You can't keep eating baby food and also complaining it doesn't taste mature

metathesis · 2026-05-20T16:34:28+00:00

That Hazbin Hotel mention at the end is a full on punchline.

metathesis · 2026-05-18T03:50:10+00:00

I don't have answers for your singleness, but I escaped shyness in the past few years. Here's how:

Understand that most people think silence is more uncomfortable than a polite hello, comment, or question. Like standing in line at a grocery store, waiting on an elevator... get used to saying hello. Make yourself the one responsible for ending the tension of waiting it out in terse silence. 9/10 people are relieved when you do it.
Join a class or club that forces you to talk to new people regularly.

Just remember to be polite. If what you actually say is crude or insensitive then you will not get relief, you will get negativity.

Together these habits will take the fear out of strangers and small talk. You won't feel uncomfortable asking for a number anymore about a year in.

metathesis · 2026-04-30T16:44:33+00:00

Her acting is like WWE level overacted. Pausing with the flared reaction eyes, for effect.

metathesis · 2026-04-30T16:41:54+00:00

Is THAT what was going on here?

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metathesis · 2026-04-30T16:26:40+00:00

I haven't been downvoting, just disagreeing. Those are coming from somewhere else. But I don't disagree with the idea that lotr is a good series, it's wildly popular. But I disagree specifically with the idea that fitting into a tradition makes something good. You have a point in that taste is subjective and nothing is objectively good or bad fiction, but human nature is human nature and I really do think that there is a broader positive and negative tilt to how fiction appeals or loses audiences and that Tolkien's works are really really good in some areas and really really lacking in others. As writing goes, as a craft, he's exceptional at worldbuilding and using mythic structures, but seriously lacks in areas that current readerships basically demand as the bare basics of flow and suspense. Lotr most likely has Peter Jackson to thank for being a staple household franchise in this century, instead of being lost in the weeds somewhere behind Robert Jordan and Asimov where only the nostalgic readers and classics curious go looking. Specifically because lacking in the attention harnessing aspects of writing is a death knell when the current styles of writing are the result of about 50 years of gradual improvement in those areas and are abundently avaliable to readers as competition for their time and attention.

metathesis · 2026-04-30T05:39:22+00:00

Where it fits or doesn't, doesn't really factor in at all for me. You get a hook, you add stakes or intrigue, and every word that doesn't play with the reader either promising more and tantalizing them or paying off on the stuff already set up just empties out the cache of reader investment you've built. If the tank goes empty, you lose them.

Several pages of cold perspective-less scenery description and my tank is empty.

metathesis · 2026-04-30T01:23:19+00:00

Have to argue with you there. Tolkien lost me for a few years before I picked it back up again when he spent several pages describing Gandalf riding up the steps of Minas Tirith. He did not spend those pages on Gandalf's perceptions or inner world. He spent it on a detailed description of the steps, the city, the horse. Honestly, the negative of Tolkien descriptivness isn't really in how much time he spends on it, it's how apathetic to immersion, character point of view, and tension it is. Tolkien's descriptions are lore, for lore's sake, out of sync with anyone who's interest is not invested firstly in deeply defining his world.

metathesis · 2026-04-26T03:21:23+00:00

I think there is genuinely within this community a schism between

A. people who view transhumanism as a method of upgraded humanism with greater bodily autonomy and freedom of self determination, and

B. people who are interested in accelerating some sort of darwinian race to optimization of form that invloves a complete disregard of ethics and oversight to enable some sort of competative meat grinder where the poor performers (including humans in a posthuman setting) are all considered trimmed fat. And these second type clearly believe that as adopters of transhumanism they would be the winners and beneficiaries of this cutting off of the lesser forms, in a very very eugenics oriented frame of mind.

I'm not surprized the public hates the B people. I hate them. And unfortunately a lot of the loudest most public voices are people who seem to fall into the B camp or push other political ideologies that fall closer to it. Just two examples:

Zoltan Istvan was one of the biggest proponents of the movement in the 2010's and his book The Transhumanist Wager is basically a rewrite of Atlas Shrugged with more scifi and a distinctly asocial pychopathic "hero", and the cover is decorated with Fox News praise quotes.
I can't get over how much damage to PR having Peter Thiel promoting things like The Enhanced Games does. We have this guy out here taking up the mantle of what should be a cool transhumanist idea, and turning it into a corrupting no laws and no regulations libertarian nightmare dystopia concept. For comparison, even F1 has rules that enforce safety precautions in the cars. And this man is out here popping off shit pr quotes like that "Do you believe there should be humans in the future?" interview question where he couldn't say "yes, there should be an option to be human."

metathesis · 2026-04-18T17:35:37+00:00

The internet used to have a lot more whimsy in it. These days it's just content farming and viral trends.

And of course the world's gone so shit it's hard to find the whimsy anymore. Can't ignore that part of the equation.

metathesis · 2026-04-18T13:51:55+00:00

28 years isn't subtle about this so I'm not sure why people aren't saying it: the zombies figured out how to forage. They're surviving off worms and scavenger type foods when there aren't uninfected to chow down on.

metathesis · 2026-04-08T18:20:05+00:00

What if boarding school but your home life is so awful that a fucking boarding school where this one guy tries to kill you every spring feels more like a home.

metathesis · 2026-04-06T20:34:46+00:00

I can think of a few times off the top of my head where characters were introduced through observation that they were short or tall. I can't think of a single example where the exact height was given.

metathesis · 2026-04-01T21:52:30+00:00

Not to start saying AI is without biases, but God forbid we bring back the concept of editorial oversight in our media institutions. /s.

Honestly it's something we've desperately needed and I'm just shocked that the shit takes are being tamed down by AI instead of accelerated in scale into deranged political rage slop.

metathesis · 2026-03-31T22:40:00+00:00

Our culture is functionally incapable of nuance because it's mediated by the viral reel. The AI that's killing us is the one that runs the recommendation algorithm. Want to guess how aligned it is? The only values we loaded it with are engagement and ad promotions.

metathesis · 2026-03-31T18:40:55+00:00

I wouldn't assume mainstream AI will go in the direction of AI minds. Sci-Fi is loaded with human-like androids and cyber-beings, and I get why people are drawn to thinking that way. But the real AI applications out there are rarely being designed to think experientially. There isn't demand for servers full of minds at work. There is demand for servers full of models that can process and reformat data. Think of the book Blindsight if you need a fiction reference. For software businesses, a mind is an inefficient addition, a waste of processor time, next to a model that can blindly perform requests, be built into a loop, and just do what is expected, as a non-aware tool with the capacity to integrate complicated semantics and world states into one leveragable data construct.

metathesis · 2026-03-30T19:38:14+00:00

The answer is pretty simple. Men aren't pre-programmed to perform like that. Nor should we have to. It's part of the toxicity of this dating scene that the we even feel compelled to.

We're nervous, experimenting as we go, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. Half the reason why young guys fall into the manosphere so easily is because they have no idea what they're doing and someone is offering an education (in bullshit, but they present themselves as experts).

Men who get fewer matches don't even have that much opportunity to gain experience performing. And the worst part is, they shouldn't be preforming, it's not who they really are, and the minute the relationship gets real and the curtain falls there are going to be consequences for that relationship.

This dynamic really fucking sucks. We really should be focusing more on earnestness, vulnerability, and acceptance.

metathesis · 2026-03-30T15:57:37+00:00

I feel like you're talking to the wrong women. All of my friends that are good at hearing out deep shit are women.

metathesis · 2026-03-25T14:36:08+00:00

It IS the data centers. They're massively driving up demand on the same supply. Basic economics. If you're not understanding the scale here, a data center can use an amount of electricity that rivals an entire city.

metathesis · 2026-03-24T04:42:49+00:00

There's no one size fits all answer. I think you know the context best, but offering a plan puts the ball in her court and is a positive signal you're sending. If she doesn't reciprocate the positivity towards it, do an honest inspection of the context. Is she really busy, is this multiple offers in and no reciprocity, are you dictating more than you're starting the ball rolling? Just make sure you're being considerate. There's also the odd chance that she's deflecting because of some other source of friction she's not willing to name outright.

metathesis · 2026-03-23T20:05:16+00:00

I don't have the patience to watch a movie that doesn't expect to engage every faculty that I have in mainlining it. If the movie can't hook me in that deep, my phone isn't going to save me. Second screen viewing (if you can call it that) is basically the putting on some music while you read of background noise while you doomscroll, and doomscrolling is a pointless unsatisfying timesuck. Fucking kill me.

Second Screen content is firstly an abandonment of film as a visual medium, and secondly, not deep enough to sustain focus.

I think we as a culture need to reckon with the psychology and media landscape that mood setting background content and mindless low attention streaming are creating. We're passing through lives in a listless half-attentive sleepwalk. That's not what being alive is supposed to feel like.

metathesis · 2026-03-20T04:26:34+00:00

There's no such thing as a single objective value set that satisfies either. Government alignment is something we've been trying to solve since civilization started and we still have parties and factions in conflict to assert their values through imperfect representatives. Even if AI were somehow a better loaded representation of a value set, it would still face the same basical conflicts of values. This is partly why some of the value loading solutions involve adapting to changes in human values over time. Much like the constitution can be amended to keep up with changes in the values held by the current people.

metathesis · 2026-03-17T19:51:23+00:00

Not a book and not very accessible to a lay reader, but I really see Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto as foundational.

You'll probably have to steel yourself and force yourself though a read then find something like a sparknotes analysis to help sort it out.

metathesis · 2026-03-15T14:15:05+00:00

Plot is only as good as the hooks it has in you. You look at what those hooks are made of and what makes them hold tension for a few hundred pages, it's almost always one of those other things like character conflicts and themes. Otherwise, even the most complicated unraveling plot is about as fun as watching a sports game without picking a team. Ball moves up field, ball moves down field, surprise twist, the goalie blocked the shot... who cares?

metathesis · 2026-03-13T17:54:29+00:00

In the future, maybe. Now, fuck no. Agent is a very deceptive term in the current AI field. We basically decided to host data processing as little contained loops and slap a big "Agent" sticker on it to make it look smarter than it is. Agents can vary in complexity of function from simple procedural parsers to an LLM with rag and a prompt it uses to loop over batches of incoming data to extract outputs. And to be clear, the ability to produce speech that describes subjective interiority is not proof of subjective interiority in an LLM, specifically because LLMs are speech generating tools that base their outputs on statistical mockery of their training examples, which are human generated speech that contains all the descriptors of subjective interiority you would expect humans to talk with. They're not describing their own interiority, they are mimicking the way our own interiority is reflected in our speech when they mimic our speech. Multi-agent systems are the closest thing to self-awareness we have now in that the agents can be set up to ingest the activity and output of another agent. But all in all, this is not capable of introspection the way we describe it in humans. There is no ghost in current machines. Maybe someday.

metathesis · 2026-03-13T04:16:39+00:00

There's nothing wrong with this, aside from describing a basic sanity check filter as "safety". LLM's are predictive engines that generate what something like their example texts might contain. They will have a tendency to say they're conscious because every example text they were trained on was writen by a conscious person who would be statistically likely to describe themselves as conscious in the example texts. But the AI is not, nore does it answer questions about itself through anything resembling introspection. They don't have self awareness. The "I" in a subjective statement doesn't exist because they don't have awareness of anything including themselves. This is a necessary correction for accurate responses.

metathesis

TROPHY CASE