pronouns and flags and stuff - 26 years old, he/they
Likes: D&D, Pathfinder, Pokémon, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Terraria, insects, cats, memes, cute/wholesome stuff, theater, basic human decency
I had a Tumblr since before the Great Reddit Migration of '23, but I wasn't really active, and now I am, so I consider myself an /r/196 refugee.
So I am finally getting around to writing a proper intro post lol, so hi, i'm tsintzask, or tsin for short. i use that handle everywhere online pretty much, so if you see a tsintzask elsewhere, chances are it's me.
i have had this blog for a long time now, but only really became active here after reddit decided to ban the app i was using to access it. I was an /r/196 user who migrated to my unused blog, basically.
I'm from Greece, and I study computer science in college. As of the most recent edit, I am doing my masters program, so that's going pretty good.
i would consider myself an anarchist, though i don't think humanity is currently ready for that kind of world - i think there's just too many selfish people around that would seek to take advantage of things. still, the current system has got to go. the fundamental idea behind capitalism is to prioritize money over people, and that's just plain evil.
As for other stuff about me, i have been told before i have neurodivergent vibes (it wasn't in like in a derogatory way, but as a serious thing) and yeah i kinda see that. I ought to go get checked sometime
i like a lot of things, as you can see in my blog description: D&D, Pathfinder, Pokémon, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Terraria, insects, cats, memes, cute/wholesome stuff, theater, basic human decency. And I wanna gush about my likes a bit-
D&D and Pathfinder
I've been a player in both d&d 5e and pathfinder 2e, and a DM in d&d 5e. we're talking whole years of doing this. making characters is really fun, and playing them is even more fun! I mostly play online over Discord, but have played a lot irl too, and still do.
Pokémon
While i'm not as into it as i used to in my teens, i have played every game from pokemon pearl up to ultra moon, but not any further as i don't own a switch. that is subject to change if/when i get more into piracy. I've also played pokemon emerald and leaf green in emulators, and i've played mystery dungeon: explorers of darkness. one of the few video games to actually make me cry, btw.
Genshin Impact & Honkai Star Rail
this is my most recent fascination, i've been at it for a couple years now. mihoyo makes their games so incredibly gay and i love that. while i've been a bit burnt out on genshin, i am currently enjoying star rail a whole lot! and i ship a bunch of stuff that sometimes contradicts each other, so if you see conflicting ship arts in my reblogs, there's why. part of it is that i ship kujou sara with every other girl in genshin
btw, feel free to friend me in either game, in the EU server
Genshin UID: 741043259
Honkai Star Rail UID: 700410303
Terraria
oh man, terraria. all of my high school energy and two of my undergrad college years went into this game, it's just so good. I occasionally do modded runs every few months now.
Theater
I'm not a theater nerd or anything, but I did go to an amateur theater group for a couple years. was fun, i'd do it again for sure!
Basic Human Decency
I just think being nice is good. i don't get argumentative often; I used to argue often, but i try to keep most of my interactions with bigots/assholes/etc as a simple joke on their expense before i block them. also, it's taking some effort, but when i have something negative to comment on someone i don't actually have reason to dislike, i've been trying to just let it go and ignore instead.
you can show a drawing to a theoretically infinite number of people a theoretically infinite number of times and there will still be errors nobody catches until it's posted and we all just have to live like this
One of the staffers at our local anarchist bookstore just left the reading group I run because a trans woman asked them not to call her "bro" in the group chat
i had a dream last night that the entire world used a currency (?) called angrypennies which as the name implies are obtained by experiencing anger. the stronger and more intense your anger was, the more angrypennies you'd gain. an all-consuming rage would earn you more than a slight irritation, etc. so people were always searching for ways to fuel their anger and purposefully keeping themselves angry all the time because they wanted to earn angrypennies. unclear if angrypennies could be exchanged for goods and services, or if they were just a collectible.
anyway, as if this wasn't heavy-handed enough, at one point british comedian greg davies appeared and explained that angrypennies couldn't be worth feeling angry all the time. this was a real revelation to dream-me and i was finally able to break free of the angrypenny grind and allow myself to experience emotions other than anger.
it goes without saying that i will be using the word angrypenny as if it was part of the common vernacular instead of a term that my dreaming brain conjured up i.e. "he's all about the angrypennies" (derogatory way to refer to a guy who searches for reasons to be angry and possibly lacks introspection)
I was drinking tomato juice while gaming, and I finished it, but then I died and had to reload a save from before I finished my tomato juice, and for a moment, I was genuinely confused about why my tomato juice was still empty.
Growing up, older folks would always get confused when I expressed familiarity with media from their childhoods and would act incredulous when I attempted to explain the concept of reruns. They'd be like "How do you, a child of this fallen era, know of Looney Tunes" and I'd be like "Because it has never not been playing on television" and this would seem to be brand new information to them
4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.
5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.
some interesting thoughts (!) from "head of strategic futures" openai
3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.
I think open-weight is basically as diffusion-accelerationist as closed (maybe slightly more on the margin), but considerably development-decelerationist due to raising ai hyper scale cost of capital. By the way, I don’t ascribe moral or ethical valence to these terms; I’m being descriptive.
This is the part that interested me, production must be sabotaged in order to ensure accumulation, very Veblen.
In a rare rebuke, more than a dozen former workers of the powerful data-mining and surveillance company say the firm's work with the Trump a
Liberals and tech workers believe in fucking nothing. "Bwuh, i didn't sign up to assemble a massive real-time surveilance machine for the government to use it on GOOD People like Americans! Only on BAD people like foreigners!!!!"