self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
The Civ devs are cowards who decided that religions as disparate as Buddhism and Islam deserve no special military or cultural modifiers in their games, so expecting benefits from Judaism would be pointless!
That said, an Israel Civ could be represented by high science and military production but lower pop growth IMO.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
I fell prey to a viral meme recently extolling everyone to drop what they were doing and reas This Is How You Lose The Time War without doing any research into it.
Got in early too, couldn't have had more than a few hundred likes on it, and I was quite bored.
I've read like 10% of it, and it's.. ok? so far.
Stretches the imagination that the two primary protagonists have some weird weaboo-esque obsession with the timeline of Our Earth™, to the point they act like quirky Valley Girls instead of hardened assassins, but it's good enough I'll give it the benefit of doubt till I dig in further.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
We're now post-scarcity for beauty.
Unlike all ages past, if all you wish to look at are beautiful things, you're very much in luck. Any idiot with a midrange GPU, or an internet connection for the matter, can generate all the beauty on demand they want.
And I contend that this is clearly and obviously a good thing.
Ugliness sucks, going to stores and online catalogues and being forced to choose from a limited selection sucks, forced consumption of capeshit wherever you go sucks, now anyone with a modicum of taste can overcome their lack of artistic aptitude and make their own.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
Looking at the pace of progress in both rigid and soft body robotics suggests that the overhang of software above hardware isn't going to last very long.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
I designed a proper cover for my ongoing web serial, Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum using a combination of AI image generation on-and-offline, Photoshop and Canva!
Certainly looks a lot better than I could have ever hoped to make in the past without hiring someone, especially since I peaked at drawing stick figures and isometric houses, Graphic Design Is My Passion, and I know just enough Photoshop to hang myself with haha.
What do you guys think? All I'm hoping for is to standout compared to the frankly amateurish art that most Royal Road writers commission, which isn't that high a bar to meet.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
Glad to hear it! It just needs to catch eyeballs, I'm counting on the prose to keep 'em.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
Hell, I'd go to the US if there was an obvious and reasonably fast route with my current credentials. I settled for the UK in the interim. America's still where it's at, and a lot of the people decrying it's downfall need to step outside and see what the rest of us live with for a bit.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
Thank you! In fact, when I began the story, it was with the goal of creating the kind of fiction that I desperately craved but couldn't get anywhere.
Fuck it, I'll write my own book, with blackjack and hookers!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
Are you running it locally? Are you familiar with in painting or more advanced techniques like controlnet?
Alternatively you can try Bing Image Creator that runs on the latest version of DALLE, it's quite good, and understands context much better than SD.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
A vacation in Thailand. Was significantly less depressed and stressed out by the time I was done, though sadly it never lasts.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
The Starship Troopers game is a derivative of another game called Squad that I play quite a bit, and likely inspired by a popular mod for the same.
I play Squad, Arma and Warhammer 3 when it comes to multiplayer titles, but I thing ping would be a pretty big issue when it came to multiplayer across continents. Although Arma and Squad aren't the most latency sensitive games by far.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
If you want very specific and controllable results, by all means use controlnet. You can inherit silhouettes and poses from reference images, such as a humanoid silhouette that you can make into a robot without the issue of pauldrons.
That, or deleting the offending section and inpainting over and over again till it's fixed.
While SD isn't the most advanced model by itself, it's the extensions that let it put up a fight against Midjourney and the like!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
I would trade that much IQ to be at least normal in terms of conscientiousness. Having ADHD sucks and bottlenecks all else.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
The image is pretty much entirely AI generated, any PS work was limited to fixing some obvious congenital deformities in the silhouetted kid, and removing annoying watermarks.
Are those images AI generated themselves? I could do with a better prompt, this is one I thought up waaay back when SD was in alpha, and eventually found a variant that worked for the purposes I was going for.
As for the overall style, I wanted it to be idiosyncratic, something that stood out in a field of works that think throwing a spaceship in front of a nebula is good enough!
I appreciate the comments on the typography, at the moment I'm locked into the current version, but it's something to consider for the future!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
I can promise to at least try it out! Feel free to DM me with your steam name and I'll add you
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
That's such an incredibly meh design. Not outright ugly, but I'd cry if I paid $48 mil for it and had that to show for it.
But at any rate, I doubt that house is the defining contributor to his sense of self-worth or happiness.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
If I had to wild-ass guess, he just doesn't particularly care, has multiple better houses he prefers and just wanted a minimum viable product, or is just so inured to luxury it doesn't bother him.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
They work almost all of the time in South Asia. I was aware of the 'myth' in question, but unquestionably validated that they did do what they advertised pretty much everytime I checked.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
Thresholder by Alexander Wales. It's extremely meh compared to my favorite work by him, Worth The Candle, which is about as close to a 10/10 as it gets.
To put it as simply as possible, a normal ish dude gets isekai'd, becomes Iron Man before the plot commences, and then gets sequentially thrown into new worlds where he needs to face off against an ideologically opposed opponent to progress on.
I have a soft spot for the better class of Xianxia, so I just started Reverend Insanity, a rather highly rated one. Shame the genre as a whole is rather trash, but I did find a few good ones like 40 Millenniums of Cultivation. Your brain gets used to the weird translation quite quickly, and I'm honestly surprised that more of them don't rely on GPT-4 for translation these days, though given how fucking longwinded some can be, it might cause bankruptcy haha.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
I have a finely honed sense of schadenfreude, and I feel no embarrassment about it.
I am a rather reasonable person, so the majority of people are only getting what's coming to them. In fact, I've found spite and hatred to be excellent motivators when nothing else can rouse me out of my depression, such as when I worked out for a year on the nominal basis of beating up this one asshole (not that I ever did, but the fantasy was worth it).
Overall, I can't help but be happy when bad things happen to bad people, literally couldn't happen to a better person as far as I'm concerned!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
Xianxia? 40MOC by far.
Contrary to the name, it has only minimal similarity to Warhammer 40k and you don't need to know anything about it to enjoy it.
The scope is truly insane, and the author manages to keep the stakes high across wildly ridiculous scales. The characters aren't particularly Xianxia tropey, and the exploration of different styles of government and conflict in varying shades of gray is great.
But most importantly, it's gut bustingly funny, I haven't laughed that consistently at anything since, and it even unironically teared me up multiple times.
Look for it on Boxnovel, you can read it for free and with minimal hassle.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
I've dabbled with Controlnet and img2img, but it can be a PITA at times.
Bing has one benefit of having a better encoder, it understands subtle nuance in prompts and semantics better, though you tradeoff stylistic flexibility.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
It is. I had to abandon my read through because the version I was reading hadn't been translated further, but a while later I did see a fully finished version.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
A lot of things leave money on the table. The police don't usually train new criminals, and the cardiology department in the hospitals doesn't sponsor the addition of transfats to the cafeteria food.
Turns out we're not averse to doing so when there are obvious moral issues, most of the time.
Thank you!
On the topic of why intelligence isn't easy or even merely difficult to improve:
Unlike larger muscles, more intelligence didn't have any inherent downsides in the ancestral environment. Today, smarter people are more likely to end up in dysgenic IQ shredders like cities, or simply have less children, but that wasn't really the case before.
If you go from being a normal dude to being absolutely jacked, your basal metabolic rate can go from like 2500 to 4000, which is absolutely massive. That's even leaving aside exercise. In earlier times, when we weren't effectively post scarcity for calories, if being twice as strong didn't allow you to get literally twice as much food, you're going to starve to death while a scrawny dude might scrape by.
Thus, our bodies are programmed such that they refuse to hold onto to extra muscle unless it's being both actively used and well fed.
On the other hand, both Einstein and a village idiot have nigh identical brains that born burn 20 watts regardless of whether they're deriving E=mc^2, or going ooga booga.
In genetics, there's strong evidence that intelligence is a consequence of health, that every deleterious mutation decreases intelligence and there are very few mutations that increase it. The greater the mutational load, the lower the IQ. If you had an cloning machine that could create an individual who had the literal average of everyone's genes, they'd likely be significantly smarter than the average person because the errors would be canceled put.
(Brain size is a component, but that's the gist of it)
Since intelligence is so useful, there have been strong evolutionary pressures to increase it, such that the low hanging fruit has been long plucked by evolution itself. Most pharmaceutical aids are simply tradeoffs, such as Adderall increasing focus but decreasing creativity.
IQ scores can be increased by practise or education, but only to a small degree. That's because IQ, while a very good proxy got intelligence, is still a proxy that can be gamed. But the gains are limited, you can't take a 100 IQ person and get them to score 140 no matter how much you train them, and I doubt they could make 120 either. So in practise and reality, intelligence is largely immutable after birth.
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