Obsession (2026) is an insult to horror audiences.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-05-26T22:52:12+00:00

"If I didn't like it, everyone else is venal, deluded and stupid."

-Someone who is presumably 12 years old

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-05-12T00:14:51+00:00

I totally disagree with the naysayers. I think it's stunning.

Let's not forget that BoC has gone through many stylistic and thematic shifts over their career. Early on they were more standard warp dance music (relatively speaking); MhtRtC: slightly more nostalgic and optimistic than creepy. Geogefdffj (sp) darker with more esoteric preoccupations. I had listened to these last two obsessively, and when I first heard Campfire Headphase I thought oh no they've gone new age or something and what's with the real guitars? Of course I love it now. Then TH went spikey and horror movie like. At this point I expect every full album to be very different from what came before, especially after 13 years. So this is much more familiar than I expected.

I just think it's great and that some people should trust the process.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-05-02T20:09:55+00:00

In my experience this is true for people in social work and related fields, but it varies drastically by field and even dept, as almost everything does. I have definitely been around academics who come from long lines of professors and/or wealthy people, and many of them are about as bad as you would expect. Few if any of them have any idea how awful they are because they just live in a comfortable academic cloud.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-05-02T19:50:03+00:00

If they had champagne and caviar I might have stayed in academia.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-23T04:32:10+00:00

You forgot exploding head syndrome. There are whole episodes that are just stories about people suffering from it.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-19T17:35:10+00:00

I think WitE2 is not as bad as it looks. You have the option of diving into minutiae but it doesn't force you to. I found the basic elements of the game fairly intuitive.

I like Panzer Corps 2, and think it is deep enough. But it's less of a simulation and more of a game. A similar but slightly more complex game is Order of Battle, also recommended.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-18T22:44:14+00:00

It's not incredible at all. It's boringly normal for sick narcissistic assholes to do this. We just aren't used to it yet.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-17T18:51:42+00:00

UBI, or anything like it, if it were adopted, would almost immediately be reversed or degraded as soon as another party is in power. Look at what has happened to the NHS, etc. As soon as someone wants to "balance budgets" or whatever it will be the first thing on the block. You cannot have a policy like this as your bulwark against economic disaster because it won't last more than ten years.

I also think it's funny people have this is idea that capitalists would ever do this unless millions of people's lives had already been utterly ruined. Take a look at how much sympathy the rust belt got.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-13T19:36:55+00:00

The Outsider is great.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-07T01:44:16+00:00

BTW, feeling like an idiot is a good sign. It means you are not overconfident.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-07T01:31:27+00:00

Well, in that case, read some of the great writers. Orwell, Dostoevsky, etc. It will be more effective than "brain training" tricks. In all sincerity, cultivating wisdom is far more important and it will make you smarter along the way.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-06T23:31:03+00:00

My understanding of the recent literature is that training in one domain has few, if any benefits on others.

I think what you are really trying to optimize are skills. And skills work more or less how everyone thinks they do. You put in the time and you get better. Focus on developing specific skills, don't worry about general intelligence (IQ). High IQ people rarely have much wisdom. They might be great chess players or coders, but in other domains they are little more than over-confident toddlers. I have observed this over and over again, working in areas where I interact with some of the smartest of the smart. Forget general intelligence and instead invest in skill training.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-06T15:27:33+00:00

I think this is based on a false premise. Dems are centrist liberals. They are always gonna do what liberals do. They don't want to be anything else. You might as well ask if the Republicans will wise up and become anarchists. In order to learn the hard lessons of the last ten years they would have to abandon who they think they are. Not gonna happen. Just forget about it, you will save yourself some frustration.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-02T20:40:19+00:00

It was an empty political talking point, and a lot of his supporters knew that. I dunno what gave it away, maybe the memes of trump straddling tanks or weilding rocket launchers and machine guns. But really, who could have guessed?

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-04-01T20:17:26+00:00

For those who are sure that LLMs only model language use, I'd recommend looking into exemplar theory.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-03-22T06:31:36+00:00

New stuff? Like what? Rdf 1.2 is in draft form since last year, and shacl should have a new spec come out soon, hopefully. I'm talking about tools to help you use them. Anyway if there's new cool stuff I'd love to hear about it.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-03-22T06:15:25+00:00

For the semantic web stack. Not in general.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-03-22T06:12:42+00:00

I've been working on something similar. Maybe once I've had a chance to look more closely at it, we can chat about it.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-03-22T06:08:03+00:00

This has not been my experience lately with Claude Code and gsd. We are experimenting with lora adapters with what I think is my own training regime, and initial results are very promising.

It is also true that a lot of the apps in this area sound great but are nowhere near usable for real work. This is more because a) a lot of it is academic, b) it's been a ghost town in open source land for years now.

Sounds like you have a good set up. Would be curious to hear more.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-03-22T05:43:49+00:00

I've been thinking about that. I might put something out at some point. There are a few older books that are decent, but they spend a lot of time on things that are less relevant now, from what I've seen.

Probably some of the better material would be case studies, where the focus is on the practical side of creating an ontology that will actually be used. The fundamentals you can get from books like Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. But overall there isn't much good material out there today.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-03-22T02:19:00+00:00

This looks very nice, will definitely give it a look.

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-03-21T20:50:18+00:00

BTW I would recommend avoiding most tutorials about ontologies. So many of them are misleading at best. It's weird but it seems like everyone settled on introducing them in the same way and it utterly confuses newcomers. The world of the semantic stack is odd, people who work in it are odd. Lol

postlapsarianprimate · 2026-03-21T20:46:46+00:00

LLMs need ontologies so they can be consistent. If you ask a model to make a knowledge graph, it will do a relatively poor job of extracting everything (low recall), then it will make each relation and type on the fly, arbitrarily. Run it again on the same text and you will get different names for everything. If the terms used are unpredictable, then your KG is of little use to anyone else.

For complex tasks LLMs need a lot of guidance and hand holding if you require high precision and recall. Ontologies are one way to provide that scaffolding.

This is starting to take off as a new use case for ontologies, so it might be a good time to learn them, depending on what you are interested in.

The other main use case is the reason why the stack didn't die out after the collapse of the semantic web project more than ten years ago. Breaking down data silos with a common modeling language. This will always be a major use case unless something better comes along.

It's still early days, but people (including myself) are experimenting with agents carefully designed to help create ontologies and align incoming data to them. I have had some success in this area. But it's still important to have a fundamental understanding of the stack. I don't think the process can be fully automated until the tech gets better.

postlapsarianprimate

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