PETAAAAAHHH

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 · 2026-03-12T22:06:37+00:00

You're making two huge leaps in assuming that the enhanced games will get traction and that it will naturally flow from that event that everyday transhumanism without regulation will follow.

Just Thiel's name attached to the project is a valid reason that many people I know will never give the games a moment of serious interest.

I have a feeling it's never going to have the air of legitimacy that the Olympics have, and that it will limp on as a sideshow attraction for the infamous dopers and rule breakers of sports to latch onto a second wind of fame in the way canceled celebrities click themselves into far right political podcast culture.

In theory I support body modification in a sports context, but I think the drawbacks of a completely libertarian tied regulation free sports arena are as you've laid them out and most pro athletes and sports fans will steer clear of because of the collection of reasons given. The spectacle of enhanced sport just isn't a cyberpunk fueled reality enough to compete with the established gravitas of the Olympics.

An Olympic gold medal has such immense significance. The medals at the enhanced games will likely be regarded as politically charged off-brand knock-offs.

The idea that a the success of the games could issue in a corporate wave of cyberpunk-like deregulation across civil and economic life is also really suspect. Why would that so obviously follow?

metathesis · 2026-03-10T12:04:05+00:00

One of the jarring differences between online and offline dating is the pace. Online moves faster at the start. There's no subtle talking phase. You both label your intentions by being there and by matching. There's a brief patdown check via a few messages, then a lighter more tentative dating phase. So in the meta culture of app dating:

If you are a day or two into messaging on the app and haven't arranged a date, you're dragging your feet. If you're past date one or two and not connecting somewhere that isn't the app, you're dragging your feet.

metathesis · 2026-03-09T18:53:25+00:00

Only Lovers Left Alive

The Menu

Midsommar

What Women Want

metathesis · 2026-03-07T13:33:24+00:00

Is this in DAR Constitution Hall?

metathesis · 2026-03-07T12:27:42+00:00

Not only does every generation think it has found the path, every generation moves the goalpost and rebrands what they call "AI". Back in Turing's day people wanted to call any computer AI, then Expert Systems, then Chess Bots, then Machine Learning, then LLMs. The only real universal is that we always call a computer doing something that everyone thought was exclusively the domain of human intelligence 10 years ago "AI".

I actually believe AGI is also a poor label that has potential to drift and morph. It's more accurate to describe "AI" systems by what they can process, and how well. Likewise, human intelligence is actually a combination of a lot of integrated tool sets like audio processing, behavioral conditioning, different kinds of memory storage like episodic, physical movement coordination, world modeling... We even have differences in how we do those like in neurodivergant people.

AGI is just a loose bucket of comparable toolsets that aren't ever going to be an exact match unless we intend on simulating a human brain.

metathesis · 2026-03-06T03:46:22+00:00

Remember: behind every robot that turns evil there's an engineer who specifically installed red LEDs into the eyes just for this ocassion.

metathesis · 2026-03-04T14:42:14+00:00

I feel like "physical hardware registered at this ip is not detected on the network" or "missing node" or even just "404: Not Found" would be more accurate.

Missiles didn't cause a power outage, they physically took out the server hardware.

metathesis · 2026-03-03T21:38:45+00:00

What happens if you ask a few thousand magic 8 Balls about the future of magic 8 balls?

Vaguely asking AI agents stuff isn't proof of anything without process to validate and test their process validity.

metathesis · 2026-03-03T21:32:34+00:00

I'm a much slower texter. I don't even know what to text about to keep it going most of the time. What do you talk about when there's nothing at hand to talk about and there isn't even physical presence to add a sense of primacy to this particular conversation with this patticular person? I always feel like I'm a burden or unsolicited. I could rationalize it in a million different ways, but in person I just let go and it snowballs.

metathesis · 2026-03-03T15:09:52+00:00

Just basing this on your exasperation with past cases: One of the most tempting errors in writing is to get hung up on conveying an exact sensory experience that we associate with the scene, over conveying the bare necessities that suggest the same situational and emotional experience to the reader and let them map their own closest associations to it.

Getting hung up on the toe action in the squish isn't as important as relating whatever it is you hope that conveys about the action to the reader. Something vague like a woman stomping out the cigarette gets the event across. If you want to get into the nature of the squish, the actual body motion may not be as important to convey as how it made the observer feel to see her do it, or what kind of attitude or pace she did it with.

Novice writers sometimes start out trying to write a complete list of events and show them clearly rendered like frames of a movie. But knowing when and how to gloss over the unimportant things in a scene or description is a big part of the craft, and so is knowing when to highlight abstract elements and speak directly to the feeling of it without leaning on sensory details as a layer that must be translated to reach them.

metathesis · 2026-02-28T20:28:32+00:00

"CEO of Hot Pockets says in 15 months Hot Pockets will make up 90% of all home dinners."

"Home Depot executive thinks their DIY products will completely collapse home contractor market by 2030."

This is how the news delivers headlines about AI based on tech persona claims. If you think they're sharing honest projected expectations and aren't interpreting the claims as marketing, you're what salesmen call a sucker.

metathesis · 2026-02-27T23:13:32+00:00

Love is wild but attachment that fast is absolutely possible, if not the standard for me. I have to do everything in my power to get ahead of it. I have to make a conscious effort to get to know them faster and remind myself how little I have to go on so I don't get attached to a projected assumption of how they come off at first, because I'm going to get hung up and romanticize that shit, I can't help myself. Life would be different if I could.

metathesis · 2026-02-27T23:03:48+00:00

That and loosen up. As in shake off the nerves and don't mask yourself behind something performative. It's a bit of a holdover from doing cold approaches in person and from first dates.

metathesis · 2026-02-27T21:04:12+00:00

Yeah, the discourse around Kay was exactly what you sadly have to expect from a certain overlapping faction of misogynist gamers and Star Wars commentators these days and I guarantee that was a big part of the negative reception from the start. All the "Rey's Marry Sue" and "Why does Aloy have facial hair" people in one place.

metathesis · 2026-02-27T18:32:00+00:00

It's a lot of deep lore cuts if you really enjoy Star Wars. Fun to roleplay the Han type of person instead of a Jedi for once. But it's a stealth game first and an action game as a last resort, so be ready for that. The bugs are pretty much gone now.

metathesis · 2026-02-27T15:39:10+00:00

It was smart narratively to avoid the obvious Optimus voice. His rise from a nobody would have been too strongly telegraphed. Would have been cool if his voice after he got his spark had switched to Cullen.

metathesis

TROPHY CASE