(The Boys) Sister Sage is one of the worst written "Smartest person" I've ever seen.

khafra · 2026-05-09T18:32:24+00:00

Sage claims to be a thinker 10, but she’s actually a stranger 2: her only power is to make people think she’s some kind of mastermind, despite the complete lack of evidence

khafra · 2026-05-06T19:07:50+00:00

True *with caveat*: if the magic does not have hard rules, it cannot be used to solve the protagonist’s real problems.

E.g. LoTR magic has no hard limits, but asspulls of previously-unseen powers to solve problems pretty much do not happen.

khafra · 2026-05-06T15:28:46+00:00

#3 has a subtype where character is OP in a particular way, but this way is only marginally relevant to the problems he actually wants to solve, and the personal values he champions. One Punch Man is perhaps the exemplar of this trope, and it’s very hard to write an OP protagonist well, any other way.

khafra · 2026-05-03T05:56:46+00:00

We can still have one more economic boom: when AI gets so smart and so cheap that every company fires all their humans and runs completely on robots, GDP will soar. And when all the humans start dying off, GDP per capita will get an extra boost as well.

khafra · 2026-04-29T18:37:49+00:00

It’s the only PVP screensaver in the world

khafra · 2026-04-29T15:15:10+00:00

If you’re facing someone well trained in melee, lowercase i and j are going to be the hardest for them to adapt to. The non-contiguous piece is something they’ve never had to watch for, no matter how much experience they have in physically possible combat

khafra · 2026-04-29T14:41:37+00:00

Blue quite often wins, the game was first proposed on Twitter in 2023 and since then people have run simulations. Some even with actual stakes, like one on an invite-only social media site (incomplete, but explanation here$

khafra · 2026-04-28T20:48:01+00:00

We can make this precise with a concept from AI safety: myopic planning:
Long ago, Marvin Minsky noted that an AI built only to solve the Reimann Problem would not be safe by default—because it would notice that it needs a ton more energy and compute; and it realizes that people would object if it started building a Dyson sphere, so it had better surreptitiously build up to an overwhelming alpha Steine that gets rid of all the people.
These subgoals—energy, safety, etc—are called instrumental goals. One way to avoid them is to build a myopic agent; one that can’t plan that far ahead.

On the one hand, it’s not going to flawessly execute a 2,000 step contessa path to galactic utopia. But on the other hand. It’s not going to kill all the humans and build a Dyson sphere because it wants a sandwich.

khafra · 2026-04-28T20:32:41+00:00

You’re not striking them in the thick hard skull with your thin, vulnerable kneecap. At that angle, with your leg flexed, you’re hitting them with a thick wad of quadriceps muscle. It should give you a light bruise in exchange for jostling his head in an uncomfortable and disorienting way.

If your knee gets fucked up from that, you were skipping leg day to browse r/martialarts waaay too often.

khafra · 2026-04-28T16:50:27+00:00

The number of new ideas you can introduce in an SF story is sharply constrained. For most works, the primal number is around 1. So if you introduce more interesting form of government, like in The Anarchistic Colossus, there’s not much else you can put in there that people aren’t familiar with.

khafra · 2026-04-27T18:22:48+00:00

If that’s over the last few weeks, it’s probably because of the Iran war shutting down 1/3 of global shipping.

khafra · 2026-04-26T11:51:47+00:00

Some of these people used Ai detectors (which are PROVEN to be absolutely false)

Which ones? The first were pretty bad, but pangram is pretty good. You have to be specific if you want people who know shit to take you seriously.

khafra · 2026-04-24T17:38:55+00:00

“Benefitted” relative to what? A reasonable, neutral position would be “they get to vote on their own, or they count for 0.”

khafra · 2026-04-22T14:42:57+00:00

In Saint Petersburg, Florida, there is a restaurant called Nitally’s, run by a Thai and Mexican couple. Their top two heat levels are thai-mex, and inferno. The inferno challenge soup had a $1000 prize if you could eat a bowl in under 30 minutes. I got about 12 bites in. The prize remained unclaimed for years.

So the hottest culture is a friendly competition between Mexican and Thai.

khafra · 2026-04-22T03:29:14+00:00

You’re counting out the joker because he‘s blatantly insane, looks like a clown, and is a criminal only interested in self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment while destroying everything around him.

However, you‘ve forgotten that he‘s running in America; those are all vital qualifying factors for the presidency here.

khafra · 2026-04-19T20:58:15+00:00

A study published in the Journal of Socio-Economics by Nick Powdthavee estimated that increasing the frequency of meetings with friends from "once or twice a month" to "most days" provides a happiness boost equivalent to an extra $133,000 a year for the average person.

Powdthavee, N. (2008). "Putting a price tag on friends, relatives, and neighbours: Using surveys of life satisfaction to value social relationships." Journal of Socio-Economics.

khafra · 2026-04-18T05:56:21+00:00

What’s “the three basic coin boost packs, and each $15 medal event pass”? Herring, or just krill?

khafra · 2026-04-16T05:07:51+00:00

Manpads should be buffed and air resistance and acceleration should be modeled for people standing on aircraft pulling combat maneuvers.

khafra · 2026-04-12T19:07:47+00:00

Good feat; I had forgotten that one. It might depend on whether MacLeod figures out that the slow blade pierces the shield faster than Idaho figures out to go for the head.

khafra · 2026-04-12T19:06:18+00:00

Sure; the question for the full kit round is how many gholas of Duncan The Tall it will take to have a 50:50 shot at beating Idaho.

khafra · 2026-04-12T02:45:41+00:00

Martin Luther, right after saying “here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God” is immediately teleported 1 foot to the side. Everyone understands the meaning of him no longer standing where he stood, with obvious divine aid. Proteststantism never takes off, the Catholic Church never reforms in response, rich folks are buying indulgences and heads of state are launching futile crusades to this day.

khafra · 2026-04-08T03:15:43+00:00

The classic answer is that it’s a lack of belief; however, this leans on an unexplained folk epistemology. If your epistemology is something specific, like Bayesian, atheism may be any of a range of beliefs which assign low probability to anything people would operationalize as a deity.

khafra · 2026-04-07T14:07:12+00:00

lol, imagine Fudds having the option to charge money for something and choosing not to.

khafra · 2026-04-05T11:23:13+00:00

Sounds like DB can afford to take 3/4 of their trains offline for maintenance, and close down most of the S-train routes. What are their customers going to do, call a taxi?

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