The list of diatribes about forum drama that are interesting and edifying for the outsider is not long, and this one is not on it.
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.
Their writing is so boring I can't even summon up the enthusiasm to make a "senpai has noticed us" joke.
"Computers will be really good at chess" was already a trope in 1960s science fiction. HAL 9000 is canonically so good that he was instructed to throw the game half the time so that his human opponents don't get bored. The Enterprise computer is so good that Spock being able to beat it — Spock — is a major plot point.
My "I have no specific views on eugenics" T-shirt has prompted many questions already answered by my T-shirt
There is a way of seeing the world where you look at a blade of grass and see "a solar-powered self-replicating factory". I've never figured out how to explain how hard a superintelligence can hit us, to someone who does not see from that angle. It's not just the one fact.
It's almost as if basing an entire worldview upon a literal reading of metaphors in grade-school science books and whatever Carl Sagan said just after "these edibles ain't shit" is, I dunno, bad?
The video title "A Pragmatist's Take on Small Talk" would be much better if it were William James giving advice on navigating the social niceties. Step 1: this hat.
"The image of the penis is translated into a depth measurement...."
That's numberwang!
Yet another news story that omits how the science in HPMOR, the Sequences and the flagship e/acc blog is just wrong. Like, failing junior-high biology wrong.
The A.I., trying to access a Web site, was blocked by a Captcha, a visual test to keep out bots. So it used a work-around: it hired a human on Taskrabbit to solve the Captcha on its behalf.
Wait, didn't that turn out to be bullshit?
Shot:
One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement.
Princeton University’s Board of Trustees voted Monday to fire Joshua Katz, Cotsen Professor in the Humanities, effective immediately.
The university said in a statement that the dismissal followed an investigation initiated in February 2021 after Princeton received a detailed written complaint from an alumna who had a consensual relationship with Katz while she was an undergraduate under his academic supervision. That relationship was the focus of a 2018 disciplinary proceeding against Katz, which resulted in a penalty of unpaid suspension in 2018–19 and three years of probation following his return, Princeton said. The unnamed alumna did not participate in or cooperate with the 2018 disciplinary proceeding, according to Princeton. But when she came forward in 2021, she provided what Princeton called “new information,” triggering a new investigation. The second inquiry did not revisit the policy violations for which Katz was previously punished, according to Princeton: “It only considered new issues that came to light because of new information provided by the former student.”
“The 2021 investigation established multiple instances in which Dr. Katz misrepresented facts or failed to be straightforward during the 2018 proceeding, including a successful effort to discourage the alumna from participating and cooperating after she expressed the intent to do so,” the university said. “It also found that Dr. Katz exposed the alumna to harm while she was an undergraduate by discouraging her from seeking mental health care although he knew her to be in distress, all in an effort to conceal a relationship he knew was prohibited by university rules. These actions were not only egregious violations of university policy, but also entirely inconsistent with his obligations as a member of the faculty.”
Garnish:
Katz has previously denied that he engaged in any conduct beyond that for which he was suspended in 2018. He’s argued that Princeton wanted to fire him because of his political speech, including for a 2020 essay in Quillette which he referred to a Black student group as a “small local terrorist organization.” But Princeton’s dismissal announcement sheds new light on what the 2021 investigation was about; contrary to Katz’s public statement that he was being effectively retried for the same violations for political reasons, Princeton was now looking at a different set of allegations from the former undergraduate student herself, in part because Katz had (according to Princeton’s apparent findings) prevented her participation in the first investigation.
From a downvoted comment:
Because players aren't sure where a story is going and can't edit previous sections, the stories tend to be plagued by pacing problems- scenes that could be a paragraph are dragged out over pages, important plot beats are glossed over, and so on. It's also very rare that players are able to pull off the kind of coordination necessary for satisfying narrative buildup and payoff, and the focus on player character interaction tends to leave a lot of necessary story scaffolding like scene setting and NPC interaction badly lacking.
If your goal in writing this was in part to promote or socially explore these utopian ideas rather than just to enjoy a forum game, it may be worth considering ways to mitigate these issues- to modify the Glowfic formula to better accommodate an audience.
Yud's response:
We are both experienced authors not in need of this advice at this level.
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If I were to transition today and didn't pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn't.
This is the same fuckin' diseased mentality that gets cis women harassed in changing rooms for having jawlines that are slightly too heavy.
The math is also weird and unclear in that way which feels like a person reaching for grandiose Theories Of It All without any experience solving more mundane problems first.
I think that in this particular instance, it's OK to kinkshame