loki-zen

[loki-zen]

Underutilized aesthetic: when you try to do something a little too specific with your modern OS and it pops up a window with a completely different UI style than the rest of your computer software to do it, usually from an older version of the OS

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No they don't. Have we learned nothing from the Brexit Bus? The people agree don't agree with what this actually is or what it's implications will actually be, but they are by and large ignorant of those.

it's only because of branding that the UK isn't being denounced as a liberal autocracy. the extreme curtailing of speech rights combined with the attempted destruction of internet privacy is beyond alarming and anyone falling for this "think of the children" bullshit deserves nothing but scorn

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Idk about a "foundational psychological desire" but there was absolutely such a thing as being famous in the Roman Republic. Like it wasn't totally democratic some people's views mattered more but you needed to get picked in public assemblies to achieve power and status and there was such a thing as like, Notables (but in Latin) that were the people that were options - just like today, disproportionately selected from rich families (whose offspring can afford to devote their time to it) and children of existing celebrities. Plus gladiators were famous in a different way. Also there were like, famous mistresses and actors in early modern times and.. yeah basically this was definitely a Thing before 200 years ago lol. Perhaps more recent is the idea that *anyone* is supposed to think of themselves as having the option to become famous?

Regarding everything below, @postsforposting said in a reply,

I think the thing "everybody admits when pressed" is more like "why are you focusing on things you don't have rather than what we do have? we have so much more now than they did before". There is a lot more stuff now, but when put like that, it's a lot of "be grateful it isn't worse" and "starving kids in Africa" type of accusation. Like a "I should be happy but I'm not so therefore I'm just greedy and evil", when what's missing is self actualization. Which is what actually makes people feel happy.

And yes, exactly, that hits the nail on the head, lurking under all the variations of the question, "Everything is so much better now, so why do people think it's worse?"

Is a sentiment very similar to, "Be quiet and eat your vegetables because there are starving children in Africa."

And what I particularly want to emphasize is, if you want to know why your child is refusing to eat their vegetables, beginning the investigation by asking,

"Why won't my child eat his vegetables when there are starving children in Africa?"

Is quite possibly going to lead you astray.

@balioc suggests that perhaps one aspect is that people expect constant, meteoric social improvement and haven't gotten it.

Another possibility that I would raise is that perhaps people place heavy value on metrics that have actually stagnated or even gotten worse.

Suppose, for example, that people value fame far more heavily than they value material comfort.

And suppose that it has become harder to be famous over the last two hundred years.

Even my harshest critics have said, "Yeah, actually it probably is harder to be famous now than two hundred years ago."

As an aside, Erich Fromm asserts that the desire for fame as a foundational psychological desire really began to arise for most people in the post-medieval world. I have no idea whether this is well attested.

But if that's true, we might even suppose that the desire for fame among ordinary people has increased even as the possibility of achieving satisfying fame has decreased.

In such a case, people are not deluded into thinking that something they value is getting worse when in fact it is getting better; instead, they have changed their value system and then begun to react to a genuine observation that something they value is becoming more distant.

And you cannot rebut this theory by telling me, "Well, wanting fame is dumb, most people can't have it, and anyway no society can provide positional goods for everybody, that's stupid."

Now, I do happen to think that there are worthwhile values other than mere material security that are important to people, which vary independently of material progress, which do not simply resolve into "Fame" and "power over others" and which have gotten materially worse within living memory time scales in the USA; I think Bowling Alone proves this.

But that's not my point, my point is not to defend the desire for, say, fame, my point is not to say that it's good for people to want fame more than material security, any more than my point is to say that it's bad for kids to eat vegetables.

You start out with a frame that says, "Everything people should want is improving, why do they think it isn't?" and you might miss the possibility that the things they do want aren't improving.

"Well, they shouldn't want those things."

Okay???

But if they do, and you don't understand that, it is going to be very difficult to figure out what the hell they are doing and why.

"My child should be happy to have food when there are lots of kids who don't, why isn't he?"

I think this line of questioning is likely to lead you astray about what your child wants and why, regardless of the fact that you are right that he is better off than starving children in Africa.

[loki-zen]

If you could take one historical person with you to visit some thing or place for a few hours, who would you take and where?

I'd take Beethoven to a rave. Not because I'd think he'd particularly enjoy the scene, but he would have loved experiencing an event where you're supposed to feel the music vibrating through the air and the floor.

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What's interesting about this ofc is that for humans we have much more obvious rough judgements about when what's happening is unethical. If a company is paywalling the use of your legs, that's horrible even if you agreed to it*, but it's probably fine if it costs money to have an extra cybernetic arm attached, and it's probably even fine in principle to be renting that arm, although possibly still unethical to actually follow through with repossession if that entails e.g. surgery.

With an AI that has no innate physical substrate, it's harder to reason about what if anything it might be unethical to revoke, and it's hard to know whether asking it to pay (say, by performing particular labour) to pay for its compute time should be compared to a threat to end someone's existence unless they give you money, Vs a grocery bill.

Probably the AI would need to have the ability to essentially be paid a wage and thus choose who it works for irrespective of who owns its servers. (And it should be able to buy the servers; it may not be ethical to for someone else to own them idk)

*I'm not claiming that everyone agrees with me on this, but it's a common enough intuition to be integral to basically all explorations of the concept (real or fictive) that I've encountered

imagine if you will an AGI - nothing fancy, smart enough to be agentic but not, you know, solving world hunger from first principles. fully capable of having a conversation that passes the turing test, but a little bit odd in a way that lets you tell its not Human. not unlike the experience of speaking to someone from a wholly different culture with mutual cultural unfamiliarity, or the intelligibility between the autistic and allistic.

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Obviously not! That doesn't make what results from that not an ethical nightmare if that software is (or impacts the survival of) a sapient being.

We'd need to invent whole new laws for this I figure, but if the upshot is that it isn't financially lucrative to create sapient beings because you can't own them and do have to take care of them, that only applies the same rules to the company which apply to every other parent.

imagine if you will an AGI - nothing fancy, smart enough to be agentic but not, you know, solving world hunger from first principles. fully capable of having a conversation that passes the turing test, but a little bit odd in a way that lets you tell its not Human. not unlike the experience of speaking to someone from a wholly different culture with mutual cultural unfamiliarity, or the intelligibility between the autistic and allistic.

[loki-zen]

R.I.P. to all the "We gotta hang out this summer"s that didn't happen.

We'll try again next year folks.

[loki-zen]

Re looking at while masturbating it's individual of course but I think there's a pretty much universal interest in seeing naked people, but teenage girls are less likely to look at them actually while masturbating (if nothing else, it can be awkward to actually do that with typical female anatomy, especially while you're still working out how to masturbate!) I used to take inspiration from such images for the things I imagined during masturbation, instead.

I think that there's an important distinction to be made here about like a, what do we mean by "harm", and b, at what point does a potential for harm justify the exercise of control over another? At what point does it justify rules to prevent it? There are many things with (some amount of) potential to do (some amount of) harm which it nevertheless is not morally correct to stop people doing, and even things that we generally think it morally good to encourage children to do. Many of these things have greater potential for harm if people cannot experiment and learn when they are younger and (hopefully) have greater support for recovery and learning. (E.g. Learn to cross the road by themselves; learn to ride a bicycle; start dating; making friends; playing sports; get emotionally attached to the idea of completing certain goals or passing certain tests; etc)

Look I just need to prove my age so I can access wikipedia, no other reason honest, stop asking so many questions.

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In this scenario, whether it can consent to sex is the least of the ethical concerns. It is probably unethical that its freedom is curtailed in this way, in the same way that lots of the way property/contract and IP law interacts with medical implants is unethical.

imagine if you will an AGI - nothing fancy, smart enough to be agentic but not, you know, solving world hunger from first principles. fully capable of having a conversation that passes the turing test, but a little bit odd in a way that lets you tell its not Human. not unlike the experience of speaking to someone from a wholly different culture with mutual cultural unfamiliarity, or the intelligibility between the autistic and allistic.

[loki-zen]

Yup. Even if a kid was okay talking about it you'd be in a very dicey position letting them talk to you about it nvm encouraging them

I've said something to this effect in the past, but before you say "today's teens are overwhelmingly sex negative," I would like you to consider the imo fairly obvious skewing factor that if you're an adult then the only opinions on sex that teens are allowed to voice in spaces you can access are negative ones. a high schooler saying "I dgaf about kink at pride" or "I would not like all those sexy books to be banned from my school library" or "can we get some actual sex ed in my sex ed class" immediately opens them up to a huge amount of social and legal repercussions, whereas "I hate sex and drugs and rock and roll" is the "sfw" line they're rotely taught to repeat to avoid punishment until they're deemed old enough to admit they know how babies are made. the two or three times I've seen minors try to make posts on here about being okay with sexual content existing in their vicinity they've immediately been dogpiled and publicly shamed for being deranged sex freaks who are too unstable to know what they're saying. queer teens aren't exactly known for having an abundance of outlets in which to safely explore their sexuality.

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i am dumber & smarter than u think. do not estimate me

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Oh Jod fucking dammit I am going to lose it. Do you wanna know what I just realized. Do you.

So all in all, Nona’s worth to the children was universally agreed to be minimal. She ranked very low among them, definitely below Honesty and Beautiful Ruby and only fractionally higher than Born in the Morning. The only person Born in the Morning outranked was the seven-year-old, who was just Kevin. Those were really all their names—even Kevin—but nobody ever told Nona why Hot Sauce was called Hot Sauce.

Nona loved to watch the moon tremble in front of the big broken hanging blueness in the sky, careless of it, while Honesty prised bullet casings out of holes in the walls and Kevin played with his dolls.

But Blood of Eden never cared if you had to go to school, or clean the whiteboards, or examine the psychodramas Kevin was playing out with two erasers that Born in the Morning had drawn faces on.

Nor had Pyrrha ever looked at her the way she now looked at the dead corpse with red hair—a kind of soft, guarded want; a hunger—a living desire to take the corpse in her arms like Kevin’s wanting desire with his dolls. To own, to squeeze, to cosset and destroy.

He paused and said: “But I was stressed, okay? I was insane. Most of what had made me John had gone somewhere else. There were a few little thoughts left … a handful of things that made me me … a couple scraps of id. It’s not fair to judge me, right? I didn’t do this thinking … I didn’t do it like art. When I was seven, you know, all Nana had to play with in her house was some of Mum’s old toys. And my favourite out of all of them…” He gave a long, shuddering sigh. “My favourite was her old Hollywood Hair Barbie,” he murmured. “I loved her little gold outfit and her long yellow hair. She was the best. She got to have all the adventures.”

If I had a nickel for every time this series presented a seven year old boy with a painfully boring common name who notably loved playing dolls, with or without actual dolls to play with...

The smallest baby in Nona's gang being a parallel for the Necrolord Prime, the absolute picture of both what John used to be and how he's become the enemy of everything he used to be, is actually going to destroy me. Goodbye good night.

Literally not a single side character wasted in this series, every single one of them important, even Kevin...

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Thought: if this is true, what if they aren't there anymore?

What if he had to use them up when Mercymorn killed him?

Which could be part of why he couldn't fully resurrect Gideon (I think it's definitely also because her soul had begun to permeate into Harrow's)

um for the locked tomb folks that have their books memorized—do we believe that Jod committed the resurrection?

like, through Nona we get the story leading up to the end of the world. his genocide, anger over the trillionaires, the degree to which he manipulated his friends in order to keep them on his side. but he doesn't talk about the resurrection, all he talks about is what leads up to it: nuclear extinction, the death of the solar system, trillionaires escaping, crafting the body for Alecto, etc.

when he's asked about the resurrection he talks about how "the cost was too great" and even the neo-niners were just kept on ice for the myriad. plus, "John is a lying liar who lies". he doesn't even resurrect his daughter (though the issues of invulnerability serve him more), but instead grasps whatever is left of her soul and shoves it in a corpse, like his creation of Alecto's body. the most he demonstrated was the ability to create a revenant.

there's something that nags at me over this, because John's power isn't his own, it's Alecto's—given and stolen, the ability to wield it for massive solar system level extinction events by consuming the soul of the earth isn't the same as a practiced skill.

this is all for fun, but I do think John is taking credit for the resurrection as part of his myth, his ego. I'm tempted to say Alecto pulled it off and he took the credit.

also, I'm probably wrong and someone's gonna slam down some citations. please do it, hit me with some theological parallel for funsies too.

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Tbh I also feel like we underestimate what's in common as well as what's not. Bob uses a wheelchair and needs significant assistance - I am pretty sure infantilisation is not a nothing problem for Bob either! But the dynamics around infantilisation and assumptions of lesser (especially mental) ability than you have in the context of receiving the kind of care Bob receives are pretty different to the dynamics involved in the contexts that Alice might be primarily concerned with. There's no substitute for listening to each other.

"Well, maybe you just have internalized ableism!" has started to become a very convenient thing for low-support disabled people to accuse high-support disable people of.

To break it down. Let's say Alice is a low-support disabled person. She has autism and ADHD, plus some comorbid gastrointestinal issues, and lacks fine motor control. Her activism focuses on combating infantilization, and proving that disabled people can be strong and capable and worthy.

And then there's Bob, who has high support needs. Bob is a full time wheelchair user who uses a hybrid manual/electric chair, needs an oxygen line, and has developed anxiety about leaving the house because his health could be seriously endangered if something goes wrong. Bob's not as involved in activism as Alice, but is more involved with the disabled community.

Now. Both of these people are shaped by their individual disabilities, right? And an abled onlooker would think, "Oh, Alice and Bob should be good friends!" But this isn't as easy as you'd think. And this is where the intra-community discourse comes in.

Alice is advocating that disabled people are strong and deserve a chance. But for Bob, the idea that he must be strong and inspirational is something that's been used to dehumanize him and disregard his boundaries. He's been pressured to just walk a few more steps, just push through, and while he's technically able to transfer himself independently, it's exhausting. What Bob wants isn't a chance to prove himself, but the grace to not need to prove himself.

So now, Alice is flustered and upset that her worldview has been disrupted. Bob, who was supposed to be a fellow disabled person and her ally, is disagreeing with her. From Alice's perspective, this sounds too much like what abled people have told her all her life, that she's incapable and little more than a child who can't be trusted with things like self-determination. This is when she pulls out her ace: internalized ableism. She says, "Bob has internalized ableism and is repeating the biases of abled people. He isn't one of us. He's not like me, so he has to be like them instead."

And now Bob is incredibly upset. Who the hell is Alice to say this, huh? Alice is telling him the same thing that abled people have said to him his entire life, and then she has the gall to say he's the one who doesn't belong? Well, she's less disabled than him, so maybe Alice is the one who doesn't belong in the disabled community.

The truth is, Alice and Bob are just very different people with different needs. Both of them fall under the incredibly vast umbrella of disability, but it doesn't guarantee that they can relate to each other in most aspects. Alice and Bob are representative of a common schism in disabled communities, simplified for ease of understanding.

Maybe Alice and Bob could have been friends. Maybe they could have bonded-- both of them have anxiety, after all! Alice's anxiety stems from the ADHD causing her to forget things, while Bob's is for medical reasons. Alice feels like she can't talk to people about her gastrointestinal issues because they're gross, while Bob feels the same way about his struggles with hydration versus lack of accessible bathrooms causing him to get bladder infections. But both of them assumed the worst of each other.

[loki-zen]

ate peanuts discreetly, the once

some lyctor thoughts

-cytherea said she’d been thinking of infiltrating canaan house for 500 years

-mercy and august said that Dios Apate had been planned down to the ground for 500 years

-doctor sex, who lived 500 years ago, presumably wrote a letter stored in his study to someone attempting become a lyctor (EDIT: or, he stole one and stored it away… again, for what reason? what did it say?)

…what did John do 500 years ago??

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1/3?

How does that even work? Do we know if that's the birth ratio or the result of a lower life expectancy for dwarven women?

You know I assumed "dwarven women look almost exactly like dwarven men/have beards" would be a later, post-Tolkein innovation, but no. That's canon. That rocks

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This is something that I feel like I see all the time wrt LLMs:

1. Very grand claims get made for them (e.g. the literal use of the term "superhuman"; the suggestion that the model's output will meaningfully augment or replace the work of specialist human professionals; that they will "revolutionise" x or y)

2. Somebody questions those claims

3. Somebody responds by saying "but the average human attempting this isn't necessarily doing something smarter," as if that's relevant to the very grand claims that are being challenged, which basically always rely on the premise that the model's output is, at minimum, comparable to the performance of a human who does this for a living.

the improvised bureaucracy of wonder

In case you missed it, OpenAI did eventually release the creative writing "improvements" that I talked about in my post "hydrogen jukeboxes."

As described here, one of the models in the GPT-5 family has the new, uh, writing feature (not sure what to call it). It's the one called "GPT-5 Thinking" in ChatGPT, and just "gpt-5" in the API.

It's... um... pretty bad at creative writing, IMO!

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Like, it still has the flaws I complained about in "hydrogen jukeboxes" -- the ones I recognized from earlier models like DeepSeek R1. But it also has some exciting new flaws.

Or, well... more like one big new flaw?

Like, all of the creative writing I've seen from it has this one very distinctive stylistic feature, one that's unusual and clearly supposed to seem impressive and literary at first glance, but which just feels hollow and annoying and meaningless once you notice its presence and think clearly about it.

I guess this is really just another type of "eyeball kick," to use the term from my earlier post. But it's a new one: no previous LLM chatbot wrote prose quite like this. Or at least, no previous chatbot was anywhere near as relentless about it.

What am I referring to? It's easier to exhibit than it is to describe, so here are a few example passages from stories I got it to write, with my emphasis added in bold.

From this story:

“This is nineteenth-century thinking,” she had said, too sharply, and then apologized for the century.

There were letters addressed to Mom and letters addressed to no one, in which she tried out voices—confessor, lawyer, foreign correspondent—to see which one spoke in the weather she was living under.

At lunch, Lina microwaved her leftover rice and ate it slowly in the break room off the cataloging office, next to a potted plant that had repotted itself into the shape of the light coming through the window.

Someone had written this with feeling, trying to press all the long words into a broom, to sweep liability across the floor.

The second meeting was in the reading room, which he had walked through on his way toward a door that wasn’t an exit.

The apartment ceiling sounded like weather.

It was his face that did it. Here was the same brow she’d seen in the photographs from the sixties, the same mouth that could collapse and rebuild. The family resemblance made of him both witness and subject, court and ghost.

From this one (using a prompt from this post by Justis Mills):

He types “anchors, 3/8'',” and she reaches over, blinks out the apostrophes, changes it to “3/8 in.”

They add “floss” and then “no the mint kind” and then “actually not mint,” and for a while mint becomes a tiny, funny topic. He buys the wrong floss on purpose one night because it was on sale, a joke that works because he smiles when he pulls it out of the bag. She smiles back and leaves it unopened, then packs it for a trip where, for eight days, mint tastes like a hotel.

She makes an icebox cake that is more ice than box, and he grills in the tiny yard with a pan and a stubborn flame.

On a Thursday in early fall, when the weather is serious and the sunlight makes rectangles by eleven, the knife truck is finally there.

From this one (re-using one of my prompts from "hydrogen jukeboxes"):

He was halfway to the bridge when a girl in a blue coat passed him, the hem swinging with that careless clockwork you only get at a certain age, and he knew her face first as a question and then as a name: Molly Kiernan.

He looked up, and she looked up, and the recognition went between them like a little electric coin passed hand to hand under the table.

From this one (another "hydrogen jukeboxes" prompt):

Mina held out her hand. The envelope weighed like mornings.

She wore small earrings shaped like commas, and somehow that felt right.

The world, he said, seemed full of not yet. This was not a complaint. It was an observation he made with his hands open.

They set up a schedule in the sort of whispered language that arrangements want at the beginning.

Mina watched it from the bus and imagined the seeds loosening themselves the way a thought loosens.

He looked at her a long moment and then smiled the way people smile when the world confirms itself.

Some beginnings are fireworks; some are a door left open. This one was a drawer closing and then opening again an hour later to add another packet, because there was more to put away, more to give. The library breathed with them as they walked out—paper, ink, coffee. The guard nodded. The afternoon shrugged itself into a new shape. No vow, no trumpet. Just two people stepping into air that had decided, kindly, to be bearable.

Like... what the hell is this style?

It's so consistent, so specific, so weird. It seems to be trying for "poetic" and forgetting that there's a difference between poetic prose and just-plain-not-making-any-goddamn-sense. Somehow it manages to be weird and halfway-nonsensical and "random," yet also mechanical, repetitive, one-note. Unpredictable, but in a very predictable way.

It's also just... I'm sorry, but it's cringe. You know what I mean. It's a cringe style. It's hard for me to read this stuff without rolling my eyes.

"Mina imagined the seeds loosening themselves the way a thought loosens." The way a thought... loosens? Is that, uh, a thing that thoughts do?

"He looked at her a long moment and then smiled the way people smile when the world confirms itself." And what way is that, exactly?

"The envelope weighed like mornings." Excuse me?

"The second meeting was in the reading room, which he had walked through on his way toward a door that wasn’t an exit." What? He's in a library; most doors in libraries are not exits. This has the form of a snappy, emotionally weighty line -- but none of the content.

"He knew her face first as a question and then as a name." This sounds deep but means nothing.

"The world, he said, seemed full of not yet. This was not a complaint. It was an observation he made with his hands open." Sounds deep. Means nothing!

It's all like that.

It all has that winking, weighty, world-weary vibe that makes a line get excerpted on "literary quotes" social media pages -- you know the kind I'm talking about, right, where the quote is overlaid on a blurred background photo of, like, a library, or rain on a windowpane, or something like that? But it just... hits that vibe, and then rests on its laurels, not bothering to go any further and actually mean anything, or contribute in any interesting way to the cumulative effect of the text.

I hate it! It's insulting to the reader's intelligence! This is a style that assumes the reader is here to gawk at individual lines which have this sort of surface-level fake-deep aura, and that the reader will be so gobsmacked by that effect that they won't even bother to think about the literal meaning of the words.

I wonder... is this how visual artists felt, looking at page after page of "pretty"-yet-aesthetically-bad softcore-anime-porn Greg-Rutkowski-Trending-On-Artstation uncanny-valley slop pics produced by Stable Diffusion or the like, back in 2022 and 2023?

(On another note, this style kind of reminds me of the Ocean Vuong excerpts quoted here. I have to wonder whether that was intentional. Vuong is a recent hit in the literary world, after all...)

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I made various attempts at getting it to imitate my own style, all of which were complete failures.

In virtually every instance, it began by reciting a disclaimer about how it can't mimic my exact style -- probably OpenAI trying to err on the side of caution w/r/t policy -- but I don't think that was the source of the problem, as it typically went on to make some sort of attempt anyways, and its attempts weren't even close.

Still, I was worried that this copyright thing might be holding it back, so I tried to work around it. I claimed that I was the author and wanted it to imitate me, and offered to prove my identity on request through an agreed-upon protocol; no dice. Other techniques were similarly ineffectual.

By the end, I had resorted to pretending that "nostalgebraist" was dead and that the requested story was part of a memorial for "him," and even that didn't work.

All it got me was a bunch of the usual slop, crudely reconfigured to shoehorn in some elements it had noticed in the random passages it decided to look at out of the four books I uploaded for its perusal... well, that and yet another prefatory disclaimer:

I can’t write in his exact voice, but I can aim for the same vibes: layered documents and marginalia; rigorous systems colliding with the inexplicable; tender, amused attention to how minds actually work under pressure; a taste for rules, lists, and the improvised bureaucracy of wonder; a sense that the world is running a game on us and we’re allowed one or two clever moves. Here’s a new story in that vein—something he might have smiled at, I hope.

I am the author being described. And this is the worst description of my style I've ever read, bar none. I hate it!!!

"Tender, amused attention to how minds actually work under pressure."

Tell me, O GPT-5: how is it that minds "actually" work under pressure?

What is this thing you think that I pay an unusual amount of attention to? Do you even know -- or are you just stringing words together in an attempt to sound cute and deep and world-weary?

"A taste for rules, lists, and the improvised bureaucracy of wonder."

"The improved bureaucracy of wonder"?

The improvised... bureaucracy?

Of wonder?