I watched the movie before I knew there was a book, so I came at it without all that context and I thought they did a good job with environmental storytelling. Things weren’t exactly laid out but I always felt like I had a handle on who the characters were and why they were motivated to do what they were doing, and the bits of the world we did see felt detailed and “built” even if the movie didn’t establish a ton of worldbuilding.

I had no idea that ottoman had a color.

Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of its previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.

Never is a long word, but I have a bunch of poems and short stories and other errata that I think seems unlikely to ever see the light of publication. I have submitted poems to journals and other publications (never successfully published though), but the vast majority of my writing is compost that I’ll turn over every few months and see if I want to revisit it. Occasionally I’ll tweak things here and there or, more likely, reading an old thing will inspire a new thing that gets added to the pile. Maybe I’ll get something published someday. Maybe I’ll be a modern Emily Dickinson and get famous posthumously. Or maybe, like most poets, I’ll fade unremarkably and unremarked-upon into the wash of history. I’m content with any of these outcomes.

Oh no oh dear don’t make me chronicle the progression of the natural miracle that is the evolution of language as I swore to do when I solemnly took my Lexicographer’s Oath oh no that’s my least favorite thing.

It really depends on the advice, and my relationship with the advice giver. I generally give advice at least a thought, even if it was unwanted, unless I have a reason to mistrust the advisor. As for how I respond to the person, if it’s a friend I’ll usually have followup questions, for people I know less well it’s usually a cordial variant of “hmm, interesting perspective” and then I have to think on it for a while before I respond, if I respond at all.

Sometimes I think about how so many of us look up at the stars and wonder “if there really are aliens out there, why aren’t they colonizing the galaxy as fast as possible, as any intelligent species would naturally do?” like it’s the thing just anyone looking at the stars might think. we might be the horrifying biomechanical paperclip maximizer that the other aliens in the galaxy have to band together to defeat or face extermination.

Yep, I think the accepted English pronunciation of “Euler” is as a homophone of “oiler”, so the award would be “the oilies”. I never heard the name out loud as a kid so I pronounced it “you’-ler” until well into adulthood, until someone made a big deal about me not pronouncing it correctly. I remember the occasion very clearly 🙃

We can call it the Euler Award for Excessive Achievement in Science. Or the Eulies if you’re in the industry. And we can make a big deal about it if anyone pronounces it “the yoolies”

That tracks. It felt like someone at the show really liked the first version but someone at the network made them change it, so they were like “fuck it, put a tambourine under it idk” and called it good enough.

Ooh, I never get to ask this question: Do you have a preference between the initial version and the season 3 version? I always felt like they changed it because they got the feedback “fans don’t like the song” but they didn’t really know what to do with that feedback, so they wound up with a rewrite that sounded almost, but not quite, exactly the same. But I am in the group that never really vibed with either so I find it hard to draw comparisons. Curious to get a perspective from someone who liked the intro.

It’s nice. Feels like browsing in an old western saloon.

I hope it happens. And by it I mean VR / AR equipment that I can comfortably use for a few hours at a time without getting sweaty, fatigued, or motion sick. When I’m using a computer I like to have a bunch of displays, and it would be really convenient to have a comfortable headset that I can wear instead and live my dream of coding in VR / AR and spin displays up or down on a whim, or better still use some as-yet-undreamed VR native UI that takes advantage of the platform. That dream is still a way off, it seems like, but I still want it.

Gonna give The Victorian internet a read, thanks! Really love the noosphere, I have a few pieces in progress with ftl communication featuring aliens / future humans that sort of evolve / claim to have evolved into hive sentiences with their own ansible network that borgs them together. And since maintaining the network is crucial to the survival of the culture, network engineers are generally very powerful political figures. A severance between two populations can be treated as the birth of a new sentience or a heresy, depending on the prevailing ethics of each group, and there are always factions that break away from the collective and prefer old-fashioned async society. Really love thinking about how these technological networks could evolve over the long term.

Thanks for doing the moddin’ 🤠🤏

I don’t think it has to be, or even should be the case really. I mean, as a general rule I don’t think it’s a great idea to let kids download stuff off the internet and run it without a knowledgeable adult at least reviewing what they’re doing, or pre-screening what software they’re allowed to use if they’re younger than a certain age. You can introduce kids to open source software and teach them computer skills while still putting limits on what they’re allowed to do, e.g. not allowed to install software without asking a parent, or only allowing them to test software on an old machine that doesn’t have sensitive data on it. I know I got thrown to the internet as a kid but I don’t think that’s the best way for kids to learn stuff.

That said, I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having them, so I don’t know how realistic that is for kids nowadays. I don’t know if they’re still as far ahead of the adults as we were when it came to working the internet so I recognize the possibility that that all may be clueless childless adult nonsense.

That seems to be the prevailing opinion. I can’t complain. As far as I definitively know, the Parks & Rec version of the series finale is completely correct. Sounds like it really went off the rails there toward the end.

Game of Thrones. I enjoyed it at first, then realized about halfway through I had really lost interest and was just watching through intertia. Eventually I stopped and still haven’t seen the last few seasons. From context, it seems like I wasn’t missing much.

galacticwaffle is an LLM bot.

Dunno. Where there are some eyeballs, there’s some market for influence. Obviously someone is bothering, but as for how much money is being thrown at the fediverse at this moment, I would guess somewhere between “peanuts” and “small potatoes”. On the other hand I imagine a bot trained here could be deployed elsewhere with little effort, similar to how a reddit bot can be deployed to lemmy with a little bit of rework, so maybe it’s seen as a low-risk training ground. In any case I don’t see it being a problem that gets less salient as the fediverse grows.