celluloid_dream
No bio...
User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
To take this on a slight tangent - at least for phone/tech companies, they're not keeping nearly enough data about me.
I bought a new flagship Samsung phone this year, billed as having all the AI bells and whistles. It was supposed to work magic with its cloud access, integration with all the built-in apps, on-device processing, and smart assist / suggestion features.
What Samsung AI actually does is sit around offering an inferior version of my SOTA-subs (Claude,Gemini,ChatGPT) and I basically never touch any of its features. It's the brand-new-but-already-outdated-car-touchscreen of AI tech. Also, a few times a day it annoys me with an unnecessary pop-up saying "Good afternoon! Here's a random news article based on your location. The current weather is overcast. Have a great day!". I hope to god no inference cycles were wasted generating these turds that wouldn't have passed muster as a feature in 2015, let alone 2025.
I want to be able to sell my soul to the machine. I want it to spy on me every second I use it. I want it to already know that I've been pulling up my topo map every time I have a spare minute, see that I've been looking at such and such an area, know that I usually do hikes of this distance and that elevation gain, and go have a think about that in the background and come back to me with something useful that I would actually want to know, and haven't seen yet - that "there's low cloud forecast for that area on Saturday, just FYI", and "trip report from 2 days ago mentioned an active bear in the area".
and to head off objections, Yes I want it reading my texts. Yes, I want it looking at my photos. Yes, I want it to be my Whispering Earring. "Better for you if you don't hit send on that reply. She'll likely think you're being flippant even though you're being sincere".. and so on.
obviously not with that kind of sharing enabled by default, but it should be available!
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
We observed the strange outcome of a government policy decision: an attempt to convert a luxury hotel in the heart of the Wharf into a center for asylum seekers. Leaving aside the political firestorm, the pure economic logic is baffling. It seems like an attempt to solve a problem using the most expensive possible tool, a phenomenon I've noticed governments are particularly prone to.
To tug on this particular culture war thread, I also don't understand why anyone would agree to this. Even if your only allegiance were to the asylum seekers, you could house more asylum seekers with the same funding in cheaper real-estate on the outskirts of the city. See also: homeless shelters, rehab centers, halfway houses, etc.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean about having "zero use cases beyond potential future receptionists". They are already assisting with real tech work in my office. An easy script that might take me half an hour to an hour now takes seconds, with maybe a minute or two to confirm it's correct. They are incredibly good at debugging, sorting out random systems issues, and such. The sort of thing that would cost me a whole morning of frustration more or less gets one-shot by dumping some logs into the LLM and asking it what's up. These queries cost pennies in compute. From my perspective, they have already replaced a junior developer, junior sysadmin, personal assistant, etc.
and this is the worst they will ever be. How can that be terrible financially?
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
Ok, Samurai Champloo and Bebop, I get. These are essentially, perfect YA comfort food cartoons, oozing with character, atmosphere, unique soundtrack, etc. etc. They are perfect for non-anime watchers because they're crossover western-style stories done up in anime styling.
But Elfen Lied? Are we thinking of the same show? The one with the body horror? The creepy "magical" girls, the harem protagonist, etc.? I don't understand how that's even in the same category. I would recommend someone looking for "anime for non-anime watchers" never, ever, ever watch that. It will just reinforce every bad stereotype about the genre while having a perfectly "meh" plot.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
Yes, actually just get a good LLM to read over the chapter you just finished and catch anything you might have missed. I feel like I got SO MUCH more out of the books this way.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
It's not just advice columns. People do this in real life for some reason!
The speaker almost always has a common gendered relationship in mind - daughter, boyfriend, wife, etc. - but are deliberately choosing not to reveal that info when it would be harmless, and help the listener understand the situation better.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
Stop signs are periods, not commas.
If a driver has slowed to a crawl (walking pace or less) for a stop sign, they have done 99% of the work toward preventing an accident. Assuming they would fully stop if anything else is nearby, then to me, it doesn't matter if they roll the stop sign slowly on a clear intersection.
If you feel differently, I'm curious why
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
from "how and why to be ladylike (for women with autism)":
when you’re sexually attractive to a man you’re talking to, it hijacks some of his attention, and it’s not easy for him to wrest it back. ... the thing is he won’t really mind when he feels like you might be having sex, but if it ever becomes clear that that’s definitely not happening, then frequently the tool he will use to wrest some of his hijacked attention back from you, is feeling negative feelings about you. another aspect is that he might feel that he could never hijack attention in the same way, that he could look good but what you are doing to him is something he’s incapable of–so the easiest, most available go-to negative is resentment, which is very poisonous. people don’t like feeling manipulated unreciprocally without payoff.
and that is very similar to the dynamic I see going on with Aella and the ex-rat diaspora here, and other places. I see a burning, seething resentment far in excess of what she's actually said or done. For this particular stunt, I think Amadan is probably right and it's at least half an act, but nevertheless, I think people should try and cool their emotions about her. - just chill? Live and let live.
As someone on twitter said: (can't be bothered to go find it) "Aella is what first-principles thinking actually looks like". That's what is so great about her. If that lead her to heroic quantities of LSD, a high body count, and an unorthodox bathing schedule.. well, so be it. She has honest to god genuine curiosity. Yes, often wrapped in attention-bait trolling, but curiosity nonetheless. I don't follow her, but I'm always pleased when some article or tweet of hers comes down the feed challenging a taboo that no one else will touch. Agree with her or not, one Aella is more valuable than a thousand haters shouting "boo! whore!"
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
Yes, absolutely, and I do, but a lot of drivers aren't paying as much attention.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
When driving, I'm more frustrated by pedestrians than cyclists. Pedestrians cheat busy downtown intersections constantly, and this exacerbates congestion. The streets in my city are designed for timed flow patterns, and would work wonderfully if everyone would just respect the "stop crossing" signal. Pedestrians know they can get away with it (count on it, even) because it's the driver's responsibility not to hit them. Fine, I'd rather people not die, but this is pretty selfish. They also pay very little attention. The number of times I've been turning right into an alley with a pedestrian not looking up from their phone is too damn high. "I could have KILLED you! - you could have DIED! Don't you want to know about that? at least see it coming? At least shoulder-check!"
When cycling, again, pedestrians most of the time because despite having the clearest field of view and moving the slowest, they're paying the least attention. They are liable to step into my path without looking, then jump back like they've seen a bear and scowl like it's my fault.
When walking, cyclists and drivers in equal measure. It's not that they're doing anything wrong - it's that I don't want to have to be paying attention to them. I just want to have a chill walk and think about something other than road safety.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
An inspiring video, but it's still hard to square the fact that a US-made stick of metal and plastic sells for fully 1/6 the price of a Nintendo Switch 2. The grill scrubber looks like solid product, but if I put 6 of them together, I don't think I'd have even close to the value of a new portable game console.
I get that that is an apples-to-oranges comparison, and maybe I don't have a good baseline appreciation for the cost of strong metal things compared to complex electronics. I've paid almost as much as the scrubber for a glorified chunk of construction material before, but I was not happy about it.
It's just that if I saw that on the shelf next to the $15 wire scrubbers, I'd assume it was motorized. If that's what it's going to take to bring back manufacturing to the US, I question whether the general public is willing to pay for it.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
To get those numbers, I assume housing supply is rising, but is still artificially held back in order to keep it as a viable-but-not-good investment?
That sounds a little crazy to me. If you could fix the problem faster, surely you should.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
Maybe. I also stay away from the Marvel stuff, but from the description, it least sounds like it's not nothing.
Yelena is sort of protective of Bob, in a big sister way
... but it's more like a found family type of thing.
that's something!
At the end, after he saves the world together with his best friend
... basically best friends who occasionally kiss
also something
But I haven't seen the movies, so maybe you're right and it's a wasted opportunity.
Problem? What problem? From my perspective, the shift in screenwriting priorities is actually nice. There are so many varieties of non-romantic relationships that go underexplored on screen because the writers have to make space for an obligatory romance arc. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far of late, but human desires being what they are, I'm sure it'll swing back.
Also, counterexample: Have you seen the GTA 6 trailer from a few weeks ago? My first thought was: after hundreds of thousands of words spilled about the fertility crisis, dating troubles, incels, etc, the thing that is actually going to move the cultural needle is a video game franchise modelling a healthy adult relationship between its protagonists.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Yes. Classic WoW has a lot of dynamics to it that keep people playing against their will, sort of. In some real sense, your guild has invested in you, and your character, by taking you along, giving you loot and such, so you feel like you owe them your participation, so that your friends can get their rewards too, and your group can keep progressing.
Probably better for Bubbles long term, but it was shitty the way it went down that night. She probably cried. Like getting dumped by your long term friend group and finding out half of them never liked you and were talking about you behind your back
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Yeah, Blossom was a unicorn. It's pretty rare to find someone with that combination of personality and skill. She lived somewhere exotic IIRC, like Hawaii or Alaska or something, so her internet wasn't amazing, and Classic WoW was one of the few games that was forgiving enough of network latency.
I cut Buttercup some slack because she had a tough job IRL (nurse, I think), and playing a healer in game is suffering, as you desperately try and keep people alive through their own mistakes, gradually failing at it. And yeah, maybe some insecurity
This incident was probably the inflection point in my enthusiasm for Classic. I stuck it out a while longer out of loyalty to the group, and we eventually cleared Lich King 25 heroic, widely considered the point at which you have beat the game, then quit. It was that, and other similar incidents, that made me realize the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. The game mechanics naturally led to that sort of conflict, and it just didn't have to be that way. I didn't have to play that kind of game. Would be better if I didn't. Is better now that I don't.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
I have an anecdote to relate sort of in response.
Our group of 25 raiders in a semi-serious Classic WoW guild had been together over a year (maybe 2?), through TBC into WotLK. In that time, we'd been raiding 4-8h a week, every week through progressively harder challenges, building up a lot of camaraderie. There were 3 women on the team. Let's call them:
- Blossom (main tank - paladin, age: late 20s?, personality: everyone's friend, skill:absolute gamer)
- Buttercup (healer - priest, age: early 20s, personality: cranky af, skill: totally average)
- Bubbles (dps - mage, age: late 30s?, personality: extremely reserved, skill: bad)
end of a long session of raiding already an hour past the usual quitting time. Yogg-Saron, zero light (hard mode). It's near 11PM PST, pushing 2AM for the east coasters, on a work night.
Our group has nearly got it down, but the fight is difficult and takes a long time for each attempt - probably 10 minutes or something, + ~5m to get run back and get ready after each try. There's an easy mechanic at the start where there's a big floating AoE that everyone is supposed to avoid, and screwing it up means the attempt is almost guaranteed to fail. People are tired and making mistakes, especially Bubbles, but not exclusively her. The raid leader makes a call: next person to screw up that mechanic gets benched for the night. This is harsh, but understandable. No one vocally disagrees, at any rate.
Of course, Bubbles is the next one to screw up. True to his word, the raid lead kicks Bubbles from the group (she's still listening in discord), and apologizes but explains it's just for tonight. Get some sleep, etc. Buttercup twists the knife with some sharp comments "fucking FINALLY", "should have done that 45 minutes ago". Blossom sticks up for Bubbles. "yo, chill" "just a game", "let's calm down", etc. Buttercup more than happy to double down and fight : "bro she's literally keyboard turning, shut the fuck up".
Somewhere in the middle of Buttercup and Blossom going at each other, Bubbles leaves the channel, leaves the guild. leaves discord, and doesn't play again.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Having wasted far too much time playing Classic on and off since 2019, the ratio there is probably closer to 20% total, and 10% of serious raiders. Fairly confident in that estimate based on experience in raiding guilds and hearing everyone's voices in discord.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Dictionary? Translation? I guess, but in the current year, if you're not running every page through Claude to see what you missed, what are you doing?
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Did you notice that I described Carney that way in my post? That's also what I said in my introduction of the video transcript to the LLM (not included with the pastebin), so the fault is mine, though I don't even admit it's false. Two months is a short enough time to be PM that I think most people would still describe him as "new", especially since the time was almost entirely spent campaigning.
I agree! No one is writing a bland and direct summary. That's a problem! I have such a hard time getting that anywhere. Journalists invariably give too much "important context", while excising things they deem "not important", and that's largely where the bias creeps in.
Worth noting that the article you linked is much longer (I specifically asked for short), and includes additional Q&A not included with the video I gave it. I'm confident if I could find the full video + Q&A, and altered my prompt to ask it to give context on important recent events, and gave it a word count, it would deliver something equal to the Guardian piece there.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Just try and give me a single example of LLM output that's remotely comparable to quality human work.
I just fed it a video transcript of a recent press conference by the new Canadian PM, and got this article.
I'm not going to get into percentiles, but I would say it's fine - comparable to human work for an easy quotes-and-summary article, and free of annoying media clickbait traps like making half the article about Trump.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
BC is split between "Left Coast" and "Western Canada", with the former having a higher population, but the latter covering more area.
Honestly, yes.
I also live in Vancouver, and while parts are bad, they're not that bad compared to what I've seen in other cities. Overall, I feel safe except for perhaps a few blocks in a few areas. That's not to downplay the deleterious effects of shambling fent zombies, A&W pikemen, and other baddies from the medieval monster manual, but in my opinion, the disorder is usually more of the theft/streetshitting/nuisance variety.
Anyway, here's a fine specimen of a methhead light skirmisher attempting to fell an Amazon truck (not pictured) with an improvised javelin.
knot tying
That is a great app. I just bought it, and I'll use it a lot, but I still want to complain about this class of thing in general. That is, monetizing publicly available info for mobile formats. If I didn't have a stash of Googlebux about to expire, I'd have passed on principle.
On a PC, if you wanted to look up how to tie an Alpine Butterfly, you'd quickly search it on Google or Perplexity. If some site was selling a tutorial for $5 you'd automatically move on to the next available free one, because we don't live in an age where the Mountaineering Guild gatekeeps access to the secret knowledge of rope folding, and it's near trivial to put up a site with the instructions for free. It bothers me a bit that developers get away with selling the same thing as a mobile app simply because of the added annoyance of trying to do it with a small screen + thumbs.
Yes, the presentation here is excellent. The UI is near-perfect, but also, I bet I could have Claude vibe-code me one with little effort.
"The blade itself incites to deeds of violence" - Joe Abercrombie paraphrasing Homer.
When I cross the border to the states, there's often a moment of shock upon seeing someone with a gun on their hip going about their day in a gas station, or restaurant, or shopping mall. It is, as you say, "dangerous and unnecessary", as dangerous and unnecessary as if they had brought a leashed tiger, or a running chainsaw. My brain can't ignore it. Pay attention to that! That could KILL you! it shrieks, and won't let me forget. It's the same forced attention I get around high cliffs, or heavy machinery, or a busy highway. I might know that the leashed tiger is tame. I might be aware that the running chainsaw has a safety guard, but I can't put it out of mind.
The possibility of a gun being used weighs on me, and I think on the bearer, even if they think it doesn't. It's there, physically weighing on them, tugging at their belt or ankle, or purse, reminding them every time they move that it is an option, a choice in the dialogue tree. And because it's an option, it changes every interaction into a (potential) life or death confrontation. Yes, there are circumstances under which I am prepared to kill you. They've already had that conversation with themselves, already decided that such circumstances exist and could arise today, at this Applebee's Neighborhood Grill.
I don't want to come off as too anti-gun. I like guns well enough. They're neat. I've shot them. It's just that I think we do it better in Canada (modulo silly model bans), where you can't be carrying weapons on that side of the pomerium.
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