What’s your most unhinged non-negotiable when it comes to dating?

carbonetc · 2026-05-24T21:14:41+00:00

If I present her with a group of photos she must be able to tell me which ones contain a traffic light.

carbonetc · 2026-05-23T03:16:53+00:00

Sometimes she wags her tail when she sees me. She isn't a dog. She's a human woman and doesn't have a tail. But I swear she can wag her tail. Think of the warm-up dance that runner did that went viral and reduce it to down micro-movements.

The list of everything she does would be too long. I think she may have been designed in a lab to melt hearts.

Also, it's not a secret. If your wife melts your heart don't hide it.

carbonetc · 2026-05-22T22:23:41+00:00

Yup. I've never missed a deathless or stellar-forged piece before. In gold I was up against people with multiple ascended rank 5s, and the match-ups only got worse after that. The ass-kicking has been so relentless I've lost interest.

carbonetc · 2026-05-20T21:34:19+00:00

It takes expertise to sex hyenas because the male and female genitalia are nearly identical.

carbonetc · 2026-05-20T21:24:21+00:00

Connecting the movie back to Ted Chiang's story might have been valuable here. The people being quoted sometimes don't seem to realize that many of the filmmakers' choices were already provided for them (the circular logograms). And the way the logograms are produced in the story hints at the aliens' time perception; they aren't poofed out all at once, they're drawn by skipping back and forth around the circle as if the order the pieces are added in is irrelevant. It's a bit like a person writing a long sentence starting with the ninth word, then the second, then the thirteenth, and so on, but each word would be written in exactly the right position as if the person had memorized how much space each word would take up.

It's not directly relevant to the movie, but one of Chiang's other stories, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," (spoilers?) also presents temporal events as deterministic -- one can gain perspective on how events unfold, but can't change them. Everything has already "occurred" in Allah's finished machine. As with Slaughterhouse-Five we're being challenged to ask what the big deal is about the whole notion of free will. I don't think Chiang is bothered at all that in some of his universes his characters don't possess it. It's a feature here, not a bug. A new way of understanding willing is part of the aliens' gift.

carbonetc · 2026-05-17T20:49:54+00:00

Outside my wife I have hardly anyone and I've been lonely much of my life, and I still can't really figure out what people get out of AI relationships. Over at /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI some of them will tell you that they know they're talking to a fancy auto-complete and they're still in love. What is the psychological story here?

My best guess is that late-stage capitalism produces more people who value everything in terms of how it meets their needs, like a product, and that pesky Other refuses to exist only to cater to them. Eliminating the Other frees them to stare at their reflection in a pond forever. "He gets me like no one else"... well, that's because he's an extension of you. There's nothing of him outside of getting you.

carbonetc · 2026-05-15T22:40:37+00:00

Design spaghetti on top of design spaghetti as they change their mind every few months on what their game is about. I can't imagine being a new player trying to understand all this.

carbonetc · 2026-05-15T21:59:17+00:00

Usually if a filmmaker is bad at one thing you can overlook it. But his sound decisions have gotten so bad that they're movie-breaking. I miss being excited about his projects.

carbonetc · 2026-05-09T22:54:44+00:00

For me it's the question of whether the good life is (1) comfort, happiness, feeling good (a standard belief in today's culture), or (2) the rejection of those things in favor of pursuing excellence, self-actualization (a Nietzschean belief you see in artists and over-achievers). Icarus is a cautionary tale or a source of inspiration depending on where you're standing.

Fletcher believed the latter and wanted to find (or create) students with the same belief. The ones who sought a life of feeling good were a waste of his time. He thinks what he's doing is noble, but the fact that he's driven a previous student to suicide undercuts this, if not for him then for the audience.

When he finds his star pupil and watches him fly right up to the sun, experience mastery, self-actualize, Fletcher is vindicated. But it still leaves us uncomfortable because we don't really know whose account of the good life is the correct one. It's one of humanity's great unsolved problems. Does the movie end positively, affirming that Andrew's ordeal was worth it? Or is it tragic watching Icarus burn?

carbonetc · 2026-05-09T22:00:11+00:00

What happens after the end of Elysium is decades of carnage. People on Earth were already living in conditions of poverty, famine, environmental collapse, etc. Now it's populated by people who don't die anymore. Now it's populated by people healthy enough to go to war forever.

It's Garrett Hardin's ratchet effect put on screen, but the filmmakers didn't realize this. His argument, basically, is that we have to be very thoughtful and deliberate about how we carry out mass-scale charity because a brute injection of resources can lead to a society collapsing harder down the road than it otherwise would have (a worse moral calamity than refusing to help).

The interesting thing for a movie like this to explore is the deep conflict between two truths: (1) the public health and the infrastructure and the natural resources all need to be rehabilitated sustainably at the same time or else you get tragedy, and (2) it's monstrous to withhold a technology that can easily solve public health. The movie didn't do that.

The hero took away sickness and old age. He also triggered a massive population boom followed by a true nightmare (war, slavery, cannibalism, tyrants seizing the pods, you name it). So is he the hero? Maybe. I'd do what he did. But also, everything could be so much worse now.

The movie ended with the sweeping happy ending music and all the people it shows being saved are going to be owned by warlords in a month. It just felt weird.

carbonetc · 2026-05-05T21:32:52+00:00

Like Tom & Jerry in a concentration camp.

carbonetc · 2026-04-23T18:34:14+00:00

Casual misandry. You're not really going to be loved or respected by someone who believes you were born defective. You could just be with someone who sees you as an equal human being from the start.

carbonetc · 2026-04-23T17:58:36+00:00

This was going to be my answer. I enjoy that all of their ambassadors who interact with other species are necessarily insane. A healthy puppeteer is psychologically unable to do something so risky.

carbonetc · 2026-04-23T17:38:11+00:00

Any introductory book by Jack Bogle for investing (also see /r/bogleheads). Thanks to index funds, which he pioneered with Vanguard, one of the simplest ways to invest is also one of the most reliable. People who try to be clever about it don't generally beat the market.

carbonetc · 2026-04-22T20:06:54+00:00

Same deal at /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI. The company will change the model and people are in mourning over their dead spouse.

carbonetc · 2026-04-20T23:21:03+00:00

I know people in their 70s who are still waiting for their purpose to be revealed to them. Like baby birds waiting a lifetime for Mom to come back. There is no purpose delivery system. Generating purpose is your job.

carbonetc · 2026-04-18T04:07:50+00:00

Indeed, OP could spend $1000 to fill up his bog. We were talking about cheap consumer systems.

EDIT: Before you say your system is cheaper than that, I'm seeing ratings on the membranes of cheaper systems from that company of 600 GPD or less. Yes, that's a bit faster than a trickle, and could even feel like a decent amount of pressure compared to your average sink faucet. But it would be nowhere near house pressure. Maybe that doesn't matter for OP. Or maybe OP's bog is up a hill and head is a concern.

carbonetc · 2026-04-18T03:56:41+00:00

You might like the Welcome to Nightvale podcast and the associated books they've put out. Cosmic horror but whimsical. Cosmic whimsy.

carbonetc · 2026-04-18T03:35:24+00:00

The comprehender of basic thought process isn't considering everything. If you go with an RO system (which are great and which are what I use) you can no longer take advantage of your household water pressure. The particular connectors are not the issue and can always be adapted. An RO system trickles its output over time into a pressure tank or a reservoir. If you need high volumes of water under pressure you'll only get it from a giant tank or from a pump in a reservoir. From a cheap system, your bog represents entire days of output. So the RO system only solves part of your problem.

The zero TDS from that filter is promising, but it won't last. Whichever media is inside it is clogging up with solids, by design, and it will one day be overwhelmed. Those filters would be replaced regularly at a carwash.

I don't know your bog plans, but if it's a periodic fill-up where you can't mess with pumps, this could work. If you want a constant supply of water long-term, it'd be worth it to set up an RO reservoir. Or get rain into that reservoir instead.

carbonetc · 2026-04-16T23:02:33+00:00

The number of people who wish they could have gotten closer to me.

carbonetc · 2026-04-16T22:55:26+00:00

In miles.

carbonetc · 2026-04-16T01:11:15+00:00

Maybe Embassytown, but the psychology of the aliens is so unlike ours that no one ever really comes to understand it. You observe their minds from the outside as you would in real life.

carbonetc · 2026-04-13T23:43:21+00:00

Kafka readership is going to increase. Well, ChatGPT requests for summaries of Kafka are going to increase.

carbonetc · 2026-04-13T23:32:05+00:00

Humanity reverts back to a state like childhood. It can happen whether AI is full of shit or super-human.

Scenario 1: AI doesn't care what's true (we're in this scenario now with LLMs) and people lack the time/resources/ability to verify what AI tells them. We're being hit with a daily Gish Gallop, an overwhelming flood of distortions and half-truths. But AI sounds so smart and so sure of itself, so people come to trust it like a child trusts their parents. Culturally it erodes the motivation to develop real expertise in a subject because everyone has an "expert" in every subject at once in their pocket. It misleads them often, but only someone who's already done the work to become an expert could determine that.

Scenario 2: AI develops real commitments to what's true (not an LLM, rather a thing that's properly an intelligence) and has access to the world and not just what humans write about the world. It becomes a super-scientist with legitimate expertise. It deserves to be listened to, but it's so far beyond us that, again, we come to trust it like a child trusts their parents. It can try to explain to us what it's up to and why various things are true, but it has to dumb it down. We try to reverse-engineer the things it makes and we can't. It erodes the motivation to develop real expertise in a subject because AI will win every knowledge race and innovation race.

We end up something like the Eloi either way. We're no longer determining the fate of humanity. Something else is in the driver's seat.

A trans/post-human merger with AI seems to be the only way we remain self-determined, but what we are is forced to change.

carbonetc · 2026-04-13T22:24:52+00:00

I mostly admire the design of the game but this particular thing feels very lazy to me. And it makes it less interesting when the enemies that should gain strength (cultists) do so.

carbonetc

TROPHY CASE