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dashdsrdash -dsr- @awful.systems

Does something technical in the Boston (MA, US) area. He/him.

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Post your current Ziz news and discussion here
  • Explanatory spoiler for those who don't want to read Worm, a million words of deconstruction/reconstruction of superhero comics:

    spoiler

    The source of superpowers is a pair of gigantic multidimensional alien creatures. Their eternal mission involves finding a planet with intelligent life, infesting them with powers via brain tumor neural links, and encouraging them to fight so as to generate new ideas -- the aliens are profoundly uncreative, even stupid by human standards, but immensely powerful -- and when the planet is no longer producing, they reincorporate all the changed and combined powers, then eat the local sun to power their next FTL hop.

    When their experimental subjects aren't moving fast enough, they open up their archive and resurrect the Endbringers -- superpowered kaiju which provide a stimulus for cooperation by destroying cities on a schedule. Each Endbringer is unique. The Simurgh, or Ziz, takes the form of a giant statue of a woman covered in angel wings, and wings-on-wings, and so forth. Ziz has primarily psychic powers: telekinesis; a 'scream' or 'song' that drives people to violent insanity over the course of an hour or so; and mind-control that seems limited to slowly changing supers into creative serial killers and mad scientists and so forth. Ziz floats in orbit, preventing space travel, and periodically descends to the surface to terrorize a city.

    Everything escalates. Every trope is explained.

  • OpenAI launches then un-launches Sora, Twitter gives Grok away for free
  • As long as it isn't where he is, why should he care? He's retiring on Mars, anyway.

    (Please, deities, send Musk and Thiel to Mars soon. Together, if possible.)

  • 2023 study: how EA uses double meanings for a milk-before-meat strategy
  • You must prove yourself in the Outer Circle before being granted leave to study the Inner Mysteries. Or at least attend the right parties.

  • In which a Eugenicist Effective Altruist advocates becoming a cuckold for the greater good
  • Tchah! Decker does not go far enough!

    It is clear that there must be people better suited to raise children than a dimwit like him! He should arrange for his genetic superiors to breed, then give the babies to the perfect parents, and he should give them the one thing he has of value: money!

    (and please have nothing else to do with children ever again, k thx bye)

  • Peter Singer introduces the Peter Singer AI to elevate ethical discourse in the digital age
  • It's not just going to return quotes! It will return distorted quotes! I suspect you can get it to totally reverse a Singer position within five or six interactions.

    With luck, you can then show it to Singer and cause him to die of shame.

    We don't have that much luck, though.

  • The walled marketplace of ideas: a statistical critique of SSC book reviews
  • I have seen some controversy about whether white-passing people of Jewish ancestry count as “white”

    Let me clear that up: the people who ask if someone is actually white are racists.

  • Hello Matt this is your lawer speaking. I am advising you today to please keep posting this shit
  • "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

    I suspect that he is incapable of admitting to himself that he is in a hole, much less that he dug it himself.

  • Post your IT redundancy tales here
  • My semi-serious suggestion:

    "That sounds great. I'm going to need to take a course in how to best utilitize AI, and the existing timeline will probably need to change. To really engage at expert level, I will go look at best-practices from experts. You'll sign off on reasonable expenses, right?"

    Then book a trip to [interesting place] and get it expensed. Then look for a new job while promising great things in a few months time, maybe a year or so.

  • In a rare moment, the orange site asks where the emperor's clothes are
  • The history of technology teaches us that every non-trivial problem -- and a large fraction of trivial problems -- require specification beyond the bounds of conversational language.

    Greek geometers may have invented the idea of formalizing language with specific definitions, and inventing new symbols to represent special meanings. When important consequences accrue from getting things wrong, people develop jargon: knitters and sailors and shepherds and farmers; engineers and lawyers and plumbers. If you want to convey your knowledge and intentions, you can't chat informally and expect a human to really understand what you want.

    For about a century now we've had devices that turn instructions into actions. Everyone who uses these becomes an expert in the particular form of instructions that the device needs, or else they don't get what they want.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024
  • No wristwatch, but I have glasses and without electricity I stop breathing. (While asleep.)

    So, yeah, cyborg.

  • we're not Nazis btw
  • Grew up in fairly rural upstate New York, where you can expect lots of snow and you can unironically envy neighbors who have working Franklin stoves when the power goes out.

    I can confirm all of the above, plus: if you are lucky enough to have an Army-Navy surplus store around, one of your handmedowns is likely to be an N3B parka. Definitely not Russian or German or stylish. But it will keep everything above your thighs warm, except your hands. The pockets are uninsulated.

  • Honor Levy is the latest from Dimes Square. Truly breathtaking text production.
  • True, it's too advanced for my brain due to being poisoned by Perl at a young age.

  • I can only say: spot on, but not at all in the way you were thinking
  • A bunch of youse is thinking irrationally.

    It's them what go in front of the cannon.

  • the [simulated] are a convenient group of people to advocate for
  • Charlie Stross called the Singularity "the rapture for nerds".

  • I'm imagining you right now
  • Good luck with that -- I'm a pzombie this year for tax purposes.

  • “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” Thiel wrote in an online libertarian journal in 2019
  • Is that actually true? Have they been audited? One problem with long-term storage is "long-term" is a thing that humans are bad at.

  • here in Top Pedophiles Of Twitter, my "friend" thinks about race so very little that he shit-tests every new person he meets with a racial slur
  • The main character commits rape because this isn't a real universe anyway. You made the right choice.