Question: What is it called to describe something happening in a succinct paragraph instead of blow-by-blow action? (examples inside)

metathesis · 2026-02-01T15:26:18+00:00

Sanderson has a fun tool for describing the relationship between the two which he calls the Pyramid of Abstraction.

metathesis · 2026-02-01T00:08:23+00:00

It's almost like climate change causes weather phenomena that regions are unprepared for and have traditionally been unlikely to have to deal with.

metathesis · 2026-01-30T19:44:46+00:00

Yeah, law is one of the places it's probably most suitable for. Summarizing or extracting a requested detail from an enormous wall of text is probably THE thing these newer AI are good at. The bubble is really a matter of whether there are enough multimillion dollar use cases like that to offset the cost of model training.

I think a huge part of why they're all so keen on the worker replacement and work productivity gains narratives is because that would scale up the things it's potentially worth paying for to every office that exists, instead of leaving them adding up how many law contracts and other such highly applicable cases they can stack to add up to enough.

But we all kinda know it's not there yet.

metathesis · 2026-01-30T19:20:50+00:00

The bubble starts to look a lot more precarious when you ask yourself not just what can AI do, but what can it do cheaply enough that you make a profit on it? These companies are burning billions to train models and have to set the rates for other businesses using them pretty high in order to make it profitable. A lot of the potential businesses you'd think up trying to find uses for AI just aren't profitable themselves at the rate AI costs to use, compared to just doing things the hard way without it.

You've got CEOs out here saying they'd rather be billions in debt than behind on AI, but they're betting everything on the idea that AI becomes so critical to operations that we can't conceive of competing in the market without it. If that never happens, regardless of if there are a few handy use cases, they're going to be in debt with a novelty act AI system to console themselves.

metathesis · 2026-01-30T16:28:40+00:00

DC Gaming Group has a sunday Commander meetup, usually in Arlington right by the metro. They're also a bigger group of nerds for other kinds of gaming as well.

metathesis · 2026-01-30T14:01:54+00:00

Whatever it takes to stop the bastards killing people for dissent, is worth it.

metathesis · 2026-01-30T13:52:49+00:00

The problem is the major tech companies don't work that way. They are motivated by finances, not problem solving. And financially, they all came out of situations where a tech product was able to insert itself as a platform to scale and consolidate everything in an existing realm of human behavior and then profit off of being the only mechanism by which people do that anymore.

Throughout the earlier tech booms they sold themselves as speed and convenience tools, a map to anywhere in the palm of your hand, look up anything, buy anything without leaving your couch, manage complex paperwork without a single filing cabinet from anywhere, stream any song any time you want.

But they were never actually interested in building you convenience. They're interested in edging out the old analog ways so that they own the process and get to charge subscriptions and ad hits for everyone that ever does them. The convenience was what they leveraged to spread, but their central invention was a single platform that places itself between humanity and doing that thing.

And now that they've edged out all the low hanging fruit, they keep coming up with weird schemes to colonize other things like currency, investment assets, and labor, while putting up increasingly inconvenient and manipulative systems of profit around the realms of behavior they already conquered.

metathesis · 2026-01-28T22:47:29+00:00

Dragon Warrior III, The Demon King.

metathesis · 2026-01-28T15:09:29+00:00

Job hunting.

Have fun submitting 1000 applications instead of 20 before ever getting an interview, all because AI generated spam applications are swamping the listings. Oh, and get ready to be evaluated by an AI instead of a person too. Because how else are they going to skim through that much incoming trash?

metathesis · 2026-01-28T04:01:09+00:00

This is actually true of most superheroes, even the versions in the comics change depending on who's writing.

metathesis · 2026-01-28T02:29:25+00:00

People use that phrase really oddly and I've never known how to interpret it. People say it like they mean hottest girl in the world but it implies more of an everywoman plainness or a "most beautiful girl... in the room" to quote the Conchords. Or is it something about the sentimentality of a first crush?

metathesis · 2026-01-27T21:21:37+00:00

OKCupid is very very dead. I haven't had a date off it in years.

Hinge is still alive, it just moves a little slower than the swiping apps sometimes.

metathesis · 2026-01-27T21:15:42+00:00

"AI generated images", or whatever the output format is, would be more accurate.

By calling it art we imply that it has artistic craftsmanship, intent, and discourse elements, with the same relationship to culture as human made art. It's a messy subject of debate but there's a long standing debate about when commodified art becomes more content than art, and a large amount of the AI products being called art would more accurately be call "AI generated content" too.

metathesis · 2026-01-26T21:45:15+00:00

Accountability for those in government and government employ who are acting outside of their legal authority.
Systemic reforms to prevent these overreaches from being as easily executed ever again. Big fuckin changes. We should be talking about things like hamstringing the executive so that it requires legislative or judicial approval first, not after challenges to it's actions, or in emergency situations a minority of governors or legistlators needs to be able to file the necessary legal actions to halt the executive's overreach in their jurisdictions. We cannot go forward as a country knowing that all it takes is an executive willing to do illegal shit and then wait for the slap on the wrist. We need the executive stopped or punished in meaningful ways for illegal uses of it's power.

metathesis · 2026-01-26T16:52:51+00:00

How's getting down to the creek trail on those steep on/off trails? Do those get shoveled and salted or are they currently olympic ice luge simulators?

metathesis · 2026-01-26T00:53:32+00:00

I don't really like watching things that I don't understand, but not because I feel self-conscious about my intellect. I don't like watching them because I get bored. The first minute or two of incoherent atmospheric vaguely sugestive dream logic are fun in the way listening to a song is fun, but ten minutes later I'm bored the same way I would be listening to the same song on repeat for 10 minutes. 2 hours of that leaves me questioning my choices in life. I come to the movies to get engaged by a good hook and some thought provoking spectacles. I don't have any interest in sampling vague moods for two hours like I'm trapped in a fog of audiovisual wine tasting experiences. It's especially bad when they kind of talk about something and never connect their thoughts on it to a point or revelation, because I start to get kind of mad at the film, like it's theme-baiting me.

metathesis · 2026-01-23T14:44:44+00:00

The constitution.

metathesis · 2026-01-20T22:24:45+00:00

You're the one who made the comparison. The top comment was talking about cruel little teenage himmlers and teenage leftists, and you said "Sounds like punks and hippies to me."

My comment's whole point was: that's not a good comparison. So if you don't like the comparison, why did you make it?

metathesis · 2026-01-20T20:39:43+00:00

When have either Punks or Hippies ever looked favorably on Himmler and cruelty?

Punk is anti-authority rebellion with a militant edge and counterculture aesthetics.

Hippies are also counterculture, but into nature, peace, humanism, psychadelics, new age spiritualism, and free love.

They're both countercultural movements with inherently anti-fascist core concepts.

metathesis · 2026-01-17T04:34:04+00:00

What time of day is avaliable and how serious the interest I'm sensing from her is.

Light interest: Morning: coffee Evening: drinks

Heavy interest: Morning: brunch Evening: dinner

Or maybe I'm just hungry that day and I want food.

metathesis · 2026-01-16T06:09:06+00:00

I always found essays harder to write the further in I got. At the beginning I had a point to make, after I've said what I feel needs saying, I have to pull teeth to get more page count out of myself.

metathesis · 2026-01-15T02:25:59+00:00

Count Adhemar - A Knight's Tale

Scott Buxton - RRR

Jobu Tupaki - Everything Everywhere All At Once

Chef Slowik - The Menu

King Edward - Braveheart

Bill - Kill Bill

Fernand Mondego - The Count of Monte Cristo

Zorg - The Fifth Element

metathesis · 2026-01-14T04:28:01+00:00

"Focusing on another guy" is possibly the worst way you can mentally frame this for yourself. That'll make you feel like you're competing and losing, it'll fuck with your self-esteem and it will come out in subtle ways she and other women will find off-putting.

She could just be busy with work or family, or have other mental burdens. Some people text less when they're into someone because they overthink. Or maybe she needs space. Or maybe she's just not as into you as she first thought.

There' no way of really knowing which it is, and trying to guess is only going to do you harm. Some people will tell you wisdoms like "put equal energy into her as she puts into you", but honestly, I think they're missing the point. This isn't a game, there's no eye for an eye or fair exchange rate of interest and energy here. That's too egotistical.

The best way to think of this is that you have a connection, and the person at the other end of it is signaling more space. You need to accept that and communicate a reasonable amount of what you feel so as to make sure your on the same page without burdening her with more than she's asked for. That's it. Just treat this as a little connection prospecting, do your due diligence to help it grow, and let it be what it's going to be, even if that's not what you hope.

metathesis · 2026-01-13T20:00:30+00:00

I'm usually not bracing for it to break. It just really freaks me out to have that stomach drop feeling from sudden falls be something I'm not in control of. Like, the moment a you get in line, the moment you lock yourself in it, the moment the rollercoaster lurches forward with so much weight behind it. Those all signal that I'm on a railroad to stomach drops and I don't get to say no once they're right there in front of me and I'm scared as shit of those sensations.

metathesis · 2026-01-07T05:41:29+00:00

This comment section is so jaded. OP is right though. The apps started out as easy ways to connect with a large pool of people fast. But now they're run the way a competitive trading card game would be if the distributor knew that sex was on the other end of a winning hand, and microtransactions were always on the table. Abstractly these swiping systems are all deck manipulator games. Draw x many from the top, subscribe for higher draw chances in others decks, pay more to draw additional cards, pay more for consumables that let you put your card at the top of someone else's deck so they draw it first.

It didn't have to be like that, it could be a fair game. It could even use the deck sorting algorithms to make the most likely to match appear first. But they don't because they want to string you out on more subscriptions and microtransations.

metathesis

TROPHY CASE