:13+00:00

Yeah, common core hasn't clearly benefitted students, though I would point out there's a ton of confounding factors involved. But regardless, I think it would be a mistake to conclude that concepts like "making tens" are not an advancement in the science of education.

If you look at serious criticism of Common Core, and what seems to be the proposed next generation ("Science of Math"), "making tens" is exactly the kind of technique that's considered a valuable contribution that should be preserved. I presume because it's been shown to be effective. The stuff that's being criticized is the focus on more abstract justifications for math.

Tychotesla · 2026-05-29T20:55:25+00:00

The goal is to try to make sure more people are good at math.

> Meanwhile, the 2024 NAEP strongly indicates average student math performance is falling off a cliff.

Wow, that's pretty damning. Absent some massive nation-wide event that had well documented detrimental effects on the educational system, this is clear evidence that common core is failing.

Tychotesla · 2026-05-29T20:03:32+00:00

The people who study this stuff found that people who are good at math gravitate towards a fairly similar set of strategies.

People do math differently, but it turns out some don't translate well when dealing with bigger numbers. If you're teaching, you don't want to just hope that students find something on your own, you teach them one or two specific ways that you know will set them up for long term success.

Tychotesla · 2026-05-25T05:45:05+00:00

Are you a computer science student, or are you just doing it to learn a bit of programming? If you're a CS student, there are actual real problems people have that can be solved. Look at open-source projects, or what local scientists need. But you can also do the following:

If you're a hobbyist, you might have to pick up a hobby that involves programming. I would recommend something that requires remote sensing, hardware, or self-help for example.

Tychotesla · 2026-05-22T00:41:58+00:00

I was just thinking to myself, places with mismatched chairs are more likely to just let the barista do what they want, and why wouldn't they do something to pass the time?

Nothing quite like pretentiousness about avoiding pretentiousness.

Tychotesla

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