Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They've survived flood, famine and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life! Ready to out-sit eternity. They're indomitable.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?
What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.”
"When I am at a party, I feel like nobody understands me," said the voice of a generation.
One character is nearly canceled when, on a college radio station, she says, “Trigger warnings trigger me.”
2014 sent a Vine; they want their joke back.
Generations no longer understand one another because we haven’t been injected with the same memes.
"Marvy. Fab. Far out," deadpanned Calvin's father.
i lost my cushy tech job because of twitter. the one i worked so hard for in my youth. the one i was going to pull my family out of poverty with. but instead i am a martyr in the culture wars of based capital versus woke capital. i am gaza.
When the AOE enters the Texas compound, there's nothing there.
Just cryptographically locked black boxes. They can take them, but they can't access or use or analyze them, and we just reboot from backups later.
Intelligent design theory involves probabilistic judgments such as "irreducible complexity", the idea that life is too complex and well-organized to have been produced randomly by undirected evolution. Such probabilistic judgments rely on either a causal model (e.g. a model of how evolution would work and what structures it could create), or some global model that yields probabilities more directly.
No, they rely upon numbers extracted from up a creationist's colon.
There is a duality between cosmic expansion and atom shrinkage.
Hey now, the atom just got out of a cold swimming pool.
No, not the forcing values! :-O
"Honest, babe, I'd only dump you for a ten-out-of-ten smokeshow as evaluated on my personal scale!"
epistemic status: 20 milligrams
Yudkowsky:
Talking to the general public is hard.
Multiple commenters on FanFiction.net replying to chapter 23 of HPMOR: Genetics don't work that way. If magic were recessive, then wizard parents would always have wizard kids and there would be no such thing as squibs. Look, I drew the Punnett square....
I think it was Walter Lewin of MIT, not Harvard
I think this belongs over in TechTakes rather than SneerClub; it doesn't seem TREACLES-focused.