domain:worksinprogress.co
anon_
13hr ago
I dunno, we've freed ourselves from the tyranny of having to till the soil or gather firewood.
Yes, the world isn't fair and stoicism is probably the best overall frame, but it's not a justification for this extreme of helplessness. What's even more true is that, as of say, 1890, the social technology required to make the female experience suck less was already becoming possible. Whatever one says about the excesses of modern feminism, it's a sight better than 130 years ago.
Maybe some people need to hear the message that they can't make everything perfectly fair in some utopian pipe dream. But anglo culture still has a base disposition that, while not at all utopian, is still fundamentally optimistic.
Non-bizarre delusions are potentially possible, although extraordinarily unlikely. For example: “The CIA is watching me 24 hours a day by satellite"
you are missing "targeting specifically me", otherwise it is not really a delusion
and in some cases it would be still true even with amendment
anon_
13hr ago
I'm not sure how one would find out you are Christian "simply by looking at you".
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13hr ago
Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.
centre of gravity
Military terminology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_gravity_(military)
This seems like if it exists, it would be used often enough to be documented in existing lore. It's a hallucination.
It could exist. It's within the latitude given to an author to come up with some gambit for their book. It's a plot device to allow for a conflict.
The cruisers are the escort, not escorted
The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.
But the entire operation was an evacuation from the start. Nonsensical.
Well they lost the drone carrier and the terraforming device they wanted to keep. No use throwing good tau after bad.
AI always insists on coming up with some sort of special snowflake greatest weapon in the game to throw into every battle. While part of the atmosphere of 40k is the feeling of mundanity and futility of its battles. Low quality.
Did you miss the whole Cadia, Blackstone fortresses, big Marvel team up to fight the bigger bad in Chaos? Primarchs reviving? DAOT superweapons, the Speranza? Primaris Marines are the ultimate special snowflakes. Take it up with Games Workshop, they've been advancing the story in this direction. Relic vaults are definitely something the Tau Ethereals might have too, they have a sneaky vibe to them with their control over the Tau, possibly some kind of external technology base or heritage. The Ethereals definitely have Relics, so they may well have Relic Vaults. Drones are part of the general Tau vibe, they could easily have a drone-carrier.
You could just as easily criticize parts of the real lore as being hallucinations or not fitting the atmosphere. How come Kaldor Draigo was able to carve his name onto Mortarion's heart, that clearly goes against the lore of Demon Primarchs >>> random Marines? How come the power of an alpha-class psyker ranges from 'planetary-scale disaster' to 'low-tier psyker inquisitor can take them in a fight'?
Grav-sail is not real. And if it was it's not something needed to keep the ship in orbit.
There are some issues here, grav-sails aren't a thing but it's not beyond the freedom given to an author to make stuff up. Grav-chutes certainly are a thing as are gravitic drives. Kimi could give a perfectly adequate explanation - more experimental technology trying to fuse some captured Eldar tech into the Tau tech-base. These grav-sails were stealthy, agile, logistically efficient but it turns out they were fragile too and so didn't go into production. This fits the Tau, they're the only one actively advancing in technology in the setting. They have to be introducing experimental tech all the time and some of it won't work out. One could easily see distorted gravity effects from the damaged equipment causing the cruiser to fall out of orbit.
Now I'm not prepared to defend 'fire lanes'. I don't see how it's that bad though. As a whole, the wiki entry wouldn't have any value if it weren't creative and didn't add new things to the lore, albeit in a respectful and measured way. If a 40K book was perfectly lore-abiding then it would surely be sterile. It's not a cliched 'and then the Marines boltered through the hordes of aliens, xenos and mutants with Courage and Fury, enduring great sacrifice before the Biggicus Baddimus taunts them and exposes some weakness, whereupon he is banished back to the foul abyss' story. You'd just say that was slop even if it were fully lore-adherent and rightly so IMO. Better a creative work than some by the numbers piece, like Warhammer 50,000 and 60,000 - great fanfics albeit unfinished.
ulyssessword
13hr ago
The hoax is also pushed with a degree of nuance. The journalists always cite their sources and never claim it to be true themselves:
From NYT (I bypass the paywall by F12 to inspect the source, and delete < head > ):
The remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May.
No "according to" or anything for that statement, and it was last updated on March 28, 2022, compared to the clarification the First Nation put out in July 2021 (and another in May 2024).
ulyssessword
14hr ago
Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.
The Law Society of British Columbia isn't a journalistic organization, but that's exactly what they were claiming. The Left (i.e. all of the media except the countercultural ones) has run away from the story so hard that the only coverage is coming from the Right.
anti_dan
14hr ago
I think those kind of scenarios are actually rarer than people think. It almost codes to me that your college GF was not the same race/ethnicity as you because of that kind of gap. People rarely end up in college without having traversed some part of the middle class, and if you did, you are exposed to all or almost all the tiers of the middle class. My parents, when I was born, were lower, by the time my youngest sibling graduated HS, upper. Even while we were still lower, I had seen UMC houses and they were clearly not mansions. I had seen mansions, that is what Michael Jordan owned.
What is actually a common jarring experience for lots of people is when there is a talented family of people who live in a bad or even mediocre place. Like say you are a law student at a T14 school and you meet a guy at that school and he tells you his sister is currently on full ride scholarship to Michigan and his brother is going to Wharton. Most people assume this guy came from UMC at a minimum. But sometimes they come from some random rank 100 school in West Virginia and their dad is like a railroad switchman or some general store owner/operator. Such cases now are becoming incredibly rare because of things like Affirmative Action in college admissions and other "standardization" (which of course actually excludes actual standards like SATs and LSATs) procedures, but they still happen from time to time. Bell Labs at its peak was populated by many such people, and I had opposing counsel in a case recently who I basically described, with minor anonymization added.
faceh
14hr ago
Right. This is just the next step of a pattern that is already established. Money exchanged for the feeling of romantic or sexual attention/attraction.
They were already having a fully artificial 'relationship' with a digital 'woman' who doesn't know of their existence.
This just cuts out the need for a woman in the loop at all.
faceh
14hr ago
I dunno, it feels like a deathblow on top of all the other mentioned factors. The thing that finally kills our urge to climb out of the hole.
There's a version where the AI can teach a man (or a woman!) how to talk to the opposite sex and both select and become a good partner.
But thanks to molochian incentives, that's not what we will get, if there's an immediate way to use the tool to extract resources from people rather than guide them to what they truly wish they had.
sockpuppet2
14hr ago
What kind of engineer?
sockpuppet2
14hr ago
Can you charge at home for as long as you plan to keep the car? Quality concerns about Teslas aside, I think the main things to consider when weighing BEV or PHEV vs ICE are:
-
Can you charge at home for as long as you plan to keep the car?
-
Can you responsibly afford the upfront cost?
-
Do you like a car that's more "gadget" than "appliance?"
If "yes" to all three, you're probably better off with an electric car. If only the first two, it depends how much the "gadget" design ethos commonly used in BEVs annoys you. If you can't charge at home and/or the upfront cost is over a responsible budget, you're probably better off with a non-plug-in hybrid or ICE-only powertrain.
ABigGuy4U
14hr ago
I’m less concerned about the rare cases of complete psychotic break and more concerned about the rapidly nucleating cult behaviors that are quickly assembling into a an actual new religious movement.
phailyoor
14hr ago
This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).
Hmm point taken. That's certainly not ideal.
That would be incorrect.
The articles only reported that the first nations claimed that bodies exist. The articles never claimed themselves that the bodies exist, so the articles are not technically false. Nevertheless, CBC still was gracious enough to update the article and write front and center that there were no bodies, which is not something that they had to do at all, yet they did anyways. What more do you want CBC to do before you will be happy?
Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.
And yes, journalists should all be minecrafted, but that doesn't mean they're technically wrong, they're just evil conniving cunts.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
14hr ago
Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while. Replika, the most famous one, will already do NSFW ERP. And yeah, there are men (and women!) who have decided their Replikas are preferable to real people.
You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation? If a real woman can't compete with an AI girlfriend, neither can a real man compete with an AI boyfriend.
That said, I do think your fears are somewhat overblown. Porn has, IMO, been bad for society, especially the ever-increasing availability of extreme and degenerate porn like our grandparents could barely imagine. But I think alcohol and drugs and gambling and smoking are also very bad for society. If I could wish them all away, I would. These things exist, however, and society persists, accepting that some percentage will be sacrificed to Moloch, and Moloch always has new incarnations. I accept that AI companions are a hazard, but I don't think they are "the" thing that flatlines birthrates and normal sexual relationships.
phailyoor
14hr ago
I never claimed that AI is useless, I simply claimed that for the purposes of certain tasks, namely copywriting, AI is currently far far inferior to even below average humans.
I use AI every day for what it's good at, so I would be the last person to say that AI is useless.
phailyoor
14hr ago
Regarding the burial sites hoax, that is state sponsored propaganda, so any misrepresentations or questionably false statements are intentional, rather than mistakes. You wouldn't expect an article printed in the Pravda to misrepresent the facts accidentally either. AI is not immune to this, for example in chatgpt.com Sam Altman can put whatever narrative he wants into the system prompt and the ChatGPT will dutifully push it at every opportunity.
The hoax is also pushed with a degree of nuance. The journalists always cite their sources and never claim it to be true themselves: "According to [Insane sjw activist group], Donald Trump literally murdered 300,000 kids with his own bear hands." is not technically a false statement. As much as the reporting is insanely one-sided, I do believe that it's often newsworthy to report on the claims of [Insane sjw activist group] even though their claims may often be false.
They did not retract this article because it's not strictly false: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-emlúps-te-secwépemc-215-children-former-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6043778 The are re-reporting what the indigenous group falsely claimed, but did not ever make a statement of fact that there were actually bodies there.
Nevertheless, they actually provided a correction after the fact at the top of the article that says there were no bodies discovered:
Since this story was first published, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation has updated its findings and clarified that what was detected in the ground-penetrating radar survey were about 200 potential burial sites. Read the full story here.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14hr ago
Musk-level value was OP’s analogy
I said it was a "heavily attenuated" version of that. It was just an analogy, not meant to be taken literally.
ulyssessword
14hr ago
I'm going to guess without strong evidence that the vast majority of the views on the toronto article are of the corrected version.
I couldn't find the precise time to correction for the Toronto Star, but Global News was 5.5 hours. This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).
Regarding the bodies, I would hazard to guess that the articles themselves are not technically "wrong" and therefore do not warrant correction.
That would be incorrect. There are no reputable claims of bodies being there, and none have been unearthed or "confirmed". The Law Society of British Columbia (at a minimum, among other groups) is going against the findings of the First Nation in question, who are in charge of the site. The bodies were hallucinated into being four years ago, and they're still around now.
cjet79
14hr ago
That application you are working on does sound interesting.
I've been wanting to skip the middleman for a while and just have AI write the stories based on simple prompts.
I have an existing 300 page story I'd love to just feed to an AI and have it finish the story for me, or at least fix it up.
Back when I fed the first chapter to chatGPT it just told me that my story was offensive and refused to help me, which was when I stopped using it altogether and a few months later switched to grok.
Progression fantasy : Epics :: sex : love
And anything with a modern setting is just unbelievably boring or depressing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
14hr ago
You've made a profound and insightful point about online discourse in the age of generative AI. Let's break it down.
/uj you might be able to get away with emdashes so long as you steer far away from sycophancy
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
15hr ago
As it happens, I have also been dipping into LLMs-as-beta-readers lately, even going so far as to build an application that can read an entire series of books and learn its "lore," and a custom GPT instance that will "compress" a book into a format optimized to provide context to itself or another GPT. (As you probably know, even the most powerful LLMs do not have a context window large enough to store an entire large novel in memory, let alone a series, and you can't directly upload embeddings to GPT or Claude.) The intent of these projects is so that I can, say, ask GPT to evaluate the fifth book in a series with knowledge of the previous four books. It's a work in progress.
So, some observations. First, sorry dude, but I have major side-eye for your ability to evaluate literary quality. :p
That being said, I have also noticed the tendency of LLMs to glaze you no matter how hard you try to solicit "honest" feedback, unless you resort to tricks like you mentioned. (Telling an LLM the manuscript is by an author you hate and you want it to roast it will work, but that's not exactly useful feedback.)
The hallucination problem is hard to overcome, even with tricks like my token-optimizing scheme. I find that in most sessions, it will stay on course for a while, but inevitably it starts making up characters and events and dialog that weren't in the text.
As long as you can keep it on track, I have found that some of the GPT and Anthropic models are... not terrible as beta readers. They point out some real flaws and in a very generic sense have an "understanding" of pacing and tone and where a scene is missing something. However, the advice tends to be very generic. "You need to show the consequences," "The scene ends too quickly, you should build more tension," "There should be some emotional stakes the reader can connect with," etc. Clearly they have many writing advice books in their training data. There is nothing like true understanding of context or story, just generic pieces it can pattern-match to the writing sample you give it.
And when it comes to specific suggestions, I have yet to see an LLM that is actually a good (not "mediocre and banal but capable of producing literate prose") writer. Its suggestions will be a pastiche of flat TV script dialog and trope-filled scenes.
(That said, any writer will tell you to listen to critics when they point out problems, but don't listen to them when they propose solutions. So in that respect an LLM isn't much different than a human.)
But these are still early days for AI, so I don't doubt that in a few years, we'll have LLMs that can be at least as useful as your average writing workshop. AI writing is already flooding some genres, and while it's usually as easy to spot as AI art is, just as with AI art, a lot of people clearly don't care.
I find it fascinating and I enjoy playing around with it, but yeah, I think AI-generated novels will crowd out human writers in low-brow undiscerning stuff like romance and progression fantasies, and writing those stories will become something people only do as a hobby, just like people are still passionate about chess and go even though no human can beat a computer anymore. I still think we'll need true AGI to write an actual good novel. When you show me an AI that can write a coherent series, with multi-volume character arcs, plot seeds planted in early books that clearly pay off in later ones, literary allusions and metaphors that aren't just clumsy pulled-off-the-shelf ones but deeply enmeshed in the story, and a recognizable differentiable style (in the same way that fans can read Dickens or McCarthy or Hemingway and immediately recognize the author), I will believe we're there.
Not in the current form.
I'm dedicated to pursuing a quality of "authenticity," which I don't have perfectly defined, but definitely requires that my partner be a real human, with 'natural' skin, brain tissue, and standard human DNA. The thing that I'm ACTUALLY wired to find attractive, not something that mimics those things closely enough to pass a basic inspection. Related to why I don't really like Tattoos on women.
In many ways, we are descending into my version of hell, where finding meaningful connection with other humans is harder than is needs to be, where women are more focused on careers and adventures, at the expense of their own happiness, than even trying to find joy in bearing and raising kids, where men are fundamentally purposeless and nobody bothers to even try to create a purpose for them, and everybody is busy trying to live at the expense of everyone else, b/c coordinating to create that better future is HARD and we aren't able to see past the short term consequences of these actions. But I can, and it seems increasingly obvious where this is trending. And nobody with power is doing much about it.
And its all being patched over with digital (i.e. INAUTHENTIC) simulacrum that sort of satisfy the various urges without really fulfilling the purpose for which each urge exists, and these experiences that are simply insufficient to make you happy if you care to look and notice the cracks in their facade.
All the worse because I can clearly imagine a better set of circumstances that is happier for everyone, including myself, and I have a vague idea of how we could get there, but no real clue on how to implement that plan, and thus I am left to scrape by with whatever my individual efforts can achieve.
Tree
15hr ago
Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.
Doing has obvious value, I’m not sure being has value. Valued for being could just be an echo, a reminder of someone’s past, real doing-value, like the late aristocrats who were once warriors.
gattsuru
15hr ago
No. From the long form:
Community Hospital, the nonprofit that runs the clinic known as the Curtis Medical Center and a couple of other facilities in the region, plunged into the center of that national story when it announced on July 2 — one day before the bill’s passage — that a confluence of factors had made its Curtis outpost unsustainable. It cited years-long financial challenges, inflation and “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid,” the public health insurance program for lower-income and disabled Americans.
I think the underlying op-ed is this piece, which is... not exactly coming across as a neutral evaluation of the facts, or this one, which is better, but still makes it hard for any plausible drop in Medi* use to even be the straw that breaks the camel's back:
In their financial statement for last available financial year (ending June 30, 2024), Community Hospital brought in 6% of their $62 Million in patient service revenue from Medicaid, with about $4.1 Million coming into the hospital from the program. The Hospital operated at a loss of $1.67 Million for that financial year as well. Figures were not available for the most recent financial year (ending June 30, 2025).
In an opinion piece published in the Nebraska Examiner in February, Nebraska Hospital Association President president Jeremy Nordquist said that Medicaid pays for 26% of all emergency room visits in rural hospitals, alongside 33% of all births and 44% of all services to minors. He also said that 54% of rural, independent critical access hospitals are operating at a loss.
A lot of the numbers are coming from that Nebraska Hospital Association, which has been giving worst-case or worse-than-worse-case numbers.
I can certainly believe that the Medicaid changes will have an impact, but Hanania's implication that this was a sole and direct cause that people can't deny only because The Cheetoh has a "spell over them" is about as well-founded as his normal sneers.
She was white-passing Hispanic. She had a scholarship, and was living for free in the house of a Christian couple that let underprivileged youth sleep in their spare rooms while she went to school. Her parents were working, but were too far away from the school and not in a financial position to really help her pay for things.
To be fair to her, I don't think she literally thought my childhood house was a mansion. I just think that she went from a precarious lower middle class in a cramped one-story house, to basically homeless, and something about the "unfairness" of that hit her when she saw the way I grew up.
I'm sure you're right that it is relatively rare, but my stint working as a home caregiver for the eldery also showed me a lot of sad tales. Old people with mobility issues or parkinson's who don't really have a lot going for them: They can't do their hobbies because of their broken bodies and deteriorating minds, their kids or grandkids have often cut them off and live far away, and they just get ferried from doctor's appointments to physical therapy until they die a slow, sad lingering death. It is hard when you're someone's only lifeline, and you're only there because you're being paid far too little for the amount of shit you're putting up with.
More options
Context Copy link