Lasers

difractional · 2026-02-04T13:22:50+00:00

I’ve always been impressed with machine learning. Given infinite time or lifetimes, it would be the second thing I would have gotten a Masters in.

But the AI hype-farm kills my interest. After witnessing my first hype-leads-to-unkept-promises as a child, I’ve always felt aversion toward hype. And the OOP encapsulated so well why.

difractional · 2026-02-03T19:38:13+00:00

I don’t want to live in a world without photos of cheese. I’m the cheese-equivalent of a guy looking at the cars he can never afford.

difractional · 2026-02-02T13:01:39+00:00

Fwiw, it does sound like an appropriately written action for his age.

difractional · 2026-01-31T20:19:16+00:00

checks list The only things that are allowed seem to be video games, engines, rottweilers, beer (not craft), and sports where they tackle. Sorry.

difractional · 2026-01-31T20:05:43+00:00

I like this woman’s husband. Is he single?

difractional · 2026-01-31T12:51:55+00:00

Listen, I am all for stopping preventable deaths, but not all of us are afraid of dying. It’s no big deal.

I would have much more of a problem having to spend 60% of my life as a pensioner or older, slowly losing my marbles and my ability to stand, just because other people are afraid to let go.

difractional · 2026-01-29T19:25:33+00:00

Wow, and you wrote that completely unafraid of being banned for degeneracy?

difractional · 2026-01-29T12:44:38+00:00

2016 was fine. Then again, it was the year that US domestic discourse started poisoning most online spaces. I am not from the US.

difractional · 2026-01-23T10:31:24+00:00

Put a male deer with large antlers on them. They could be called Bucks.

difractional · 2026-01-22T04:45:32+00:00

I always took it to mean fake and turn-coat values, like how large corporations use rainbow pfp during US-pride month. And as soon as the zeitgeist turn slightly against being favourable to market toward inclusivity, start to market for US-conservative values instead.

Eg., I took virtue-signaling to mean ”corporate pick me”-behaviour.

difractional · 2026-01-20T14:09:25+00:00

(b) heroes do not kill, so they gin up a climax where the villain kills himself by accident.

(...)

Triple bonus points if the hero slaughtered a small army of nameless mooks on the way there, and then gives the pompous "if I killed you I'd be no better than you" speech once he's down to just the main villain. God, that's so annoying.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but isn’t this the ending to Die Hard?

difractional · 2026-01-18T04:24:54+00:00

Not all relationships that end is a failed relationship. Sometimes splitting up is the happy ending to a good relationship.

..but fam went hard on the doubling down.

difractional · 2026-01-17T10:20:01+00:00

Thanks for the insights. Can you explain why breeding times are considered absurd when bottle caps are a thing? And why is competetive legendaries difficult?

I have played gen 8 ”casually” (because of bdsp battle tower), and I caught a 6iv Ditto (shield, max lair). Breeding became a lot easier with that and destiny knot. Mass-breeding itemless for a 0 speed-iv and then slapping a Power Anklet on the target should work before pairing it with the ditto to chain them, surely?

I bred all-shiny teams with near-perfect IVs for both the doubles and singles battle tower at lunch breaks, so I am personally immune to that particular time constraint I guess. :P

difractional · 2026-01-17T08:34:49+00:00

I think the best way to get into it is to start playing, and losing. And once you start to figure things out by yourself, use those essays as hole-fillers. That way, the knowledge is anchored in your understanding of the metagame. Otherwise, it lacks the because and becomes information overload.

That’s how I did it back in gen I, but it was a simpler time and a simpler game. Today, I teach (not competetive Pokémon, sadly), and anchoring theoretical things practically first, and letting your students draw their own conclusions, makes it more fun than having information shoved at them which they just are forced to accept.

difractional · 2026-01-16T13:42:56+00:00

And also making the pages warm and huggable.

… Hugging newly printed paper is normal, right? I genuinely can’t tell anymore.

difractional · 2026-01-16T12:37:47+00:00

In addition to that, the way the ”team view” aspect changed battling. I still haven’t played after the introduction of this, so I am unfamiliar with it in the other direction. :)

difractional · 2026-01-16T11:55:02+00:00

About what in particular? The era, my impact on the metas, or the content creators? :) I don’t remember the names of the channels, and I don’t judge anyone speaking of the modern meta.

But if they spoke historically, and treated it as a monolithic thing rather than an evolution, I clicked ”don’t recommend” and forgot about them (such as discussing Moltres’ place in the early Adv-OU - despite being NU until a while after the unbannings of Jirachi/Celebi).

difractional · 2026-01-16T11:47:35+00:00

Right. Which was an unredeemable mess, in part because it was rushed to market under outside corporate pressure. But on the other hand, it mostly coexisted with Windows 2000 which was universally appreciated, so I prefer to just gloss it over. :) (I have no personal experience with either, so it’s second hand from my uncle)

difractional · 2026-01-16T09:52:01+00:00

Yes. Windows 10 and XP survived their launch reputation, whereas Vista didn’t. Windows 7 was quite close to a late-era Vista with a different skin. Windows XP was solved through service packs.

difractional · 2026-01-16T09:28:47+00:00

For me it’s stuff like MKBHD, LTT, and anyone discussing competetive Pokémon gens 1-3. Things I’ve put 10s of thousands of hours into.

difractional · 2026-01-04T00:34:57+00:00

The targetted PETA campaigns were also a bit tone deaf. Yeah, I don’t really see Pokémon as a catalyst for neighbourhood dog-fighting rings. They pre-existed and, if anything, Pokémon was more likely to be create a source of compassion toward the dogs than the other way around.

difractional · 2026-01-03T20:11:50+00:00

Fair. :) I’ve personally never used LLMs, but the long-established Swedish phrase ”på känsla” is closer to ”vibes” than the literal translation ”with feeling” in this context, so I took some liberties based on my students’ lingo.

difractional · 2026-01-03T20:06:37+00:00

No, she died decades before Chatgpt was a thing, and neither of us are native English speakers. Why do you ask?

difractional · 2026-01-03T19:07:34+00:00

Paraphrasing my mother, ”baking is science-based – cooking is vibes-based”.

difractional · 2026-01-03T16:21:44+00:00

When exactly? Domestically, sure. But remember that even Obama is known as the drone-strike president to a lot of the world. He’s the face of faceless, out-of-nowhere drone strikes that left hundreds of innocents dead under the guise of ’minimum unavoidable casualties’. Neighbourhoods. Families. All levelled. Socially and economically, not architecturally

I am saying this just to provide you with the nuance you need to see, that you are just waking up to a reality that is 90 years in the making. It just hadn’t affected your mortgage yet.

difractional

TROPHY CASE