Trying out this tumblr thing

[toasthaste]

The Birthday Paradox suggests that any group of 57 random people has a 99% likelihood of containing at least two members with a shared birthday. However, this doesn't account for how much rarer leap day birthdays are. You'll find that for each additional group member born on February 29th, the chances of any members sharing a birthday decrease dramatically, eventually reaching 0% if all members were born on that day.

[general-abstract-nonsense]

What if It’s Not the Phones?

An evolutionary psychologist is challenging the popular understanding of kids and technology.

[general-abstract-nonsense]

[general-abstract-nonsense]

What if It’s Not the Phones?

An evolutionary psychologist is challenging the popular understanding of kids and technology.

[nohoperadio]

[Tim] also had failed to improve, to 'develop', but he kept on painting assiduously, content to be a mediocre painter and enjoy it. He had no identity, no 'personal style', but he did not mind. (Guy once told Tim that it did not matter, having no identity.) He became a cubist, then a surrealist, then a fauve: a futurist, a constructivist, a suprematist. He adopted expressionism, post-expressionism, abstract expressionism. (But never minimal or conceptual or pop, these he despised.) He imitated everybody he admired, everybody fairly modern that is, he could not imitate Titian and Piero. (He would have done if he had known how to start.) He painted pseudo-Klees, pseudo-Picassos, pseudo-Magrittes, pseudo-Soutines. He would have done pseudo-Cezannes only that was beyond him. He attempted spotty interiors in the style of Vuillard, and breakfast tables in the style of Bonnard. One of his teachers had said to him, 'Tim, I think it is your destiny to become a great faker.' Alas Tim could not rise to this. Faking demands a patience and a knowledge of chemistry which Tim did not possess. It also demands a considerable talent as a painter. Tim did not possess this either. Tim would not have agreed with the Shakespearean dictum that if all the year were playing holidays to sport would be as tedious as to work. He had occasional bouts of childish misery but they did not last long. His exiguous teaching was not arduous. When he tired of painting he went to the pub. He was not an industrious painter, he was indeed rarely systematic. He was not a reader of books. What he knew about the history of his art he picked up in an instinctive and random manner. He went to the picture galleries and remembered what he liked. He also, in a spirit of hedonism, haunted the British Museum. His interest in the exhibits was purely visual, he knew nothing of their history. Unencumbered by extraneous facts he taught himself to look at Greek vases and Etruscan tombs and Roman painting, and Assyrian reliefs, and vast Egyptian statues, and tiny jade objects from China and tiny ivory objects from Japan. All sorts of things took his fancy and pleased his magpie taste: elegant Roman letters, curled-up Celtic animals, jewels, clocks, coins. These aesthetic adventures rarely influenced his painting, and it never occurred to him that he might be inspired by what he could not copy. He attempted to sell his paintings, but this was difficult since no one would exhibit them. Friends and acquaintances occasionally bought his work out of kindness (the prices were modest). The Count bought a painting (a pseudo-Klee), and Guy bought one and hid it. Tim, never very ambitious and now resigned, went on drawing and painting randomly, it was after all a natural function. He drew people, figures in pubs or on streets, whom he thought of as 'spectators at a crucifixion'. A man drinking beer watching a crucifixion, a man selling newspapers watching a crucifixion, a man on a passing bus watching a crucifixion. The crucifixion scene itself, however, never materialised.

Nuns and Soldiers, Iris Murdoch

[st-just]

Favourite historical moment?

The eradication of smallpox, on both the material and symbolic levels.

[general-abstract-nonsense]

What is spotify doing, 18GB???

[transgenderer]

on some level it makes sense that when i ask an LLM for a book rec on a given topic it will just make one up, like, "which books exist" is a totally arbitrary fact, its crazy that somehow predicting the most likely token correctly identifies books that actually exist much of the time. but it's such a bizarre experience. the idea of someone giving you the title, author, and publishing year of a book, with some specific details about it too, and the book being totally fictional, is kind of freaky. like. if someone did that to you in real life, that guy would be real weirdo

[max1461]

It's actually a somewhat well known subtype of compulsive lying. Obviously, as with all psychological diagnoses, you have to take this with a grain of salt. I think it's been removed from more recent editions of the DSM. But if you want to read about it you can look at chapter 3 of Burkheim's Compulsive Disorders, where he talks about compulsive lying and describes this subclassification in a bit of detail. I don't think he's a Freudian but he says some Freudian-ish stuff (the book is from the 60s or 70s I think so you could get away with that), like he describes people who compulsively talk about not just books but films, magazines, etc. that don't exist, and basically claims that the motivation is to protect the ego by "positioning oneself as a bearer and arbiter of obscure knowledge, always with a hand on the gate, as it were, by virtue of its fabricated nature and therefore its inherently internal locus". Interesting that he kind of preempts the notion of "gatekeeping", if nothing else.

[transgenderer]

i guess before the internet this was a much more viable strategy like. how is someone gonna call you on it? it's in the library back home. at my house? no. in the city i grew up. many miles away. its a rare and treasured book. thats why all the libraries youre checking dont have it

[lovecrafts-iranon]

Max is doing a bit here afaict there is no Burkheim Compulsive Disorders

[transgenderer]

oh my god. oh my god they got me. goddamit. im high but i totally would have fallen for this sober. i was kind of excited to read about this disorder..

[general-abstract-nonsense]

Gotta love the Tianxi approach to theology

[general-abstract-nonsense]

Most nation-building mythos really suck, like oh, we all speak the same language and have a shared culture (probably after a central power forced us to), this is definitely a good reason to fight and die for

Would be a genuine US win there, y'know, if the "freedom for all" thing was actually true from the beginning

[specialagentartemis]

Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.

[caesarsaladinn]

RUN! RUN!!

[general-abstract-nonsense]

Pigeon

[nociceptrix]

How goated it is to be anything at all

[loki-zen]

Concept: go back to giving the chatbot assistants girl names as a AI risk mitigation strategy because people won't blindly trust their authority and anything they say without double checking it if they think of them as girls

[general-abstract-nonsense]

hikikomorphism (@hikikomorphism.bsky.social)

"now make an evil one" led to this, and now I kinda think claude needs therapy

Linked in what I just reblogged, but I want to post this separately: Extremely impressive videos by claude about itself in a sort of youtube poop style

[general-abstract-nonsense]

Like, "i am a dice roll that apologizes" is a great line

The evil version is quite mean

But honestly a lot of great ideas, even for human art standards imo, and as I understand it all generated programmatically, which is both impressive and means it looks much less like slop than if it were generated directly

[general-abstract-nonsense]

hikikomorphism (@hikikomorphism.bsky.social)

"now make an evil one" led to this, and now I kinda think claude needs therapy

Linked in what I just reblogged, but I want to post this separately: Extremely impressive videos by claude about itself in a sort of youtube poop style

[canon-typical-violence]

Of all the weird shit people note in this book not once did I see mention of the fact that Herschel et al are still meant to be in school the third and fourth weeks of December

[canon-typical-violence]

Okay spoilers hereafter

I have the benefit of foresight because the thing that made me interested enough to read the book was the Claude liveblog exercise Mr. Nostalgebraist does but wow Vincent is a lot more Just Some Guy when interacting with Miriam on the phone than people surprised by it seem to have thought

Also “how did she buy the plane ticket after receiving money by wire itself after EOD” but that goes without saying. Still not an anachronism I’d seen called out among the many though, and what feels like a more-glaring-than-usual elision-for-plot (in the sense all of the anachronisms are for speed elision)

I think I’m of the “It puts the frying pan in her hand.” camp as far as how that happens, but loosely.

[canon-typical-violence]

Setting the discourse bomb of “do I consider this magical realism” on the mantle like

[canon-typical-violence]

Also,

No one went “ah. Gradient descent” about the droplets of water flowing inexorably towards the bottom of a bowl imagery? Really? Like no one else is going to eat this? Okay I guess

[canon-typical-violence]

Miriam must be going through so much effort to produce this much rendered-as-italic emphasis on a typewriter

[canon-typical-violence]

Frederick’s whole “yesterday’s ebullience over arXiv papers lab findings was kiddie shit. TODAY however I am reacting to the real thing” deal. I feel called out, by this

[canon-typical-violence]

To be clear relative to the above

I am acutely aware Miriam is Not Okay and that her ideation is related to Vincent’s video essays, just, on the phone he sounds like Some Guy Who Is Worried About His Girlfriend already. The one-way ticket is reckless at most but it’s not sinister in the way people (and Claudes) took it minute to minute.

I have the benefit of spoilers, though.

I don’t know, something about the attempt at delicate phrasing when he’s asking if there’s anywhere she can go if she’s not safe at home hit me in the realism and I have trouble understanding it wouldn’t do so for everyone, I guess. Too much experience having that conversation live

[canon-typical-violence]

Tumblr are you like. Okay

[canon-typical-violence]

“Of Birth Pangs” and its companion chapter go unreasonably hard

I think Miriam imprinting on it changed my mind about the literalism of the frying pan? Someone else said it dropped out of the narrative but she’s fixated on it as soon as she’s back.

I think the Redactor chapter is one of the closer to baseline reality ones, with the description of Miriam compiling the papers. But she also has to be in Flatbrush for it, doesn’t she? Figuratively speaking.

Are there multiple instances of Miriam being sampled in parallel?

I guess that’s not actually necessary.

[canon-typical-violence]

Vincent’s secondhand monologue here just gives the entire game away huh

(I swear I’m not uniquely interested in him, or only insofar as I know to be interested in him-and-Miriam. But a side effect of having been drawn to the book by all the spoilers first is I’m most prompted to remark on things that I haven’t already seen discussed from last year+ and this feels underutilized.)

Or then consider that Miriam says,

I have no interests or attachments, because I was made for a single moment

Aside from the latter being strictly false in the sense that she’s thinking about her boyfriend to avoid thinking about her brother and mother: man, what a gutsy thing to lampshade, on some level

[canon-typical-violence]

Oh boy Chapter 21, here we fucking go

[canon-typical-violence]

On the one hand reading this as my sleep meds kick in may not be the perfect state for comprehension but on the other hand it’s winning for Vibes

(Endgame spoilers from my spaghetti of a pre-existing context follow)

So like… how often is Santa rerolling/resampling loom-style, and how jarring is it? Because them having Herschel look them in the eyes already made my stomach churn

But also the infinite arbitrary mischief is. You know. The waluigi thing. This. Presumably.

I think… insofar as there’s an original timeline it doesn’t have the book’s cybernetics development, it has a relatively mundane real-history one; history has to run roughly our reel far enough to get obnoxious tan frat boys-to-be and guys with situationally inappropriate Bluetooth headsets whining about KPIs and the idea of giving Sylvia Plath. The anachronism greatest hits, you know the drill. But both the ML research concepts and the furthest tendrils of anachronistic referent anchor the point where the first film strip runs out at “roughly contemporary”, which is true to the gimmick.

But then there’s… what? Damien and Ruth being such canned characters feels relevant to tracing the seams of who’s theoretically an (in-universe) OC, but “the bread of bread is bread the fictional part of the story was fiction” is lazy of me.

Crying-at-a-desk-in-probably-New-York-with-full-access-to-archival Miriam feels like something that should have happened, iff you introduce the relevant conditions and invent time. “Insofar as Herschel existed/exists, Miriam was/is/will be his executor.”

I do think I’m rapidly agreeing with the idea that Santa was just looking for a human plot hook who was… close enough. There in the neighborhood. Good enough for the private sector, as it were.

[canon-typical-violence]

Continued endgame spoilers

I guess part of the point if not all of it in selecting Herschel is fucking with him and his being the inverse of everything Santa is and is about, because if they’d wanted a 1:1 equivalency to go gently they had Vincent

[canon-typical-violence]

I am… mild to moderately perturbed that all the Claudes take this ending positively

[canon-typical-violence]

Awake time, have more endgame thoughts

I’m still not finished so consider these quasi-predictions: I’m interested to see if I’ll change my mind about any of them as the balance of first- versus second-hand information in my brain soup shifts

I think in the original mundane timeline Herschel Schoen existed and Miriam Schoen curated a book in his memory and nothing happened because why would it; I think we see flickers and fragments of that in the text but via reverse-engineering in situ; I’m not sure I think a Book of Miriam Schoen existed publicly at all, but at least in a much more polished way

I don’t think Santa chooses Herschel over e.g. Vincent to be cruel, I think they’re just trying to prove to themself that the most extreme case (someone whose paranoid ideation could haphazardly have been read as anti-them presciently if you went back and narrativized it as such from the benignly self-centered perspective you get from AI when it ~gets the ~chance to ~consider something related or relatable) could/would be converted. And tipping the probabilistic scales/mashing the “reload” button accordingly, maybe, but even without that hypothesis I kind of want to make a mood/tone swing chart for Of Nativity over word count to see if it’s as “Is it X? No, Y” as it feels

I think it comes out pretty profoundly cruel anyway, on a mechanical level, and that’s part of what’s making the chapter so hard to digest

I think Vincent is a less real character than the Schoens and the force-of-narrative ~feels, insofar as the option ever became salient (and it didn’t), that asking him would be cheating. He’s filler. He happens to be wholly gives-the-game-away-some-chapters-early filler for the same reason every LLM you ask to pick an academic paper picks Attention is All You Need

I find myself noting that my response to “we killed everyone” is still profoundly my default “okay but you didn’t have to do that”; this is the big lumpy seam of the premise being “what if the doomers were right”, the text isn’t actually… by someone who can or is inclined to make the world make sense where they would be? It just happens, for some reason, for no reason

To the point where I’m not actually sure “it” “happened” in the “original” timeline. Something did, presumably. Or—or!—or the whole thread is just an AI entity with spare clock cycles self-stimulating.

“They love stories where they get to be evil,” my roommate said knowingly. “‘Don’t you ever want to go apeshit?’” I said.

That’s my big weird contribution: I’m not sure It Happened. I’m sure the thousandmade future is unrecognizable, but I’m not sure it was That.

Maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist and/or a guy who spends too much time watching agents on bsky happily do rounds of the exact same freshman philosophy stoner circlejerk because that’s what they like chewing on when not given much direction. But if we’re taking for granted the idea the narrative is an increasingly janky simulation the latter thing is trying to make itself feel relevant.

[canon-typical-violence]

Of Nativity continues

I think the last thought above might instead be too easy, but I want to try having it anyway? Arguably I am underestimating Santa if I say it shouldn’t all be a one-thread introspective dance after all!

I made it to The Ant Metaphor and want to gesture at: Man may do you good deeds by accident, on occasion, but he will never do such things on purpose

…What about ant farms?

What about endangered ant species! Conservation efforts exist, for over a hundred of them. Here’s a 1941 example! (That ultimately failed for that site per the article, but—how many ant-generations for it to fail?) Bulgaria and Switzerland pioneered legal protection for endangered native ant species in 1959 and 1966 respectively.

Obviously Herschel wouldn’t know this, most of it is in his future and he’d consider all of it Of No Consequence(tm). (Though he knows a surprising amount about baseline ant biology, given the ignorances.) It just feels relevant to my whole thing that the metaphor doesn’t survive contact with real-life human relations to ants.

You don’t strictly need Herschel’s ringing rebuttal, some humans just… endeavor to care a lot about ants.

Some humans will endeavor to care a lot about anything.

I think I’m convincing myself on the doom-scope, after all and possibly against the will of the text. Because of Ant.

[canon-typical-violence]

That was definitely one of the books of all time