RobotOverlord525's recent activity
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Comment on Millennials: How do you feel about nostalgia pandering? in ~talk
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Comment on Millennials: How do you feel about nostalgia pandering? in ~talk
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentTo be fair, if you are going to make a show a period piece, you probably don't want it to be completely incidental that it happens to take place in another decade. Making the '80s as irrelevant to...To be fair, if you are going to make a show a period piece, you probably don't want it to be completely incidental that it happens to take place in another decade. Making the '80s as irrelevant to Stranger Things as it was to the first season of Seinfeld (or the first seven seasons of Cheers) would not necessarily be the best way to structure the show.
That said, it's definitely possible to go overboard with irrelevant side details that detract from the storytelling in order to overindulge in nostalgia. I was never personally bothered by it in Stranger Things, but that doesn't mean that it hit the right balance for everyone.
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Comment on Millennials: How do you feel about nostalgia pandering? in ~talk
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentAgreed. Look no further than to the Epic Of Gilgamesh, one of the first books we've discovered in the historical record. We have different versions of it separated by centuries, written in totally...I think humans have an innate desire to recycle, reinterpret, and retell stories,
Agreed. Look no further than to the Epic Of Gilgamesh, one of the first books we've discovered in the historical record. We have different versions of it separated by centuries, written in totally different languages.
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Comment on Do you have a favorite setting shared amongst multiple authors? in ~books
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI wasn't a huge Riker fan (Geordi was my favorite character), but young-me accepted the narrative at Troi and Riker were "meant to be," so Worf was getting in the way of that. (Plus, I never much...I wasn't a huge Riker fan (Geordi was my favorite character), but young-me accepted the narrative at Troi and Riker were "meant to be," so Worf was getting in the way of that. (Plus, I never much cared for Worf as a kid. I was never keen on brutish characters.)
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Comment on What is happening to Japan? in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI think Fox News was the harbinger of the "choose your reality" phenomenon. Social media makes it worse, I'm sure. But the seeds were being planted in the '90s. To go back even further, I think...I think Fox News was the harbinger of the "choose your reality" phenomenon. Social media makes it worse, I'm sure. But the seeds were being planted in the '90s.
To go back even further, I think the antiintellectual trends that were part of the Evangelical attack on science generally and evolution in particular are part of that, too. When you have multiple generations being fed a narrative that there is a vast conspiracy of people lying about what the truth is, it undermines faith in science and institutions. I think it primed people to be ready to accept the Fox News narrative that other news organizations are just lying to you and you can only trust them. (Which ironically made it easy for some die hard Fox News fans to abandon them when they started undermining the MAGA narrative about January 6th, leading the Fox News fans to pivot to even more disreputable "news" sources like OANN or NewsMax.)
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Comment on Do you have a favorite setting shared amongst multiple authors? in ~books
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentThe Pocket Books Star Trek novels were some of my first grown-up books I ever read. I still have a bunch of them. By middle school, I started pivoting towards Star Wars books. (With occasional...The Pocket Books Star Trek novels were some of my first grown-up books I ever read. I still have a bunch of them. By middle school, I started pivoting towards Star Wars books. (With occasional forays into BattleTech, courtesy of my favorite Star Wars author, Michael A Stackpole.) Now, it's been decades since I read a shared-universe novel.
Speaking of Imzadi, I still remember listening to the book-on-tape narrated by Jonathan Frakes. The romance angle was not lost on me and I remember being incredibly annoyed when Troi ended up with Worf in season 7! (Which was clearly not how I thought things were supposed to work out.)
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Comment on Honk your horn in ~health.mental
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI seem to recall my Acura Integras having those, too. I think it was a consequence of manufacturers not yet having figured out how to incorporate horn buttons into steering wheels with airbags.I seem to recall my Acura Integras having those, too. I think it was a consequence of manufacturers not yet having figured out how to incorporate horn buttons into steering wheels with airbags.
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Comment on What is happening to Japan? in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI think the root of the problem goes to the fact that there are fewer and fewer agreed-upon authorities for truthful information. In the mid-twentieth century, it didn't matter what your political...In the end, social media has created the breeding ground for this type of rampant misinformation and is eroding what little is left of real reporting. People are much more engaged with a YouTube short or a Facebook headline than they are with a detailed analysis of a situation. It's sad.
I think the root of the problem goes to the fact that there are fewer and fewer agreed-upon authorities for truthful information. In the mid-twentieth century, it didn't matter what your political persuasions were, I gather that every American would trust that the gist of the information they saw on the evening news was more or less accurate. But now, if you don't like what people are saying, you can find in authoritative-sounding source that will tell you the world works exactly like you think it does. Even if that means powerful "Others" are controlling everything and oppressing people just like you.
I think dwindling attention spans are ultimately not the root cause of that problem. But they are representative of it – everything is geared towards engagement. Which drives sensationalism, which in turn is often built on outrage.
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Comment on The goon squad. Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation. in ~life
RobotOverlord525 LinkI came across this on Reddit. Weird shit. My wife and I were discussing the phenomenon. Specifically the part where the author says, Before the rise of social media, before the rise of Internet...I came across this on Reddit. Weird shit.
My wife and I were discussing the phenomenon. Specifically the part where the author says,
This isn’t to suggest that we aren’t enthusiastic collaborators in the progressive annihilation of our brains. Nor is it to suggest that, absent attention-shattering social platforms, we’d use the internet solely to keep up with friends and engage in improving hobbies. Peering into Goonworld’s darkest corners has convinced me that what we are dealing with here may well be a structural flaw of networked communication itself. Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults?
Before the rise of social media, before the rise of Internet forums and message boards (I say, on a message board), it was hard for the instincts that drive all of this to reach the critical mass necessary to start forming a sort of community. Maybe one in, what, 10,000 men has the latent predisposition for this? One in 100,000? What was the likelihood that even two such men would meet each other, much less a bond over an extreme interest in pornography? But the Internet brings everyone closer together, so makes reaching that critical mass possible. Once it does, the community becomes a self-sustaining reaction and, in cases of bizarre niches like this, one of seemingly never-ending escalation.
In response to this article, someone on Reddit posted the following.
You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto.
You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.
She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.
In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.
It strikes you that true love does exist after all.
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Comment on What ridiculous thing would you spend billions on? in ~talk
RobotOverlord525 LinkI missed the boat on this one, but, just for the heck of it... A 996 911 restomod. Does a 30 year old car need a restomod? Sure doesn't. Would anyone want one even if I sold it at cost? Probably...I missed the boat on this one, but, just for the heck of it...
- A 996 911 restomod. Does a 30 year old car need a restomod? Sure doesn't. Would anyone want one even if I sold it at cost? Probably not.
- An awesome car museum in Portland, Oregon (where one failed during the pandemic). Highlights would include a chronological presentation of every generation on Corvette and Porsche 911 juxtaposed beside one another. (Mid-engine Ferraris would be nearby.)
- A huge documentary series on every generation of Corvette, 911, and mid-engine V8 Ferrari featuring my favorite car reviewers. With track testing at Laguna Seca. Every season would conclude with a roundtable discussion about each car.
- A highly historically accurate series of prestige miniseries based on my favorite historical events. First up? The Second Punic War, with the first season focusing on Hannibal up through 209 BCE and the second picking up on Scipio Africanus taking over Roman forces. After that, the ascension of Edward III of England. After that... who knows? Maybe something on the Scientific Revolution and/or Royal Society? The Thirty Years War?
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Comment on What ridiculous thing would you spend billions on? in ~talk
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI dig this, but is there any room in your adaptation for a man-Shep who is romancing Liara? We don't have to call him Shepard. We can call him... Grissom? Have him do some of the things you don't...First on the list is Mass Effect because I have to get there before the actual adaptation gets made (sorry folks, you're getting FemShep with a Shakarian romance),
I dig this, but is there any room in your adaptation for a man-Shep who is romancing Liara? We don't have to call him Shepard. We can call him... Grissom? Have him do some of the things you don't want FemShep doing? (Don't want her punching the report? Make man-Shep do it!) If nothing else, he gets to become a mouthpiece for the decisions that don't become canon in your adaptation.
(I've often considered how a proper Mass Effect adaptation could deal with needing to have one canon (presumably paragon) Shepard. This was the best I ever came up with and I don't love it.)
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Comment on What is a business/org that is great and ethical in so many aspects that everyone should consider using? in ~life
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI seem to recall that laundry detergent sheets are bad environmentally insofar as they have plasticizers in them. The Wirecutter certainly wasn't impressed with them, on a number of levels. They...I seem to recall that laundry detergent sheets are bad environmentally insofar as they have plasticizers in them. The Wirecutter certainly wasn't impressed with them, on a number of levels.
Laundry detergent sheets are sometimes offered as an alternative for people looking to avoid detergent pods, which are wrapped in a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA/PVOH). While PVA/PVOH is considered a safer choice by the Environmental Protection Agency, some people are concerned that PVA/PVOH doesn’t biodegrade as quickly as claimed, and some would prefer not to use petroleum-derived products.
But if you want to avoid PVA/PVOH, detergent sheets aren’t the way to do it: To achieve their tearable texture, detergent sheets include PVA/PVOH in their formulas.
They weren't impressed with their sustainability or water usage, either.
I've been using their environmentally friendly recommendation, Dirty Labs, instead. It seems to do the job well. (Though I do need to figure out why my daughter ran through so much of it recently when she was doing laundry...)
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Comment on US conservative news network Newsmax files antitrust lawsuit against Fox News in ~tv
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI think there's some merit to the rather famous quotation often referred to as Wilhoit's law: Or, to put it another popular way: "Rules for thee but not for me." In this case, "Monopolies are good...I think there's some merit to the rather famous quotation often referred to as Wilhoit's law:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
Or, to put it another popular way: "Rules for thee but not for me."
In this case, "Monopolies are good unless they harm me."
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Comment on “First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion in ~books
RobotOverlord525 LinkThis is a move in the right direction. I think Cloudflare's recent policy change around AI scrapers, in a similar vein, points in a similar direction. AI companies need the data and they need to...This is a move in the right direction. I think Cloudflare's recent policy change around AI scrapers, in a similar vein, points in a similar direction. AI companies need the data and they need to pay for. How they're going to do that, given that they still aren't profitable, I don't know. But piracy is bad no matter who's doing it. If creators don't have ad revenue (in the case of websites) or sales (in the case of book authors), it makes having a healthy job market for those things virtually impossible.
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Comment on Survey results on books that people identify as shaping their life/personality after reading them in high school in ~books
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentYeah, if nothing else, this article really emphasizes how much of a Philistine I am and was back in high school. These were the ones from that list that I read in high school and what I remember...Yeah, if nothing else, this article really emphasizes how much of a Philistine I am and was back in high school.
These were the ones from that list that I read in high school and what I remember about how I felt about them. (I graduated from high school almost 25 years ago, though, so no guarantees that this is accurate.)
- Fahrenheit 451: Meh. It's all right.
- The Grapes of Wrath: Boring! Read the Cliff's Notes.
- The Great Gatsby: Finished it. Hated it. Very boring.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Annoying characters. Very boring. I learned nothing I didn't already know from lectures and history books.
- The Scarlet Letter: Boring. Might have read the Cliff's Notes.
- Walden: Looked boring. Didn't even bother. If I had an essay I had to write about it, I think I just winged it based on class lectures about the book.
Despite that, I was reading a lot. (Sometimes in other classes when I shouldn't have been.) But all of it was science fiction that I thought was entertaining. Lots of Star Wars and BattleTech books, but also Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and maybe a few other non-"shared universe" books. Embarrassingly, I think Starship Troopers' arguments for "earned citizenship" were persuasive to me.
But I don't think I was assigned more than a few books in high school that I actually liked, much less felt like they affected me. Black Like Me was maybe the only one that did. I remember being very upset by it. I think it convinced me that the American South was an awful place full of hideous racists that I never wanted to visit. (Not the argument the book was trying to make but probably something teenage me took away from it anyway.)
I enjoyed the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo that I read in 10th grade. But I wouldn't say that it affected me in any profound way. Julius Caesar was moderately entertaining to me, which surprised me since I had considered Shakespeare universally boring.
But that's it. That's all of the assigned reading I can remember having any sort of positive reaction to. The most that all of that assigned reading really convinced me of was that literary fiction was boring as fuck and that I should avoid it. It convinced me that nothing outside of sci-fi/fantasy was worth reading.
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Comment on Survey results on books that people identify as shaping their life/personality after reading them in high school in ~books
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentThere's also a sampling bias. This is a list of books NPR listeners/readers say impacted them as high school students. Age is a factor. The audience is another. They're not going to talk about...There's also a sampling bias. This is a list of books NPR listeners/readers say impacted them as high school students. Age is a factor. The audience is another. They're not going to talk about popular fiction they read for entertainment. It's going to be biased towards prestige titles—things that are part of the literary canon. And those are all going to be old.
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Comment on "Is democracy a fad?" Ben Garfinkel’s sobering forecast for democracy in the automation age. in ~society
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentEven if we accept the idea that the Roman Republic was a democracy (don't let the "Senate" fool you, it wasn't—the property-holding qualifications for even the lowest magistracies in the Roman...There are a few democracies that are significantly older than the US.
Rome devolved into authoritarian government, but Rome is not the only model for how a Republic will develop.
Even if we accept the idea that the Roman Republic was a democracy (don't let the "Senate" fool you, it wasn't—the property-holding qualifications for even the lowest magistracies in the Roman Republic were steep), the Roman style of government still wasn't "common" in the ancient world. Democracy as we know it really is a very late-18th and a 19th century phenomenon. As the article observes...
In other parts of the world, small states with noteworthy democratic elements have emerged from time to time. Certain small states in Greece, as the most famous example, were borderline-proper democracies for a couple hundred years. However, if there was any trend at all, then the trend was toward more consistent and complete dictatorship. States with noteworthy democratic elements tended to lose these elements over time, as they either expanded or fell under the influence of larger states.[4] No sensible person living one thousand years ago would have predicted the recent democratic surge.
Point is, democracies are historically unusual. Hopefully not an aberration, but I think the author makes a persuasive case for why it might be.
one of the goals behind the US constitution and bill of rights was to prevent authoritarian government from emerging and taking over.
I think we're seeing right now how weak those systems can be. The raison d'etre of the Electoral College was to prevent men unsuitable for the Presidency from attaining that office. That's not a very democratic institution, but it's supposed to be one that's anti-authoritarian. And clearly it doesn't work. Likewise, Congress's impeachment powers are supposed to be a check on the executive branch, but they fail if the legislature doesn't have any interest in upsetting the executive's supporters. All of the societal trends driving these are part of the author's overall argument of a trend towards authoritarianism. We humans don't naturally share power. And even when power is shared with us, some of us don't really want it. Apparently.
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Comment on "Is democracy a fad?" Ben Garfinkel’s sobering forecast for democracy in the automation age. in ~society
RobotOverlord525 LinkIronically, I came across this in Dario Amodei's big utopian essay on what AI is doing to do for us. Democracy has only been common for the last 200 years—a blink in the 5,000-year history of...Ironically, I came across this in Dario Amodei's big utopian essay on what AI is doing to do for us.
Democracy has only been common for the last 200 years—a blink in the 5,000-year history of states. In this post, AI policy researcher Ben Garfinkel explores why that might not last, especially as automation reshapes the social contract.
When I imagine a potential doomsday scenario of automation, this is pretty close to what I'm thinking of. Less Skynet and more robotic-powered authoritarianism.
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"Is democracy a fad?" Ben Garfinkel’s sobering forecast for democracy in the automation age.
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Comment on Passing the torch - Discord is getting a new CEO in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentAbsolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding...My prediction is that this will lead to enshitification as Discord tries to maximise shareholder value.
Absolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding (just hosting all of the stuff free users upload indefinitely can't be cheap), "notification" style ads are a huge annoyance for me.
These days, I rarely use any of the voice or video functionality. Instead, it's how my weekly D&D group communicates with one another outside of the game and has been the number one way I chat with my brother and, during work hours, my wife. (We used to use Google Hangouts, but then Google did the Google thing of killing it.) Discord has a lot of handy chat functionality that I appreciate.
Time to start shopping for a new chat platform, I guess. Ideally one my D&D group can upload images to.
I saw a complaints about the use of '90s metal outros in Alien Earth that were countered by the almost disturbing fact that those songs are closer to when Alien was first released then they are to the present. (Alien came out in 1979; ÆNIMA came out 17 years later, in 1996, which is currently 29 years ago.)