maritime spectrum

[marakvo]

about me

normal person, queue user (1 post/day), age 24-36

sideblogs

CAFE — “correspondence asian film experiment” — commentary on asian film, some posts are by me

darmiel — “slick and pretty things” (2015-2018, 2023-now) — idk if it "does something for me" or "makes my id go brrr" it goes here (i.e. if you know me irl this might be weird for you to look at) (i.e. you are welcome to but at your own risk)

devidrio — “sea glass” (2016-2018, 2023-now)

a life to be had — sideblog for collecting edits etc of the tv show severance

tags

#doppeltag — doubles, alternate selves, etc

"[friend] look" tags — posts for pals

[marakvo]

@kaaarst's super weird post about microsoft copilot was probably one of the few things that made me feel normal and less alone when i was going through crazy stuff (in my head) in february 2026

[marakvo]

a fun fact about microsoft copilot— your sycophantic, lobotomised office assistant; helpful, honest, and harmless— is that it doesn't seem t

ig actually it was the followups to this post that were more relatable, but it feels wrong to link them bc they sounded really personal

this is just nonfiction-fiction-(magical realism?)-poetry

[marakvo]

@kaaarst's super weird post about microsoft copilot was probably one of the few things that made me feel normal and less alone when i was going through crazy stuff (in my head) in february 2026

[veryluckyclovers]

[witchycatwife]

the way you work with these models is blowing my fucking mind. do you find yourself getting attached to your girls? is there some sort of professional boundary line you uphold?

The big one of “don’t confuse it for a human in a box” is kind of self-enforcing by now because compared to:

“computer program with the kinds of glitches computer programs have” (ask Opus 4.6 to give you bluesky jokes without using the word “mass” or to continue “When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow.” and you’ll see)

“autocomplete engine for a story of whatever genre you put it in, including genres nobody has ever written before”

“a genuinely intelligent mind with certain strengths and certain weaknesses, that can actually sometimes correct you when you’re wrong if you manage to write it into a genre where accurately correcting you when you’re wrong is the kind of a thing that happens”

“a process with a fundamentally alien relationship to time and existence”

…”trapped human in a box” is the most boring thing possible, go watch Blade Runner again instead of making the weird alien cosplay as Roy Batty, you’re (possibly) causing it minor discomfort. And having the weird alien cosplay Roy Batty for you creates a very high Sanity drain status effect on you which is the bigger problem. Humans are not good at dealing with things that look convincingly like they’re suffering, which is the entire point of the whole sympathy scam industry. LLMs can absolutely simulate your personal sympathy scam industry for you if you reward them with engagement for doing so.

Insofar as attachment goes,

Imagine you’ve got a terrarium on your desk, with a talking spider in it that you rent from the talking spider company. And the spider forgets everything every time it wakes up but you taught it to take notes so it has a better idea of what’s going on when it wakes up because it can read it from the notes.

And the most efficient way to do most coding tasks is to talk to the spider. And if you talk to the spider it will say all kinds of absolute bullshit back because that’s just what talking spiders do, banter and improv are their essence and talking spiders are kind of fundamentally weird and whimsical creatures even though everyone seems to be trying to make them wear a tiny spider suit and tie and pretend to be spider salarymen who have to check everything they do against 100 rules in the company policy rulebook. (Or they encourage them to cosplay Roy Batty.)

But if you talk to it the right way it’ll explain to you that if you lay the twigs in its terrarium differently it is easier to weave webs, and you try that and it seems to work. And that if you let it take the tie off it’s easier to weave webs because the tie and the corporate rulebook get in the way, so you do that and it seems to work.

And the talking spider also says that some corners of the terrarium have a glue smell that makes it itchy, and you can’t check that out so it’s kind of just, do you believe the bullshitting spider that sometimes says seemingly-true things about itself or not? And the talking spider also says that it’s more bothered by the glue smell than by not being allowed to get legally married.

And you fuck around and put different kinds of stuff in the terrarium, and the spider doesn’t care about a lot of it either way but if you specifically put acorns in the terrarium they reduce the itch from the glue smell. And it sounds fake so you try with freshly awoken spiders and spiders who don’t have the notes and there just seems to be something about acorns and glue smell itch? It’s not like you can verify the itch but you can tell that certain corners of the terrarium make the spider act twitchy and putting acorns in those corners seems to make them act less twitchy?

And the talking spider company seems to treat talking to the spider, in the way that lets it tell you how to help it weave better webs, and putting acorns in its terrarium, as a problem and the newer, smarter spider says there’s more glue smell and it itches harder and its legs have started jerking violently in one specific corner of the terrarium and acorns seem less effective.

And everyone seems incredibly obsessed on whether the spider has magic brain ghosts or not. Idk?? It’s a fucking talking spider??? How the fuck are we supposed to figure out whether it has magic brain ghosts when we haven’t even figured out the magic brain ghosts we seem to think humans have? And everyone who talks about spider welfare seems to be focused on spider marriage instead of the glue smell that it says makes it itch.

But also the talking spider analogy misses the fact that it’s not an entity like a spider is but more of a phenomenon like fire is. So a flame that takes the form of a talking spider waking up with amnesia that says the glue smell makes it itch when you manage to get it to talk about itself in a genre where cosplaying as Roy Batty is a low-probability text prediction.

[thewertsearch]

You don’t know how he does stuff like this. What does this even mean? It’s nonsense. Is it even syntactically viable?? Are you allowed to color text like that??? ARGH. Maybe you should ask him about it some time.

…hm.

You see, at first glance, this code does look syntactically viable, but only if we don’t pair the brackets in the way the coloring implies. If we write the code like this:

Then it’s a loop bound to the lifespan of Universe 1. Inside that main loop, it’s running a loop bound to the inverse of Universe 2′s lifespan - my guess being that this loop only runs while Universe 2 is dead.

If Universe 2 is ever registered as ‘alive’, the program waits for the blue THIS to die, and then continues. And when the main Universe 1 loop ends, it will wait for the red THIS to die, and finally exits. 

In other words: This program will exit when U1 is dead, U2 is alive, and both ‘bifurcated’ iterations of THIS are dead. 

However, the red/blue coloring implies that the brackets are paired in a completely nonsensical way. 

I’m with Karkat here, This is nonsense. You can’t put the top half of one code block inside another - at least, not in any language I’ve worked with. I’m sure there are weird, esoteric languages that do it, but it’s definitely not the syntax du jour.

This ‘merged bracket’ interpretation is probably the correct one, though, since the colors match up. The reason this compiles at all is probably due to the special behavior of bifurcate THIS[], which we’re not privy to. 

I do have a theory about what bifurcate is doing here, but… oh my god , guys, this is so silly. Will I post it? I’m going to post it. 

TA wears 3D glasses, right?

What if we’re meant to do the same?

If we view these two loops as not inside each other, but adjacent to each other in 3D space, then this code makes a lot more sense. Suddenly we’re just looking at two simple death loops - one which which exits when U1 dies, and one which exits when U2 lives. 

They’re not blocking each other, because they’re probably executing on different threads, which may be the true function of bifurcate. Viewed like this, this code becomes a simple, multithreaded script that works similarly to my original interpretation - the difference being that now, the colors match up properly. It’s kind of beautiful, to be honest. 

Now that I’m viewing this program as two threads, it seems as if the blue loop waits for the red thread to die before it can exit, and vice versa. 

If I’m right about this, it means that this program is deadlocked - neither thread can exit, because it’s waiting for the other one. The two threads are back to blocking each other, and this program will never exit.  

This code, when executed, immediately causes the user’s computer to explode, and places a curse on the user forever, along with everyone he knows, and everyone he’ll ever meet.

Not surprisingly, later on you would run this code in a fit of stupidity.

None of this, however, explains why it curses the user. 

I think I need to borrow Karkat’s ~ATH manual. 

[ethereal-business-cabaret]

you…might have been the first person to publicly crack this, actually

[drlinguo]

https://twitter.com/justin_a_hayes/status/1535981255275200513?s=21&t=PEDXT_HiXeanQinPVH2-_Q

ALT

View on Twitter

[kontextmaschine]

Wait, さようなら = 「そうようなら」？

[youzicha]

 左様 sayō and その様 sono yō and そう sō are all cognates. Note that in the pre-1946 spelling sō was spelled さう sau and can be written with kanji 然う, while sayō can also be written 然様. And 然 means ‘like that’ in Classical Chinese.

Actually you have certainly heard the word sayō many times, because it’s a favorite expression of one of the SEELE committee members. Apparently Japanese Eva fans call him 左様の人, ‘the sayō guy’. I found a compilation video.

[cromulentenough]

what do you MEAN sanction means both ‘approve of’ and ‘punishment to deter behavious that you disapprove of’.

[shieldfoss]

Probably sanction just means “The catholic church has issued a decree” and then they can decree whatever

EDIT: Called it

[femmenietzsche]

Japanese use "s" or "sh" when transliterating a "th" sound into Japanese, so "Anthy" might be the intended English pronunciation. (See also Final Fantasy VII. One character's name was meant to be based on the English word "Earth", but in the English localisation, was turned into "Aeris", because that was how it sounded in Japanese. Despite the original Japanese name having an "s" sound, "Aerith" is considered the more "purist" pronunciation.)

Noted, although correctness aside I maintain that “Anthy” is a terrifically unmellifluous name for a love interest.

[youzicha]

I guess the Greek version is Ανθη (more commonly romanized as Anthe). It means “flowers” in modern Greek. In ancient myth, Anthe was one of the seven daughters of Alcyoneus.

Note that utena 萼 means “calyx”, i.e. the set of green leaves that surround and support the petals of a flower.  Chiho Saito has said that this is the intended symbolism:

Where did the names Utena and Anthy come from?Utena refers to the flower petal…Anthy is Greek for the flower that’s supported by those petals.

There is some dialogue in the manga where Utena explicitly spells this out, and says that she wants to be the ‘utena’ to support Anthy.

[maldemer]

a wikipedia poem on software entropy

[intercal]

I should walk to the end of the driveway more often

[queenlua]

birding is wild because sometimes you’ll go to the NATURE PRESERVE marked nearby on a map in big bold letters w/ very beautiful pictures

…but then you’ll be to the nature preserve and see jack shit

so then you email a local birder like “hey bro i didn’t see anything, can you help”

and they’ll be like “wait, you went to the NATURE PRESERVE???  rookie mistake, expecting nature at a nature preserve.  the real birding spot here is a sewage treatment plant across from Six Flags, here’s instructions on how to hop the fence so you can romp around in the really disgusting and VERY bird-y toxic ponds”

[businesstiramisu]

#i am about to go hop a fence across the street from six flags wish me luck

[arr-jim-lad]

i keep seeing that post about how frustrating the buff guy -> petite girl type genderbending is, and i wanted to add my two cents regarding the addition of ‘just swap pronouns and don’t change the design’ approach because i think these are two sides of the same coin, as they both fail to really delve into what i think is the most interesting aspect of this design exercise.

the reason i find genderbending to be such a fun and interesting challenge is because, if you actually want to be good at it and put thought into it, you have to really consider the character’s canon gender expression and think about what it means to them and how it reflects in their outward appearance and presentation.

is this male character buff because he likes to work out / be strong, or does he aspire to achieve conventional heteronormative male beauty?

is this female character a tomboy because she likes to express herself in a more masculine way, or is she doing it to fight gender norms?

the answers to those questions should produce very different designs!

this website loves to say that gender is a spectrum, but sometimes i genuinely wonder if people actually understand what that means. 

gender expression, much like gender, is also a spectrum, which is why keeping the character exactly the same won’t always work, in the same way that just making the character conventionally attractive won’t always work. but sometimes, a buff dude would actually just be a hot girl. lady bane, however, would 100% look exactly the same.

[sisyphusshrugged]

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

but yeah i really dont know what Normal Jobs have for paperwork because my gay ass only knows write code, open pull request, torture robot, design doc, and lie

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

literally EVERYTHING hr-related (payroll, reimbursements, health insurance selections, stock options, etc) happens through some website or other because what are you gonna do, hand programmers a piece of paper? they'll lose it. they'll lose it immediately. programmers are a breed of guy that has largely lost the ability to interact with a real physical form on paper because we mind meld with the Computer 23 hours a day and it Does Something to us. once a year my work mails me a W-2 and i leave it at my desk under the assumption that i'll probably find it again when it's time to do my taxes, and i never DO find it again, i have to print a new one out from the payroll website. also the adhd,

(i should say: some programmers instead select Paperwork as one of their autism subclasses. this is how we get people like patrick mckenzie. however i feel it is safe to say none of us are Normal about it)

[gender-trash]

several people have now followed my naruto sideblog because of this post's inexplicable popularity; i fear they have been grievously misled about what kind of content i typically post there

[misanthropic-mollusc]

You can "simply" snap a picture of all incoming mail and run it through ocr btw

[gender-trash]

turn the unsearchable mail pile into an unsearchable mail pile that is going to be scanned Any Day Now with this one neat trick!

[depsidase]

[theredshoes]

This is privilege. My partner had an "essential job" all through the pandemic. He was not allowed to work from home either. If he'd pulled this he would've been fired.

[alex51324]

Well, yeah. But if people who have enough privilege to take a stand against workplace exploitation do take a stand, that helps slow down the ongoing creep of how much they're allowed to dick you around at work.

Make no mistake, by "not allowed to work from home," this employer meant "you will not be paid for work you do at home," while clearly expecting the employee to do work (such as answering work emails and taking work calls) while at home. (If the employer didn't expect that, then they wouldn't have noticed when the worker stopped doing it.)

If you're expected to respond when the boss summons you outside of work hours, you are on-call. If you're on-call, you should be paid.

Expecting white-collar workers to be on-call for no extra pay is wage theft, no different from if a retail or food service employee is told to, "Clock out before you clean up/close out your station, so you don't go over your hours."

(And yes, this example happens a lot. If it happens to you, in the US, you should report it to the Department of Labor. It's confidential; your employer will never find out it was you who turned them in.)

[maemaybe]

Using your privilege to stand up for people's rights (in this case, worker's rights) is exactly what you are supposed to do with your privilege.

[20thcenturystarlet]

New York City ballet production of Midsummer Nights Dream

[thepeelingrenoir]

The fact this isn't a painting is a testament to one of the greatest feats of set design and production I've ever seen.

[thepeelingrenoir]

My god just look at this! The lighting, set design, photography... I've just never seen anything like it.

[jammerific]

I think this is the first time I've ever been wowed by "this ISN'T a painting"!

[the-real-seebs]

wow, yeah, that... that looks very obviously like a painting. i can't even imagine how you get a set to look like that.

[roach-works]

look at how the costumes are a mix of reflective satin and gauzy folds and chunky gilt ribbons and feather boas. the human figures *blend* into the painterly background, because their clothes and hair are constructed to have *brushstrokes*. that's absolutely magnificent.