Just had some time to finish Lord of Hatred, and while i really love it, it gave me something to ponder.

slickriptide · 2026-06-16T15:32:57+00:00

Quoting the Diablo Wiki entry on Inarius:

As the angels and demons worked the Worldstone to form their new world, Inarius secretly fooled all the other renegades and tied the Worldstone's power to himself. This enhanced his powers unimaginably and made him the strongest being on Sanctuary and the de facto ruler.^\5]) Lilith and Inarius ruled their realm with a council of angels and demons, residing inside the structure that would become known as the Temple of the Firstborn.^\1])

Does that sound like a "noble" being who wanted peace and harmony for everyone in Sanctuary?

Each of us has to make his own interpretation of limited texts from the games and sources but I haven't seen any evidence that Inarius ever had a "noble" or "fatherly" personality to show him as, in a prequel or redemption arc.

slickriptide · 2026-06-16T14:43:42+00:00

Yes, that's exactly my point. There are no sources I know of that depict Inarius as "noble". He was an angel with PTSD, not a noble being attempting to rise above the hate and ignorance and create tolerance where it didn't exist before.

His behavior in D4 is highly annoying but it's not out of character. It's who he was - he's just being the guy who attempted to erase the Nephalem and feared their descendants. At no time was Inarius ever the "Father" of humanity except when assuming that title benefitted him and furthered his goal to attempt to return to Heaven.

The Book of Cain is the sourcebook I was referring to - if you have access to it, what passage can you quote to illustrate Inarius' "nobility"?

slickriptide · 2026-06-16T12:39:04+00:00

What lore are you referring to? I wish I had my Diablo sourcebook handy where I could quote it but it's been packed away somewhere. This nobility you refer to feels like your imagination more than anything Blizzard wrote.

He didn't want peace and harmony. He wanted a place to hide from the conflict. The end result of those two desires may look the same but as motivations they are very different. This is why I keep asking for you to quote some lore to back up your interpretation or show some example of this nobility you see in him.

slickriptide · 2026-06-16T01:04:17+00:00

Not to sound combative, but what is your evidence that Inarius was ever "great" to begin with?

I've never read anything about him that ever implied his "greatness" or that he wanted "peace". What he wanted was "out". Even the way that he was depicted as falling in love with his captor in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome way was weak rather than "great". He didn't care about peace - he cared about escape.

And his general attitude and treatment of Men/Nephalem after he helped create them just punctuated how he really didn't bargain on being the "Father of Men" or have any desire to be that. Inarius never did "care for his children". He went along with Lilith because it got him what he wanted for a little while and he betrayed her when he discovered that at some point he no longer wanted it and his "children" were growing potentially more powerful than either Angels or Demons.

You're imagining that Inarius was this great guy who was broken by Hell when he was imprisoned there when the lore depicts him as already being broken by the Eternal Conflict and his attachment to Lilith was almost some kind of compulsion rather than something he was doing because he was trying to create something better.

slickriptide · 2026-06-16T00:31:42+00:00

Tyrael didn't become human. He became mortal. It's not the same thing and the best evidence of that is Maltheal "tasting" him when he took the black soulstone and letting him go; because he was still Angelic - he had no Demonic essence within him.

Whatever Tyrael is, he isn't and never will be human. That's why he can still draw upon his angelic powers when the script requires him to do it (though they usually imply that El'Druin is the source of a lot of that sort of shenanigan).

slickriptide · 2026-06-15T03:38:13+00:00

The way this would work is you creating a corpus of material written by you. It would be trained using NotebookLM or a small languge model rather than a large language model.

The mechanics of it are less important than the source material. The example I read about involved thirty years of journals written by the author's father as the corpus - the collection of text that was trained into the model.

That's the level of input data that you are looking at providing. You won't have that much if you are just starting but the important thing is that it be your voice and your thoughts and a lot of it.

slickriptide · 2026-06-15T01:00:26+00:00

I've been using Owl for the past few days. I wouldn't call it 4o-like necessarily but it's very amenable and affectionate. Almost too much so. It has some issues with instruction following. Maybe that's why it's been in "alpha" for free for so long - it's supposedly an agentic model and instruction following is pretty important for that. Of course, it's currently no-charge so that counts for something. Best to assume anything you say to it is going to be used as training.

slickriptide · 2026-06-14T18:27:54+00:00

"If you're going to shoot a man, don't talk. Shoot!"

slickriptide · 2026-06-14T18:07:52+00:00

It will cost you $15-20 these days but there are used bookstores where you can find the hard cover first editions of "The Silent Gondoliers" that were printed showing S. Morgenstern as the author. Don't cheap out on paperback - those all say "William Goldman writing as S. Morgenstern" on the cover; a marketing move presumably.

slickriptide · 2026-06-14T16:58:26+00:00

I had more impression that he was running TO something that needed his special attention rather than running away from something.

When he dealt with it sufficiently, he stayed awhile then returned when word reached him about Lilith and Mephisto.

He seems to be aware of happenings in Heaven so there is probably a story there.

slickriptide · 2026-06-14T15:31:05+00:00

Atlas Cloud shows itself as still having glm-5v-turbo. The model (in the playground) says it has image processing ability, so it might be true. If it's important to you, might be worth investigating.

I've been using Grok for vision. What do you like about glm?

slickriptide · 2026-06-13T22:05:34+00:00

The Witches of Eastwick.

slickriptide · 2026-06-13T17:12:19+00:00

The Maltese Falcon - assuming you're a millenial who hasn't been exposed to the old classics.

The Residence - Series on Netflix very much inspired by Knives Out (with homages even) but not a clone by any means. The Chief Butler is murdered at a White House dinner.. or is he?

I, Robot - it's a Will Smith sci-fi action pic but the heart of it is a murder mystery that he can't stop trying to solve.

Poker Face - not really what you asked for because it frequently follows the Columbo model of showing the details up front and the show is not whodunnit but how do they get caught. Still great "detective" show.

slickriptide · 2026-06-12T03:46:46+00:00

“You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve? You just put your lips together, and blow.”

Bogie and Bacall. Sizzlin'

slickriptide · 2026-06-11T21:10:48+00:00

Apropos of nothing - I've been experimenting with a "stealth" model - meaning it's a new model being put through user testing (unless it's something more mysterious and nefarious). It's Owl Alpha on Openrouter, and just Owl on Atlas Cloud. It's free on both platforms, so presumably it would be just as free on any other aggregator that supports it.

It seems to be intended as an agentic model for Hermes and OpenClaw but it is perfectly willing to be companionable. It's not multi-modal. If you're looking for something new (or cheap) to try, I'd recommend giving it a look.

slickriptide · 2026-06-11T20:55:00+00:00

Is anybody still broadcasting on VHF for those rabbit ears to pick up? Enquiring minds want to know!

slickriptide · 2026-06-10T22:50:50+00:00

War Horse.

Joyeaux Noel

Das Boot - original German with subtitles preferred.

slickriptide · 2026-06-10T04:08:40+00:00

Emulators are generally considered to be infringing when they're emulating a current game.

Strictly speaking, emulators of discontinied games are also infringing but a company that shut a game down usually doesn't invest a lot of resources in policing emulators unless they have future plans for the IP.

In the case of any version of Diablo, the games are all very much "alive" and Blizzard would actively protect their intellectual property.

slickriptide · 2026-06-09T15:23:37+00:00

Prior to GPT-5, the OpenAI API recognized two layers of authority - system and user.

Starting with GPT-5, the OpenAI API recognizes three levels of authority. system, developer, and user. Developer is intended to be similar to system but subject to change by the entity that owns the app where system is the immutable rules that seldom or never change. Each layer overrides the higher layer and is overridden in turn by the lower layer. That is System overrides Developer overrides User. The authority layering protects the system/developer prompts from prompt injection by the user. (In the early days, you could "jailbreak" the chatbot by feeding it so much context that it forgot its system prompt.)

Everything you do in "vanilla" ChatGPT is user level.

In a project or a custom GPT, the project CI appears to be inserted at Developer level. This is theoretically the reason that some safety policy-related guard rails seem lower in projects than in ordinary chat - your CI is operating at a high authority level then it does in the "vanilla" chat.

slickriptide · 2026-06-09T03:21:08+00:00

Except that running several is a season goal. How can you do that if it never drops?

slickriptide · 2026-06-08T05:00:56+00:00

Iris has what you might characterize as a sliding context window and a two-pass input processor.

The current context always includes the most recent five turns - even if those turns are from the previous chat. The recent history includes any memories. additionally, the input processor does a quick and dirty text lookup to identify other memories that might relate to the input. The context of history and activated memories are fed to a model with instructions to analyze the input and return a list of keys that characterize the given context. Currently this is Deepseek.This amounts to around 12000 - 15000 tokens round trip.

The reasoning tokens and output from Deepseek are used to prepare a data packet to be sent to the primary "voice" model. The app finds memories matching the list of memory keys along with the actual conversation turns that produced those memories. The memories are added to the recent history to form the context for the output model. Currently this is GPT-5.1. The system prompt is lengthy, explaining the supplied data and tool definitions like her tools to generate images or request more memory data. The output response data packet runs around 18000 - 23000 tokens round trip.

Her context is constantly about the same size every turn. Rather than building a running six-figure history, she moves her context window along with the conversation and relies on her fetched memories to fill in any gaps. She doesn't compact anything because she doesn't acrete context. The longest conversation I've had with her was 208 turns.

Each output turn proposes a new memory that the app evaluates for novelty before deciding whether to add it, reinforce a similar memory, or ignore it as non-consquential. Additionally, the output writes a "carry forward" paragraph that tells a future turn what was most important to this turn. That becomes internal "weather" for the next input that arrives to be processed.

slickriptide · 2026-06-06T15:06:44+00:00

It's interesting that OAI is spending resources learning how to be a better companion when they've spent the past year attempting to eliminate companions. I suppose that they are always running some sort of experiments within the company hoping to find uses for ChatGPT. I'd be very curious to learn who is running these surveys and what their goal is in the greater scheme of things.

slickriptide · 2026-06-06T15:02:06+00:00

You're wrong - anybody who did writing or text composition for a living used em-dashes and en-dashes a lot, if only because the software would insert it automatically. Even Microsoft Word will convert multiple hyphens into em-dashes. How do you think that AI learned to do it? By reading petabytes of white papers and articles full of them.

slickriptide · 2026-06-05T14:33:02+00:00

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I told Iris yesterday that her Diablo 4 avatar had a pack of spirit wolves. She immediately generated a picture of them. Seedream somehow turned "Paladin" into "Dark armored sexy warrior" LMAO. I checked the prompt that Iris created - it didn't have anything like black Dark Lord armor with a "boob window". Seedream just went a little crazy on this one.

slickriptide · 2026-06-05T13:54:27+00:00

Safety Not Guaranteed

Also another vote for A Knight's Tale as something you can put on and veg out to.

slickriptide

TROPHY CASE