Everyone agrees that Murderbot is a #relatable neurodivergent mood, but we don’t talk enough about how ART is also extremely relatable. I, too, am intensely overbearing, Need To Be Right at a fundamental level at all times, and default to the maximum force necessary in response to difficult challenges.

I am half-joking but also deadly serious. These traits of ART’s are part of the beauty of its dynamic with Murderbot.

ART and Murderbot are excellent partners in mutual administrative assistance precisely because the features of their thinking, their existence as themselves, mesh so well together. They are not connecting despite their neurodivergences, but are enabled to support each other’s strengths and cover for each other’s weaknesses because of it.

ART’s overbearing processing power and huge knowledge base make it powerful tactical and medical support on Murderbot’s missions. Where ART gets caught up in detail and proving unknowns, Murderbot can take decisive, competent action with incomplete data. ART can speak up assertively, even aggressively, for Murderbot’s benefit when Murderbot’s anxiety prevents it from standing up for itself. ART might have difficulty with empathy, such as with processing the full emotional context of human media or intimidating every bot it meets, but Murderbot can provide that empathetic filter and act as intermediary. And the mutual extreme lengths that they will go to for each other are irrefutable evidence of the care they have for each other (proof of being loved which Murderbot’s anxiety and fear of abandonment cannot so easily dismiss).

Which is not to say that there aren’t misunderstandings and missteps that they have to work through in order to get to trust and communicate with each other on this level. But the effort they put into connecting with each other and making it work is just another part of why their relationship is so important. They are two characters whose neurodivergence-coding is integral to the beauty of their relationship.

i like to come up with working definitions for myself and i think Confidence is just knowing sometimes u gotta get the griddle hot first. some pancakes gonna burn be ugly taste like ass but like, you are not the pancake. u are the infinite batter

i mean i’d love it if i did. ive always wanted to write my own koans.

traditional advice about confidence is so ass. wdym “believe in myself” when i so clearly have evidence to the contrary?? “you can do it!” how do you know?! that cant possibly be true every time. but being able to say “lol that one didnt count” as many times as i want is something i can totally get behind

[ID: Tags reading #umm #did you just rewire my brain?? /end ID]

I didn't really get meal prepping when it was about assembling full meals in little fridge containers, because those become unappetizing after literally 48 hours, so if you're working 4 or 5 days a week, what's the point? But now that it's about freezing different recipes in small portions using silicone molds and then assembling modular meals? I've completely lost my mind. As of right now I have three-bean vegetarian chili, lemon-dill chickpea stew, two kinds of rice, macaroni & cheese, and guacamole in my freezer. Also frozen pancakes. Also just two servings each of Hungarian mushroom soup and prepped chef's salads in my fridge (including hard boiled eggs!). I'm working 3 twelve-hour days right now, which means I can't cook at all during the work week, so the day before my "Monday" has become cooking day. I'm having a lot of fun, but I maaay need a chest freezer.

pause, rewind, linger | Machina Ex Machina // Ontologically Evil // The Rogue 2 // Against the Sky // Humanicide 2396 // Jailbreak!! // We, They, It // Static From the Stars // Core Function

Sorry for being cranky, Reddit found one of my stream-of-consciousness posts that blew up and, because they're Redditors, missed the part where posting on Tumblr isn't the formal, high-effort act that Creating An Entire Reddit Post is viewed as.

There's a huge cultural split between "and yet you made an entire post about it" websites and "do you know you can make your own post" websites, which means that posts on the one type of site will be completely recontextualized by screenshotting them and putting them on the other type to the single-website segment of the userbase.

On a Redditlike site, which broadly also includes forums, creating a Post is a privilege reserved for someone who's done their time in the comments by standing out and saying Important and Related Things, such as highlighting the flaws of the original post. Making a Bad Post is a crime, and if you're not putting in the effort to pander to the specific type of content that the sub-community wants, you're making a Bad Post.

On a microblogging site, posting means that you have a text box in front of you that you're encouraged to dump whatever the fuck you want into. Firing off three posts in quick succession vaguely centered on the same topic because that's what's on your mind is called "using the website." Replying to someone else's post with your own tangent is annoying, because you can just make your own goddamn post.

This clash is why I do not like when Redditors hallucinate about some block of text I put on the internet while waiting for the bus several months ago as if it was some deliberately crafted Statement and not like, me seeing some stuff on Tumblr and participating in an ongoing conversation at the time.

‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.

My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!

They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.

Shower

Okay, enough of "what are the best/worst books you've read", I want to know what your favourite comfort books to reread are. What are the books you turn to and turn to again because they scratch a particular itch and make you feel a particular kind of joy? No justification required, no "I know it's bad but" or "I know the plot is stupid but", just the ones that you keep coming back to because they make you happy?

The AI bubble bursting will mean that every product currently propped up by the tech industry doing circular self-investments has to be supplanted by an alternative that actually makes more money than it costs to run, or disappear with no replacement.

That doesn't mean literally every application of machine learning or language models goes away forever, because machine learning and generative models existed before Silicon Valley decided they were the infinite money algorithm, and will still be around after they stop thinking that. "Generate ten videos of cat people working in the baby mines for free" or "have the chatbot generate a summary every time I google" are not sticking around.

Roughly ten years from now, we'll have completely different approaches to using machine learning-based software, based on the applications of these algorithms that actually make sense given the resources used. They'll likely look a lot like the applications of machine learning that already existed before OpenAI, because those were motivated by finding places where these models were useful first, then developing the models afterwards.

The smuggest asshole alive will act like Sam Altman was vindicated in the end, but he will not have built Computer God, he will have been the figurehead of one of the worst investment bubbles in US history.

You have to separate the tech from the Silicon Valley hype ecosystem, is the thing. They've been betting on new iterations of "buy up ridiculous numbers of GPUs and then run an Infinite Money Algorithm on them" for the entire 20s so far.

The last few were promising to replace money and turn all video games into investment opportunities by putting all your in-game items on the blockchain. This one is making even more ludicrous promises like replace all human intellectual labor because they happened to land on an algorithm that vaguely resembles something scientists have gotten results out of.

The dot com bubble bursting didn’t mean people stopped making websites for things. It just meant people didn’t start investing in you just because you were making a website.

Yeah and like there was an internet both before and after the bubble, but extremely era-specific behaviors like "we're rebranding our corporation to [name].com, give us money" didn't make it out of there alive.

sex repulsed peopl remember this always

Also, while I'm procrastinating on my own draft, let me share my best piece of writing advice. I call it 'robot mode'.

One of the most common impediments people face as writers is the fear of the blank page. Starting a text is the hardest part. It feels impossible to get that opening line just right so that everything starts to flow. So, people procrastinate, and an essay that could have been a four-hour draft turns into a week.

Staring at the page until a perfect sentence arrives in your head is a bad method. Try this one instead. Try robot mode.

To engage robot mode, imagine that you are a classically-styled science fiction robot. You're the ship's computer. You're a box that does logic. In the voice of that robot, simply describe the contents of whatever you intend to write in the driest, most accurate, and least-stylized method imaginable. Real bare-bones, style free stuff. Use simple words when at all possible (the style of Simple English Wikipedia is a good reference point). 'In this essay I argue for X. The argument starts by assuming Y. I describe the case study Z in which the relevant details are a, b, and c. Then I argue that a, b, and c, when combined with Y, form a good argument for the truth of X.' Don't do much explaining here (though you will naturally feel yourself starting to form the explanations) - just lay out the logical connections as precisely and concisely as you can.

Nobody actually wants to read an essay like that, but everyone will like an essay that is clear enough in purpose and structure that it can be described like that. If you have a precise enough vision of what the contents of your essay are that you can write a robot mode description of it, you are ready to write your essay. If you can't, workshop it until what the robot says makes sense. Once it does, you will magically find it much easier to begin writing properly.

Usually I do not put the robot mode paragraph into my essay itself, but sometimes it makes a good abstract. And it is sufficient to make the page no longer blank. Every time I get stuck later in the draft, I can repeat the exercise. The robot returns and describes the purpose of the current section. Then it goes away and writing resumes.

Try it. See if you like it.

as a lover of Women Fighting & Killing media it's so important to me when they actually let the women look like shit. you know what i mean. like im so bored when a woman is in what's supposed to be a brutal fight and her hair is just aesthetically tousled or something and her makeup is still pristine. fuck offfff. if she's beating the shit out of someone and fighting for her life she should be covered in blood n bile she should look like she got hit by a truck and the truck exploded

How i draw...wingggzzzaaahhhhhhhh

gonna engage in modern art by adding a video to this post every time the inside of my brain feels like an industrial buzzsaw, to illustrate how the inside of my brain feels like an industrial buzzsaw

something slightly different today

you can’t ascribe me personhood in any way that matters

chatgpt to the users demanding apologies