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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2151 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 8, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A sufficiently advanced intelligence can glaze without direct sycophancy.

It’s the secular guardian angel.

Absolutely. But it was using Spotify's own metrics to assess popularity, and ran the scripts to collate those figures. We're talking evidence-based, rigorous, scientific glazing. At that point, it's not sycophancy, it's acknowledgement of my clear superiority over other mortals when it comes to diversity in musical taste.

Among ten thousand dimensions of the latent space, there's always one along which the user can be glazed.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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