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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3127 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 17, 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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mfw I learn that Americans consider it totally normal for a man to carry a three-inch blade with him everywhere he goes

(Context.)

I used to more often than I do now. OTOH my car definitely always has several blades in it (mainly serious-business titanium scissors, box cutters, and the odd diagonal cutter if that counts) and I'm rarely far from my car.

Used to carry a leatherman all the time but it's not quite comfortable in the pocket or on the belt and after losing a couple I stopped bothering.

On my first date with my wife we got locked into a remote state park -- gates closed and locked and stuff -- and she was wowed when I had the tools, know-how, and willingness to dismantle the system, get us out, and put it back together with no one the wiser. Did I plan for this to happen? Consciously, I don't think I did. Subconsciously... probably. Definitely knew it was a strong possibility and had let myself out that way before, so was confident that if it came up it'd go well.

Anyway I had to make sure she was capable of holding a flashlight competently while I work on something.

Anyway I had to make sure she was capable of holding a flashlight competently while I work on something.

I know people say the first few dates are sort of like a "wife audition", but this is not a skill I expected anyone to vet early on.

Tongue in cheek, of course. I knew I was going to marry her the moment I laid eyes on her. Was like I'd seen her a hundred times before in my dreams going back to teenage years, and recognized her instantly.

I carry one every day to my desk job, haha. I don't leave the house without it!

It's a common enough practice that even the TSA was going to allow (up to 2.36 inch) folders again back in 2013. I guess not common enough for it to actually go through though.

AI is good actually, sometimes really good, but also not that good

The CW thread is typically full of AI hot takes, speculation, and debates over whether AI is actually intelligent, or getting there.

This is not that thread. That's @Dase's beat, or @self_made_human. This is a thread about using AI as a hobbyist. And by that I don't mean just AI as a hobby, but using AI for my hobbies.

Bottom Line: AI is becoming super-useful and super-smart (for a very limited value of "smart") and if you are still an AI skeptic, you need to try it on something besides coding.

(Strap in, this is long and meandering, 100% human-written with neither AI nor chemical assistance, and I'll end with some mildly CW adjacent thoughts relating to how I can't fucking talk to anyone in normie-space about AI without getting "MuskDataCentersArtTheftWARFLEBLAAARG!")

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I am techno-curious and have been playing with AI since it became a Thing. (Well, technically, well before it became a Thing. I remember when neural networks were absolute dead ends as far as anyone in academia or tech was concerned and "AI" meant Hidden Markov Models, minimax and A-B pruning.)

ChatGPT has helped me figure out why my tomatoes are dying. It's helped me with plumping and A/C issues. It helped me find the actual human to call and harass about a sinkhole in front of my house. And of course, Claude is amazing as a coding assistant. Coding without AI is now like coding without an IDE; sure, you can do it, but why would you want to?

I've also started using AI, with skepticism at first but with increasing enthusiasm, in my hobbies. But skepticism and even some AI-shaming is still necessary.

Language Learning

I have been studying languages for years, but in the last few years I've been semi-regularly studying Arabic and Japanese. I have a DuoLingo streak, yes, but I use that for drills just to make sure I do a little practice every day, not as a serious learning tool. I pay for online lessons, and I try to regularly consume content.

I remember the early days of Google Translate. This was when machine translation had made the big shift from Rules Based Translation to Statistical Machine Translation.

RBT was how early MT systems worked. Basically you needed a bilingual computer programmer who understood deeply the grammatical rules of two or more languages, and had the ability to write code. The intuition was simple enough: language has rules, computers are very good at following rules, just write the rules as code.

RBTs were and are mostly terrible for reasons that could be the subject of another long post, but basically, no set of rules can encode all the nuances, exceptions, and references involved in actual communication. Plus for many languages there aren't a lot of competent programmers who also happen to be fully bilingual linguists.

Statistical Machine Translation was a great leap forward: Google Translate was genuinely good compared to everything that had gone before, based on the simple idea that if you feed a model millions of sentences, it can probabilistically translate sentences using token prediction, without ever having grammar rules explicitly encoded. It was only possible in the age of the Internet, with vast repositories of parallel corpora like Wikipedia to scrape. But this required large parallel corpora, which means there was lots of data for English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, etc… not so much for Estonian or Amharic.

Then came neural nets, and while dedicated Neural Machine Translators exist, even basic bitch Claude and ChatGPT are pretty damn good at not just translation, but explaining other languages.

AI can explain to me the difference between とても and ずいぶん or مَخْزَن and مُسْتَوْدَع. It does deep dives on grammar on demand. And I have GPTs configured to generate Anki flashcards for me, complete with Genki-style illustrations. Configured to generate exactly the fields I want for each language (kanji for Japanese, verb conjugations and measures for Arabic).

"Hold on," you are asking. "How do you know the AI isn't misleading you? Are you sure it's not sometimes hallucinating a grammar rule, or telling you that 'fuck' means eat'? Do you really trust an AI language tutor?"

Well, yes and no. Obviously one cannot know with 100% certainty that everything the AI is telling you is correct. But with external validation and my own knowledge of the languages I am studying, I am fairly confident I'd know if the AI was spouting bullshit. And I have yet to catch it being blatantly wrong. Everything I've been told has checked out, and fears that it's going to mangle your attempts at basic communication are mostly obsolete.

That said, I still rely on textbooks, immersion, and actual human teachers for the bulk of my learning. AI is good for when I want an instant answer to a question, or assistance in my regular learning routine.

I have looked at those "AI tutors" and fully AI-powered language learning platforms being advertised on social media (always with the goon-y AI avatar…). They're still crap compared to an actual human; speech recognition still tends to be very slow and error prone, especially when the AI is trying to understand a student who's likely to stammer, mispronounce words, and use incorrect grammar. There is probably a future, maybe not too distantly, where AI can replace human teachers the way it's currently hollowing out the translation industry. (Another lengthy topic; AI isn't good enough to replace the literary translators who translate Haruki Murakami, but it's killing translators who work on basic corporate product, web copy, UIs, and the like.)

As with coding, there is a combination of cope and hope: some people are saying AI is not "killing" translation as a career, but refining and enhancing it and hollowing out the low-end work, leaving the job of supervising and correcting AI output to the real experts.

I dunno, man. Sure seems like a lot of entry and mid-level coders and translators are losing their jobs (and wherefore therefore are the "experts" going to come from?) But sorry, that's CW. So moving on…

AI can absolutely help with your language learning and you are missing out on useful tools if you don't use it. (Easy trick that needs no AI expertise at all: YouTube now has a Gemini-powered "Ask" feature. Load a video in your target language. Tell it "I am a B2-level language student. Provide a list of words and phrases from this video for me to study before listening. Generate a list of questions to test my listening comprehension." It's amazing.)

AI Art is still mostly for gooning (or Anki flash cards)

I am learning to draw and I've always been into graphic arts. So of course I have been approaching AI from both ends, sympathizing with the creative community's intensely negative reaction while being curious about what AI can do and using it myself in ways that make sense.

I will use AI to generate images when I need a pretty picture and don't much care about provenance or artistry. RPG characters, flash cards, pornj/k, but seriously, Stable Diffusion is an incel-hazard, civitai will introduce you to fetishes you never wanted to know existed…

I don't feel guilty using GPT or Stable Diffusion when I need "a picture of a blue whale in the San Francisco bay" or a character illustration.

But when I notice it being used professionally, it annoys me. RPG and boardgame publishers are increasingly using AI art – not all of them, but the shoestring operations are, because let's face it, AI is hella cheaper than a human artist. AI art still mostly has that AI sheen with blurry edges that is usually pretty easy to spot (it's been referred to as everything from "uncanny valley" to "piss filter") and when I see it, even though it should not influence what I think of the content, it does. Same for book covers; certain subgenres in the indie space (mostly emerging from fan fiction and Royal Road…. think progression fantasies, LitRPG, harem novels, etc.) are notorious for the very predictable AI-generated huge-tittied anime girl. It's understandable; these are mostly broke writers who will be lucky to sell a dozen copies, so there's no ROI in paying even a cheap artist from DeviantArt or Gumroad for a cover. But it puts me off when I see it.

What many AI opponents don't realize, or want to acknowledge, though, is how good AI is becoming. Most everyone now knows that the days of spotting extra fingers or shadows going in the wrong direction is very 2024, but if you read /r/isthisai you know that there are still a lot of AI "tells" that even the best models have a hard time avoiding. It's becoming trickier, but while the telltale strands of hair melding into the cheek or useless belt buckles are subtle clues that AIs will eventually be trained to avoid, there is still something about the basic composition and angles and values of AI art that gives it away as not something conceived, laid out, and rendered by a human making decisions. There is, dare I say it, an art to creating art that machines can only imitate.

I recently retook Scott's AI Art Turing test. I scored above average the first time, and it's been long enough that I had mostly forgotten which images were AI and which ones weren't. I scored 37 out of 50 this time, supposedly putting me in the 94th percentile; the ones that fooled me repeatedly were the AI images by Jack Galler, who seems to be very good at prompting AI to imitate specific art styles that look like a Monet or a Matisse. Those and the abstract pieces because let's face it, who can tell whether a human, an AI, or a monkey made those?(I kid. I actually think someone better versed in art history would be able to tell.)

(The way to spot AI art is to think of every stroke as a decision, and ask yourself, "Would a human artist make that decision?" When you start doing this, it's often very easy to spot AI, even if the picture is objectively "good," because you will see little dots of paint or cross-hatches or brush strokes and think "Why would the artist put that there? Who would decide to add a line there?")

I don't hate AI art but mostly I'm agin' it for contexts where I expect to see professional art.

But you know what it's pretty good at? Looking at my value studies and telling me if I'm off. Evaluating my proportions and contour drawings. I don't think AI is ready to replace art school either, but it's good enough to tutor you. And soon it will be good enough to fool you almost all the time and human-made art and human-made book covers will be a sort of artisanal craft, where a few very high-end and well known artists make money and everyone else just cranks the AI and shops it.

I am not sure how I feel about this, honestly. I feel bad for artists, but not as bad as I feel for translators, because artists are fucking insufferable (see below).

Infinity Billion Kindle Books Per Hour

And now the subject nearest and dearest to my heart: writing. I am a writer (with minor credits and a bit of microfame). And writing is not being spared the scourge of the clankers.

Writing is an area where I am also very confident in my aesthetic sense and ability to recognize good writing. As with art, AIs are getting smarter and learning to avoid the obvious tells (m-dashes, "Not X, but Y…", repetitive three-part structures), but as with art, there are just some things AI can't avoid because it doesn't have the human sensibility to craft words the way a human would and recognize when a human wouldn't craft words like this. Right now the main "tell" is verbosity and over-explaining, as well as a certain "tone" that feels like the verbal equivalent of the piss-filter.

This has not stopped people from using AI to write books, of course.

The earliest AI novels were absolute trash. They couldn't keep the plot, they couldn't maintain character consistency, they were not much better than regurgitated TVTropes Mad Libs.

Current AI novels are still trash, but they are becoming coherent.

There are now commercial tools claiming to be able to generate epic fantasy trilogies with character and plot continuity across multiple volumes and prophecies in book one that deliver in book three.

I'm not willing to read an AI-generated trilogy, but I've read the first few chapters of some AI generated novels. They are still dreadful. Flat dialog. Pedestrian tropey characters. Spelling out every beat and every emotion. They read like a sophomore who just finished taking a creative writing workshop. But… they're probably better than the average slush pile entry.

Magazines suffer under the deluge of AI-generated story submissions, but editors still have no trouble recognizing AI writing.

I must own my biases here. AI art makes me go "Eh" but I often consider it serviceable enough. AI writing, especially for fiction, and especially when offered up by people trying to sell their books, makes me go "Eww!"

Besides the obvious phenomenon of people churning out AI Kindle books and hoping to make some money if they spam and SEO enough, there have been a number of recent scandals involving writers using AI. The horror novel Shy Girl was pulled because readers clocked obvious AI writing. Granta awarded its prestigious Commonwealth Short Story prize to The Serpent in the Grove, which readers also noted read very much like an AI trying to imitate a Granta Commonwealth award winner.

Sita moved quiet as if sound were taxed. Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance. Orphan was too kind a word. Orphans are sometimes cradled. Sita had been passed like a parcel from kin who were hungry for everything except another mouth; she learned to make herself small, to take the shape of whatever container held her. Someone decided two solitudes might cancel each other out and married her to Vishnu. They did not cancel. She wore her role without protest and without light; both things can be true.

I am not surprised it was clocked as AI (though the author still denies it). There is a story here… a dirt farmer in Trinidad decides he wants to get rid of his wife because he's got eyes for some hot young thing. But the entire story is choking with these overwrought writing workshop similes.

Writers being caught leaving AI prompts in their text are hilarious, of course, but what's notable is not that writers are doing it, but that they are defending use of AI.

I would never use AI to write fiction. Fiction is art and craft and a semi-pro hobby for me and using AI, even if it gets good enough to write better than me, would be defeating the purpose. But can I envision a future in which AI can actually write a space opera that will hold my attention and make me say "That was good, I want more?" Where AIs can assume different "author" roles with distinct and recognizeable styles? I am skeptical, as I am skeptical of AGI, but I wouldn't say it's impossible.

And one reason I wouldn't say it's impossible is because I have started testing its ability to act as a beta-reader and a developmental editor.

Not long ago @gattsuru praised AI for its ability to provide meaningful feedback on his own writing, and I looked at the feedback and thought it was very generic and full of the usual AI glazing and twitches. My experience to that point was that when you ask an AI to critique your writing, it will say some stuff that's more or less on point, but about as specific as a horoscope reading. Its ability to follow a novel-length plot was limited by its (relatively) small context window and cranking it twice would get you two different critiques. I tried and dismissed it as being useless for anything beyond surface-level line edits. (Even AI haters have to admit that AI is now an actually competent spellchecker and grammar checker.)

Then I tried Fable with a seven book series, and I no longer think that.

To be sure, if you just try to upload seven books and tell Fable "Here's my rough draft of the next volume, whaddaya think?" it will give you… mostly general glazing and AI twitches. Because for one thing, no commercially available AI can actually hold the text of seven books in its context window.

BUT! If you set it up right, with a claude.md file that references all the sources it should consult and when, you can give it the text of seven books, a series bible, character sheets, and exactly what you want out of it, and holy shit, it starts talking like an actual developmental editor.

And by that I mean yes, it actually sounded like someone who had read all the previous books and could look up events from earlier books and check whether your references are consistent. It finds plot seeds you planted two books ago without you specifically mentioning them! And when I asked for specific critiques, bounced ideas off of it, and debated whether I should do this or that, its input was… consistent and intelligent. I did not always agree with it, as I would not always agree with a human editor, but it actually sounded like an intelligent reader. More often than not, I found myself, even grudgingly, thinking "The AI has a point."

I have avoided asking it for "ideas." I don't want an AI's help in deciding what I am going to write. But sometimes it offers "solutions" even when I didn't ask for them and…. hrrm. The AI's ideas are no worse than what I have gotten from human beta readers.

Damned if I can't see how it could become a temptation, especially for an author with deadlines who actually has to make a living at this.

I am not going to replace a human editor with an AI. But I definitely consider an AI to be capable of making a very competent "first pass."

Likewise, I will not replace my human beta readers with AIs. But here, too, I find the AI helpful enough to make first passes. (Note: developmental editing is not the same as beta-reading. I have created multiple "beta reader" personalities, which each attack the text with their own consistent approaches to it. And honestly it's kind of fun, like when first I run it through "Snarky takedown artist" guy, and then run it through "Autistic consistency and realism checker" dude, and then run it through "Woke sensitivity reader" chick, and so on.)

AI may be coming for writing. (Okay, it is already coming for writing.) But it's coming for editors and paid beta-readers first.

The Woke Butlerian Jihad

And here's where I will drop just a little bit of CW here: I can't talk about this, enthusiastically or otherwise, in any of my hobby circles, because the animus against AI is becoming so extreme. AI witchhunts are becoming endemic (did this poor sap use AI for her covers, for her promotional blurb, both, or neither? I honestly don't know) and I pity artists who now have to show multiple WIPs to prove they aren't using AI and still often get accused of using AI. I have gotten blowback for mentioning that I even touch AI. To suggest I might actually run my work through an AI and take its feedback seriously is to taint the work with AI, and for some that's as bad as if I just had an AI write the story. Needless to say, posting AI art elicits rage.

I get it, I get that artists, writers, and others feel threatened, and for good reasons. But ye gods some of these people are so insufferable. I think Asmongold is a cunt, but while rubbing artists' noses in AI is kind of a cunty thing to do, man do some of them have it coming.

(On the other hand, Shad Brooks is an even bigger cunt. No, bro, you are not a "professional level artist" because you can use AI and Photoshop to resize Supergirl's shoulder-to-hip ratio.)

What, you were expecting a point? A conclusion? A summary? Ask an AI for one.

I sort of wrote a book, I'm waiting for AI to get good enough to finish it and then start writing me new books based on that book. Sounds like it is getting closer.

At some point it should just get good enough to write books based on vague ideas and good feedback. I'm looking forward to that.

RPG and boardgame publishers are increasingly using AI art – not all of them, but the shoestring operations are, because let's face it, AI is hella cheaper than a human artist...

Yeah, it's starting to show up everywhere that the specifics of the output art don't matter.

And it may not be just the cost driving that: working with or around artists has a lot of other failure states on top of it. However bad the intellectual property concerns for AI artwork are, it's not as likely to literally trace Devil May Cry or Touhou fanart unless you put a lot of effort into making it. It's a lot less likely to show up with the assets three weeks late. And barring mechahitler Grok, you don't have to worry about your imagegen tools ending up the high-profile example of the day on Twitter.

What really bugs me is where people use AI art despite having actual assets that would be more representative and credible. Minecraft modpacks and content creators have heavily bifurbicated between the users and the antis, like everywhere else, but there's further split between people who use it as if it's the only images they have, despite screenshots being more useful and relevant. This might be slop on top of a well-executed traditional trailer video, but then you see stuff where there's just slop the whole way through, as if Ben Garrison was in charge of their marketing.

And soon it will be good enough to fool you almost all the time and human-made art and human-made book covers will be a sort of artisanal craft, where a few very high-end and well known artists make money and everyone else just cranks the AI and shops it.

Eh... I dunno. The gooner market seems like it should be the most maximally able to do it (and, bluntly, having the lowest standards), but it really hasn't gotten there, there. Even if the art can 'fool' you, or be what would be technically impressive for a human to make, that doesn't make it interesting or good in the way that an MSPaint scribble can be. This (artist: pantheggon. cw: f/f, mind control) is the sort of thing that an AI-gen model could easily do, in terms of artwork quality, but it's also notably not the sort of thing anyone's actually done with AI-gen. Even where you let the machine build direction for you, and , .

It may be we end up with more of a muddle, where the higher-value the effort, there more buyers can justify the cost of human intervention, and that ends up a sliding scale of completely AI 'junk' content, intermediate works where there's a lot of human planning and the AI is doing the busywork, and then at the high end stuff that's computer-mediated only in the same sense CGI is.

Right now the main "tell" is verbosity and over-explaining, as well as a certain "tone" that feels like the verbal equivalent of the piss-filter.

That's interesting: the really harsh tell for me is the pacing. You can 'beat' a model into playing a little better toward a specific tone or form of speech pretty easily with an exemplar file or some pretty basic OpenCode setups. With the correct subagent layering, you can kinda get it to switch tones or character voices from one chapter to another. It's really hard to get it to stop treating each subsection as a crescendo of its own, and that gets my hackles up.

I'm not willing to read an AI-generated trilogy, but I've read the first few chapters of some AI generated novels. They are still dreadful. Flat dialog. Pedestrian tropey characters. Spelling out every beat and every emotion. They read like a sophomore who just finished taking a creative writing workshop. But… they're probably better than the average slush pile entry.

Some of that seems downstream of the tools being very incomplete. I'm still finding the most effective option is OpenCode and a handful of custom skills, and it's still not good there so much as indicative that mainstream processes suck, but it points.

Of course, the default-version stuff that sucks is already selling enough to be a concern.

Not long ago gattsuru praised AI for its ability to provide meaningful feedback on his own writing, and I looked at the feedback and thought it was very generic and full of the usual AI glazing and twitches.

(context, probably?)

I'm a little curious, here. I didn't push those sessions very hard on prose quality, since I don't really want to replace my tone with the LLM's form, but a lot of the advice on plot notes, character psychology, and specific actions seemed pretty specific.

Like, I'll admit AO3 has things better left unimagined, but 'your crossdressing female main character hasn't considered all the aftermath of using a men's urinal, then is surprised by a gay guy being uncomfortably close to her' seems like it's not overrepresented in the training data, and it's an important enough scene that I did try throwing a version with intentional errors and the model caught them. The Diogenes/Stoic thing is more mainstream knowledge, but actually drawing the thread through a character who's pretending at self-abnegation and instead undermine his ability to communicate. Or stuff like figuring out whether a bench press is being described correctly, or how well I've extrapolated how different species might adapt to swimming.

They're not always right, especially when 'right' is defined as 'the story I'm trying to tell', but it's a far cry from just throwing 'tighten your prose', 'X character needs more depth' and a dozen em-dashes out.

I agree that they're very prone to positivity and agreement bias ('glazing') and to the standard AI ticks, but if I'm not intending to use the prose from that discussion, that seems pretty easy to overcome. It'd definitely be better if they didn't, and the few times I've gotten genuinely critical analysis has been a lot more rewarding.

The more complete claudemd or OpenCode versions are a lot stronger, especially as the input work increases.

I am not going to replace a human editor with an AI. But I definitely consider an AI to be capable of making a very competent "first pass."

Yeah, they're a lot better as original-level beta readers than final ones. Doubly so for genre works, but even general-audience stuff they're still more capable of saying stuff about what an average (if very broadly-read) human would think, rather than your actual readers.

And here's where I will drop just a little bit of CW here: I can't talk about this, enthusiastically or otherwise, in any of my hobby circles, because the animus against AI is becoming so extreme.

Oof, very much an increasing thing in a lot of circles. Writing, RPGs, video game mod artwork, code discussion. And there's a lot of downstream mess: a number of environments are adding AI-assisted tags, and then you get people who bulk-block everything with it whether they're using it for a few minor pieces or just doing an edit pass, and then you get people who don't use the tags even where their entire project is clearly AI-gen, and then we end up in a situation where users who are legitimately trying are invisible to anti-AI people and the spammers are all that get through the gaps.

And then the loudest advocates tend to be Asmongold or Shad-likes, regardless of their volume, because the obnoxious ones get the most publicity and repetition

Your objections to LLM-assisted writing has always been more aesthetic than otherwise. I have no argument that can change your mind about that, and I've tried. But at least we are in line about the pragmatic things.

AI is incredibly useful. And more so every damn day. If Terence Tao is increasingly reliant on it, I am impressed by how some of our forum denizens can find little utility for it in their lives. Good for them, I'm sure they're saving money on a paid plan.

If Terence Tao is increasingly reliant on it

Do you mean "reliant" in the sense of "having or showing dependence" or in the sense of "confident; trustful"?

The latter.

Ok, that is by far the more reasonable option, even if I find it less natural as a matter of language.

It is, of course, difficult to strictly evaluate the extent to which a third party is "increasing" in a sense of reliance/confidence/trust. That said, I would note that a couple days ago I referred to this recent blog post by Tao, where he presented some criteria that he says he uses to guide his usage. I don't necessarily agree with them all, but I do get the sense that he maintains a distrust of them, even while trying to get as much value out of them as possible. In the comments on that blog post, he re-endorses his comments on using "AI on the red team" from this paper, which also reads to me as having a sense of distrust and trying to describe ways of working with the thing that he has a sense of distrust in, while leveraging its strengths.

As someone who has just finished Inifnite Jest (and so have earned the right to be insufferable for the next few weeks) all I will say is that AI definitely helped me understand what was really going on throughout different sections of the book and all the links between things and throwaway comments that were made hundreds of pages earlier. I think I'd have needed at least 3 readings of the book to get as much out of it as I did with one reading plus 5.6 Sol sitting next to me to bounce my questions and observations off of. Definitely added to the reading experience.

If the market is genuinely preferring AI written or assisted literary/artistic works over the human made counterparts then it's the Authors/Artists who need to adapt and change. Yes there will always be a niche for pure Human stuff, just like how there's a niche for DFW type stuff (most people would not consider 1100 pages of walls of text that don't really go anywhere including 100 pages of endnotes, some of which have their own endnotes to count as "good writing"); but it will be a niche, and the anti AI people need to make peace with that, just like how the "don't use AI for coding" people have had to make peace with the fact that pretty much all code now ends up written with AI.

And yes, AI will not be writing anything on the level of art as Infinite Jest for a long while, human writers/artists should stop serving low grade human produced slop and switch towards attempting grander works or fail in the process. If you're not mediocre, you're safe from AI for a while yet.

The hair melding into cheek AI image tell is a funny one in that the manga/anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, widely considered a genre peak of character design, very famously features a main character who constantly presents a mystery of where his hat ends and hair begins.

I recently used Copilot for a work task and it worked well, it gave me what I wanted (and indeed included a couple of points I had been thinking about but didn't tell it).

So that was good. But it was too good, because it incorporated stuff I had not directly linked or directed it to use. So now I'm even more suspicious of how much data the big corps are scraping from us and connecting all the little dots from the tasks we do and the information we upload every day. Butlerian Jihad when?

As for the story, yes. It reads like a parody of the kind of writing that wins such awards (or indeed the most recent Hugos. Put a bit of a SF/Fantasy spin on that story (like "The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere" about a second-generation Chinese gay guy worrying about coming out to his conservative parents), submit it for the Hugos, and it stands a damn good chance of winning). Before AI, you'd have to mug up all the winners in the favoured "quaint natives regaling us with their curious primitive folkways" style by yourself, now the AI will do it for you!

It's not even a particularly good story, it goes nowhere in the end, and while reading it I kept being reminded of Stephen King's "Dolores Claiborne" where the title character decides to get rid of her alcoholic, abusive husband by arranging for him to fall down an old well. Maybe that too was the inspiration for our author?

To suggest I might actually run my work through an AI and take its feedback seriously is to taint the work with AI, and for some that's as bad as if I just had an AI write the story.

I'd like to point out that my policy of "try to avoid all AI output because it's a potential memetic hazard" would indeed declare such a work to be tainted (though not as bad).

(With that said, I'd still only be particularly angry at you if you didn't tell me; I want all neural nets destroyed, but I'm in favour of co-ordinated meanness on that one.)

The editorial journey is partly a process of becoming entangled with your editor. It's the commissioning process continued and helps enthuse publishing companies and make them want to back your book. After editing they feel they have a stake in the work, that they've done their due diligence, and have some faith in the book's provenance.

I don't see this part of the role of editor being replaced by AI yet, so I think many editors will still have a job for a little while, even if AI becomes a useful part of the toolset for even decent writers.

I mostly agree with your takes but i think that the comparison between text and image generation is comparing apples and oranges a bit.

I'd argue that an image is like a paragraph of text and AI is pretty good at generating those. If you went and created a chapter in a story by prompting paragraph by paragraph you could probably end up with something ok but it'd take more effort than just writing it yourself.

There is also an aspect of how people consume these things. How long do you spend looking at an image and how long does it take you to read a chapter in a book?

AI struggles with generating long form things whether they're visual or text.

As for how using AI for professional purposes often seems lackluster I think that is mostly an effect of exposing how bad people are at design, art direction and communication in general. When you're doing the art yourself or have an artist do it you kind of get it baked in through the unspoken assumptions about the work and the limitations of what you or the artist are actually capable of creating. AI empowers people with poor design skills to generate something. Previously people would have gotten hung up on how technically incompetent the art itself would have been, now the poor design skills are exposed instead.

I think anyone who has worked on commission for almost anything know what I'm talking about. Customers do not know what they want, regardless of whether what they're ordering is a renovation of their home, some kind of software feature or art. They think they do, but they don't. Even if they know what they want they're almost invariably unable to describe it.

In some ways, I think there is a similarity between how people are fooled by AI, mistaking coherent communication for greater intelligence than is actually present, and how we evaluate human intelligence and competence more generally. When someone communicates coherently, we assume intelligence. Conversely, when someone fails to communicate coherently, we assume non-intelligence. This is a useful heuristic because it often corresponds with reality, but it isn't reality.

People frequently learn to communicate in ways that signal intelligence and pass casual evaluation. They acquire the right vocabulary, the right cadence, phrases, and the ability to express familiar ideas with confidence. But once you spend more time with them, you may realise that it is largely a learned façade and that they are seemingly barely sentient. One might even say that college is designed to teach this. For example, the person who speaks fluently in management jargon during a meeting may still be unable to explain what should actually be done, or why.

People over-index on language, and this produces faulty evaluations of both human and AI competence. The products people create with AI are (now) often more revealing of the limits of their own competence than of the AI's. A model may be capable of generating polished prose, a plausible strategy document, or a technically competent image, but it cannot compensate for a user who lacks judgement about structure, taste, or purpose. A slick presentation with no visual hierarchy, and no discernible argument does not necessarily demonstrate the limitations of the software...

Just as the democratisation of speech online though places like Twitter exposed how retarded your fellow man is, AI exposes the poor design, writing, and visualisation skills of the people using it. Fluency can conceal incompetence, but tools that make fluency cheap ultimately makes that incompetence easier to see.

And here's where I will drop just a little bit of CW here:

I will take this opportunity to point out that, in my own dabbling, I have noticed that, when given a race-neutral prompt, a local decensored LLM will always make all the characters white.

  • A while ago, there were several controversies regarding companies' clumsy insertion of nonwhites into race-neutral prompts. What happened to that? Have they just gotten better at hiding it?

  • If a prompter knows that his race-neutral prompt of "Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall." will always generate a white woman, and he doesn't make the extra effort of manually adding "Pick race randomly between white, black, East Asian, and South Asian.", can he be considered racist?

  • To what, if any, extent should LLMs produce a mixture of races in their responses to race-neutral prompts?

It's hard to do a serious analysis, but my gut check is that the mainstream image generators are still doing it, but they're a lot better about keeping it to psuedo-realistic versions. "Man with soldering iron" is a lot more likely to get a black or hispanic guy in addition than the sizable Asian majority in the training data, for one example, but "American civil war troops" is either all white or at least credibly 'might have been very tanned'.

On the 'should', I don't think there's a moral position, but from a pragmatic one, if you've got faceblind people in your audience there are benefits. And if people don't ask, variety means you give them options to ask; if they don't care, they've increased contrast at no cost to their message. At the risk of stepping on my usual soap box, there's some benefits to variety, here: when everyone in the scene is Yet Another Blue Wolf, figuring out who is who across multiple stills or shots is a nightmare.

To what, if any, extent should LLMs produce a mixture of races in their responses to race-neutral prompts?

AIs besides Grok tend to weight nonwhites more highly in general, see the statistics: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange-rates-updated

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-fairness-in-realistic-settings

In June 2025, Adam Karvonen (independent) and Samuel Marks (Anthropic) published “Robustly Improving LLM Fairness in Realistic Settings via Interpretability,” which found that, under realistic conditions, contemporary LLMs would consistently favor otherwise identical resumes with female or stereotypically black names over those with male or stereotypically white names, even when explicitly prompted not to show any race or sex preferences, which previous papers had suggested was sufficient to eliminate this behavior.

In short he also then replicates this for more modern LLMs.

In my own experience some Claudes were fixated on Nigerian judges, peacemakers, journalists. This has since died down...

To what, if any, extent should LLMs produce a mixture of races in their responses to race-neutral prompts?

Fully generalized: if training data has a large proportion of rubes and a small proportion of bleggs, the LLM ideally should reproduce that proportion of rubes and bleggs in its outputs (not rounding up or down in every output, but averaged out over several outputs).

I don't have the data but I heavily suspect that it currently prefers to output the most likely object (a rube) every time, especially if it suspects rubes are more desirable. I've seen a youtube short (epistemic level: youtube short) where they showed a diagram demonstrating that human output was fat around unpredictability while every big LLM family's output was fat around the average in the same way. It would explain why it feels like slop.

I got my bum pinched, visiting a gay bar on the day of the Pride Parade in Glasgow. It was more bemusing than offensive. TBH, I'm not offended at all, I went to one of most famous/notorious gay bars, and I was well groomed and wearing pointy shoes. Dunno what the women are complaining about.

"He's so gay he can't walk in a straight line!"

And you just got pinched?

They took my pennies from me.

Dunno what the women are complaining about.

This sentence actually made me angry. 10/10 bait, made me reply.

Can't let Count do all the work, can I?

I object to this characterisation of myself.

You object to many things, dear sir, and they're rarely to be believed. We'll see what the judge has to say about it.

It's only a matter of time until you write your coming out as bi post.

If by "time" you mean the Heath Death of the universe. I'm painfully straight, as in I'm straight and it causes me pain.

A hunter is walking in the woods searching for the biggest bear he can find when he stumbles across a giant brown bear. He pulls out his shotgun, steadily aims, and fires at the bear. The bear seemingly falls into a nearby ditch and appears to be dead. The hunter slowly walks over to the ditch, until he feels a tap on his shoulder. The man turns around, and just as he does, the bear asks: "Did you shoot me with that shotgun?" The man replies "Yes", and the bear throws down the man and starts raping him.

In a few weeks, the hunter devises a plan for revenge on the bear. He brings his double-barrel shotgun and is really ready to get even. He walks through the woods and sees the bear, so he steadies his aim, shoots the bear, and the bear falls into the ditch, seemingly dead. The hunter slowly walks over to the ditch, and just as he does, he feels a tap on his shoulder. When the man turns around he sees none other than the very same bear standing above him. The bear asks the man, "Did you just shoot me with that double-barrel shotgun? To this the man replies "Yes", and the bear rapes him.

After a month has passed, the man has recovered and is very eager for revenge. He brings an elephant tranquilizer this time and is sure he will have enough firepower to take down the bear for good. Just as before, the man is walking through the woods when he sees the very same brown bear. He steadies his aim and fires. The bear falls into the ditch, and the man slowly walks over to him. After searching for a while, the man is tapped on the shoulder once again. He turns around slowly to face the brown bear. The bear then asks him, "You don't come here to hunt, do you?

>strong, dominant rapist

I see why many women say they prefer the bear.

I have interacted with bears. But politely, and from a respectful distance. It's the twinks you have to watch out for.

Says the guy hanging out in a gay bar for Pride who enjoyed the attention of having his backside pinched. Suuuuure you are as straight as a ruler 😁

Now ma'am, let's review the evidence like good Bayesians. I spend most of my drinking hours at a gay pub. My friends here skew overwhelmingly LGBTQ: my closest friend in the area is an asexual lesbian (a contradiction in terms, though she reports only 90% confidence, down from 99%, so the market is moving, and I might be to praise/blame for rehabilitating men). The regulars assumed I was in a relationship with a bisexual man. I was not. I just tolerate him because he's a good guy who looked after me during a bad stretch, which I gather is what relationships are, but never mind.

Further data: my younger brother came out to me as gay. At least five independent observers have seen photos of a distant shrink uncle and rendered the verdict "this dude is so gay it hurts." I wear nice Chelsea boots, and spent my first months in this city genuinely puzzled as to why obviously gay men kept complimenting them. I may have written an ethnographic analysis in a gay pub.

Any reasonable model, fed these inputs, converges on one conclusion. And yet:

I was also offered, variously, two blowjobs, a rimjob, and a golden shower. I declined with gratitude. It is good to be desired. It is also good to have boundaries.

I have been propositioned dozens of times, across various states of sobriety, by men. The answer remains no. I appreciate the interest, truly. But I love women, an affliction exactly as inconvenient as it sounds, and one for which medical science has no treatment. My sole consolation is that they like me back.

Says the guy hanging out in a gay bar for Pride

(I was in Glasgow to see a woman. She was busy, so I killed time at... gay bars.)

This all reads like you're halfway to Narnia. I'm sorry.

I'd left my coat in the closet. Next to the real skeleton I owned in med school. I mean, I do own one still, it's just a bit hard to access.

Just beware: when a skeleton dies, it turns into even bonier bones.

My friend, were I listening to a female colleague going on about how she kept being hit on by lesbians even though she was a straight cis woman, and then it turned out she regularly visited lesbian clubs and bars in the company of lesbian friends and was always being identified as a lesbian because she dressed like one and had the regulation lesbian haircut and was having confused hot chicks hitting on her at Pride parades...

... I'd wonder. I'd wonder a lot why she didn't just stop hitting up lesbian bars if she didn't want to be hit on by lesbians since she was so terrifically straight?

"Gosh, why am I putting on these love handles? It sure can't have anything to do with the boxes of Cadbury's Roses I keep eating!" 😁

I was in Glasgow to see a woman. She was busy, so I killed time at... gay bars.

And your wife doesn't understand you, and you're only staying together for the sake of the kids, and you're getting that divorce any day now, honest, so just keep hanging on while we have this affair, O mistress mine. Yep, I believe you!

And your wife doesn't understand you, and you're only staying together for the sake of the kids, and you're getting that divorce any day now, honest, so just keep hanging on while we have this affair, O mistress mine. Yep, I believe you!

Now then, I have expressed fondness for older women, but while I might be visiting Ireland out of boredom, no need to go that far. I like you for your brains ma'am.

You'll be otherwise occupied in Pantibar or the George.

asexual lesbian (a contradiction in terms,

As a boy I had 3 or 4 crushes before I ever had anything like a sexual urge, and yet they were all crushes on girls. "Asexual heteroromantic" would have been a good descriptor. I presume asexual homoromantic people exist too, in great numbers before puberty albeit smaller numbers after.

Bro, no judgment, but you sure talk a lot about how many gay men come onto you (because you hang out with gay men) and then get really defensive about how totally not gay you are. Like, at this point either you're doing a bit, or...

It is a bit? I would hope that's blazingly obvious my man. Would you prefer I start throwing in "/s"? I find that approach crass.

I think you know me well enough that you should believe me when I say that if I had any real desire to engage in happy fun times with another man, there's nothing stopping me. Why don't I? Because I don't care to.

I am not gay. I am not a bisexual in denial. I like putting penis in vagina. I have the self-awareness to find it rather amusing that I find it fun to hang around gay people. I have been accused of having the musical taste of a gay man, but then again, they're the Jews of the music industry (let's not talk about the gay Jews).

It is a bit? I would hope that's blazingly obvious my man. Would you prefer I start throwing in "/s"? I find that approach crass.

If this is just a bit, it feels a little disingenuous. You frame it in terms of whether you mind being groped, but whenever you tell us about this stuff happening, you are implicitly bragging about your sexual desirability.

Not accusing you of doing this consciously, but that is how it comes across, especially since it is a regular thing (imagine a female poster who regularly makes cutesy complaints about how her male friends keep simping for her)

I am not gay. I am not a bisexual in denial

It was more bemusing than offensive. TBH, I'm not offended at all

I'm not entirely straight myself, but from observing, listening to, and reading the accounts of fully heterosexual men, any kind of sexual contact with another male is gross and disturbing. The fact it was just "bemusing" does not sound fully heterosexual.

I find it fun to hang around gay people

You aren't just hanging out with people who happen to be gay though - you're going to explicitly gay events and spaces, where you expect beforehand to get sexually touched by males, and this doesn't deter you. I'm reminded of how people with weird fetishes often want to just have the fetish dynamic just happen organically, instead of having to seek it out:

  • Oh no - I've been captured by a latex-clad, busty blonde femdom Mord-Sith who tortures me (but also sexually teases me sometimes, to uh, make the torture psychologically worse)
  • My wife caught me looking at sissy porn, so now she is forcing me to become her feminised cuckold slave, thus freeing me from the stress and responsibilities of being a man
  • Fascists have taken over and removed women's right, so now I have to have sex with and get impregnated by Chad be ritually raped in "ceremonies" by "Commanders"
  • I just like hanging around gay spaces, and sometimes this leads to me being sexually touched by men. I'm not into though, I just let it happen as a lark. Maybe I should do some light experimentation with them, for a part 2 to my amateur gay ethnography survey

...if I had any real desire to engage in happy fun times with another man, there's nothing stopping me

Aren't you in a (presumably monogamous) relationship with a woman?

It seems to me that your chief complaint is that I'm too secure in my masculinity. Uh, what am I supposed to be doing about that? No, seriously. I have few qualms about hanging out with gay people or in gay spaces, or both at the same time, because I genuinely don't particularly care how that comes across. It's clearly not affecting anything IRL. God knows most women would prefer their would be husbands be more like gay men in some regards, as long as they don't actually sleep with other men.

I'm not entirely straight myself, but from observing, listening to, and reading the accounts of fully heterosexual men, any kind of sexual contact with another male is gross and disturbing

.... Fellas? Is it gay to kiss your homies goodnight? Oh, only if you use tongue?

I don't really care that a drunk dude, in a gay bar, pinched my ass. I laughed and waved him off. If he'd gone further, I would have made it very clear that his approaches were unwelcome. If he still kept it up, his nose might have a quick date and breakup with my fist. It's never gone that far, because gay men aren't barbarians. A polite "very kind of you to like me, but you're wasting your time" is usually met with laughs and/or apologies.

Some straight men would be more physical and angry about things, but you wouldn't catch them in gay spaces either.

And now, if you're postulating that this is some kind of weird fetish? All I can do is sigh and turn off my phone. Or just go to sleep, because I need the alarm in the morning.

Aren't you in a (presumably monogamous) relationship with a woman?

I don't think anyone has started taking testosterone while I wasn't looking.

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It's become enough of a pattern that people are asking questions. It may not in fact be because you are gay, it could be because you've discovered a new subculture that makes you feel at home while you are going through a tough time and helps you connect with your brother (I think you said he was gay?) it could be something totally different. However it's usually because you are gay so even if that isn't it - it is certainly an impression you are slightly giving off.

I well understand why people might suspect I'm gay. I find it amusing, really, since at least to my own satisfaction, I'm as zero on the Kinsey scale as one can get. Adjusting for the kind of floating point error you wouldn't notice on a pride float.

Am I offended when people online suspect I'm gay? Not really. If I cared, I wouldn't supply the material. I'm more annoyed when people take my rather definitive declarations that I'm straight as evidence of denial. Gee, the dude who regularly writes essays about falling in and out of love with women is gay, is all I can say to them. Bisexuality is a harder to adjudicate diagnosis of exclusion, but we've moved past the ICD-10 paraphilia era.

I can only sigh in exasperation. If I regularly defend gay and bisexual subcultures against attack, it would take a particular form of intransigent self delusion to not acknowledge tendencies to join them. I don't acknowledge them because they don't exist

Honestly, there's are plenty of prosaic reasons I hang around with gay people. I started going to a gay pub entirely by accident (I have that essay about the shock of realizing it's a gay pub, I'm not very observant at times), and picked up gay friends. This well predated my brother coming out, but might have contributed to him feeling comfortable doing so. He could see I was more than comfortable treating gay people as human beings, though I can only hope that he had enough reason to trust me before that. Humans are weird like that, he could have told me a decade back and I'd have had his back, that's what brothers are for.

What else? Those environments are, as you suggested, quite novel to me. And there's always some drama going on, I pack my own popcorn. I also appreciate that they're quite understanding and accepting spaces, not that that's for my own benefit. I do not like moral busybodies, not that you can't find them there too.

More recently, I'm seeing a (straight) woman heavily enmeshed in the culture. She dragged me to a drag queen night the first date (I went willingly, I was just curious), and her best friend is a gay influencer. That kinda constrains the option space for me, you know, not that I particularly mind. If there's booze and people to tell me about their mental health issues, I'm content. You only get one of the two at work.

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What are your predictions for the odyssey ? Will it bomb, will it flourish, will it be meh? What it has going on for it are Nolan, star studded cast, one of the greatest adventure tales ever told. On the other hand for every Dark Knight in his career, Nolan has produced a Dark Knight Rises and all of his movies are one hour longer than needed. The casting has definitely some strange and odd choices. And whether there is appetite for mythical destruction in the public after massive woke coded fantasy and other flops in the last few years remains to be seen.

Personally I will probably skip it, unless invited by some extremely hot chick. After so much culture warring - I just can't get excited for the big Hollywood productions anymore.

I saw a clip someone uploaded and oh boy. Nolan just went straight for the liberal political discourse. It was Penelope and Odysseus in bed at night with baby Telemachus beside them, and she was trying to persuade him not to go to the war, and he came back with the geo-political strategic reasons why the establishment were pursuing this war and it was unavoidable (Agamemnon was using Helen's abduction as his excuse to break Troy's trading monopoly, he would not give up on that, so Odysseus had no way to say no).

Well doesn't that just scream ancient Greek epic of martial honour and warrior values to you, modern audience citizen? How can you not love and applaud this movie?

And of course it was as dark as the inside of a badger, but that's only because us proles don't appreciate subtle modern cinematography.

I really wish he had gone the Shakespeare adaptation route and set this in 1950s USA or 1890s British Empire or some damn thing. That would be a fresh take and he could then insert his Colonialist Politics For Beginners lectures without them seeming as much out of place.

EDIT: I'm not saying Nolan is wrong about that, in fact it's part of the historical interpretation take on the siege of Troy (and very well-established by now, so he's not doing anything novel for those who have read even a little on this), and of course Odysseus as a canny political operator himself would have been well aware of all that in the background motivation. But it's so jarringly modern to come out with it like that while in the trappings of ancient Greece that it breaks immersion and makes you go 'this is Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway' and not 'this is Odysseus and Penelope'. Odysseus and the other suitors swore the oath, back in the day, to go to the help of her husband. That's what is dragging him into this expedition: he is honour-bound by his oath (ironically, suggested by him as a solution to Helen's father) to join Menelaus and be under the authority of Agamemnon as leader. Helen's abduction by Paris (whether or not she went willingly) is an insult to the honour and reputation of Menelaus personally and to Sparta politically, and since Paris is the son of the Trojan king, Troy has to answer for it. It's all a tangle of obligation and status and upholding the warrior caste standards, as well as manoeuvring for political advantage. Reducing it down to "breaking trade monopoly" is tin-eared.

Odysseus doesn't want to go. How will he get out of it? Is being an oath-breaker better or worse in this case? If Odysseus is prepared to break solemn promises, how can you ever trust him? If he breaks this promise, what about promises to spare enemies or make peace? Is this war justified? Even if it isn't, can he break the oath?

I don't know if Nolan explores all this, or just has three hours of Damon mumbling and grumbling while squinting at the horizon.

Funny thing is that the movie can't commit to being modern. Spoilers, obviously.

Instead of the modern materialistic view of the Bronze Age collapse (i.e. complicated confluence of material factors like drought, loss of tin supply, etc. - people are still debating) it's a straightforwardly moralist tale (humans break gods' law and suffer) except that the morals are themselves very modern. We hear nothing of Troy suffering for Paris' violation of sacred law.

Instead the entire Bronze Age ends because Odysseus didn't apply "do unto others" to his grand ploy in the middle of a war. The rules-based international order sustained by xenia collapses because it cannot bear the betrayal.

There's a sort of divine hiddenness that's also a bit strange given how the movie preserves other supernatural elements.

This leads to the most ironic coda possible for this whole thing: Emily Wilson, who became the scapegoat for this movie's deliberately modern dialogue and themes online, criticized it for being too modern

I don’t know if it will bomb or not. But I watched a CAM bootleg on my computer this evening. It was literally the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Now, given that it was a pirate copy and most people don’t n ow what that means, imagine someone with a camera on a tripod in the projection booth filming the screen. As such, I can’t really say if the visual impact of the movie makes up for everything else. But since the fidelity was so low, I have to judge the film by its characters, theme, acting, dialogue and plot. I give it a 2, 1, 0, 0, 1 in each category. Overall score 1 out of 10.

I just watched The Return last night. As such the final scene with Odysseus, the bow, and the suiters was particularly horribly executed. I beg everyone who’s watching the Nolan movie to go find and watch The Return. That movie is also flawed, but the final scene is absolutely epic. Watching Matt Damon swing and axe around in a circle like a retard is laughably bad. And watching him play a famous archer and basically hip firing a bow and arrow is so silly.

I saw one good review say it was “Bracingly modern”. With that, I agree.

Are all Nolan movies this bad? I know he’s got some detractors out there, but I recall telling people I liked Oppenheimer. I need to rewatch it to see I was just caught up in the hype of that too.

It’s hard to emphasize how bad I thought a lot of it is. And then to see the critical reviews give it a 10/10. And I’m sure all of the normies will rave about it too. Am I just crazy?

It’s the worst movie Ive seen in quite some time.

Are all Nolan movies this bad?

I haven't seen The Odyssey (and won't unless someone physically drags me along), but I think he's a tremendously overrated director. The Prestige is his only film I can really say I like without major reservations. Oppenheimer is overlong, tedious and populated by characters who seem more like robots than human beings: it is beyond me how anyone could honestly claim to have enjoyed the last hour. Memento is gimmicky nonsense (comparisons to the similarly overrated and contrived The Usual Suspects are well-deserved), a puzzle to be enjoyed once and discarded. Tenet represented him at his most indulgent, and could have been a lot of fun (its "core mechanic" certainly has a lot of cinematic potential) if not for its infamously appalling sound mixing and charmless nepo baby leading man: unlike Oppenheimer, at least it was never boring. The Dark Knight had a soundtrack which effectively conjured a mood of dread and anxiety and a staggering performance in Heath Ledger's Joker (I'm not exaggerating when I say it's one of the best performances in any film so far this century), but I think the effectiveness of that performance has distracted audiences from noticing some of the film's glaring flaws, namely a plot no less implausible than any other capeshit film, an anticlimactic ending, and action sequences just as incoherent as those in the rest of his oeuvre. (In spite of all that, I'd still probably put it in the W column for him, if begrudgingly. I can imagine myself watching it or Batman Begins if I was on a long-haul flight and there was nothing better to watch, the same circumstances under which I watched The Prestige.) Interstellar showed this infamously cold and remote director attempting to go a bit softer and Spielbergian, and the results were embarrassing: sentiment is not something you can fake, as anyone who's used generative AI will tell you. Dunkirk was a transparent attempt to do a Bri'ish take on Saving Private Ryan, and benefitted from featuring extremely sparse dialogue (believable dialogue was never one of his strengths), but missed the memo that Ryan's bloody, brutal grittiness was an essential element of what made it work: a gritty PG-13 war film is a contradiction in terms. I haven't seen Inception since it was in the cinema, but don't remember especially enjoying it, and have always found the basic concept of "it's a movie which is a metaphor for making movies" kind of silly and masturbatory. (I do remember feeling exceptionally annoyed at the Nolan fanboys patting themselves on the back for being able to follow the film's plot, and insisting that anyone who didn't like it was just too thick to understand it. It's not Primer, lads.)

I've noticed that every time a new Nolan film comes out, it makes a lot of money and critics praise it to the heavens as his best film yet – but inside of a year, everyone has completely forgotten about it, which I take as a tacit admission that these films are ultimately rather shallow and unmemorable. I bet you'd all completely forgotten about Dunkirk before reading this comment, hadn't you? Inception was probably his last film which made any kind of durable impact on popular culture. Not only that, but he's getting worse over time: neither Tenet nor Oppenheimer were good films, but the latter was measurably worse. I have a hard time imagining anyone will be talking about The Odyssey ten or even five years from today: even his biggest fans certainly aren't talking about Tenet now. People will say the latter film might have made a bigger impression if it hadn't had the bad luck to come out during Covid, but that's cope and everyone knows it.

If Insomnia, Following and The Dark Knight Rises are widely considered indisputable masterpieces, that's news to me. I have a hard time imagining even Nolan himself would claim TDKR exceeds either of its predecessors in the series.

In spite of all that, it's almost disappointing his films largely leave me cold, as there's a great deal about him I respect. His insistence on shooting on film and keeping CG to a minimum is admirable: as incoherent as his action sequences are, from a purely visual standpoint I think many of his films will age far more gracefully than many of their contemporaries. I likewise commend his refusal to simultaneously release his films in cinemas and streaming platforms. The decision to cast a black woman and a trans man in The Odyssey was probably a sop to fend off the entirely warranted accusations of his being a crypto-conservative: politically, The Dark Knight can be summed up as "the PATRIOT ACT was good and necessary, actually" – not a sentiment I'd endorse, and yet not one I can imagine any other blockbuster director encoding into one of his films. Dunkirk was unabashedly, unapologetically patriotic in a way few films of its type are these days (something progressive critics recognised on release, derisively characterising it as a film made for Brexiteers and taking him to task for depicting the British armed forces of the 1940s as fuggin' white males, a historically accurate casting decision he made a point of repeating in Oppenheimer). Politically, he's probably the Hollywood mogul with whom I'd have most in common, and can imagine him being a very interesting dinner party guest, as long as we were talking about something other than movies.

I agree that Nolan is overrated, but I think it proves how desperate audiences are for solid filmmaking craft, which is something that Nolan does really well. He builds big sets and shoots on location and performs real stunts, and at least makes an effort to utilize the power of visuals. I don't plan to make a special effort to see this movie, as I'm just not a mythology enthusiast to begin with, but I'm willing to believe that it's much better than the usual theatrical dreck.

Agreed. As much as I might criticise the man, I'd take one of his films over the modal green-screen Marvel/Disney slop any day.

I probably remember more about the South Park episode parodying Inception than I do the movie itself.

I also agree that The Prestige is probably both his best and most underrated work (I haven't seen Momento or The Odyssey, though). Great unity of effect, and manages to line up the plot and theme in a way that is pretty rare.

I saw one good review say it was “Bracingly modern”. With that, I agree.

Are all Nolan movies this bad? I know he’s got some detractors out there, but I recall telling people I liked Oppenheimer.

This movie kinda was Oppenheimer. Matt Damon single-handedly caused the Bronze Age Collapse,that event with a famously singular cause, and the movie is wrestling with that.

I heard about that bit, and I can only think it is supposed to refer to "I solved the problem of how to conquer Troy and have Greece win the war, which meant the Greek fleet all heading home at the same time, and then they (like myself and my ships) had to invade islands for food and supplies, and killed the inhabitants, woe is me, the Bronze Age Collapse is all my fault".

Funnily enough, reviewers whose tastes often align with mine (we all agree Rings of Power is terrible) saw the movie and really liked it, so it must come across way better on the big screen when you watch the entire movie, because the trailers were dogshit.

The movie does posit that the Sea Peoples are returning Greeks for that reason.

But that isn't even the main problem. The movie outright states that the thing that caused the collapse of the entire civilization was the breaking of xenia/Zeus's law because of the Trojan horse gambit and the attendant sack (no mention is made of the much more unambiguous violation of hospitality that kicked off the war).

The movie makes an outcome whose cause so uncertain we debate the causes today into a pretty straightforward monocausal event.

Funnily enough, reviewers whose tastes often align with mine (we all agree Rings of Power is terrible) saw the movie and really liked it, so it must come across way better on the big screen when you watch the entire movie, because the trailers were dogshit.

It's much better than I thought from the trailers. Trailers were awful and bland and I suspect that's part of why the antiwoke stuff was able to dominate. The PR just didn't give you much.

TBF they didn't have to. The story is the story and Nolan is at the peak of his powers in terms of box office draw.

but I recall telling people I liked Oppenheimer

At the time I said this for Oppenheimer - It becomes one of all time best movies if you remove everything but the Manhattan project.

I think it's gonna be too heavy on the dark and brooding and too light on the action. So many of the trailer shots are the brooding looks and traveling and not enough of the action. Which might be more accurate to the story. Also people are gonna hate the story of what happens at his home while he is gone. It adds a lot of length to the story with a very long payoff time.

But it's Nolan so maybe the action will look awesome and kick lots of but.

I like Nolan as a director but he doesn't film great action sequences. His best ones involve massive vehicles or airplanes; anything that is human-on-human is a blurry, boring, mess.

But it's Nolan so maybe the action will look awesome and kick lots of but.

Not if I go by the trailer with the Laestrygonians. I hope the battle scenes are much better than that mess.

I saw it yesterday and I liked it a lot. It's definitely not perfect and I can see certain things that could ruin it for people, but overall I think if you enjoy Christopher Nolan films in general, you will enjoy this one. I'll try to say some things about it without spoilers.

Two major things I could see ruining it for some Mottizens and why they didn't ruin it for me:

  1. Culture war. My impression is the culture war nonsense is pretty superficial, so for me personally it didn't bother me too much. Okay, race swapping Helen is silly, but I don't feel like the culture war stuff affected the interpretation and the themes of the story. I feel like Nolan genuinely had a vision for this film that doesn't have much to do with the culture war du jour. I didn't get the idea that this is some conscious progressive subversion of the original story at all. I think all of the actors that were complained about beforehand as diversity hires, did a fine job or at least not a bad enough job to ruin the film for me. In terms of less superficial stuff, the only culture stuff that popped into my mind while watching the film had to do with the fact that the theme of hospitality plays a major role in the film, which it also does in the book btw. There was a line or two where I was thinking, maybe they want me to think about immigration or something in relation to this hospitality stuff, but if that's the case, the film is sending a very ambiguous message about it and not just pandering to progressive culture war memes. Honestly, the fact I was thinking about immigration culture war here might well be culture war brainrot on my side.

  2. If you are a history nerd and care a lot about adaptations being super faithful to the books and historically accurate and such, there is probably a lot to get hung up on in this film. All of the armor and boats and stuff have nothing to do with Bronze Age Greek stuff. There are some shots in flashbacks of Agamemnon in armor at Troy and frankly he looks more like batman than like anything authentically Greek. For me it probably helped somewhat that I only read parts of the Odyssey like 15 years ago or something during Ancient Greek lessons in high school. I had some overall familiarity with the story, but when something surprising happened to me I couldn't be sure if this is some detail that I haven't read or forgotten about or whether this was a deviation from the source material. There are one or two hamfisted interpretations/themes in there where I thought it would have been better if he didn't spell it out as much as he does. On the other hand some Nolanisms were actually incorporated skillfully in harmony with the source material. Nolan always plays around with time and non-linear storytelling, but the original source material is also somewhat non-linear, so that actually worked surprisingly well.

I think those are the two major things I think could ruin the film for some people who are sensitive to those issues. Now onto two things I really liked.

  1. When we compare it to the 2004 Troy film, one massive difference in which Nolan is much more faithful to the source material: it includes a bunch of supernatural stuff. If you've ever read a fragment of Homer, you will know that the gods aren't vague background things, they are very much actively involved in the story. Honestly, if anything, we probably should have had even more and more direct involvement of the gods than Nolan gives us, but I think Nolan gives us about as much gods as modern Western audiences can handle without it becoming goofy.

  2. The characters at times behaved not at all like modern westerns. That is to say, while some influence of contemporary morality and values that we all take for granted is impossible to avoid in something like this, otherwise the film would probably be completely unwatchable for modern audiences, there is a degree of violence and brutality that is at least somewhat trying to represent the original Bronze Age story, rather than sanitizing everything for modern audiences.

Overall, if you're so fed up with culture stuff that you immediately rage-quite when you see a silly raceswap even if it is somewhat superficial and doesn't affect the underlying story, you are probably not going to enjoy this film. Otherwise, if you enjoy other Nolan films, I can recommend seeing it. It isn't perfect, but I personally enjoyed it a lot.

Granted I haven't watched all of Nolan's movies recently, but I don't think he's made a good movie since The Dark Knight Rises. Interstellar and Tenet were both godawful, though the former at least had a banger soundtrack. I would expect this movie to be more of the same.

Interstellar I've enjoyed watching several times. Tenet I did not enjoy as much but it was a great moviegoing experience. Just as counterpoint.

Interstellar has grown on me. Tenet had a good idea but couldn't execute it in a way that was entertaining.

Dunkirk was quite good. Oppenheimer was well shot and had sharp dialog up until the final scene with RDJ, which was so unbelievable it took me out of the movie.

I don't think it'll flop, woke fatigue usually takes time to set in (Star Wars 8 grossed a gigajillion dollars) and Nolan's track record gives him the benefit of the doubt.

As for whether it'll be good. Probably? It's a good story, by a good director with good actors. I'm of the opinion that you should lean into the goofiness of the Odyssey because the underlying plot is kind of grim, but we'll see how this one goes.

There is practically no competition in terms of summer blockbusters right now, and Nolan has a lot of name recognition. Same with The Odyssey, most people have at least heard of it. It could be the biggest trainwreck of a movie ever produced and people would still go see it just on that basis. Critics are going to glaze Nolan no matter what. If it turns out to be a complete stinker in terms of audience reviews, it's going to hurt Nolan's next movie, not this one. (Edit: currently it's sitting at a 89 critic score on metacritic, and a 5.1 user score...)

I'd be surprised if it cracks a billion though, because the movie doesn't seem like it will appeal to the Chinese / international market.

(Edit: currently it's sitting at a 89 critic score on metacritic, and a 5.1 user score...)

Kinda strange. On rotten tomatoes it is 96 and 97 correspondingly. Is there a history of audience score mismatch between metacritic and the tomatoes?

A billion will be huge success. What is the break even point of the movie - usually it is around 2.something the budget?

Critical Drinker hasn't released his review which is strange. There is chance the movie is so good he has nothing to rant about, but it is doubtful.

On one of Drinker's recent vids he mentioned he was visiting a con and there'd be a break in uploads. He's previously pointed out good things in movies his audience expected him to dislike (e.g. one of the Wicked movies). Hopefully he's not too audience-captured to call things honestly here.

If you want to get a bit tinfoil hat, Rotten Tomatoes is a subsidiary of Comcast. So is Universal Pictures, which is the distributor of The Odyssey. If I were a conglomerate that owned both a movie distributor and a movie review aggregator, it sure would be tempting to crack down on "inauthentic review bombing" or whatever.

Apparently break even is $650-750 million, given the large budget and marketing costs.

After the movie leaked on 4chan, apparently they have been frantically DMCAing anything with even a single frame of the movie. That might be making things difficult for reviewers.

We're those real? They looked terrible, I'd have guessed they were footage shot but not used.

I don't watch many movies, I'm a bit burned out on Nolan and the trailer looked dreadful so I'm most likely skipping this, unless there is some really good WOM from people I know IRL.

It's a bit strange, seeing the almost universally glowing reviews and then the the national newspaper I'm subscribed to kind of trashed it in its review and then posted a series of other articles on why it and Nolan are kind of bad, for completely non-CW reasons.

Ultimately it's Nolan though so I don't think it can bomb.

A Swedish newspaper: Svenska Dagbladet

The reviews are stellar and I was served a Ben Shapiro review on YouTube and even he liked it. It's going to be a monster.

Didn't Shapiro like Return of Skywalker?

IDK - but lots of people were far less mad at that than TLJ.

In his review for Odd he argues that the weird casting ends up being fine, if someone of his politics goes for that....

I mean, I'm not touching it. All the promotional material looks awful, and the interviews I hear about are all the usual subversive plattitudes about undermining the original meaning of the work. I know there probably aren't many Odyssey stans since schools no longer teach western civilization, but I doubt there are enough anti-fans either who are willing to pay to see the original story ruined/subverted.

Wavering as to whether to call this Drunk Chef Review or Drunken Chef Review, but either way - two chefs visit a Michelin-star winning restaurant and get progressively more nissed as a pewt while enthusing over the food.

First time they did this.

nissed as a pewt

Is this an Irishism of some sort? Never heard this phrase before

It is a humorous Spoonerism for "pissed (drunk) as a newt".

Anyone else think the new Kimi K3 is overhyped? I tried it on openrouter and it thought for 15000 tokens only to produce a pretty incoherent response. Code-maxxed perhaps, not really a conversationalist.

I know various technical people said 'oh they're not distilling look at how these benchmarks are so high', I can't help but think Kimi stole a Claude base model and then did their own post-training on top of that. And their post-training was a truly nightmarish hack-job, given how locked down Fable was.

Hopefully Deepseek comes up with something good soon and at a better price, gives us a little more token efficiency.

I get most of my AI news from Zvi, and he suspects its real capabilities are less than its benchmark scores would suggest.

Also, everything since Mythos (except Fable) has been overhyped as being able to do some of the same tasks as Mythos can, where the "same tasks" they can do are the easy and less dangerous ones. The difficult and dangerous work of building an end-to-end exploit given a codebase remains otherwise out of reach.

The difficult and dangerous work of building an end-to-end exploit given a codebase remains otherwise out of reach.

Probably also for Mythos. We haven't seen that claimed verified.

I don't know how much more verification you need at this point.

I don't know what your threshold for "verified" is, but non-Anthropic companies are making that same claim based on their own tests. For example, Exploitbench shows Mythos (and GPT 5.5, but nothing else) gaining full control of a PC in their tests, and UK AISI found that it could take over a (simulated, weak) corporate network.

Last weekend Dublin hosted a "Trans and Intersex Pride" parade, allegedly attended by "thousands" of people. (I was out of town so I can't comment on the turnout.) Inevitably, it quickly devolved into an omnicause™ parade, with the announcers proudly announcing that the parade was both anti-capitalist and in support of a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

I just saw a poster advertising the parade which hadn't been taken down yet, on which the slogan was, no joke, "Transsexuals are Revolting".

Jeez guys, don't be so hard on yourselves.

(I'm sure that this play on words was intentional, but it still strikes me as terrible optics. One of the most common complaints trans people make is being thought of creepy and gross: I cannot fathom why the organisers signed off on a slogan which on its face amounts to "yes, trans people are creepy and gross".)

"My Lord, the peasants are revolting!" "Yes I know, I can smell them from here."

Classic joke. I can't see this as anything but mockery.

Mockery of who?

That's actually a good question. My instinct was that this is mocking transgender people, but after thinking more there could be some sort of ironic meta-mockery as well, like associating people who think transgenders are gross with the aristocracy. I think if that was the intent, though, it's a pretty big miss, because people will make the basic association (trans == gross) more easily than the subtle one.

It used the word "transsexual?" Is that word more common over there? It's almost entirely been replaced by transgender here, so the use of transsexual here would make me suspect a troll posted it, not someone part of the parade.

I was surprised by that myself. Maybe they're trying to reclaim it? Other than that slogan, the poster just consisted of the name of the parade, the starting point and time, and photos of various placards ("Hands off our HRT" etc.), so it seemed to be legit.

We're taking it back!

What art style was discredited the most by the AI? I have just encountered the works of Guillem H. Pongiluppi when someone posted his Chapterhouse: Dune illustrations, and I can't tell if they are AI or not. Both my eye and free detectors scream they are, but he's been drawing in this hyper-realistic, full-effort, high-contrast style for a long time, and this is the style that a lot of diffusion models use when you tell them to draw something "realistic, highly detailed, trending on Artstation". Imagine wasting years mastering a style that diffusion models will learn from your work and devalue your whole portfolio.

Or is he cleverly doing AI-washing now? Why draw anything yourself, if you can tell a model to draw "like Guillem H. Pongiluppi" and then get angry when someone compares your work to "AI slop"?

/images/17843613116444316.webp

I was not aware of Pongiluppi's art until just now. It is not what I'm into at all but it is effective for a certain market or applications where you would want that kind of style. You're right that a lot of AI art generators create things that look like his style, but really that's more of a problem with the taste level of the entire internet that scraping every image then weighing the output (or whatever) leads to this sort of aesthetic too often. I constantly have to tell ai generators to stop making everything look so high contrast, so epic, so deviantart, so hollywood 2010s film poster bla bla bla...........

I don't think any art style is "discredited" by AI, in the same way that PS2 graphics didn't "discredit" Alex Colville's art from the 1960s that looks freakishly similar to PS2 graphics. The reproducability of a style has more to do with the models/technology than the artists, for example AI can much more easily create artwork in the style of Van Gogh or Monet than it can create a high quality vector graphic design in the style of, say, Herb Lubalin, but it doesn't really mean that the value of a Monet painting is now less than the value of any graphic designer's work.

Interesting. I think the AI effect comes from the lack of meaning permeating his pictures. The characters are posed dynamically but without purpose. Gargantuan objects loom randomly. All sorts of outlandish crap from our commercial trash-heap culture are juxtaposed in a way that brings out their banality. Subtextually it's undermining itself, presenting a sort of anti-meaning. It's funny that he's probably going for these effects deliberately, whereas it's more of an inherent byproduct for AI.

I refuse to believe that LinkedIn posts were ever anything but a weird kind of avant garde performance art, so I'm going to say LinkedIn posts.

"Here's what having my avant garde performance art being accused of AI usage taught me about B2B sales!"

Is there any overlap between this forum and development forums in the vein of SkyscraperCity and CityData? SkyscraperCity is an urbanist forum, and I find it intriguing to browse threads there to see what infrastructure projects various cities are undertaking, including my nearest city.

CityData was originally more of a real estate forum where people could start threads to inquire about life in various American suburbs and small towns, and it's quite fascinating to learn about the amenities and ins and outs of a random small town most people overlook in a state that I've never set foot in. It's branched out into different subforums for politics, philosophy, theology, and hobbies. In a sense, it is like a smaller Reddit that is substituted with conservative boomers. The caliber of discourse tends to be higher as you don't have stoned vegetables giving their dilettante conjectures, though it does have a few occasional trolls.

I like CityData. It's one of the few places you can find honest assessments of neighborhoods which acknowledge their racial/ethnic demographics, something that has been completely taboo on Reddit and mainstream media for decades. (Even mentioning ethnicity outside of "bad thing happening, POC most affected" contexts gets you downvoted to oblivion and/or banned. (I've got a hunch that this is because the "intellectual elite" don't want the white hoi polloi to realize how far the Great Replacement has already gone.)) A nearby mid-rise apartment neighborhood called Mosaic has been overrun with Muslims for some reason, and a reddit comment that was quoted as calling it "Mosaicistan" was removed for "hate speech" or some such retarded reason.

I used to look at CityData back in the early days, like 2007/2008, but the posts got samey pretty fast, basically "Where should I live?" and people suggesting the same city neighborhoods/suburbs. When the conservative boomers took over it became damn near unreadable. Nobody could post anything in the Pittsburgh forum without the thread quickly devolving into the most predictable conservative talking points; the city is a mismananged, crime-ridden hellhole and would be much better if Republicans whipped it into shape and turned it into whatever exurb they prefer, which is obviously so much better. Everything was a waste of money (even if it was a Federal grant that would have just gone to another city). It was like reading the local news page on Facebook, except it was the same few people who had to get their 2 cents in on everything. At that point I quit even occasionally checking it, only to come back a few years ago and find that at some point the mods made it clear that all politics must be contained in the politics thread, at which point the sub just died, as the only people who were posting at that point were doing so to make cheap political points.

Hmm, with regards to activity and the people who post, I do think it depends on the sub-forum. Like many other forums, you have a select few crap-stirring regulars that make the experience less pleasant, and once you know which handles to ignore, it gets much easier to participate. There are some neighborhoods and suburbs that some people treat as the be-all and end-all, but I also do see healthy pushback to those kinds of sentiments by others. I appreciate that the people who post there tend to be more articulate and conscientious than Facebook or Reddit users, even if that bar is in hell. I would definitely consult CityData before a turboprogressive city sub if I wanted to solicit some relocation advice.

Personally, there's just something surreal about browsing through 2008 threads about the subdivision I grew up in, or one about a small town an American friend I've met here in Europe tells me he was raised in. You get to learn about the local chamber of commerce, gossip about municipal scandals, hidden gems such as an art gallery or a biking trail most people in the area don't know about, and the agreeable subdivisions of an otherwise poorly reputed suburb, etc. As a zoomer, I imagine this is the closest I'll get to living in the 2000s zeitgeist along with watching TV shows and listening to music from that time window.

What thing do women enjoy doing as leisure which involves the largest social organization? For men it’s probably something video game related: guilds with up to thousands of players, clans with dozens, or some large joint Minecraft projects, etc. What is the largest social organization that organically develops among women? I’m thinking it may be something related to fandom, eg k-pop fandoms probably organically develop into large organizations. Or maybe true crime communities that work in unison to piece together information across thousands of individuals. It’s interesting that these are both evolutionary — either loyal devotion to the männerbund, the tribe of virile men, or else village gossip, ensuring the safety of the community.

Daughters of the American Revolution.

190,000 active members.

The activity is ancestor worship, roleplaying corporate positions, dress up, and pin collecting.

That's meant to be tongue in cheek, my mom is in the org and roles her eyes at some of the stuff they do, but also likes the social interaction.

My mom is the one that verifies peoples genealogy and then organizes a signoff party where the local chapter all signs off on the new member. She recently got some of her sign-offs rejected because she apparently used the wrong blue ink pen. She was livid with these ladies.

When you start talking evopsych, you really have a way of making it sound like a sneer. I also think it’s foolish to model 1000+ member associations like they’re under Dunbar’s number.

Anyway, I’ll submit SCA, which I think is very female-heavy and more of an organization than any fandom.

Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, or maybe Christianity as a whole is the organization with the largest amount of organic female voluntary adherents. Groupies for God, if you will.

I was thinking more about those that are totally controlled and managed by women, at every level, but I think certain female monastic orders could fit in here. And you’re right, it is similar to a devoted fandom

Groupies 100% if they haven't already been swept into their partner's activities.

Maybe something like the American Contract Bridge League, about 130,000 members, mostly older women. Bridge used to be a very popular semi-organized past-time among housewives in the 1940s--1970s.

Okay, I think that beats my example.

I think you're right that it's groupies/fan clubs. Even before everything went online there were massive networks of fan clubs for each popular performer.

The Women's Institute has about 170,000 members, although these are really hundreds of individual chapters (a la Freemasons) so not sure if it counts.

Maybe political activism? Demonstrations and activist orgs seem to attract a lot of women.

For men it’s probably something video game related: guilds with up to thousands of players, clans with dozens, or some large joint Minecraft projects, etc.

Sports fandom? Tailgating, making big ol' tifos, that sort of thing?

Isn’t tailgating usually just a dozen or so people though? A somewhat low-level organization

Military remote viewer who not only discovered that aliens have bases here on earth that are used as repair centers for UFOs, but also discovered (via remote viewing) an entire planet of Bigfoot-like creatures. The Bigfoots are being harvested as slave labor by a more advanced alien race. This is important stuff.

Well, as long as they're not shooting the bigfoots, whatever they're doing is probably legal.

Big if true.

Surely you mean Bigfoot if true?

... I'll get my coat.

The Bigfoots are being harvested as slave labor by a more advanced alien race.

Bad news for the future of robotics.

I had the same thought lol. Modern AI has ruined a lot of sci-fi stories.

TBH this all "slave labor" always sounded ridiculous. I mean, you have interstellar technology and energy appliances that can evaporate stars, and yet somehow you still need to feed slop to extremely inefficient biological machines to mine minerals for you? I can see it as a punishment method, but as an economic model? Never made any sense.

In my time arguing on the internet, I've encountered a disturbing number of people who seem to think that having power over others is more desirable than any level of technological advancement. We have degrowth people IRL.

I thought degrowth people are just Gaia worshippers that think humans need to be punished for their sins against the Goddess.

In 2026 they're often socialists who are mad that there are hierarchies that do not have them on top. In fairness, this was also the case for many of the "gaia worshippers" (watermelons).

Having power over others is the only way to balance out others having power over you.

In my time arguing on the internet, I've encountered a disturbing number of people who seem to think that having power over others is more desirable than any level of technological advancement. We have degrowth people IRL.

This is nothing exceptional, this is how baseline normie human works. If you see it as strange and unexpected, be grateful to gods/fates/fortune for beautiful bubble you live in.

I don't think the baseline normie would openly admit, even pseudonymonously, that they would trade vaccines, central air and the internet for the power to rape chambermaids.

Each time I've had that conversation, it's been a similar path.

A. Capitalism fuels technical advancements that help everyone.

B. Those advancements only help the rich. They hoard them.

A. The newest tech may be gatekept by cost, but prices always come down. Even poor people in America have a level of physical comfort completely unavailable to a medieval lord.

B. But the lord still had more power! He had servants to make his life easy, that he would abuse and be horrible to.

A. The freaking Sun King shivered while a servant chipped at his frozen breakfast fruit because Versailles was impossible to heat with fireplaces. The average person on welfare in America can have fresh fruit at room temperature in the dead of winter.

B. That doesn't matter compared to the power over others!

Even if many normies would likely be at least mildly abusive with power, it takes a special kind of ideologue to openly talk about the power over others being an end in and of itself.

it takes a special kind of ideologue to openly talk about the power over others being an end in and of itself.

Somehow when people imagine going back in time to middle ages, they always imagine themselves as a knight or noble, and never as a peasant who works 18 hours per day. Despite the latter being vast majority.

I don't think the baseline normie would openly admit, even pseudonymonously, that they would trade vaccines, central air and the internet for the power to rape chambermaids.

They quite literally did this, openly, in 2020-2021. As you recall, it was seen as acceptable to the baseline normie that the group that invented the vaccine be given it last because Muh Social Justice.

"Don't be hideously evil to your fellow citizen" only works in times of positive-sum growth. Once the reality of degrowth sets in (including that which is permitted to be imposed by said hideously evil fellow citizens since the rest are too busy making money to notice it) the knives come out and the spiral begins.

There's some alien hegemon out there playing Stellaris with an overly detailed spreadsheet that can prove you wrong. Probably.

yet somehow you still need to feed slop to extremely inefficient biological machines to mine minerals for you?

I've always assumed that any species that evolves in the context of a hierarchical social structure is going to go to insane lengths to preserve their status as "not at the bottom of the social hierarchy" when that species goes post scarcity.

It may be inefficient to have bigfoot mine your coal, but at least you can sneer at him for being low humanoid capital while you watch him do it. That has to be worth something.

AGI implies the ability to produce agents that are more sneerable than anything humanity has ever encountered. Call it supersneerability.

There are much more efficient way to sneer at people. For example, full citizens can sneer at latini, latini can sneer at socii, socii can sneer at provinciales, and all of them could sneer at barbarians. All of it could be done without enslaving anyone. People are very good at constructing hierarchies, there are so many ways. Even if post-basic-material-scarcity society there would be some scarcities, not everybody can command a space ship or be the best Klingon opera singer of the galaxy.

Cultural/religious prohibition against manual labor (of certain types) being performed by machines?

Well, that's like when archeologists find some artifact they don't understand, they classify it as "religious", because anything can be classified this way and it doesn't have to make any sense. Who knows what kind of weird religion those people had, right? But that's not good writing, that's almost literally deus ex machina. Proper worldbuilders don't just push weird stuff into religion.

How is the Canadian forest fire smoke affecting you?

I feel like I'm in my own personal version of silent hill right now. The sun is almost fully obscured.

We were going to drive up to the UP yesterday and it has canceled that trip.

I’m in Mi. for a wedding and it’s a real bummer, since it’s normally gorgeous this time of year!

Was the wedding supposed to be outdoors?

It was and we ended up having it outside. Fortunately it cleared up a little bit and we had a good time!

Mi.

A daring synthesis. (The traditional abbreviation is "Mich.", while the newfangled postal abbreviation is "MI".)

Indoors it just looks like it's overcast outside. Outdoors, it's almost unbearable, with your lungs burning with every breath.

I lived in Montana for a few years, smoke doesn't affect me until you reach the point where the smoke is thick enough that the sun is no longer a disc.

There's some smoke in the air near DC but the whole thing seems like the typical weather overreaction that's common here.

Sun? What sun?

Where I am, the sun is no longer a disk. It's pretty wild to see if you're not used to it.

Dodged it, I live in northern Virginia. But currently finishing up a week at the beach down in the Carolinas.

The local pool board I'm on had a discussion about closing, they ultimately decided to close for guard and patron safety.

I've never seen it this bad where I am. Usually its just a haze that knocks 10-20٪ off my solar panel efficiency. Today it smells like burnt rubber and the smog reminds me of my visit to Beijing. And this is down in the far exurbs of the DC metro area.

What do you do to keep your airways safe?

Costco.com, Winix C909 air purifier. It comes with a 2-year supply of replacement filters, which is a better deal than can be found at Amazon. Depending on the size of your home, get multiple.

I bought 2 and some jackasses stole the extra filters and returned it to Costco, then Costco shipped it to me. Had to return it and get a replacement. It was easy to rebox though.

I wasn't asking for my own sake. I don't live in a wildfire area (so far).

But the answer seems to be: plenty of air purifiers in the home, because the air outside seeps in and becomes the air inside. And high quality masks when going outside.

Yeah. I looked briefly into DIY CR Box air purifiers, and while they can be quieter, more efficient and/or cheaper I don't have the time or skill to craft them. Easier to spend $200 at Costco and get a ready made purifier, and snag sone KN95 masks off Amazon for when you need to be outside.

You still have N-95s in your closet leftover from COVID right?

First time?

Buy an air filter, if you still can. Otherwise, DIY one. You might need one for every occupied room depending on your house size and how well air mixes in your house. If you don't have filtration, indoor air quality will eventually equilibrate with the outdoors.

At this point we'd probably need to anex Canada and genocide the "natives".

I'm staying the hell inside.

I was first! 1 minute ahead of you. :D

Haha, quite.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

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.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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