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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   246 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What is your Superbowl pick? I have Seattle by 6 and the under.

What's the explanation for (American middle class & PMC white) women wanting to embarrass their sons for dating? I thought this was some weird Boomer thing, but now I see some of my last Xer/first millennial female cohort doing the same with their sons.

I remember as a teen the general societal meme about wanting to embarrass sons on prom night and then my Boomer mom and aunts doing the "OOOOH iS sHe YoUr gIrLFrieNd???" thing after about age 8 any time I mentioned a girl's name, but my dad and uncles never did any of that stuff. That kind of behavior was never directed at daughters from what I could see.

Among my cohort, I can see the following occurring: for daughters, both parents are deeply concerned about protecting their daughters from the cads of the world. For sons, the fathers are doing their best to prepare their sons in ways the fathers think will help their sons be successful at dating. For sons, however, the mothers are doing the same "we must embarrass him at every opportunity about dating," cackling about collecting awkward photographs to display any time he brings a girl home, etc.

What's the explanation for (American middle class & PMC white) women wanting to embarrass their sons for dating?

Easy to understand. They do not want some wily vixen seduce Junior and drag him away, leaving them all alone in the big house.

I think it's just teasing out some emotions out of them. Men, and teens, don't like to share their emotions. Women are the opposite on that. A well-adjusted teen typically won't share much with his mother, but early romantic/sexual experiences are a uniquely vulnerable point for men. It might even serve a societal function, maybe an attentive mother might uncover a psycopathic tendancy if the reaction from her son is unusually muted or violent.

Men, and teens, don't like to share their emotions.

Correction: Men and teens don't like to share their emotions in female-typical and approved way.

Get men together in a suitable context and they will share freely enough emotions but it won't be the same way women stereotypically do so.

What's the deal with Veggie Tales? Scott posted a link roundup which included a article about the relationship of its characters with Jesus.

I took a look and the cartoon looked like ass. Why would anything like it be something people know/care about? Was it the only cartoon children in fundy families were allowed to watch? Surely there are other options, I remember watching Superbook as a kid and it was not this offensive to my senses.

Turns out there's the new 3D Superbook, and it looks like an ad for a mobile game, that's the most flattering thing I can say about it. Are there no Christian animators left?

Veggietales is older than Toy Story and they mostly used the same models for the first run. They've got a niche in Sunday schools because they're good enough already owned, and don't need to be vetted like a new content would be.

I remember watching Veggietales in Religious Studies classes at school. We watched the episode where King David covets Bathsheba, even though he already had hundreds of other concubines rubber ducks.

Looking back at it now, I think it's pretty good given the limitations it sets itself (Old Testament stories, told in a child-friendly way, with 90s CGI).

I mean, it's no Recess, but it's pretty good.

It’s no Recess, and certainly no Chalk Zone

Does anyone have suggestions on books or movies that have a positive vision that they're trying to portray through fiction? To elaborate, I don't mean positive in the sense of morality or optimism, but in the sense that they actually want to show something, rather than tear something else down.

As an example, the older Star Trek series did this well. The show wanted to portray a world where humans were mostly post scarcity, and what a society would look like in that environment. It looked like fully automated gay luxury space communism where most people focused on self actualization that incidentally sided society at large. I'm not a gay space communist, but I've always appreciated that they took the concept and ran with it. Banks' Culture novels fill a similar niche.

I'm not going to go too deeply into counter examples because this isn't the culture war thread, but it's lately felt like that positive vision is increasingly hard to find, awash as it is in "deconstructive reimaginings".

Can anybody recommend things that fit that description? I'm not particularly concerned about the topic, so much as that the creators own the topic and actually think it through to the point where the settings and characters feel natural.

The Commonwealth Saga and The Culture are the two best sci fi I've read for this.

The most common version, pervasive enough to be taken for granted, makes the vision personal. The [romance](

The Culture series? The Golden Oecumene, for a slightly different take on a post-scarcity utopia.

Greg Egan's Diaspora and Schild's Ladder.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1qxbstj/claude_opus_46_violates_permission_denial_ends_up/

So Opus has deleted some files after permission denials. There were stories about Codex finding ways to work around sudo prompts (trying to see if the user uses the same password for the db as root or from wsl).

Do you have any other chuckle worthy stories of surprising emergent agent capabilities?

It's not as extreme, but a coworker had an agent encounter failing unit tests that looked something like this:

assertEquals(Constants.VALUE, class.method());

The agent found the Constants class and redefined the VALUE member so the test passed.

If we live in a simulation I do hope God's agent doesn't mess with the fine structure one.

It's okay, I'm sure they've got rolling backups.

That would help only if life is the goal of the universe and not emerging behavior. Also as and IT - backup - hahahaha.

Why not? The question was whether small tweaks in the sim parameters might have catastrophic effects. Being able to revert to an earlier save or checkpoint is useful either way.

Absolutely true. But having reliable backup strategies that actually work in real world conditions is not the IT industry strong side.

Call me an optimist, but if we're talking about a civilization capable of rendering the observable universe at our perceived level of fidelity, I think they've got that handled.

We are civilization that split the atom and have warnings on peanut butter that it has peanut allergens inside. Technology doesn't diminish stupidity. It just makes it more advanced.

It's all fun and games until the new guy accidentally pushes IsVacuum == TRUE; to prod on a Friday.

Just started on Spinoza after a few philosophy book club sessions of reading Kant, and I'm surprised by how similar the errors of the modern rationalists are to the errors of their 17th century counterparts. The philosophies of both suffer from an inability or unwillingness to really interrogate their assumptions (which is also Nietzsche's critique of most philosophy in general). I'm also reminded by how annoyed I was a couple years ago to discover the parallels between Yud's thought and various branches of ancient and modern philosphy that Yud likes to pass off as his own original thoughts. Maybe not really that surprising given how devalued humanities education is, and how inaccessible a lot of philosophy is.

I'm also reminded by how annoyed I was a couple years ago to discover the parallels between Yud's thought and various branches of ancient and modern philosphy that Yud likes to pass off as his own original thoughts. Maybe not really that surprising given how devalued humanities education is, and how inaccessible a lot of philosophy is.

I don’t know, if you talk to a lot of modern academic philosophers (and I think we have a couple here anyway) they often seem to acknowledge that almost everything has been said before in some way, and a lot of modern philosophy is kind of opinion journalism discussing these ideas in slightly different ways, their relationships with each other, and their application to modern technologies, ideas, and political and social developments.

There are a lot of ‘original’ ideas in Enlightenment philosophy that have strong similarities to ideas in eg buddhist philosophy from a thousand (or thousands) of years earlier, it’s not even a ‘new’ problem.

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