#Logical Data Modeling

[erstudio-idera]

What is Logical Data Modeling and Why is it important?

Learn what logical data modeling is, why it matters, and how it bridges the gap between conceptual and physical models. Check out benefits, best practices, and how tools like ER/Studio support logical data modeling for scalable, platform-independent design.

Visit us to know more: https://erstudio.com/blog/what-is-logical-data-modeling-and-why-is-it-important/

[thedatachannel]

Data Modelling Master Class-Series | Introduction -Topic 1

https://youtu.be/L1x_BM9wWdQ

#theDataChannel @thedatachannel @datamodelling

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[chromegnomes]

the most frustrating thing about AI Art from a Discourse perspective is that the actual violation involved is pretty nebulous

like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross

but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory

by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:

Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)

No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)

Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)

it's extremely annoying to talk about, because you'll see people straight up gloating about their Intent To Plagiarize, but it's hard to stick them with any specific crime beyond Generally Scummy Behavior unless you want to create some truly horrible precedents and usher in The Thousand Year Reign of Intellectual Property Law

[willowsnook]

Papaya Was Never the Problem

request: Y/N spends months crushing on Lando, only to be heartbroken when he moves on with someone else. Ready for something real, she realizes she had her eyes on the wrong McLaren driver all along—maybe it was Pato she should’ve seen from the start.

pato o’ward x reader

—----------------------------------

Your 16-year-old self would be disgusted at you if she knew that you’d be 23 and simping over a man who did not feel the same about you. But you couldn’t help it, everytime you thought it was over, Lando would pull your right back in. 

It wasn’t really even his fault, you had both agreed to keep things casual, that you weren’t looking for anything more. But somewhere along the line, it became a little blurred. You tried to take a step back, but everytime you did he pulled you right back closer. Whether it was random flowers he sent to your door, making sure that everyone knew he took your opinion the most serious out of all the McLaren strategists, or coming over to watch a movie and not hooking up. 

You felt crazy. You knew logically that you needed to cut it off but damn you just loved his attention. He could make you feel like you were the only girl in the world. 

But you knew that wasn’t the case. If you weren’t there on his arm, someone else was. It was never anything serious – until it was. 

It was a race day just like any other and you were buried in data, trying to figure out what you could do between now and qualifying to ensure Lando started P1 on Sunday. You had been at it for a while now, interrupted only by the clearing of a throat. Max Fewtrell stood next to your desk, and the look on his face had you instantly stopping. He looked…guilty? 

“What’s up?” You asked, and he hesitated. 

“I need to tell you something that is going to hurt you,” he started. “But you’ve become one of my closest friends so I can’t let this go on any longer.”

“What are you talking about?” You asked, heartbeat raising. 

“Lando is bringing his girlfriend ot the race tomorrow,” Max said and it felt like you had been doused with a cold bucket of water. 

“Girlfriend?” You asked, the word foreign on your tongue. 

"Yeah," Max winced. "I'm so sorry. I thought you knew. It's serious apparently. They've been together for a few months."

A few months. The words echoed in your mind as you tried to process what Max was telling you. All those nights, all those moments that felt like something more—they had meant nothing.

"Who is she?" The question left your lips before you could stop it.

"Some model he met at a party in Monaco." Max's hand came to rest on your shoulder. "You deserve better, Y/N. You always have."

You nodded numbly, tears threatening to spill. "Thanks for telling me."

After Max left, you sat motionless at your desk, staring at the data that suddenly seemed so meaningless. Months of your life wasted on someone who had been leading you on while building a relationship with someone else.

The next day, you kept your head down, focusing entirely on work. When you spotted Lando in the garage, you ducked out of the way, avoiding him for as long as you could. You were forced to finally see him during the pre-race briefing and you doing everything in your power to not look at him did not go unnoticed. 

“Y/n,” Lando called as everyone walked out. “Can we talk?”

You nodded, gaining the courage to look him on the eye. You knew he knew what was happening the second his eyes met yours. 

“I-I I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I should have told you, but we always said it was casual between us right?” 

“Why didn’t you just say something?” You asked, your sadness melting into anger. “Like what’s fucking wrong with you Lando?”

He flinched at your tone, the guilt written all over his face. “I know. I just wanted both of you as long as I could have it.”

“And then you decided that you wanted her more,” you said for him, your heart ripping in half. “Quite frankly I never want to see you again.” 

Hurt flashed across his face but you didn’t give him a chance to respond, moving past him and out the door. 

The race went horribly. Lando dropped from P2 to P10 and it was just a disaster all around. You knew it was your last race, you’d made the decision last night, before even talking to Lando. There were plenty of things you could do with an engineering degree so you weren’t worried. You could go anywhere you wanted. Away from all of this. 

Zak was in a conference room when you found him and you shut the door behind you as you walked in. He looked up at you in surprise, the doom and gloom from the race on his face. 

“Hey y/n, tough day today,” he said and you nodded. “What can I do for you?” 

“I’m going to be leaving McLaren,” you told him, trying to not let your voice waver. This was your first job and you loved the people here. Loved the work, the environment, everything. But you couldn’t stay. 

“What?” Zak veered back, shocked. “After one bad race?” 

“It’s more than one bad race,” you said quietly and in that moment he knew. He’d seen the two of you together, and wasn’t the only McLaren employee that was confused by another girl’s presence today. 

“What are you going to do?” He asked and you shrugged. 

“I don’t know yet,” you admitted and he shook his head. 

“Y/n, you are one of the most talented young strategists we’ve come across,” he told you. “I can’t let you leave.” 

“I can’t stay Zak,” you said, exasperated. He thought for a moment before lighting up. 

“IndyCar,” he said and your eyebrows furrowed. “If you’re okay to move, let me put you on one of our IndyCar teams, probably Patos.” 

You hesitated. You were open to moving somewhere new and across an ocean was pretty far away from Lando. Plus you’d get to stay in racing, which was definitely ideal. 

“Okay, I’ll do it,” you said and Zak grinned. 

“It’s settled then.” 

—-----------------------------------------

“Welcome to Indianapolis!” Your new coworker, Hannah beamed at you from outside of the Arrow-McLaren office in downtown Indy. 

“Thank you,” you said politely.

“I know we don’t go to as many glamorous places as you’re used to but Indy is pretty historic for racing,” she said. 

“Yeah, I actually grew up in Kansas City,” you told her and her eyes widened it surprise. “So I’m familiar with all of this, even if it’s been a while. “

“Sorry! They never tell me anything,” she grumbled. 

“No worries,” you told her sweetly. She led you through the lobby and to the upstairs floor, where different mechanics were working. She was around your age so you felt comfortable chatting with her, happy to have someone to be friends with in a new place. 

“Okay Tony is waiting for you in his office up there,” she told you and you thanked her before stepping into the room. 

“Ahh, y/n, pleasure to meet you,” Tony said, standing up to shake your hand. “Zak sings your praises all the time so I’m happy we got to steal you away.” 

“I’m happy to be here,” you said, sitting down across from him. 

“I’m going to put you on Pato’s team - he’s our best driver here and I think you guys will get along,” he said and you nodded. “Ah here he is, Pato! Come in here for a sec.” 

You turned as the door opened, and in walked a man you'd seen on TV but never in person. Pato O'Ward had a vibrant energy to him, his smile genuine as he entered the room. His eyes landed on you, and for a moment, you felt a flutter of something you couldn't quite place.

"Welcome to the team," he said, extending his hand. His accent was thick but endearing. "Tony has been talking about you all week."

"Has he?" You shook his hand, noticing the calluses that came from gripping a steering wheel for hours on end.

"All good things," Tony assured you. "Pato, Y/N is coming to us from the F1 team. She's one of their top strategists."

"Was," you corrected with a small smile. "I'm all IndyCar now."

"Well, their loss is our gain," Pato said, his gaze not leaving yours. You smiled shyly before turning back to Tom. 

“Well, let’s get started.”

—------------------------------------

IndyCar was a whole new puzzle to crack, but you were loving the challenge. The other strategists had welcomed you with open arms, eager to hear your ideas for the car as you headed into a race weekend. 

Pato was fast, but Alex Palou was faster and it was a problem you were drowning trying to figure it out. It was late, the warm air of Riverside blowing gently through your hair as you stepped outside, eager to take a break. No one else was at the track, just you and a bunch of numbers, just like you preferred it. 

Switching to IndyCar had been a good move. Max had called you a couple of times to check in and you were honest when you told him: you were happy here. Much happier than you were back there. You’d become fast friends with Hannah, and she’d introduced you to her friends, quickly accepting you into the group. 

Working with Pato was a breeze. He was focused and driven but also fun and lighthearted. You ignored the way you caught him looking at you every once in a while. You’d seen that look before, just on a different man in a papaya suit. 

“What are you still doing here?” 

Speak of the devil, you see Pato coming up to you, a boyish smile on his face. You smile back, appreciating the way the track lights hit his face. 

“Trying to get you a win,” you said and he laughed. 

“I thought I was supposed to be doing that,” he replied and you shook your head amused, turning back to stare out at the track. 

"No, I think it's a team effort," you replied, leaning against the railing. "I'm just used to working late. It's a hard habit to break."

"You don't have to do that here," Pato said, moving to stand beside you. His shoulder brushed against yours, and you tried to ignore the warmth that spread through you at the contact.

"I want to," you admitted. "I want to prove that I belong here."

"You already have," he said, his voice dropping lower. "Everyone can see how talented you are."

You turned to look at him, surprised by the sincerity in his voice. There was something in his eyes that made your heart skip a beat.

"Thank you," you said softly. "That means a lot."

A comfortable silence fell between you as you both gazed out at the empty track. The distant sound of cicadas filled the air and you were too lost in your own thoughts to see the way Pato was looking at you.

“You know,” he said, breaking the silence. “I was supposed to meet you last year in Brazil but I was told to stay away.” 

“By who?” You asked, eyebrows scrunched in confusion as you turned to look at him. You sighed as you saw his face, already knowing the answer. “Lando.”

“Mhm,” Pato answered. “Is that why you came here?” 

“Yes,” you said honestly. “I needed a fresh start.” 

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said and you looked at him once again, his eyes on yours. “He didn’t deserve you.” 

You felt the heat rise to your cheeks, suddenly very aware of how close you were standing to him. "You don't even know me," you said softly, but there was no bite to your words.

"I know enough," Pato replied, his voice gentle. "I know you work harder than anyone else on the team. I know you care about the success of everyone around you, not just yourself. And I know that anyone who couldn't see what they had with you is an idiot."

You laughed, shaking your head. "You're just saying that because I'm trying to get you a win."

"No," he said, turning to face you fully now. "I'm saying it because it's true."

The intensity in his gaze made your breath catch. For months, you'd been so focused on getting over Lando, on proving yourself in this new environment, that you hadn't allowed yourself any opportunity to open your heart.

“I can’t start something with you Pato,” you said sadly. “No matter how much I want to. I can’t go through it again.” 

“I don’t think you understand that it would be completely different,” he said but you didn’t say anything, just looked down at your hands. “Okay, if I have to spend the rest of the season proving that to you then I will.” 

—----------------------------------------------------------------

It felt like you were back in F1, watching Max lurking like a shark in the background, quickly gaining on whoever was in front of him like a shark who had seen it’s prey. Except this time the shark was Alex Palou and Pato was unfortunately the prey. Pato had led almost the whole race but Alex did what he did best: win. 

The garage was dejected, despite taking second and third and you fully expected the silent treatment from the drivers. Lando always shut down after races, always so in his head that there was no point in talking to him. Pato was quiet during the debrief but you were used to it so it didn’t bother you. 

Picking up your stuff, you headed out the door. Pato was waiting for you outside and you looked at him in surprise. You would have expected him to get back to the hotel as soon as possible. 

“Do you have plans?” He asked and you shook your head. He was still in his fireproofs, sweat and champagne stained on his face. “Get something to eat with me and talk about the race?”

“We just had a chance to talk about it, but you didn’t say much,” you countered and he rolled his eyes. 

“I just want to talk to you right now, okay? I’ll talk to the rest of the team when we’re back in Indy,” he said. 

You hesitated, caught off guard by his directness. This wasn't what you expected after a race that didn't go his way. But there was something in his eyes—an earnestness that made it impossible to say no.

"Okay," you agreed. "But you should probably change first."

He grinned, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. "Give me ten minutes."

True to his word, Pato emerged from the motorhome shortly after, dressed in jeans and a simple black t-shirt that hugged his frame. You tried not to stare.

"There's a little place around the corner that's pretty good," he said, leading you away from the track. "I found it last year."

The restaurant was small and unassuming, tucked away from the main streets where most of the racing crowd would go. The hostess greeted Pato by name, clearly recognizing the driver and led you to a table in the back. 

"So," you said, taking a sip of your wine. "Second place isn't bad."

"It's not first," he replied, but there wasn't any bitterness in his tone. "Palou is just... consistently good. But we're getting closer."

“We have the advantage on some of the upcoming tracks though – you’ve performed better than he has in the past.” 

Pato’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, a smirk growing on his face. “Watching my old races huh?”

You rolled your eyes but a smile was evident on your face. “Doing my job.” 

The rest of dinner was spent going through the race almost lap by lap until you really just had nothing left to say. Pato paid the tab and held out his hand to you almost challenging as he got up. You rolled your eyes but took it, letting him lead you out of the restaurant. 

“Tired?” He asked, once you were outside and you nodded. “Okay let’s get you home cariño.”

You blushed at the term of endearment and he grinned widely before tugging you along to the car. The ride back to the hotel was short and he walked you back up to your room, gently pressing his lips against your cheek before saying goodbye. 

Remember what happened with Lando

Remember what happened with Lando

Remember what happened with Lando

You chanted this to yourself as you got into your room but it was becoming hard. Pato seemed to be everything Lando was not but you had built up a lot of walls around your heart. You still didn’t know what you wanted, not sure if you could handle another situationship during a season just hoping that it could be something more in the offseason. 

—---------------------------------------------------------

There was a few weeks in between races so you packed your bags to head off to a nice vacation during your free time. Hannah had begged you to join her and her friends so you found yourself on the sunny beaches of Punta Mita, baking in the Mexican sun. By day three of the vacation your skin had a nice glow to it and you decided you never wanted to go home. 

You were sitting on loungers outside with your friends watching the sunset, a margarita in your hands when you saw a familiar face sitting at another lounge area, his eyes trained on you. Your head snapped towards Hannah who looked over your shoulder then smirked. 

“Did you know he was going to be here?” You asked. 

“I swear I didn’t, but I’m definitely not complaining,” she said with a smirk and you groaned. Soon enough, Pato was walking over with his friends, asking if they could join you all. The seat you were sitting on was definitely big enough for two so you begrudgingly scooted over as Pato plopped down next to you. His arm rested behind you on the back of the lounger and he gave you a small smile. 

“Hola hermosa,” he said cheekily and you couldn’t help but smile at his antics. 

“Are you stalking me Pato O’Ward?” You said and he let his head dip backwards, laughing. 

“Oof, using my full name, does that mean I’m in trouble?” He asked. 

“Maybe,” you teased. 

“I’d love to see what the punishment is,” he murmured, eyes flickering down to your chest. Your face flamed which only made his smirk deepen. He pulled you in closer to his side and you panicked, feeling yours and his friend’s knowing eyes. 

“Pato, everyone can see us,” you whispered. 

“Kind of the point cariño,” he replied, letting his hand fall to rest on your upper arm, tracing the skin with his finger. You started to say something else but he jumped into a conversation with his friend next to him. 

You couldn't help but feel conflicted as you sat nestled against Pato's side, the warmth of his body seeping into yours. The sun was setting over the ocean, painting the sky in vibrant oranges and pinks, and despite your internal protests, this felt... right.

After a couple more rounds of drinks, the group decided to head to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Pato's hand found the small of your back as you walked, guiding you through the crowded beachfront. The gesture was small, but intentional. Public. A statement.

"You're not being very subtle," you murmured as you reached the restaurant.

"I'm not trying to be," he replied, his eyes meeting yours. "I told you I would prove that I'm different."

At dinner, Pato insisted on sitting next to you, his leg occasionally brushing against yours under the table. The conversation flowed easily, most of his friends having been around a lot of his racing so they could keep up with you and Hannah. When it died down, most of the group decided to turn in for the night but you weren’t ready to retire just yet. 

“Walk with me?” You asked Pato and he nodded, slipping his hand into yours as you headed down the shoreline. Being with Pato was easy. You were never stressed, never waiting for the second ball to drop. 

He walked you back to the resort, stopping before the staircase that led up to your floor. You turend to him in confusion but were cut off by his lips against yours. They moved slowly and you found yourself moving against him, bringing your hand up to cup his face. His rested on your waist, holding you close to him. 

You pulled away after a bit, biting your lip as you stared at him. 

“What are you thinking cariño?” He asked. 

You hesitated, heart hammering in your chest. You weren’t sure if it was the warmth of the kiss still lingering on your lips, or the way his voice sounded like honey under the moonlight, but the words tumbled out before you could stop them.

“I like you,” you admitted, eyes dropping to the sand. “But I’m not sure I want to do this again, just be someone there for your convenience not able to commit during the season. I’ve already done that before.”

The words hung in the air like a challenge, one you almost regretted the second you said it. But Pato didn't say anything right away. His expression shifted, the playfulness draining from his face, replaced by something sharper—something that almost looked like hurt.

“Wow,” he finally said, his voice low. “You really think that little of me?”

Your eyes widened, head snapping up. “Pato, I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “You meant it. And maybe that’s on me—maybe I was too forward, maybe I made this all feel too easy. But I’m not him, Y/N.”

He took a step back, still looking at you like you’d just slapped him.

“I’ve never once treated you like an option. I never played games. I’ve shown up, I’ve been honest, and I’ve waited—for you to see me, to trust me. And I would’ve kept waiting if you needed more time.” His voice cracked slightly at the end, and it cut you to your core.

“I’m not asking you to be mine right now,” he added. “I’m not asking you to give me anything you’re not ready for. But I am asking you to stop treating me like a placeholder for your past.”

Your throat tightened, your own eyes stinging with tears you didn’t expect.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered.

Pato nodded slowly, running a hand through his hair. “I’ll wait for you as long as you need, Y/N. But only if you’re willing to believe I’m worth waiting for too.”

And then he turned, starting to walk back toward the resort, leaving you with your bare feet in the sand and your heart unraveling in your hands.

—----------------------------------

You didn’t hear from Pato for the rest of the break and you tried to not think about the silence. It was hard to not compare him to Lando but it felt like you were right back in it. Big fight, usually a misunderstanding, and then he wouldn’t look at you and you’d pretend it didn’t hurt. 

That’s why you were dreading the return to the office, you knew he was going to be there today and you weren’t ready for the silent treatment in person. Hannah gave you a sympathetic look when she saw you, having heard everything that happened when you both travelled home. You spent the first half of the day at your computer, analyzing some data before deciding to get up to grab some coffee. 

Rounding the corner you ran straight into someone, your sorrys were cut off by two arms wrapping around you, pulling you into their chest. 

“Hola hermosa,” Pato whispered into your ear and you relaxed into him, letting your guard down. You couldn’t help the tears starting to gather in your eyes as he pulled away. “Oh cariño, what’s wrong?” 

You tried blinking away the tears, but one fell and was quickly swiped away by his fingers. 

"I thought you were going to be mad at me," you admitted, voice shaky. "I thought you wouldn't want to talk to me anymore."

Pato's face softened, understanding replacing his initial concern. "Is that what he would have done? Gone silent on you?"

You nodded, unable to meet his eyes.

"Look at me," Pato said gently, tilting your chin up. "I meant what I said on the beach. I'm not him. I was hurt, yes. I needed space to think, but I wasn't going to throw away what we have because of one fight."

"I'm sorry," you whispered. "For comparing you to him. For not trusting that you're different."

"I know," he replied, brushing a strand of hair from your face. "And I'm sorry I walked away. I should have stayed, talked it through."

The admittance that he could have done something differently didn’t go unnoticed by you and you started to say something else when someone called out your name. 

“Y/n!”

You turned around to see Zak Brown coming down the hallway and your face broke out into a massive smile. 

“Zak,” you greeted and he pulled you into a bear hug, lifting you off your feet. 

“Oh how I’ve missed you,” your old boss said. “I hope you’ve been keeping up with the F1 races, I need your advice.”

“Of course you do,” you teased. Zak reached out to shake Pato’s hand before Pato excused himself to head to lunch. 

You walked with Zak to the conference room, chatting about the previous F1 races and what he was thinking. 

“I saw you and Pato,” he said as you reached the doors and you froze before deflating. 

“Just hopping from one driver to the next aren’t I?” You asked quietly. “I know what you’re going to say.” 

Zak looked at you carefully, “Lando didn’t deserve you, everyone knew that. But Pato’s different. He looks at you like you’re his whole world so what I was going to say is that I’m happy for you.”

You looked up at him in shock. "You think so?" you asked, a note of vulnerability in your voice that you rarely let anyone hear.

"Y/N, I've known Pato for years now," Zak said, leaning against the doorframe. "That man has always been passionate about racing, about winning. But I've never seen him look at anything the way he looks at you."

You felt warmth spread through your chest at his words.

"Besides," Zak continued with a knowing smile, "I didn't transfer you here just because you needed to get away from Lando. I sent you here because I thought you'd be brilliant with this team. And maybe, just maybe, I thought you and Pato might hit it off."

"You were playing matchmaker?" You laughed incredulously.

"Call it an executive decision," he winked. "Now, about these race strategies..."

The meeting with Zak flew by, and by the time you emerged from the conference room, it was late afternoon. You checked your phone to find a text from Pato.

Dinner tonight? My place. I'll cook.

After stopping by your own place to change into something comfier, you headed to Pato’s. He smiled as he opened the door when you knocked, stepping aside to let you in. 

“It smells amazing,” you commented. You knew you were no longer going to enjoy your family’s white people taco nights after just one glance at what was cooking in the kitchen. 

Pato grinned, stepping back over to the stove to stir something in a pan. “It’s my mom’s recipe,” he said. “I figured if I was going to earn your forgiveness, I should start with food.”

You laughed softly, walking toward the kitchen island. “You already have my forgiveness,” you said, watching the way he moved so confidently around the kitchen, barefoot and in a soft black t-shirt. “But if you want to impress me, this is definitely the right way to do it.”

“Good to know,” he said with a wink. “Because I plan to keep trying.”

Dinner was relaxed, the two of you sitting across from each other at his kitchen table, a bottle of wine between you. He kept your cheeks warm with compliments and your stomach sore from laughing. It was comfortable—easy in a way that didn’t scare you anymore.

After the dishes were done (you washed, he dried), Pato grabbed a blanket and led you out to the small balcony that overlooked downtown Indy. The sun had long set, but the glow of the city lights made everything feel soft and quiet.

You curled your legs beneath you as you settled onto the outdoor couch, Pato sitting next to you and draping the blanket over both your laps.

“It’s kind of wild,” you said after a few minutes, your voice low. “That I ended up here. That it took me going through all of that mess just to realize the right person was someone I hadn’t even met yet.”

Pato turned to look at you, his profile lit up by the warm patio light. “I hate that he made you feel like you were hard to love,” he said quietly. “Because being with you? It feels like the easiest thing in the world.”

You swallowed, heart thudding in your chest as you met his gaze. “I was so scared of getting it wrong again.”

“You didn’t,” he said, reaching out to gently tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. “You just hadn’t found the right person to get it right with.”

A beat passed between you before you leaned in, pressing your forehead to his. “Are we really doing this?” you whispered.

Pato smiled, the kind that reached his eyes. “We’ve been doing this for a while now, haven’t we?”

You kissed him again, slower this time—deeper. It didn’t feel like a maybe or a placeholder or a temporary distraction. It felt like a beginning. When you finally pulled away, Pato rested his hand against your cheek.

“So,” he said, eyes dancing, “do I get to call you mine now?”

You couldn’t stop the smile that bloomed across your face. “Yeah,” you whispered. “I think I’d like that.”

“Good,” he murmured, brushing his lips over yours again. “Because I’ve been yours since the day you walked into that office.”

And under the stars, wrapped in his arms, you finally believed it.

[catboybiologist]

Many billionaires in tech bros warn about the dangerous of AI. It's pretty obviously not because of any legitimate concern that AI will take over. But why do they keep saying stuff like this then? Why do we keep on having this still fear of some kind of singularity style event that leads to machine takeover?

The possibility of a self-sufficient AI taking over in our lifetimes is... Basically nothing, if I'm being honest. I'm not an expert by any means, I've used ai powered tools in my biology research, and I'm somewhat familiar with both the limits and possibility of what current models have to offer.

I'm starting to think that the reason why billionaires in particular try to prop this fear up is because it distracts from the actual danger of ai: the fact that billionaires and tech mega corporations have access to data, processing power, and proprietary algorithms to manipulate information on mass and control the flow of human behavior. To an extent, AI models are a black box. But the companies making them still have control over what inputs they receive for training and analysis, what kind of outputs they generate, and what they have access to. They're still code. Just some of the logic is built on statistics from large datasets instead of being manually coded.

The more billionaires make AI fear seem like a science fiction concept related to conciousness, the more they can absolve themselves in the eyes of public from this. The sheer scale of the large model statistics they're using, as well as the scope of surveillance that led to this point, are plain to see, and I think that the companies responsible are trying to play a big distraction game.

Hell, we can see this in the very use of the term artificial intelligence. Obviously, what we call artificial intelligence is nothing like science fiction style AI. Terms like large statistics, large models, and hell, even just machine learning are far less hyperbolic about what these models are actually doing.

I don't know if your average Middle class tech bro is actively perpetuating this same thing consciously, but I think the reason why it's such an attractive idea for them is because it subtly inflates their ego. By treating AI as a mystical act of the creation, as trending towards sapience or consciousness, if modern AI is just the infant form of something grand, they get to feel more important about their role in the course of society. Admitting the actual use and the actual power of current artificial intelligence means admitting to themselves that they have been a tool of mega corporations and billionaires, and that they are not actually a major player in human evolution. None of us are, but it's tech bro arrogance that insists they must be.

Do most tech bros think this way? Not really. Most are just complict neolibs that don't think too hard about the consequences of their actions. But for the subset that do actually think this way, this arrogance is pretty core to their thinking.

Obviously this isn't really something I can prove, this is just my suspicion from interacting with a fair number of techbros and people outside of CS alike.

[mortalityplays]

Forgive me if I'm mistaking you for another person, but I remember you speaking at multiple points on the unsustainability of free social media services (I think especially in response to the cohost collapse?), and I'm curious on what your thoughts on bluesky are so far. I'm not an expert on the subject, but from what I've read previously it seemed like they were on track to be financially sustainable, but I don't know if the recent floods of users has thrown those projections off. Sorry if I'm mixing you up with someone else on my timeline, in that case just ignore me.

bluesky will almost certainly follow the same trajectory of monetisation => bloat => enshittification => decline as every other major platform built on venture capital and user hoarding. it's a terrible model that only works in the short term as a mirage for attracting funding and making founders look good for a year or two before they sell.

you can see the same effect in the decline of all the subscription box services that came into vogue just before covid: they feel great to use for as long as the initial injection of venture funding lasts, because the purpose of that funding at that stage is to attract users and impress the next round of funders with how pleasant/intuitive/efficient/ethical/good value the service is. that's the stage where they're handing out freebies and bowling over influencers, and every ingredient in the box is fresh and high quality and locally sourced. wow what a good deal, what a great system!!! why hasn't anyone done this before? the answer is because it's unsustainable by design. they rack up good reviews, sign on a billion new users, attract new funding from a bunch of much more credulous investors, and then gut all of the expensive parts. portions get smaller, ingredients get worse, packaging gets flimsier, prices go up, freebies turn into "5% off your first 9 boxes when you invite 3 friends", and customer service vanishes.

with social media (and platforms like discord) the logic is the same, it's just a little less glaringly obvious to the end user because they're not coming home to leaking packages of rancid chicken on the doorstep. bluesky has an advantage over tiny operations like cohost because it was founded by a billionaire making a point for the sake of his own image. it got a really significant chunk of startup funding, and the owner had existing connections and rep in the space to attract more. That's why it has survived the goldrush period, why it still feels good to use, and why users who have been burned so many times before are finally accepting it as a stable, reliable option. It's still in its venture capital honeymoon phase where the only thing worth spending money on is making the service attractive to users.

What I expect we will see next, with another mass influx of users from twitter and new funding from a rogue's gallery of tech venture sickos led by Blockchain Capital is a strong ramp up into monetising that userbase. They've already been pretty forthright about how they plan to do this, and I think it's a solid roadmap of how Bluesky will bloat and decay over the next few years:

this is a huge lol. don't worry, we're not going to hyperfinancialize the social experience through NFTs. the thing even crypto freaks started feigning amnesia about a year ago. real "our health conscious sodas are 100% arsenic free" messaging here. They know perfectly well that rubes users are suspicious of their typical 5 dimensional tech finance chess games and are patting our hands about last week's bogeymen so nobody worries too hard about whatever 'decentralised developer ecosystem' just happens to be helmed by a bunch of crypto guys. this definitely means something good and based and not a google-like single sign on user data harvesting operation.

This is the same shit that's currently rotting the floorboards of discord. Bluntly, there is no way to run a platform on this scale without gating functionality behind paid services. Discord has been squeezing free-tier file uploads and call quality etc. down steadily and cranking up subscription costs over the last year or two, throwing in chaff like animated avatar frames to try and justify the user cost. They're also doing the same misdirection thing again here, pointing to Thing We All Hate to deflect from thing we might not like very much when they do it. Booo elon booo we all hate elon!!! wait how do we feel about subscription models again,

watch out for this to kill porn on bsky like it has killed porn on every other social platform 👍 boooo we hate elon boooo stupid idiot and his 'everything app' booooo wait why do you need my tax information, what's that about mastercard,

Look, we are all aware social media is a money pit. Let's not forget dorsey was looking to sell twitter in the first place, long before elon's very public plunge into total online derangement. Subscription services are not going to plug the hole, so we are gradually going to see more and more spaghetti thrown at the wall while early funders shuffle cards and do their pyramid scheme bit bringing in stupider and stupider investments. this is the window in which bluesky will be temporarily worth using for us, for the idiot public, the poorly rendered crowd jpegs in the background of their venture capital MOBA. it's in their interests to slow and pad the decline as much as possible, because that is how they get maximally paid.

Given the scale of the money involved, and dorsey's weird ego investment, I think bluesky will probably manage a controlled drift for a good few years before it gets really bloated and painful. and by then we will all be so used to the *checks notes* decentralised developer ecosystem that we'll just be posting through it, watching another generation of columnists call another collapsing platform 'their beloved hellsite' and passing around that meme about not getting out of our chairs no sir until idk we all get on a fediverse neurolink alternative to stick it to the elongated muskrat and our brains pop peacefully in our sleep. which I guess is the closest thing to viability any social media platform can achieve.

anyway diogenes the cynic is also on bluesky

[theonlyonesora]

The Quiet Equation

Toto Wolff x You

The leaves had just begun to change—burnt orange and brittle gold curling at the edges of Harvard Yard—when he walked into your life like an equation that didn’t balance.

You were seated in the third row of Maxwell 202, your laptop open, fingers idly tracing the rim of your coffee cup. It was your first lecture of the semester, an advanced seminar on sports business leadership, a course you’d only taken because you craved something challenging. Something unfamiliar.

You didn’t expect him.

Toto Wolff.

He entered the room not with fanfare but gravity—like a planet arriving into orbit, unannounced yet impossible to ignore. Six foot five, dressed in a charcoal cashmere sweater and slacks that looked tailor-made for his long, deliberate strides. His accent curled around his words like silk-wrapped steel. Every student in the lecture hall straightened unconsciously. A few whispered. A few stared.

But he didn’t scan the room for admiration. No, he scanned for curiosity. For sharpness. For minds worth his time.

And when his gaze landed on you, it stayed there half a second too long.

You looked away first. You always did.

.

You weren’t used to being noticed.

At 27, you’d already earned your master’s in engineering, and now you were folding into a second program focused on organizational strategy. Most people thought you were a scholarship kid who studied too hard. Maybe you were. You liked silence, liked order, liked the click of logic falling into place. You liked data because it never lied.

But now, data had a voice, and it came in the form of a man twice your age with sharp eyes and a voice like dark chocolate and gravel.

And then came the email.

Subject: Extra Credit Assignment—Mercedes-AMG F1 Guest Lectures You were one of three students selected. Three.

To assist Mr. Wolff during his time as a guest lecturer.

.

The first time he said your name, it was late afternoon. The sun had begun to dip behind the old stone buildings, casting the seminar room in an amber glow. You had just finished walking him through an analysis of cross-market brand loyalty between Formula One and other global sports franchises.

“Brilliant,” he said, like the word meant something ancient and reverent. “But you already knew that.”

You swallowed. “It’s just data.”

Toto tilted his head, studying you. “No. It’s the way you see it that matters. You find meaning in numbers the way others find it in poetry.”

You flushed. You hated that. He was too perceptive. Too calm. You liked your walls. He was already walking through them like they weren’t even there.

.

Over the weeks, something began to shift.

He stayed after class longer. Asked you questions no one else would dare ask—about why you never raised your hand, about how you learned to think the way you did. About what you were really afraid of.

He listened when you spoke, not just with attention—but with intention. As if every sentence from you deserved space to unfold.

And you?

You began to crave it. That space. That steady, quiet pull of him. The way he stood too close without ever touching you. The way he would call your name lowly in passing—never inappropriate, never unprofessional, but still enough to echo in your stomach long after he left the room.

There was an age difference, of course. Twenty-four years. But it didn’t feel like that.

It felt like… depth. Like gravity finding gravity.

.

One night, well past midnight, you stayed behind after a guest seminar to help him with a data model. The others had left. The building was quiet, shadows climbing the bookshelves. The glow from his laptop cast him in silver light, jaw tense, brow furrowed as he reviewed your notes.

“You’ve done this before,” he said softly. “Built something and never taken credit.”

You looked at him. “What makes you think that?”

“Because you remind me of myself. At your age.” He paused. “Hungry. Brilliant. Lonely.”

That word landed like a pebble in still water.

You didn’t respond right away. Then, quietly: “I don’t mind being alone.”

“No,” he said, watching you. “But maybe you’d like someone who understands it.”

You turned your head to meet his eyes—and the room, the night, the world—it all shifted. Everything suspended.

His hand didn’t move first. Yours did.

And when his fingers closed around yours, it wasn’t the beginning of anything reckless.

It was the beginning of something inevitable.

.

You never told anyone.

Harvard whispered, as universities always do. But there were no scandals. No rumors. Just the quiet glances exchanged in the corners of classrooms, the subtle shift in your breath when he entered a room.

And on the last day of term, he handed you a folded note with only two lines written in his precise, deliberate hand.

You are the most elegant mind I’ve ever met. Come to Brackley this summer. We have work to do.

You stared at the signature beneath it.

Toto.

Not Mr. Wolff. Not Professor.

Just Toto.

And for once in your carefully structured life, you didn’t hesitate. You were already packed.

Maybe part 2 ?

[foggieststars]

I think you guys are thinking too much about it. AI or no AI a fic is a fic. It doesn't matter. You think you writing about real people is ethical? Writing them fucking and with controversial pairings? AI is all over the place like get used to it. If someone is using AI to fix their errors, or to just improve some writing why tf do you care? Y'all are just entitled. Not everyone's great at English. Just stfu and LET people write what they want. God.

hi, this is such an ignorant ask i'm incredibly surprised you felt confident enough to hit send! but i'll engage with you in good faith regardless.

yes, there are debates about the ethics of writing RPF, but i think comparing them to the ethical debates about the use of AI is frankly quite laughable. not only does AI have an incredibly detrimental impact on the environment, the impacts are likely to be unequal and hit already resource-strained environments the hardest. (i am providing sources for you here, something i'm assuming you're unfamiliar with since you are so in favour of relying on AI to generate 'original' thought). moreover, many AI models rely on data scraping in order to train these models. it is very often the case that creators of works on the internet - for example, ao3 - do not give consent for their works to be used to train these models. it raises ethical questions about ownership of content, and of intellectual property beyond fanfiction. comparing these ethical dilemmas to the ethics of rpf is not an argument that convinces me, nor i'm sure does it convince many others.

"AI is all over the place like get used to it" - frankly, i'm not surprised you're so supportive of AI, if this is the best argument in its favour you can muster. you know what else is all over the place?? modern slavery! modern slavery's extremely commonplace across the world, anti-slavery international estimate that about 50 million people globally are living in modern slavery. following the line of your argument, since modern slavery is so commonplace, this must make it okay, and we should get used to it. the idea that just because something is everywhere makes it acceptable is a logical fallacy. do you see how an overreliance on AI reduces your ability to critically think, and to form arguments for yourself?

please explain to me how i'm entitled for thinking that relying on AI to produce something of generally, extremely poor quality, is poor behaviour on your part, or the part of other people who do it. you don't have to write fanfiction in english, and if you do struggle with english, there are MANY talented betas in this fandom who i'm sure would be willing to lend a hand and fix SPAG. you are NOT going to improve your english by getting AI to fix it for you.

as @wisteriagoesvroom helpfully pointed out "art is an act of emotion and celebration and joy and defiance. it is an unshakeable, unstoppable feeling that idea that must and should be expressed" - this is not something you can achieve via the use of AI. you might think it's not that deep, but for many people who dedicate hours of their time to writing fanfiction, it feels very much like a slap in the face. and what's more, it produces negligible benefits for the person who is engaging in creating AI fanfiction.

i agree with you that people should write whatever they want, but the operative word in that statement is write. i do not, and will not ever consider inputting prompts into chatgpt a sincere form of artistic creation. thanks!

[communistkenobi]

a very common mistake people make in political/social discourse is applying individualist thinking to some social phenomenon or theory. one of the most common examples is someone responding to the theory of white privilege with “but there are poor white people” or male privilege with “I’m a man but I have no power” etc. and in order to refute that properly you have to essentially get into a philosophy of science debate, to explain that the benefit of a given social theory is its ability to be generalised above the level of the individual, that what is being described is a social process, that human beings occupy various positions within a social space (a family, a neighbourhood, a workplace, a state) that are not individual. To be able to give an account of some social force you necessarily cannot be just talking about the particularities of a single person - if you were, all you would be expressing is an individual opinion about a single person. If you want to rise above the level of ‘mere opinion’ you need to actually provide an account that is general enough to apply to multiple people of varying social situations but systematic enough to be able to differentiate between who you are and are not speaking about. Of course data are lost in this endeavour - probably best summed up by the aphorism “all models are wrong but some are useful” - but the success of a given social theory is its ability to sustain its explanatory power despite these data losses. Like the whole game of generalisation is building a theory to figure out what data points to discard and which to retain. It is no more contradictory to say white privilege is real even though there are poor white people than to say the police are a white supremacist institution even though there are non-white police officers. In fact these seeming contradictions are accounted for in these same social theories - white supremacy has had centuries of policy development at this point, it is a fairly well-tested set of logics that have adapted to a variety of conflicts, problems, and political/economic/social developments (Sylvia Wynter talks about this in the context of the post-slavery US for example). White supremacy is thus resilient to these apparent contradictions (and these contradictions generate further social developments, such as the shifting meanings and locations of whiteness), which is why zooming into the level of the individual is often not helpful in explaining its effects on a social level.

Weber says that I need not know Caesar to understand Caesar - that to talk about Caesar as a historical figure and as a particular location in ancient Roman society is fundamentally different than a description of him as an individual. And nobody actually talks about Caesar as an individual anyway! Even psychological or biographical profiles of him are premised on the fact that Caesar is worthy of this profile as opposed to any other person living in the Roman Republic. The reason we all know his name is that his place in history is extended beyond the individual. A Roman general and leader is fundamentally not an individual, not a private person. The very fact that I can say “Roman General” but not say any person’s name and have people understand what I’m saying is evidence of this. By definition ‘Caesar’ the historical figure is not an individual in any meaningful sense, he has power that is only available through social institutions and formations, and that is why he is known even today. Even the most liberal Great Man Theories of history locate an engine of history within the general position of Great Man (this is a fundamental contradiction within this type of thinking, the generalised Individual). If there can be more than one Great Man in history then he is not an individual, he is occupying a generalisable position in human history that can be calculated, bounded, and studied.

So it’s very frustrating to deal with! It’s an attempt to refute an explanation of a social phenomenon with individual anecdotes, much of which is already accounted for in said explanation. It makes many, many, many discussions about the social and political world endlessly repetitive and uninteresting, because you are always stuck at litigating the most basic, atomic point of reference. And of course that is the point for many people, they aren’t interested in any of this because they are racist and they are misogynistic and so on. It is an extremely effective derailing tactic, but part of the reason why it’s so effective is because individualism is such a pervasive mode of thinking. All of the groundwork is already laid out for people who say white privilege isn’t real because the social and epistemic infrastructure necessary to get other people to buy that argument has already been built for them to make that type of claim. Which is why the people who smirk at the camera when they say shit like this are so pathetic because they behave like they thought of that all by themselves, unaware or (more probably) deliberately ignoring the fact that they live in a society specifically built to facilitate, automate, and celebrate the garbage coming out of their mouth

[blueteller]

Do you know how smart Cale actually is? Like- what extent his intelligence can reach?

That's an interesting question! Let's take a look.

From what I know of IQ scores, anything above 120 puts you in top 10% of the population. So I easily see Kim Rok Soo!Cale belonging in that category; of >120 IQ. However, IQ had always felt a little vague to me. It's nice to have a number to put on a scale and all, but what does it actually mean in reality? Let's try this from a different angle.

Gardner's Multiple Intelligences model of divides talent into eight categories, plus one additional one:

Visual-spatial

Linguistic-verbal

Logical-mathematical

Body-kinesthetic

Musical

Interpersonal

Intrapersonal

Naturalistic

Existential

Why not try to measure him up against each one, as no person is actually intelligent in every way and not even a fictional character can excel in all of them (unless they're a Mary Sue or something lol).

Visual and spatial judgment stands for easy reading, writing, puzzles solving, recognizing patterns and analyzing charts well. I think Cale is definitely a pro in this category; he does loves reading and he's fantastic at analyzing data.

Linguistic-verbal is for remember written and spoken information, debates, giving persuasive speeches, ability to explain things and skilled at verbal humor. And while I constantly make fun of Cale for not being able to explain himself, he IS good at using the "glib tongue" and being persuasive, so I think he is very skilled in this category as well.

Logical-mathematical means having excellent problem-solving skills, the ability to come up with abstract ideas and conduct scientific experiments, as well as computing complex issues. Cale is an incredible strategist able to change his plans in an instant, so he is definitely a genius in this field.

Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence is a fun one, because I think it's the hardest one to judge, considering that he literally changed bodies. It of course stands for sports, dancing, craftmanship, physical coordination, and remembering better by practice rather than learning theory. Cale... does not like that. However, it doesn't mean he's BAD at it. If he was a genius in this field, however, I believe he would like it a bit more. Thus – I suspect he was average. In the past he was forced to exercise for the sake of survival, but once he was given the option of taking it easy, he quit instantly. He is capable, but does not have any particular predisposition for it.

Musical Intelligence drives me nuts, because we literally do not know, and I dearly wish I did. There was not a single mention of it in the whole series. As much as I want to believe in a cool headcanon of KRS being an unrealized musical genius... I think he was probably average or below average in this.

Interpersonal Intelligence stands for communication, conflict-solving, perception and the ability to forge connections with others. And while you might have some doubts about Cale, I say he IS a total pro in this. Those are all leadership skills, and Cale is one HELL of a great leader.

However...

Intrapersonal Intelligence is where Cale is severely lacking. It could be partially due to trauma, but I think at least some of it comes through his natural personality. It stands for introspection, self-reflection, the ability to understand one's motivation and general self-awareness; and that is Cale's biggest weakness, one that might actually cost him his slacker life dream in the end, due to all the misunderstandings he causes.

The last two, Naturalistic and Existential Intelligence types, are also not really Cale's forte. The first is for things like botany, biology, and zoology, paired with enjoyment of camping and hiking – none of which Cale actually does for pleasure, only because he has to. And yeah, farming is in that category too, but it's not like Cale is actually a real farmer just yet. And the second is for stuff like philosophy, considering how current actions influence future outcomes, the ability to see situations from an outside perspective and reflections into the meaning of life and death – and Cale is REALLY not interested in this type of self reflection.

Which leaves Cale with 4 types of intelligence he excels at, 2 which he is REALLY BAD at, 1 where he's below average and 1 he's probably average, with 1 left completely unknown.

Does this make Cale a genius? Pretty much, yes. Does it also make him stupid in very specific ways? VERY MUCH, YES.

[sonic-syndrome]

LOG DATA – ENTRY 002

Admin "Chaos Sonic" demonstrates unexpected repair efficiency. Initial assessment: utilization of obsolete materials would be suboptimal. Post-repair diagnostics confirm arm functionality at 92.8% efficiency. Visual sensors repeatedly drawn to reflective surfaces—new claw appendages aesthetically satisfactory. Primary improvement: leg mobility restored to 100% operational capacity. Conclusion: no further floor-dragging required. Satisfaction parameters: elevated.

New Directive: "Calibrate locomotion systems." AKA Attempt: walking.

Error encountered. Locomotion protocols not pre-installed. Chaos Sonic's reaction: unexpected. Hypothesis: defective programming or inferior model status. Unknown subroutines activated—designation: self-assessment downgraded to "lesser creation" status in presence of superior unit.

Chaos Sonic forcibly engages physical support mode. Standing: unstable. Equilibrium compromised. Chaos Sonic's logic: flawed. Additional irritation: grip on polished hand components persists despite resistance. Motion attempted—balance fails. Emergency stabilization subroutine engages foot actuators at 0.3-second delay. Inefficient.

60 minutes of forced "walking." Outcome: autonomous steps achieved (quantity: 7). Success rate: 15%. Discomfort levels: high. Preference: negative.

FINAL ASSESSMENT: Illogical. Unpleasant. Highly irritating.

– End of Report

prev || start || next

[saintsylestine]

Guilliman x f!reader

First chapter here

A/N: I warned yall this man is gonna make you work.... accurate portrayal imo (which is kinda what I'm trying to do with this series ehe)

Cw: none! Just some plot building

A Model of Order pt 2

Preparation

21:17.

You haven’t moved in twenty-three minutes.

You sit at your desk, upright. Unblinking. Hands folded. Slate off. Vox silenced.

Your room is clean. Your uniform laid out like ritual: tunic, gloves, belt, collar clasp, boots polished so hard you can see the tremor in your chest reflected if you stare too long.

You haven't put it on yet.

Not because you're afraid.

Because you're calculating the exact moment to begin.

He told you 22:00.

No earlier.

No later.

That means something.

You stand.

Strip. Wash again. Not because you're unclean—because your skin still remembers last time. The silence. The weight. The heat between your legs when he didn't touch you, didn't speak, just looked.

You towel off.

Put the uniform on in precise order. Tunic. Gloves. High collar fastened so tightly it presses against your pulse. Boots locked in, soles silent. Vox bead inserted.

You don’t look in the mirror.

Not tonight.

You know what you’ll see.

21:42.

You allow yourself the walk.

Slow. Controlled.

Sublevel Red is nine corridors and four security gates down. Normally requires a primarch-level key. Tonight, it will recognize you.

Your boots echo softly in the quiet.

No one else is here. Of course not.

You haven’t seen another soul since 20:00. You think—no, you know—he arranged that.

You descend.

At the final security gate, you hesitate. Just for a breath.

It opens the moment your hand lifts.

No scan.

No password.

He’s already watching.

You take the final steps down.

Sublevel Red is before you.

The door is simple. Black stone. Seamless. Unmarked.

No signage. No panels. No reason it should be here at all.

You stand before it, breath even, heart a quiet drumbeat inside your ribs.

Your slate buzzes once in your pocket.

You don’t check it.

You know what it is.

Permission.

You lift your hand.

Touch the door.

It’s warm.

It opens.

And you step inside.

The door seals behind you with a hiss too soft for how heavy it feels.

This is not a meeting room.

It’s a tomb.

No sigils. No guards. No banners. Just you. The dark. And a single hololithic table humming cold-blue light across polished obsidian.

You’re not alone.

He’s already there.

Standing beside the projection with hands folded behind his back. Posture perfect. Still as judgment.

Roboute Guilliman.

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t nod. Doesn’t look at you.

You bow anyway.

He waits one breath. Two. Then—

“You’re late.”

You’re not.

You glance at your inner chronometer. 21:59.

“I arrived precisely on time, my lord.”

He turns. Slowly.

The movement is too precise for human.

His gaze lands on you like weight dropped from orbit.

“No,” he says. “You arrived on your schedule. I summoned you to mine.”

Your pulse jumps.

You don’t flinch.

He gestures to the hololith.

The table blooms to life—data fragments, intercepted vox clips, corrupted logs, blurred pict-feeds of burning cities and grinning commanders. A dossier opens in the center.

Inquisitor Tharell Gant.

Decorated.

Now purged.

“This man killed millions.”

His voice isn’t angry.

It’s restrained. Heavy with consequence.

“Over fourteen months, he falsified tactical projections, manipulated Ecclesiarchal policy, and sterilized three hives.”

The images change—ash drifting like snow. Towers reduced to blackened ribs. Children’s shoes left where feet once were.

“The Inquisition deems him rogue. I call that laziness.”

You step closer. The table’s light reflects off your gloves, your collar, your throat.

The data’s incomplete. Deliberately.

Half-truths, redactions like knife wounds. You’re being watched, not for your logic—but for what you do with insufficient truth.

“I want to know why,” he says.

“You have one hour.”

You glance up.

“With respect, this isn’t enough—”

It’s all you get.”

That stops you.

You inhale once.

Then you step into the light.

And begin.

---

For fifty-eight minutes, you disappear.

But not into silence.

Into him.

Into the weight of his presence, not felt through sound, but through stillness. Guilliman does not move. You are certain of this—not because you watch him, but because you feel him. Behind you. Unblinking. Like the edge of a blade waiting to be noticed.

You stand at the console.

The hololith breathes in broken information.

It is not a clean briefing.

It is not truth.

It is fragments, deliberately warped.

Scrambled vox recordings. Filtered auspex logs. Redacted Ecclesiarchal decrees with missing datestamps.

Gant’s name repeats across sectors like a virus.

But the narrative?

It refuses to be clear.

This is not an investigation.

This is absolution by autopsy.

You are being asked to carve motive out of rot.

You begin with the audio logs.

Crackling orders. Panic in the background. Children screaming. Prayers. Then silence.

You tag the voice signatures. Trace the command tone. Listen to Gant’s intonations. He doesn’t sound afraid. He sounds committed.

You cross-reference troop movements. Supply delays. Civilian detainment patterns. Where one would expect random cruelty, you find… structure.

There is a pattern to the sterilizations.

Not random heresy-cleansing.

Targeted isolation of religious drift.

You freeze. Just for a second.

He wasn’t punishing defiance.

He was eradicating instability before it could infect others.

You realize:

He was performing a kind of ideological quarantine.

Not a madman.

Not a traitor.

A surgeon. Cutting too deep.

And believing it was the only way to save the body.

Your throat tightens.

You scroll faster. Your gloves leave faint prints on the interface.

You don’t hear Guilliman move—but somehow, his presence feels closer.

The air behind you has changed.

Not warmer. Not colder.

Just... weighted.

You know he’s watching. Not for results.

But for how you breathe.

How you choose.

How your shoulders react when you realize:

You agree with Gant.

In part.

In theory.

You shouldn’t.

You do.

Not because you’re weak.

Because the math is sound.

At the fifty-eight minute mark, you isolate the core pattern:

He struck only where devotional compliance had failed to produce material loyalty.

Where faith had become pageantry.

And in that moment, you understand something worse.

He wasn’t a monster.

He was afraid of monsters who hid behind the Emperor’s name.

He thought this was mercy.

You step back from the console.

Hands cold. Spine straight.

He has not moved.

“Report,” he says.

You speak, voice low.

“He was isolating ideological contamination points—preemptively striking at systems that failed to maintain devotional compliance. He saw instability not as disobedience, but as infection.”

“He wasn’t serving Chaos.”

You hesitate.

Then you say it.

“He thought this was mercy.”

The room holds still.

Then, slowly, he steps toward you.

The space between you shrinks to almost-nothing.

He towers over you. Not hostile. Not cruel. Studying.

“You see the shape of him,” he murmurs.

You can feel the air change. Thicker. Slower. Charged.

"You understand him.”

A pause.

His voice drops.

“The question is… how far are you from becoming him?”

The silence that follows slices deeper than the words.

You don’t answer.

You don’t breathe.

He watches you for one moment longer than protocol allows.

And then—he steps back.

“You may go.”

That’s all.

No praise.

No rebuke.

No analysis.

Just dismissal.

The door opens behind you.

You leave.

You do not look back.

But his words follow you like a shadow that never blinks.

---Aftermath (you)---

You walk out of Sublevel Red like you’ve just returned from war.

Not externally.

Your posture holds.

Your boots click in even rhythm.

You even nod to the servitor posted by the turbolift, as if your spine weren’t still locked in the shape of his voice.

But inside?

Your breath feels wrong.

Too measured.

Like something behind your ribs is still being held in place by command tone and inertia.

You enter your quarters.

You don’t sit.

You don’t pace.

You simply stand in the center of the room, arms at your sides, like you're still waiting to be addressed.

There is no silence here.

Not really.

The hum of the ventilation system. The low pulse of systems on standby. The residual tension in your body that keeps replaying one line over and over:

“The question is… how far are you from becoming him?”

You want to say it doesn’t matter.

You want to believe it was just a test.

But that’s the problem.

It wasn’t.

He didn’t ask because he wanted an answer.

He asked because he already saw something in you that made him wonder.

You move to the sink to wash your hands. Not because they’re dirty.

Because they’re cold.

You stare at them.

Flex your fingers.

No tremor.

That should comfort you.

It doesn’t.

You realize you haven’t taken your gloves off since the test began.

You peel them off slowly. One finger at a time.

There’s ink residue at the edges of your cuticles—transfer from the console’s age-worn edge. It’s minor. Faint.

You shouldn’t notice it.

But you do.

Because it’s evidence.

Of how long you stood there.

Of how deeply you reached into Gant’s mind.

Of how closely you mirrored him.

You think about reporting your findings.

You don’t.

You think about showering.

You don’t.

You just stand there, hands bare, watching ink dry into your skin like a brand no one else can see.

And beneath the silence, a new thought starts to pulse—

He didn’t praise you.

He didn’t reprimand you.

And somehow… that feels like permission.

You are not afraid.

You are ready.

---Aftermath (him)---

Sublevel Red

22:59

He does not move.

The chamber is empty now—your footsteps long faded, your scent already gone from the air, your silence still burning behind him.

The hololith still glows.

He doesn’t look at it.

He could replay the footage.

He doesn’t need to.

Every movement, every hesitation, every breath you took is already filed behind his eyes. Your voice is timestamped. Your analysis, memorized. The moment your posture shifted from uncertain to resolved—marked.

She didn’t falter.

She didn’t plead.

She understood.

Not just the logic.

Not just the numbers.

The man.

Gant had been a tool, refined by fear and sharpened by mercy. Guilliman recognized the shape of him because it was his own reflection, cracked and discarded.

You saw it, too.

And you didn’t flinch.

That disturbed him more than he would ever admit.

He stood perfectly still—posture locked, jaw tight, arms folded behind his back in the formal grip of command. But his shoulders were too rigid. His eyes fixed not on the hololith, but through it—searching for your echo in the space you'd left behind.

She didn’t look back.

Of course you didn’t.

---

He meditated.

Not with silence.

With structure.

Streams of data. Resource calculus. Sector failures. The slow death of a galaxy quantified in rolling red. His breath was even. His eyes unfocused—but not empty.

This was the only way he ever found peace.

By parsing collapse into columns.

By containing madness in sequence.

Until lately.

Until her.

She did not intrude like a temptation.

She inserted like an algorithm.

Not in his skin.

In his process.

He would be mid-sentence—dictating orders, recalibrating fleet schedules—and catch himself asking:

What would she correct here?

Not because he needed her answers.

Because he wanted to know if she saw the same fractures he did.

If she saw him.

And not as the son of the Emperor.

Not as the reborn Archstrategist of the Imperium.

But as a man two steps from ruin, holding the line because there’s nothing else left to be.

The last time he’d felt this kind of pressure, he was bleeding in a stasis-field on the edge of death.

This was worse.

Because it didn’t come with agony. It came with possibility.

He hadn’t asked for her by name.

Not aloud.

But her assignments changed. Slowly. Subtly.

High-clearance. Frontline intelligence. Solo.

He rewrote her orders. Silently.

Moved her closer.

Not because she was needed.

Because she was resonant.

---

Macragge. Deep Vault. Night Cycle.

He entered the sealed reliquary alone.

One gloved hand against the palm scanner. The chamber hissed open. Not with reverence. With ritual.

Inside: things he should have destroyed.

Things no one else knew he kept.

A shred of cursed scripture. A lock of braided hair. A broken blade etched with heretical code.

And the letter.

Lorgar’s writing.

Still preserved. Still potent.

He unrolled it without gloves. He wanted to feel it.

Even you, Roboute, will kneel. The moment will come not with rage, but with need. And when it does—you will call it reason. That is how you will lie to yourself.

He stared at it for a long time.

Then whispered—

“You were always wrong.”

But he said it too quickly.

Too automatically.

Because he wasn’t thinking of Lorgar.

He was thinking of her.

Of how she had stared into the cruelty of Tharell Gant’s mercy and didn’t look away.

Of how she had not spoken, even when she should have.

Of how he had watched her hold power, and hadn’t stopped her.

Not because he trusted her.

But because he needed to see what she would do.

And that need was growing.

Becoming architecture.

Threading itself through his routine.

And for the first time since his return from the edge of death, Roboute Guilliman did not feel like a reformer.

Or a tactician.

Or a son.

He felt...

Compromised.

And worse—interested.

-----------------------to be continued--------------

Ty for reading!!!! Would love to hear your thoughts (is it too slow??)

(∩∀`*)

Tagged (lmk if you'd like to be tagged in anything ever! And pls remind me if I forget tysm): @incrediblethirst

[shmreduplication]

decided to make a separate post rather than make a v long tangent on this post (which is good and you should read it, tldr is an AI model was supposed to identify wolves vs dogs but every picture of a wolf was in a snowy landscape so the AI's logic was snow=>that animal is a wolf not a dog)

I feel I'm saying this constantly that the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" needs to become MUCH more common because imo it needs to be used in literally every conversation about AI

here's the wikipedia article about it, note that even CHARLES BABBAGE (v important guy in computer history, if you know Alan Turing's name because of computer history then you should learn Charles Babbage's name next) was aware of the phenomena. I think it's interesting that the history of the phrase is from computer history because it's really more of a statistics problem than a computer problem. AI is a statistics+computer problem so I guess it doesn't really matter

anyway the point is if you have bad data then you can only produce bad data analysis. Garbage [data] in, garbage [data analysis and decision-making that's based on it] out. Pictures of wolves in snow in, snow used as the determining factor between wolves and dogs out. Pictures of sheep in fields in, every field labeled as having sheep out. Pictures of pornography in, flagging desert and sandy landscapes as porn out. Racist policing in, racist policing out.

people who make AI models that pull indiscriminately from the entire internet think they're avoiding GIGO because surely the internet has the entirety of human knowledge contained in it? Obviously not, for two reasons: 1. human knowledge contains the information that wolves exist regardless of proximity to snow but that fact is so obvious and benign that it is possible it was never interesting enough for anyone to put onto the internet before this very post, and 2. it only takes one snowless picture of a wolf on the internet to fulfill the idear of "all human knowledge is on the internet" and those (apparently v few) pictures can be completely overwhelmed by the (apparently abundant) pictures of wolves in snow to the point that an AI trained from the internet will still prioritize snow in determining if a picture has a wolf or dog. This is a lot of words to say that the internet is garbage so anything trained from it will only produce garbage

anyway uh. those articles are from 2018 and 2020 so extremely outdated as far as tech news goes so thanks OP for letting me know that this specific kind of landscape-determines-animal kind of AI silliness is still happening because the sheep-fields thing is one of my favorite tech stories and i've told a lot of people about it

oh wait one more thing: Psychology has a related concept, WEIRD Bias, which is about how the majority of psych research is done on people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic so we can't assume conclusions made from that research is applicable to people who fall outside of that acronym. Not exactly a GIGO situation because the conclusions can still be accurate but it definitely still becomes "garbage out" if the diversity of the sample population is not considered and the conclusions are applied universally

[max1461]

I now feel that I know exactly what's happening. I have developed a model of this condition that has been incredibly predictive, but:

it seems to defy all medical logic

I struggle myself to believe it, even though it keeps being predictive

The alternatives are basically psychosis and PTSD, because those seem like the two conditions that could make me think I have a predictive-but-medically-impossible model, when in reality I'm just suffering from some kind of delusion. But three neurologists and two psychologists have all dismissed psychosis, even though I've asked them all about that possibility several times (because, fuck, on priors that's a lot more likely). I still think PTSD may be involved somehow, in light of the fact that this seems to be praying on my greatest fears, and there is a flashback-like element to it. But it would need to be a symptomatically very atypical manifestation of PTSD. Not impossible.

Here is my model:

I have such a vivid memory because I associate sensory information with body movements/sensations, and can re-trigger the sensory information by repeating the body movement. I guess this would be some type of synesthesia?

The body movements are tic-like, in that they're often involuntary and can be triggered by sensory stimulus that is related to the one they encode. Whenever I remember an event, these movements trigger and allow me to re-experience the sensory details.

The experiences are vivid but internal.

If the tics is interrupted by other sensory experience, that gets layered on to the original experience it encoded. Mostly when these tics happen though, I am sufficiently absorbed in my own mind that external data is not written to them.

At the dentist, I was making a face which encoded complex sensory and emotional information, due to the nature and content of the panic attack I was having. When I got the anesthesia, my nerve or something got frozen half way through this tic. Uncertain if nerve damage or psychological artifact of the experience.

Thus, I became stuck in a state of perpetually experiencing the emotional and sensory content of that panic attack.

My body keeps trying to "complete the tic", by twitching my face in a certain way. However, it can't. I have repeatedly felt the tic try to go off in my face, I feel some of the twitch and an intense straining sensation, with a feeling that I am about to exit the dream-like state I am in, but the tic fails and I remain in this state.

Because of this, two things happen. Any experiences I have get written to that tic, which feels strange and stressful (because of the intense emotional content encoded there). This explains "the mush".

Also, because the tic can't happen, it tries to come out other places, in other body parts. This explains why I keep feeling the same pattern of movements elsewhere in my body, which feels proprioceptively wrong and foreign because that's supposed to be my face. It feels like it's my face, even it's in my stomach.

By going off in these other places, the tic acquires sensory information associated with them, which is why when it tries to go off in my face again it's weirdly "deformed"—by these other body parts!

The tic is currently settling into a new center of mass(?) in my stomach, so it keeps feeling like my and other people's faces are there.

The tic has a distinct "deformed part", which proprioceptively feels bulbuous and pulsating, and a "correct part", which proprioceptively feels like a series of facial twitches

This corresponds to the correct part of my memories and the mixed up part, which I tap into by directing my bodily focus. When the tic is happening, I can literally get more correct thoughts and memories by focusing on the non-deformed part.

Because I am stuck half way through the tic, and my mind is not used to being there that long, I am experiencing all this hyper-vividly, like hypnogogic hallucinations. I do actually get imagery almost this vivid for short moments as tics are going off in ordinary life, but this is stuck that way.

The "hole" in my thoughts is whatever physical part of my body, presumably in the upper throat, is failing to activate and allow the tic to complete. This is why focusing on the whole, or trying to push the correct thoughts through, often causes me to gag or throw up.

It's something like that. I don't know how that could possible work but this has been so predictive of a model that it's hard to ignore. What the fuck do I do about this?

[jinx-xxed]

Repairs

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆ .。.:*

A/N; Something short and simple since I’m very low on time and energy sorry y’all 🙏

Part of Written in the Stars

Summary; You decide to do Kylo Ren a favor. Surely he’d be appreciative like a normal person?

Content; Commander Kylo Ren, General reader, Kylo POV second half, reader is also a mechanic, repairing Kylo’s Silencer, there’s unresolved tension, he doesn’t know how to say thanks, pre-TFA, life in the First Order

Wc; 1.4k

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆ .。.:*

If anyone were to enter Hangar Five in the Star Killer Base, they’d be met with an unusual sight—a high ranking general repairing the TIE Silencer belonging to the Commander of the First Order.

You hum to yourself as sparks fly in front of your face, bobbing your head along to the music blasting in your ears while you weld two pieces of metal together. Normally, fixing up ships is not in your job description, but you make some exceptions. Like how you’re usually the one fixing up your Silencer, untrusting of some of the engineers positioned on the base. They’ve screwed up enough stuff in the past, something you’re still trying to prevent by pushing for better training and hiring processes. Unfortunately, your complaints haven’t been properly heard, despite the fact it’d be good for every damn person here. Funds are instead being shoveled towards fruitless expeditions and also the very base you sit in.

So that’s why you’ve taken it upon yourself to repair Ren’s Silencer after he brought it back in shambles. You’ve worked on your own Silencer for years, giving it enough improvements that it’s practically a completely different model than when it started, with upgrades no other ship has seen before. It’s resulted in you getting offered engineering positions more than a few times, usually by people who just want you out of the way as a general. If you’re a measly engineer, that means they could boss you around, make a fool out of you. Too bad for them, you’re perfectly content where you are.

Anyways, since you and Ren have the same model, you figure it’s logical for you to work on his. He can consider himself lucky that you’re so generous with your time, especially after he left the poor ship in such a mess.

Some engineers linger around your workspace, wondering if they should step in, tell you to back off and stop taking their jobs, or try and offer you assistance. You denied when a few had tried helping you before, knowing they’d just get in the way and clutter your area. The only assistant you ever need when you’re working on projects like this is BB-12, the trusty droid knowing exactly what you need and when you need it, and having a damages report ready for you that’s far more detailed than anything you could find on the data pads.

You don’t notice the way the engineers behind you suddenly scatter, far too engrossed in the reconfiguration of a wing plate and the damn good music dancing in your ears. Well, until one of the earbuds is pulled out and a familiar, heavy and mechanical voice is calling your name in a commanding fashion. You straighten, pausing the music and pulling your goggles up onto your head, squinting at the sudden fluorescent light that floods your eyes. You look up and see Kylo towering over you, helmet on so you don’t see his face, but you know he’s looking at you with scrutiny.

You retaliate with a look of irritation. “Do you need something, Commander? I’m kinda-“

He cuts through your words. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Your brows furrow as you look between him and his ship, as if explaining it with your eyes. “Repairs…? I thought that’d be obvious-“

“You are aware this is my ship, correct?” He demands. You see the way his fists are clenched. Always so uptight.

“Yes, Commander, I’m not blind. Your Silencer needed repairs so I’m repairing it.” You snap back. You huff and try to return to your work, but his gloved hand grabs your wrist, stopping you mid motion. Your eyes fly to the visor in that stupid helmet, glaring fiercely.

His grip is annoyingly harsh, fingers digging into the skin of your arm. “And why are you the one doing that? We have actual engineers for a reason.”

You shake him off, coming dangerously close to baring your teeth. “Unfortunately, many of the engineers here are ill-equipped to handle the intricacies of a model like this one. And maybe if someone was more careful with his things, it wouldn’t need such extensive repairs done by an expert.” You hiss. BB-12 hands you one of your tools when you hold your hand out. “Surely you see how this is a good thing for you, I’m doing you a damn favor. You know my Silencer is one of the more impressive things in this place, and that’s all because of the work I did on it. What, do you think I’m going to make your ship explode or something?”

His response is instant. “Yes.”

You scoff, shaking your head. “You’re fucking unbelievable. If anything, it’d explode because of some bumbling engineer treating your Silencer as a first-day experiment and accidentally wiring the gun system to the fucking wing controls.” You say, snapping your goggles back over your eyes. “Now can I continue working or do you actually want that to happen?”

You see his jaw shift, undoubtedly from him gritting his teeth together, and you hear the creak of his leather gloves. He’s pissed and you have to struggle to hold back your smirk of joy. Then he’s suddenly leaning in, cold metal of his mask just an inch too close for comfort. “Go ahead, general, but know that if I discover you’ve messed up my Silencer in any way, I’ll have you thrown out into the snow to freeze.” His voice is like a growl through that modifier within the helmet, crackling with his anger.

You don’t react, face entirely neutral. Most would cower in fear at the big-bad Commander snapping at them like this but he’s done it enough times to you that you can’t bring yourself to care even the slightest bit. “Heard loud and clear, sir.” You respond, and he backs off. You hold each other’s glares for a second longer before he turns on his heel and storms off in a flurry of black robes.

You shake your head, finally able to focus back on the task at hand. “The nerve of some guys, right, BB?” You say to your companion sitting dutifully at your side. He chirps in agreement. You then chuckle to yourself as you think of something. “Maybe I should request to get paid more for this in my next check. I could always go for another couple hundred credits, don’t you think?” He beeps again, rolling back and forth in his own way of agreement.

You sigh. “Ah, probably best not to. If anything, Ren would just dock my pay for even suggesting it.” You shake your head again before finally putting your earbuds back in, making sure your gloves are tight over your hands, and getting back to work.

» ☆ «

It’s about a week after that incident when Kylo has to at last pilot his Silencer again. There was a group of rouges spotted towards the edge of the base, encroaching on First Order territory, so he’s decided he’ll take a group out himself to handle it.

His black and red Silencer sits waiting in the hangar, repaired to perfect condition, looking brand new. There’s a part of him that’s hesitant about getting inside, that still doubts the general didn’t do something to it that would result in a system failure and his death. He wouldn’t put it past her, even despite them somehow getting back onto “agreeable” terms.

He swings himself into the cockpit. After all, how would it make him look if he was scared of his own damn ship? He settles into the pilot seat, which had to be refitted for a new cover after the old one got slashed through. Everything feels the same, nothing’s flashing, and he doesn’t smell any smoke as the Silencer roars to life. Seems good enough. He takes hold of the controls, easing out of the hangar with a small squadron of other TIEs following suit.

As he blasts into the sky, maneuvering around obstacles and firing on his opponents, he finds that somehow the Silencer glides smoother, fires faster. He didn’t even know that was possible. The twists and turns and flips feel truly effortless, the canons firing at a better capacity and with more ferocity.

His jaw tightens beneath his helmet. Oh, he fucking hates when she’s right.