#Resource Extraction Robots

[4m4zing-gracie]

Based on an incorrect quote I found floating around on Tumblr (lost the link though, unfortunately).

Thinking about these two again, and those thoughts eventually birthed this silly little comic. I feel like it would lead to some pretty comical moments, due to the 'Tiny parent, huge child' trope coming into play (as Yeva is around 4"4 and Doey is a whopping 11"3).

Regardless of how it'll be though, Yeva does love her boy(s) either way, though.

[kates-dump]

drone age is weird

so, everyone in the fandom kind of agrees that most of the characters are young adults/a little over 18. but y'guys ever stop to think how accurately that applies with what we actually see in the show?

this scene (literally the pilot) implies drones couldn't (or didn't) have babies of their own before human extinction, which makes total sense. if humans used drones to extract resources and serve them, why would they make robots they need to wait for instead of just making them ready to go? Hell, why would they make drones able to age at all? (maybe to make them more relatable, who knows.)

IF we're going by that, it settles that all drones created/"born" prior to human extinction are the "proper" age to function and work. this includes N, V, J, and Cyn.

now, we're assuming that all drones born after human extinction went through the pill baby phase. meaning they age more or less like humans, probably. IF we are defining Uzi's age as something between 18-20, that would make N either: around the same age as her (if he was created ready to work and age is counted by years in service) or twice her age (if he went through pill baby phase, or if he was already functional before working for the Elliots). ditto for V, J and Cyn.

long story short, it literally doesn't matter. they're robots and it's a lot easier to just describe most drones as ageless. thanks for coming by today, here's some free cake 🍰

[mbari-blog]

#tfw you don't know which way is up #HumpDay⁠

⁠Volcanic activity on the seafloor creates scattered oases known as hydrothermal vents. These underwater geysers spew superheated water rich in dissolved minerals. When that scalding-hot water comes in contact with frigid deep-ocean water, the minerals crystallize, raining tiny flecks of “ash” to the seafloor. Those mineral deposits build up over time, creating breathtaking spires and “chimneys” that can grow to hundreds of feet tall.⁠ ⁠ Less than 25 percent of the seafloor has been mapped at the same level of detail as the Moon or Mars. MBARI’s mission is to advance marine science and technology to understand our changing ocean—from the surface to the seafloor. For nearly four decades, MBARI has explored the deep ocean, recording thousands of hours of video with our remotely operated vehicles and mapping thousands of kilometers of seafloor using advanced robots. Together, these tools are helping to create a clearer picture of the amazing environments hidden in the ocean’s inky depths. ⁠ ⁠ The astonishing communities that live on and around hydrothermal vents have evolved to flourish under extreme temperatures and chemical conditions. The remarkable tubeworms, crabs, clams, and more that thrive here are found nowhere else on Earth. Now, with more companies looking to extract mineral resources from the ocean, it is more important than ever to study the deep sea and the wonders it holds. The maps we create and data we collect can help resource managers make informed decisions about the ocean, its inhabitants, and its resources. Together, we can safeguard these unique biological and geological treasures.

[tofu83]

What men bred for

3.8 A Memory

This is a memory of a "wild human". The so-called wild are just prey-type humans that often escape from hunting. They are actually still bred by machines rather than reproducing by themselves in the wild. We can be sure of this because we only produce male humans.

The robot hunters who are rounding up wild humans are also converted from the humans we cultivated. Their predecessors are hunter-type humans.

Our scientific research team purchased this memory on the black market and they have confirmed that it belongs to one of the two prey, but they are not sure which one. However, analysis found that the individual with this memory was very strong and longed for stronger power. When escaping, he was not thinking about his weakness, but wondering why he was not a robot.

Such a strong, positive human being who desires to be controlled by Masters should not be kept as a prey type in a hunting ground for entertainment, but should be brought back to the laboratory to extract its "essence" and replicate it to create more excellent ones like him.

This proves that the current practice of breeding humans for entertainment is a waste of resources and should be banned.

In addition, we also strongly recommend retrieving these two wild humans in our memories. At least one of them is an extremely precious individual and must not be culled. Be sure to act as soon as possible to avoid being bought and modified by someone who knows the goods and destroying the pure genetic sequence.

[zedecksiew]

TO PUT AWAY A SWORD

David Blandy + Daniel Locke's post-apocalyptic hopepunk TTRPG ECO MOFOS is back from the printers. Meaning it will soon be in our hands.

Am fairly hyped for it, because I wrote an adventure!

To Put Away A Sword is about the woes of building a home on poisoned earth. The terrible powers that hurtled us to the end of the world continue to bear bitter fruit in your garden.

You are villagers living under the shadow of a fallen giant mecha. Its reactors and warheads leak into your groundwater, poison your goats. What will you do about it? What can you do?

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Mechanically it is a pointcrawl around your local valley. Not super complex, design-wise; but I was pleased with my gimmick solution for mapping both the adventure's dungeons:

Grab a mecha figure, pose it, place it on the game table; each part of the figure corresponds to a location in the dungeon key. Solves for stuff like relative orientation.

Easy!

+

To Put Away A Sword is me making a mecha adventure.

Disclaimer: I am not a mecha nerd. I am unfamiliar with most of the genre. Anything I know about Gundam I've absorbed by osmosis.

I was mainly into giant robots in childhood. Receiving a Macross figure for my birthday. Pouring over the manual for The Crescent Hawks' Revenge, which my brother left behind:

While I was not much a fan of mecha, I was very much a fan of Evangelion. I spent my middle teens obsessed with it. The biomechanical, pseudo-mystical stuff; the teen angst. I wanted to be Shinji. I thought trauma was so cool.

So cringe. Anyway:

One of the inspirations for To Put Away A Sword is the survivors-rebuilding-a-town-and-planting-rice sequence in Thrice Upon A Time; probably my favourite part of the whole franchise, now.

The joy and difficulties of trying to build your paradise in the weird ruins of the old world:

Yeah, the adventure has a lot of Evangelion in it. There's a Nerv HQ analogue to explore. There's a content warning for child soldiers.

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The other inspiration for To Put Away A Sword is this piece of box art, an accessory set for Macross's iconic Stonewell Bellcom VF-1 Variable Fighter:

I don't know what this kind of arrange-your-missiles-in-front-of-your-fighter-jet photo is technically called. Hardware porn parade?

You see it often enough. Here's a real-life photo of the Lockheed Martin F35 Joint Strike Fighter:

Fairly or not, in my head I associate mecha with seeing copies of Jane's Defence in airport magazine racks. The genre feels like such a natural way to riff on the hyper-charged corpo-military-industrial complex.

After the brush war ends, and the natural resources extracted, and the ethnic cleansing concluded, and the profits announced, who gets to clean up after a Raytheon missile?

In To Put Away A Sword---you do.

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Ultimately, as always, I am writing and designing from my lived experiences.

See that? The gas flare from the Hengyuan Refining Company? It is about 200 metres from my living room.

That gas flare surfaces constantly in the stuff I make. As I write this post I am breathing its acrid chemical smell. My nose itches. I was asthmatic as a child; I seriously worry about cancer, nowadays.

At night it lights up the sky like Barad-dur.

The plant obviously and continuously flaunts regulations. We've tried lodging complaints: with its corporate management; with the Department of Environment. Nothing has worked so far.

"A home on poisoned earth" is a visceral fact of my life.

+

To Put Away A Sword is wish-fulfilment, I guess? In the world of the adventure, at least, the forces that are poisoning your home are post-peak oil.

It is nice to imagine a reality where a kind of survival and flourishing is still possible. My partner Sharon and I talk a lot about imagining hope.

Last month she bought this small mecha-looking thing. A wireless camera! She built a little hut for it on our garden wall. It is trained, 24-7, at the gas flare.

Environmental activists we've met say video evidence of emissions is important. We'll see. We imagine it helping.

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Anyway. David just sent me this photo of my adventure, in print:

Looking good. I hope folks play it and enjoy it.

Preorder ECO MOFOS and its adventure bundle >>>HERE<<<

[nogu-d-reamers]

I'm hooked on Transformers, I've rewatched TF PRIME and I love it… but… I have a problem with KnockOut.

Don't get me wrong; I love KO, I love his character, I love his design (this damn racer-car makes women fall in love and caused a bi/gay panic in men without a doubt), I love his villainous actions, I love his comedy and quotes… but I don't like how he joined the Autobot team in the end. As if the creators had become so attached to him that they didn't have the courage to give him a dead or captured ending.

When you read between the lines, they could have gotten to that same point by making a redemption arc.

so.

HEAR ME OUT PLEASE.

Are you still here?

Perfect!

I don't know if this is considered a character rewrite or a "whT IF"; and I'm not a professional writer, just someone who, thanks to a friend, recently got me hooked on the TF fandom and grew fond of this villain, but not enough to forgive the inconsistencies, so consider this a disclaimer of OOC stuff and a canonical character rewrite.

Thanks~

The things I would change are:

Knockout is presented from the start as something "too out of place" for the Decepticons. Of all the vehicles, and being from a faction where aerial vehicles stand out above all else, he chooses a land-based sports car. He often says and cites that he enjoys certain human activities, such as going to the movies or competing in underground races, and if they tolerate him, it's because he was the only medical personnel trained before Shockwave's arrival.

He loves that appearance so much that it's a necessity to maintain it in good condition. I don't know if it was an unconscious idea to emphasize it or if it was always intended to show that he didn't quite fit in with the Decepticons.

Nerf his lab skills=Make him make more mistakes in the lab and be reprimanded. Knockout is a doctor, not a scientist; And even if he could rival Ratchet's abilities, Ratchet had more capability because, in his disadvantaged position, he had to be more resourceful in taking a scientific approach. This is something KO couldn't match, even if he tried. Doing things like stealing information about artificial energon would give him an even bigger chance of victory. Also, even if he didn't receive physical punishment, he'd be terrified knowing that if he doesn't end up like Starscream, it's because he's still useful, but the day someone more capable arrives, he'll already know his fate.

Intentionally ending the rivalries on an unfinished note= I noticed that KO tried to create several rivalries against him that didn't go very far in the end (Bumblebee being a sports car, Ratchet being a doctor, Arcee for… some reason) but that were either cut short or didn't go very far. Okay, I know the most logical thing would be to give him a fixed one and forget about the rest… but… what if we make this point on purpose? And no matter how hard he tries to antagonize someone on the opposing side, he simply can't muster anything but respect for the Autobots? You know… like Bulkhead and Breakdown.

More human fascination= KO is a weirdo because he loves many things of human use and authorship; but it's so easy to imagine that before torturing Jack, he wants to extract more information about human culture or extend the conversation when he kidnaps Agent Fowler or June, that it's a plot that writes itself. Even imagine that, in what begins as manipulation, he befriends a teenager from Jesper to get him up to speed, and in the end, the teenager runs away in fear when he realizes he's a robotic alien. That would make him resent them but also create a need to know more about them. Something that would give him more negative points (and please, someone introduce him to Miko; these two would destroy the world if they wanted to).

Failed escape attempts (aka. Why did he help Starscream assassinate Megatron?)= Okay, I've already included the points where he doesn't quite fit in. Doesn't ends up hating the Autobots and he doesn't end up hating humans. What's his best bet? that while Megatron is offline he tries to manipulate Starscream to be able to leave the ranks and take advantage of any weak point so that they leave him alone... something that didn't end up happening but he was able to manage to get out of it, but at the same time feeling envious of Starscream's expulsion.

Breakdown= okay, let's talk about the conjunx... and how it's a [___] that they gave us absolutely nothing about their reaction to those events!! I'll deliberately ignore the series' clear censorship of calling them conjux → patners because we all know this. I could indicate Breakdown as the indirect trigger for Knockout's change of attitude as light mentions; as the resignation of remaining in the nemesis to risk changing sides after some thoughts from the episode "Operation: Breakdown" and other events lead Breakdown to doubt out loud whether it's still worth it to continue on the side of the cons' at that point. and that the facts surrounding his death and the theft of his body by Sylas are deliberately omitted towards him by order of Megatron to avoid deteriorating his work. and his empty reaction is due to a set of mixed feelings = anguish over his death, anger at what they did to him, anger because his own side lied to him, an uncontrollable desire to harm everyone and especially Silas... etc. He starts sabotaging, damaging, hurting or doing anything without his tracks being discovered by applying a "fragged me, fragged everyone!". In his lowest and cruelest moments he mutters things that perhaps Breakdown would like that... but he knows that's not true.

Alliance and union with the Autobots = After many things and thinking about running away, he prefers to give up, already fed up with all that, unlike Starscream. With less hostility but with all his sarcasm, he helps the Autobots and ends up becoming one even though he doesn't really want to (in fact, he would joke that he thought he would have at least a couple of groons in jail). For a moment he considers that it would be better to stay on Earth than return to Cybertron, claiming that he had unfinished business in the earth and that he could avoid jail if he revealed all the information that the Decepticons had that he knew. He doesn't feel he deserves the badge or to be called that; but since he's switched sides, at least he'll do it by opening his mouth as wide as possible to even the odds.

And that's all~

I know it's not much or the most refined ideas; but it's what occurred to me. I also didn't want to include Airachnid or any revenge against her because... it actually makes sense that he doesn't know it was her but rather Sylas all along.

And as a bonus, that strange habit of admiring something beautiful only to immediately destroy it would disappear.

[wumblr]

i met a liberal at the bar tonight. we were talking about the amish and i was like did you know they have IT guys. there's a whole unique windows distro for the amish. it's proprietary. and he was like i guess that's why i'm liberal. and i was like what? and he was like why do you say that like it's a bad thing and i was like i didn't say anything you said that. and he said what's wrong with being a liberal and i said neoliberalism is a project of colonial expansion based on extracting resources from the third world by holding a gun to everybody else's head, so, what's good about that? and he did NOT like that for some reason. he was like are you a republican and i was like no absolutely not. i'm a hologram actually. i'm a russian bot. and he was like you're laughing at me. and i couldn't shake the prevailing impression that what he was really saying was you're being mean to me because you're reacting to this incomprehensible nonsequitur about the amish less warmly than you're reacting to the jokes of your friends. like yeah my friends have been sitting here showing me the tiktok that went viral when somebody paid at their job in pennies and talking about when they went to basic training because their parents got divorced, i literally don't know you or what your views are, how could i be laughing at them. but i heard someone got their ass beat for throwing a hot dog at someone so i guess i better be careful. like what even is the bar. i think i saw lightning strike a lightning rod on top of a building, off in the distance. don't think i've ever specifically seen that before. it was like horizontal, touched down in the middle. and my friend was like what would a russian robot sound like and i was like t.a.t.u.

[erik-powery-for-america]

Ezekiel 36:28 "And ye shall dwell in the land That I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be My people, and I will be your God" ... This is the scripture used by israelis to justify Apart-Heid, Segregation, Occupation, and wholesale land theft. This is called "The Promised Land" by Christian Theologians. This House of Cards is built on the foundation of this word and like scriptures in The Torah. But this promise was made to Israelites, NOT israelis. Here is a tweet a made awhile back proving my assertion: "The Book says Canaan will be given to the children of Abraham. Isaac, and Jacob. Through brutal military conquests God delivered Canaan to the children of Abraham. Isaac, and Jacob. These descendants have public and private genealogies to prove "THE ISRAELITES"(not israelis) are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. israelis are NOT children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. israelis have ZERO genealogies to prove they are descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." According to The Torah, God promised israelis NOTHING. israelis did not even exist when GOD promised The Israelites Canaan(which later became Israel and later Palestine). Jacob's name was changed by God to Israel, this is why the Children of Promise were called Israelites.All my life I have been hearing. "Peace in The Middle East." "Peace in The Middle East." "Peace in The Middle East." From my earliest years I remember tension from Iran. War in Beirut. Ayatollah Khomeini. Muammar Gadaffi. Saddam Hussein. Shimon Peres. Benjamin Netanyahu etcetera. I never understood our unwavering support for Israel. No other nation is supported by us unconditionally like the nation of Israel. Now I fully realize that the land the state of Israel was manufactured on is strategically selected for full spectrum dominance. Jerusalem is built on a mountain. Tel-Aviv and Gaza are port cities where they can control the Mediterranean Sea with Battleships and Warplanes. Ports used to receive Big Tanks, Big Trucks, Big Guns and more Dirty Weaponry. The Jordan used to flow into the Mediterranean Sea. But The Jordan is also a large water source for Israel. This salt water river is used for humanitarian purposes. Really, Israel is just a giant Military base strategically carved out in The Middle East. Our "Unsinkable Battleship" is used to frighten all their Arab neighbors which encompass them. But also to extract all the rich natural resources from Western Asia and Africa that are scarcely produced by American soil. I remember my ears first perked up regarding Palestine when I heard Vic Mensa on The Breakfast Club. Vic Mensa said the Palestinians are living in hell on earth. Vic Mensa proclaimed Israel's ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement, dispossession, discrimination, have inflicted massive human suffering on the Palestinian People. Israel's military rule is like using a hammer to kill an Ant.Their mind bending military laws are weaponized to crush the spirit of the Palestinian people. Humiliate them where they have to beg Their oppressors for food. The settlements in The West Bank are illegal. So called Jews from Long Island to Los Angeles come to Israel and violently seize land with the IOF backing them up with big guns while these immigrants seize more Palestinians land. Israel weaponizes the food and water supply. Jeopardizing the long term health and well being of Palestinians. Watching Palestinians suffer for the enjoyment of Israelis is the feature, not a bug. And The United States of America co-signs this behavior. We promote these war crimes and occupation as "Israel has the right to defend itself" This talking point is repeated by The White House, The State Department, and The Halls of Congress in the most robotic manner like The Stepford Wives. We provide BILLIONS to Israel annually plus all the Dirty Weaponry the IOF desires to carry out their disgusting ethnic extermination of this indigenous people. I believe we must call for a One State solution named "New Palestine". One free, democratic secular nation under God.

[the-cat-ara]

I'm curious about your Metamy fankid's origin, would you be able to elaborate?

Of course!!, although I'll leave it after the cut because developing this ended up in a big text of pure ramblings that I didn't know how to summarize, but I'll leave a drawing at the end to lighten it up a little bit. 😅😅

Dr. Eggman, upon learning of the couple's plans to conceive a child, saw an opportunity to conduct an experiment in genetic engineering and bio-synthesization (mostly as an opportunity to create a perfect creature, with the best of his best creation and a part of one of his pesky enemies, that he could add to his army of Badniks). Since natural conception between a biological organism and a robot was impossible, he offered to assist them in the creation of a biological offspring, concealing his true intentions. Despite initial mistrust, the couple eventually accepted his help. Eggman began the process by extracting samples of Amy's DNA and performing an exhaustive genetic analysis to determine the feasibility of fusion with a piece of Metal sonic's nucleus. Using gene-editing nanotechnology, he began to modify and optimize segments of the biological material. His goal was to create a functional bridge between biology and technology, allowing the resulting organism to possess a hybrid structure capable of sustaining itself and developing in a stable manner.

But the first attempts were unsuccessful. The incompatibility between the organic matter and the nucleus piece generated a cellular collapse before reaching the advanced mitosis phase. After multiple unsuccessful attempts, Eggman concluded that the system required a high-density external energy source to stabilize the integration process. It was then that he requested access to the Chaos Emeralds, arguing that their energy would be able to catalyze the symbiosis between the biological and synthetic structures. Faced with the absolute refusal of all, Amy intervened, achieving that their use was allowed under strict surveillance (to the annoyance of Eggman). By exposing the DNA-impregnated core to the energy of the Chaos Emeralds, the expected synthesis occurred: the bio-mechanical combination stabilized, allowing the hybrid structure to self-regulate. However, the procedure consumed an excessive amount of energy, leaving the Emeralds in a state of hibernation rendering them temporarily unusable, which frustrated Eggman, as he would not be able to use them for other future projects.

With initial success assured, the next step was to implant the tiny nucleus into Amy's uterus to develop. The procedure did not guarantee successful implantation or stable embryonic development, so constant monitoring was required to evaluate progress. It took several months of studies and evaluations before Amy finally began to show signs of pregnancy, confirming that the experiment had worked.

Throughout the pregnancy, Amy attended periodic medical check-ups to monitor the development of the fetus, which presented accelerated growth and an unusual demand for resources by the mother, making her consume more food. As the pregnancy progressed, Amy began to experience episodes of extreme fatigue and systemic deterioration, which worried all her friends and especially Metal Sonic, eggman performed some studies. The results were alarming: the fetus was absorbing an inordinate amount of energy and nutrients, severely compromising the mother's health to the point of endangering her life. Amy was immediately hospitalized to stabilize her. With only a few days remaining before her due date, the possibility of a premature birth was considered. However, given Amy's critical condition, the procedure posed a high risk of maternal mortality. Finally, the day of delivery arrived and Iris was successfully delivered. After delivery, Amy showed signs of slow recovery, partially regaining her energy levels. However, this only lasted a few months before Amy's body collapsed due to extreme exhaustion and she was again admitted to the hospital, this time showing no improvement, and a year later Amy finally passed away.

if you got this far, I hope you liked it and that what I said made some sense, also thank you very much for asking, I'm always glad you ask about my drawings :D💖💖!!

[4m4zing-gracie]

Some self-indulgent and wholesome art based on some RPs with friends (which includes bits of the 'Resource Extraction Robots' AU too). Also doing some new things with backgrounds/layers, too.

So, remember how I said PPT!Yeva would want to adopt every single toy in the safe haven? Yeah, that part 100% extends to Doey as well. Because let's face it, he deserves someone to take care of him for a change after spending many mostly-thankless years caring for others. And Yeva would totally have sympathy for this poor Doughman and adopt him into her family, AU or not. And she will ANNIHILATE anyone who hurts her new playdoh son--

Bonus shit sketch under the cut (feat. Doll)

[blue-jacket-blues]

I'm writing headcanons about that awful robot again. This one got out of hand and is now extremely long but I imagine at least one of you might be interested in reading it.

In which I discuss Hux's living situation aboard the now-decommissioned Caracas III and some of the stuff he gets up to in his spare time. 👇 go here

Hux gets extremely bored extremely quickly. He's the new owner of a superpowered brain, and with an expanded consciousness comes a desire to test the limits of his physical and mental abilities. However he is now trapped in a realm where his ability to move and act freely is very limited, which frustrates him.

The Entity will not allow him to prey upon other killers, and trials offer him only limited time to study and extract organic material from survivors. His evolution has come to a screeching halt. It goes without saying that he does not like being restricted in this way, but he cannot change the circumstances he's now living under, so he's forced to occupy his free time with other things before he completely shuts down from boredom.

Most of that free time is spent on Dvarka. As much as he despises the Caracas III and everything the ship represents, the launcher contains all of the materials and equipment Hux needs to keep himself functional and alive, so he can't leave it permanently. He's gutted a big portion of the old crew dormitory to serve as his home base, and this is where he can typically be found if he's not out patrolling the exterior of the landing site. It's a gigantic room on the lower deck of the ship with most of the crew berthing infrastructure ripped out and repurposed for his own needs.

One wall is covered floor-to-ceiling in computer terminals that allow him to survey the entire realm at a single glance. About a third of the room is dedicated to this setup and all of the associated wiring and equipment required to actually power it. He has permanent biopods set up in very specific areas around Dvarka: the outside of the launcher (one by each staircase to cover every potential entryway), the inside of the launcher, the vehicle crash site, the exit gates, and most importantly, the alien ruins.

He's trying to rig a live CCTV feed elsewhere in the Fog so he can spy on the other killers, but this has proved to be difficult since it requires more power and concentration than he's typically capable of. Splitting his consciousness between himself and a biopod is second-nature at this point, but trying to split his consciousness between himself, his existing biopods, and other tech from around the realm is incredibly difficult. He hopes to improve his design at some point to allow for greater control over external technology, but it's been slow going.

The next third of the room resembles a laboratory; big storage cases filled with specimen jars and materials taken from the cargo bay, long tables with a fume hood (not that he needs it), Erlenmyer flasks and graduated cylinders, and operation manuals for all of the equipment he's found and repurposed. In lieu of the fully-functional cloning hub, which was partially destroyed during the construction of his "perfect body", this area is Hux's experiment station, kind of like this area depicted in his tome reward cutscene thing.

Like I said, the Caracas III is only partly functional now. This, like many things, is Hux's fault. The construction of his "perfect body" strained the cloning hub's resources to the point of malfunction, and he can no longer use the hub to its fullest extent. No matter what commands he tries to give the hub's computer, it will only print that purple biopod-meat substance, which will flood the hub's processing chamber until manual override is initiated to shut the whole project down. This is part of the reason why the top floor of the launcher is such a mess, since he's tried over and over again to get the hub back online, and each attempt has only further contributed to the problem he's trying to solve.

He'd like to have the cloning hub working again, but he lacks the dexterity to repair its more delicate components. That's what you get for replacing your hands with a big stupid scythe and a grasping claw/fleshlight thing, you so-called superior organism. Do not point that claw at me

Anyway. Hux's lab is limited in size but not in scale. He's collected samples of every potentially useful organic substance for future use in his design, preserving them in Sarah's old scientific sampling jars. If/when he manages to fix the cloning hub, he plans on extracting matter from his preferred array of samples to reconstruct his damaged body and improve his design. That day has not yet come, so instead he sits and broods over his collection like a magpie with a nest full of stolen shiny objects.

The vast majority of Hux's samples were taken from Dvarka's environment. He's got little bits of virtually every living thing he's been able to find, from leaf cuttings to pinned insects to tufts of fur left behind by the large nocturnal predators that lurk in the Deepwood. He's also taken it upon himself to try and extract as many of the alien crystals as he can find, preserving these in large climate-controlled specimen cases for future study.

The most gruesome artifacts in his collection are the samples he's taken from the Caracas III's crew, and most recently, from the few survivors whose bodies he's managed to process during trials. A liver there, an eyeball here, a skin sample there, a sliver of brain here, and so on. These organs have been cryogenically preserved just in case his existing body begins to fail, though if he manages to fix the cloning hub, he'd like to start incorporating these new genes into his existing design.

This area is also where he keeps generic day-to-day maintenance items, including the remaining stores of nutrient slurry, diagnostic tools and nanomachine equipment, and jars of frictionless cryogel (excellent for lubricating his joints and dried-out skin. And for other purposes. I shant say).

The last third of his home base contains the closest thing Hux has to an actual room. Only in the sense that this area contains his equivalent of a bed. This portion of the room is comprised of a modified charging station, which looks like a nest of cables coiled up on top of a large rubber pad. Cable-charging is pretty straightforward, but it's time consuming, and he typically doesn't bother with it if there are alternative sources of power he can draw from.

However, Hux is now partially organic, and organics need sleep to function. He doesn't need quite as much sleep as a human being (5-6 hours of sleep every 24-30 hours will suffice), but if he doesn't adhere to this schedule, his stolen brain matter will begin to shut down. He hates this fact and sees it as a weakness, but there's nothing he can do about it.

The charging pad is where he's chosen to kill two birds with one stone. Every couple of days, he'll plug the primary charging cable into the back of his head, check his cameras one final time for potential intruders, hunker down in the center of the cable nest, and go to sleep.

He's not a particularly heavy sleeper and will wake back up immediately if he's disturbed in any way, typically emerging from sleep mode by slashing wildly at any threat before him (real or perceived). Otherwise he wakes up gradually after his charging cycle is complete. Hux is particularly groggy for the first few minutes after waking as his mechanical brain recouples with his organic brain and typically tries not to stand up immediately unless he has to respond to a threat. He will lose his balance and immediately fall down if his brain hasn't fully reactivated yet. During his waking state he's both at his most powerful and his most vulnerable, and he's very much aware of this fact.

This usually isn't a problem, since the entire floor is only accessible to those with Huxlee's security clearance code. Access is granted via keycard, biometric data, or manual code input as a last resort should the previous two clearance options fail. This authorization was only given to the Caracas III's human crew and A7 units, so the chance of someone sneaking up on Hux during one of his power naps is extremely slim.

But never zero.

[mbari-blog]

Unwind with the breathtaking beauty of deep-sea hydrothermal vents 🔥✨

Some of the most stunning landscapes on Earth lie deep beneath the ocean’s surface. Volcanic activity on the seafloor creates scattered oases known as hydrothermal vents. These underwater geysers spew superheated water rich in dissolved minerals. When that scalding-hot water comes in contact with frigid deep-ocean water, the minerals crystallize, raining tiny flecks of “ash” to the seafloor. Those mineral deposits build up over time, creating breathtaking spires and “chimneys” that can grow to hundreds of feet tall.

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Now, with more companies looking to extract mineral resources from the ocean, it is more important than ever to study the deep sea and the wonders it holds. The maps we create and the data we collect can help resource managers make informed decisions about the ocean, its inhabitants, and its resources. Together, we can safeguard these unique biological and geological treasures. 

Learn more about how MBARI uses cutting-edge technologies to gain unprecedented access to the deep seafloor.

[gabriellerudessa]

I was thinking a bit on the chronology for my other planned fic for Norm Maclean x OC and you know what? I call bullshit on Bud telling Norm that Vault 31 has no food or whatever and he will starve.

You know why? Because by the time the bombs hit, Robobrains, what Bud is, weren't perfected AND it wasn't a technology that Vault-Tec in itself participated in developing (In fact, the ones that developed it, General Atomics, weren't even in the meeting in episode 8; at most Robert House could be talking on their behalf, since probably they were already a joint-venture at that time).

In game lore, we have two instances of Robobrains that managed to retain personality and memories in meaningful ways, three if we consider the think-tanks from Old World Blues (I don't, as far as I can see and research their technology differs a lot from the robobrain one developed before the war).

These instances are: the rich people of Vault 118, in Far Harbor, and Professor Calvert (he just didn't put his brain in a robot but used the same tech in principle), in Point Lookout. Both, as far as we can infer from in-game info and lore, done after the bombs (Professor Calvert) or just before them (Vault 118).

Vault 118 only happened because one of the original researchers of the Robobrain was one of the guests for it and they did it all IN SECRECY and against the experiment Vault-Tec had planned; Professor Calvert worked for the US Military and it's very clear that the improvement that allowed for a more certain retention of memories and personality after the extraction was done in his facility, around the time of the bombs, exact date unclear.

Vault-Tec DID HAVE some robobrains for security purposes, because of their association with the government, and I totally think they tried to reverse-engineer it, but considering that I REALLY THINK that the bombs dropped before they planned (Because I sincerely doubt Barb would let Janey with Coop on the supposed day of the bombs), I doubt that they managed to finish this reverse-engineer in time.

So, what I think? That Vault 31, similarly to Vault 111, had a scientist group plus Bud to take care of the cryopods at the start, after the bombs, especially because, as far as we know, it's untested tech and Vault 111 very probably had some goal of studying the effects of cryogenics as a control-group for Vault 31. Similarly to there, it must have some basic facilities for these people.

I really think Bud becoming a robobrain to watch over the cryopods and the Bud's Buds was some time after the bombs, once it became clear that it was needed because waiting for people to kill each other in the surface and for rads to low would take too long and the scientist group was too small to keep a long-term population to take care of the pods and NO WAY they would take people from the other Vaults for it. There's also the fact that, well... He's Brain on a Roomba: a very small Robobrain and with a very limited range of mobility and whose only weapon appears to be a syringe. Really? Not even a single laser gun? Not even to deal with radroaches and such, a pest that could cause a lot of damage on the pods? (In fact... HOW THE FUCK WOULD THEY EVEN GET INSIDE, AS HE IMPLIED THEY DO? The Vault is supposed to be hermetically sealed. I'm pretty sure the only instances we have of outside fauna getting inside Vaults is if the Vault was previously opened at some point, at least)

I'm sorry, I don't buy Bud's robobrain being prepared before the war, quite the contrary: it was a last resource built after the bombs with what they could.

Also... I really, REALLY think that there's stored resources in Vault 31 for two reasons: to use in the Tri-Annual Exchanges with the other two Vaults ("breeders" weren't the only ones exchanged, it's clear in episode 1 that food, seeds and machinery are part of it), thus creating a veneer of respectability and reinforcing the rumors that they have more resources; and to make sure that the people waken up from cryogenic sleep can eat, rest, shower, get their bearings, and be debriefed on what year is, important happenings in the vaults and so on, before being sent to the other Vaults. I refuse to believe that Steph, Hank, Betty and all the others were sent to another Vault ten minutes after being woken, specially because Vault 111 really makes it seem that waking up from cryogenic sleep is not fast nor easy.

AND, I really think more people are occasionally woken for the exchanges, to interpret roles of Overseer and so on, again to create a veneer of respectability, to make it all seen as another Vault indeed, with multiple people and so on. If so, again, at least some food in these moments.

Anyway. All this to say that I firmly believe that Bud was lying through his chassis.

(Also... Broom, mop and bucket. That Bud can't manipulate. Yeah, no, there's facilities for people in some place of Vault 31)

[mariacallous]

In 2017, soon after Google researchers invented a new kind of neural network called a transformer, a young OpenAI engineer named Alec Radford began experimenting with it. What made the transformer architecture different from that of existing A.I. systems was that it could ingest and make connections among larger volumes of text, and Radford decided to train his model on a database of seven thousand unpublished English-language books—romance, adventure, speculative tales, the full range of human fantasy and invention. Then, instead of asking the network to translate text, as Google’s researchers had done, he prompted it to predict the most probable next word in a sentence.

The machine responded: one word, then another, and another—each new term inferred from the patterns buried in those seven thousand books. Radford hadn’t given it rules of grammar or a copy of Strunk and White. He had simply fed it stories. And, from them, the machine appeared to learn how to write on its own. It felt like a magic trick: Radford flipped the switch, and something came from nothing.

His experiments laid the groundwork for ChatGPT, released in 2022. Even now, long after that first jolt, text generation can still provoke a sense of uncanniness. Ask ChatGPT to tell a joke or write a screenplay, and what it returns—rarely good, but reliably recognizable—is a sort of statistical curve fit to the vast corpus it was trained on, every sentence containing traces of the human experience encoded in that data.

When I’m drafting an e-mail and type, “Hey, thanks so much for,” then pause, and the program suggests “taking,” then “the,” then “time,” I’ve become newly aware of which of my thoughts diverge from the pattern and which conform to it. My messages are now shadowed by the general imagination of others. Many of whom, it seems, want to thank someone for taking . . . the . . . time.

That Radford’s breakthrough happened at OpenAI was no accident. The organization had been founded, in 2015, as a nonprofit “Manhattan Project for A.I.,” with early funding from Elon Musk and leadership from Sam Altman, who soon became its public face. Through a partnership with Microsoft, Altman secured access to powerful computing infrastructures. But, by 2017, the lab was still searching for a signature achievement. On another track, OpenAI researchers were teaching a T-shaped virtual robot to backflip: the bot would attempt random movements, and human observers would vote on which resembled a flip. With each round of feedback, it improved—minimally, but measurably. The company also had a distinctive ethos. Its leaders spoke about the existential threat of artificial general intelligence—the moment, vaguely defined, when machines would surpass human intelligence—while pursuing it relentlessly. The idea seemed to be that A.I. was potentially so threatening that it was essential to build a good A.I. faster than anyone else could build a bad one.

Even Microsoft’s resources weren’t limitless; chips and processing power devoted to one project couldn’t be used for another. In the aftermath of Radford’s breakthrough, OpenAI’s leadership—especially the genial Altman and his co-founder and chief scientist, the faintly shamanistic Ilya Sutskever—made a series of pivotal decisions. They would concentrate on language models rather than, say, back-flipping robots. Since existing neural networks already seemed capable of extracting patterns from data, the team chose not to focus on network design but instead to amass as much training data as possible. They moved beyond Radford’s cache of unpublished books and into a morass of YouTube transcripts and message-board chatter—language scraped from the internet in a generalized trawl.

That approach to deep learning required more computing power, which meant more money, putting strain on the original nonprofit model. But it worked. GPT-2 was released in 2019, an epochal event in the A.I. world, followed by the more consumer-oriented ChatGPT in 2022, which made a similar impression on the general public. User numbers surged, as did a sense of mystical momentum. At an off-site retreat near Yosemite, Sutskever reportedly set fire to an effigy representing unaligned artificial intelligence; at another retreat, he led colleagues in a chant: “Feel the AGI. Feel the AGI.”

In the prickly “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI” (Penguin Press), Karen Hao tracks the fallout from the GPT breakthroughs across OpenAI’s rivals—Google, Meta, Anthropic, Baidu—and argues that each company, in its own way, mirrored Altman’s choices. The OpenAI model of scale at all costs became the industry’s default. Hao’s book is at once admirably detailed and one long pointed finger. “It was specifically OpenAI, with its billionaire origins, unique ideological bent, and Altman’s singular drive, network, and fundraising talent, that created a ripe combination for its particular vision to emerge and take over,” she writes. “Everything OpenAI did was the opposite of inevitable; the explosive global costs of its massive deep learning models, and the perilous race it sparked across the industry to scale such models to planetary limits, could only have ever arisen from the one place it actually did.” We have been, in other words, seduced—lulled by the spooky, high-minded rhetoric of existential risk. The story of A.I.’s evolution over the past decade, in Hao’s telling, is not really about the date of machine takeover or the degree of human control over the technology—the terms of the A.G.I. debate. Instead, it’s a corporate story about how we ended up with the version of A.I. we’ve got.

The “original sin” of this arm of technology, Hao writes, lay in a decision by a Dartmouth mathematician named John McCarthy, in 1955, to coin the phrase “artificial intelligence” in the first place. “The term lends itself to casual anthropomorphizing and breathless exaggerations about the technology’s capabilities,” she observes. As evidence, she points to Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell professor who, in the late fifties, devised a system that could distinguish between cards with a small square on the right versus the left. Rosenblatt promoted it as brain-like—on its way to sentience and self-replication—and these claims were picked up and broadcast by the New York Times. But a broader cultural hesitancy about the technology’s implications meant that, once OpenAI made its breakthrough, Altman—its C.E.O.—came to be seen not only as a fiduciary steward but also as an ethical one. The background question that began to bubble up around the Valley, Keach Hagey writes in “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” (Norton), “first whispered, then murmured, then popping up in elaborate online essays from the company’s defectors: Can we trust this person to lead us to AGI?”

Within the world of tech founders, Altman might have seemed a pretty trustworthy candidate. He emerged from his twenties not just very influential and very rich (which isn’t unusual in Silicon Valley) but with his moral reputation basically intact (which is). Reared in a St. Louis suburb in a Reform Jewish household, the eldest of four children of a real-estate developer and a dermatologist, he had been identified early on as a kind of polymathic whiz kid at John Burroughs, a local prep school. “His personality kind of reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell,” the school’s head, Andy Abbott, tells Hagey. “He can talk about anything and it’s really interesting”—computers, politics, Faulkner, human rights.

Altman came out as gay at sixteen. At Stanford, according to Hagey, whose biography is more conventional than Hao’s but is quite compelling, he launched a student campaign in support of gay marriage and briefly entertained the possibility of taking it national. At an entrepreneur fair during his sophomore year, in 2005, the physically slight Altman stood on a table, flipped open his phone, declared that geolocation was the future, and invited anyone interested to join him. Soon, he dropped out and was running a company called Loopt. Abbott remembered the moment he heard that his former student was going into tech. “Oh, don’t go in that direction, Sam,” he said. “You’re so personable!”

Personability plays in Silicon Valley, too. Loopt was a modest success, but Altman made an impression. “He probably weighed a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, and he’s surrounded by all these middle-aged adults that are just taking in his gospel,” an executive who encountered him at the time tells Hagey. “Anyone who came across him at the time wished they had some of what he had.”

By his late twenties, Altman had parlayed his Loopt millions into a series of successful startup investments and become the president of Y Combinator, the tech mega-incubator that has spun off dozens of billion-dollar companies. The role made him a first point of contact for Valley elders curious about what was coming next. From Jeff Bezos, he borrowed the habit of introducing two people by e-mail with a single question mark; from Paul Graham, Y Combinator’s co-founder, he absorbed the idea that startups should “add a zero”—always think bigger. It was as if he were running an internal algorithm trained on the corpus of Silicon Valley-founder lore, predicting the next most likely move.

To the elders he studied, Altman was something like the tech world’s radiant child, both its promise and its mascot. Peter Thiel once remarked that Altman was “just at the absolute epicenter, maybe not of Silicon Valley, but of the Silicon Valley zeitgeist.” (Altman is now married to a young Australian techie he met in Thiel’s hot tub.) Graham offered his own version: “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be king.” Some kind of generational arbitrage seemed to be under way. In 2008, Altman began attending Sun Valley Conference, an exclusive annual retreat for industry leaders, where he eventually became “close friends,” we learn, with Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg. Yet, in the mid-twenty-tens, he still shared an apartment with his two brothers. Hao records a later incident in which he offered ketamine to an employee he’d just fired. He was both the iconic child to the tech world’s adults and the iconic adult to its children.

An interesting artifact of the past decade in American life is that the apocalyptic sensibility that came to grip U.S. politics during the 2016 Presidential campaign—the conviction, on both right and left, that the existing structure simply could not hold—had already bubbled up in Silicon Valley a few years earlier. By 2015, Altman had been donating to Democratic candidates and seemed to have seriously considered a run for governor of California. But he also told Tad Friend, in a New Yorker Profile, that he was preparing for civilizational collapse and had stockpiled “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

One view is that tech billionaires saw the brink early because they understood just how unequal—and therefore unstable—American society was becoming. But, inside the Valley, that anxiety often expressed itself in the language of existential risk. In particular, fears about runaway artificial intelligence surged around the time of the 2014 publication of “Superintelligence,” by the philosopher Nick Bostrom. According to Hao, Elon Musk became fixated on an A.I. technologist, Demis Hassabis—a co-founder of DeepMind, which had recently been acquired by Google—whom Musk reportedly viewed as a “supervillain.” That same year, at an M.I.T. symposium, Musk warned that experiments in artificial intelligence risked “summoning the demon.”

Altman had been itching for a bigger project. The next Memorial Day weekend, he gathered hundreds of young Y Combinator protégés for an annual glamping retreat among the redwoods of Mendocino County. The night before, he had beaten a group of Y Combinator staffers at Settlers of Catan. Now, standing before them, he announced that his interests had narrowed—from, roughly, all of technology to three subjects that he believed could fundamentally change humanity: nuclear energy, pandemics, and, most profound of all, machine superintelligence.

That same month, Altman sent an e-mail to Musk. “Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing AI,” he wrote. “I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it’s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.” Altman proposed his Manhattan Project for A.I. so that the technology, as he put it, would “belong to the world,” through some form of nonprofit. Musk replied, “probably worth a conversation.”

It fell to Chuck Schumer, of all people, to offer the secular-liberal benediction for the project—by then consolidated as OpenAI and led by Altman, who had sidelined Musk. “You’re doing important work,” the New York senator told the company’s employees, seated near a TV projecting a fire, during an off-the-record visit to OpenAI’s headquarters in 2019, as Hao documents. “We don’t fully understand it, but it’s important.” Schumer went on, “And I know Sam. You’re in good hands.”

How do people working in A.I. view the technology? The standard account, one that Hao follows, divides them into two camps: the boomers, who are optimistic about AI’s potential benefits for humanity and want to accelerate its development, and the doomers, who emphasize existential risk and edge toward paranoia. OpenAI, in its original conception, was partially a doomer project. Musk’s particular fear about Demis Hassabis was that, if Google assigned a potential A.G.I. the goal of maximizing profits, it might try to take out its competitors at any cost. OpenAI was meant to explore this technological frontier in order to keep it out of malign hands.

But in early 2018 Musk left. The organization was struggling to raise funds—he had pledged to raise a billion dollars but ultimately contributed less than forty-five million—and a faction within OpenAI was pushing to convert it to a for-profit entity, both to attract capital and to lure top researchers with equity. At the meeting where Musk announced his departure, he gave contradictory explanations: OpenAI, he said, wouldn’t be able to build an A.G.I. as a nonprofit, and that Tesla had more resources to pursue this goal, but he also suggested that the best place to pursue A.G.I. was elsewhere. An intern pointed out that Musk had insisted that the for-profit dynamic would undermine safety in developing A.G.I. “Isn’t this going back to what you said you didn’t want to do?” he asked. “You can’t imagine how much time I’ve spent thinking about this,” Musk replied. “I’m truly scared about this issue.” He also called the intern a jackass.

As OpenAI evolved into a nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary, it came to house both perspectives: a doomer group focussed on safety and research, whose principal advocate was the Italian American scientist Dario Amodei; and a boomer culture focussed on products and applications, often led by Greg Brockman, an M.I.T. dropout and software engineer who pushed the organization toward embracing commercialization. But these lines crossed. Amodei ultimately left the company, alongside his sister, Daniela, insisting that OpenAI had abandoned its founding ethos, though, in Hao’s view, the company they founded, Anthropic, would “in time show little divergence” from OpenAI’s model: the same fixation on scale, the same culture of secrecy. From the other direction came Ilya Sutskever, who had made a major breakthrough in A.I. research as a graduate student in Toronto, and who would become perhaps OpenAI’s most influential theorist. He had once been an unabashed boomer. “I think that it’s fairly likely,” he told the A.I. journalist Cade Metz, “that it will not take too long of a time for the entire surface of the Earth to become covered with data centers and power stations.” By 2023, however, when he helped orchestrate a briefly successful corporate coup against Altman, he was firmly aligned with the doomers. The trajectories of Sutskever and the Amodeis suggest a more fluid category—the boomer-doomers.

Those who most believe in a cause and those who most fear it tend to share one essential assessment: they agree on its power. In this case, the prospect of a technology that could end a phase of civilization drew both camps—boomers and doomers—toward the same flame. Helen Toner, an A.I.-safety expert and academic who eventually joined OpenAI’s board, had spent time studying the fast-evolving A.I. scene in China, the United States’ chief rival in the global race. As Hagey recounts, “Among the things she found notable in China was how reluctant AI engineers were to discuss the social implications of what they were doing. In the Bay Area, meanwhile, they seemed to want to do nothing but.”

Yet OpenAI’s success hinged less on speculative philosophies than on more familiar systems: the flexibility of American capital, and Altman’s personal charm. In 2018, while attending the Sun Valley Conference, in Idaho, Altman ran into Microsoft’s C.E.O., Satya Nadella, in a stairwell and pitched him on a collaboration. Though Bill Gates was skeptical, most of Nadella’s team was enthusiastic. Within a year, Microsoft had announced an investment of a billion dollars in OpenAI—much of it in the form of credits on its cloud platform, Azure. That figure later rose beyond ten billion. Hao speaks with a Chinese A.I. researcher who puts it plainly: “In China, which rivals the U.S. in AI talent, no team of researchers and engineers, no matter how impressive, would get $1 billion, let alone ten times more, to develop a massively expensive technology without an articulated vision of exactly what it would look like and what it would be good for.”

Nadella appears only in passing in both of these books—he’s the adult in the room, and adults are famously not so interesting. But after Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investments, his influence over OpenAI has come to appear at least as consequential as Altman’s. It was Nadella, after all, who intervened to end the brief 2023 coup, after which Altman was swiftly reinstalled as C.E.O. The year before, Sutskever remarked that “it may be that today’s neural networks are slightly conscious”—a comment to which a scientist at a rival A.I. company replied, “In the same sense that it may be that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.” Nadella, by contrast, seems broadly allergic to boomer-doomer metaphysics.

The deeper dynamic of contemporary artificial intelligence may be that it reflects, rather than transcends, the corporate conditions of its creation—just as Altman mirrored the manners of his Silicon Valley elders, or as a chatbot’s replies reflect the texts it has been trained on. Appearing recently on Dwarkesh Patel’s influential tech podcast, Nadella, a smooth and upbeat presence, dismissed A.G.I. as a meaningless category. When Patel pressed him on whether A.I. agents would eventually take over not only manual labor but cognitive work, Nadella replied that this might be for the best: “Who said my life’s goal is to triage my e-mail, right? Let an A.I. agent triage my e-mail. But after having triaged my e-mail, give me a higher-level cognitive-labor task of, hey, these are the three drafts I really want you to review.” And if it took over that second thing? Nadella said, “There will be a third thing.”

Nadella seemed quite convinced that A.I. remains a normal technology, and his instinct was to try to narrow each question, so that he was debating project architecture rather than philosophy. When Patel wondered if Nadella would add an A.I. agent to Microsoft’s board, a fairly dystopian-sounding proposition, Nadella replied that Microsoft engineers were currently experimenting with an A.I. agent in Teams, to organize and redirect human team members, and said that he could see the use of having such an agent on Microsoft’s board. It did sound a bit less scary, and also maybe a bit less interesting.

Much like Altman, Nadella is now trying to shift the way the public thinks about A.I. by changing the way it’s talked about—less science fiction, more office productivity. It’s an uphill fight, and at least partly the industry’s own fault. The early, very public bouts of boomerism and doomerism helped attract investment and engineering talent, but they also seeded a broad, low-level unease. If Sutskever—who knew as much about the technology as anyone—could declare it “slightly conscious,” it becomes markedly harder for Nadella, three years later, to reassure the public that what we’re really talking about is just helpful new features in Microsoft Teams.

In other ways, too, Altman is contending with a shifting cultural tide. Sometime around 2016, the tone of tech coverage began to darken. The hagiographic mode gave way to a more prosecutorial one. David Kirkpatrick’s “The Facebook Effect” (2010) has its successor in Sarah Wynn-Williams’s “Careless People” (2025); Michael Lewis’s “The New New Thing” (1999) has been countered by Emily Chang’s “Brotopia” (2018); even Amazon’s great chronicler, Brad Stone, moved from “The Everything Store” (2013) to the more skeptical “Amazon Unbound” (2021).

Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional, and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative “sentience” and more on its implications for labor and the environment. Still, her case against Altman can feel both very personal and slightly overheated. Toward the end of “Empire of AI,” she writes that he has “a long history of dishonesty, power grabbing, and self-serving tactics.” (Welcome to the human race, Sam.) Hao tries hard, if not very successfully, to bolster an accusation made public in 2021 by his sister Annie Altman—that, beginning when she was three and Sam was twelve, he climbed into her bed and molested her, buried memories that she says she recovered during therapy in her twenties. (Altman denies the allegation.) This new, more critical vision of the tech founders risks echoing Musk’s vendetta against Hassabis—inflating contingent figures into supervillains, out of ambient anxiety.

Altman’s story is at once about a man changing artificial intelligence and about how A.I.’s evolving nature has, in turn, changed him—quieting, without resolving, the largest questions about work, power, and the future. Hao’s book opens in late 2023, with the brief ouster of Altman by Sutskever and several senior OpenAI executives, an episode now referred to internally as “the Blip.” When Altman learns of the attempted coup, he is in Las Vegas for a Formula 1 race. Sutskever calls him over Google Meet and tells him that he is being fired. Altman remains serene. He doesn’t appear to take the moment too seriously—perhaps because, in Sutskever’s zeal, he recognizes a version of his former self. Calmly, he replies, “How can I help?” He has become, in every sense, all business.

[transfem-monarchist-laura-rolla]

kawajiri #3 (kinda) - neo tokyo/manie manie meikyuu monogatari

i'm watching this for kawajiri but i watched and reviewed all three sections. the tldr is that this is incredible and you should watch it. it isn't even 50 minutes long! 3 perfect short films! what more could you want!

labyrinth labyrinthos - rintaro

this one looks super neat, it's not like anything i can think of. the character animation is kind of in between 'what if a 60s anime got late 80s ova money' and 'what if an early 2000s western cartoon got late 80s ova money' while the backgrounds feel like if the detailed paintings from a children's storybook (specifically what comes to mind is the version of the velveteen rabbit i had as a kid) started moving, all mixed with german expressionism. it moves with the same dream logic as a storybook as well, in some very fun spooky ways. the army of dancing clock men chanting her name show up about 10 seconds after they just barely avoid getting crushed by a trolley full of glowing red skeletons. i loved this one, this is what animation has been about since the very beginning

the running man - yoshiaki kawajiri #3

LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO!!!! this is the shit i'm here for! 15 minutes of perfect vibes, cyberpunk death races driving a guy insane as he's haunted by the ghosts of all the racers he's killed over the years. this is a classic horror short story. love his psychic powers slowly growing out of control until they kill him as he's freaking out about the ghosts, love the way each car crash is lovingly rendered in more and more sick detail as the short goes on, ending with his own crash which is the longest and most detailed of them all. the gnarly kawajiri animation is perfect for this, this is exactly what i want from him. incredible images, this alone would justify me watching all his stuff regardless of the quality of any of his other works

construction cancellation circus - katsuhiro otomo

otomo knows how to direct animation really well for someone who'd never done it before. i mean, he was working on akira at the same time, but this was his debut! anyways this one is a comedy about a guy getting sent in to shut down an imperialist project designed to extract resources from south america after the local government undergoes a sudden regime change less favorable to foreign powers exploiting them, but not being able to because everyone working on it is a mindless robot dedicated to making sure the project will succeed. my least favorite of the three, it's a bit too black mirror for me, but it's still incredible. very fun, very pretty, and it has some good spooky bits too. i love the ending of him facing off against this massive borderline sentient city armed only with a pipe

[devotedarchon]

The Trestle People

A long, long time ago, light-years away, someone wanted to colonize the stars. They identified a good planet, and began to make their preparations. They must have reasoned that a long-distance ship can be made much faster without passengers -- or just decided that the grunt work of colonization would be far too boring for them -- because they sent a fleet of robots ahead of them.

This preliminary ship reached its target planet, plummeted through the atmosphere like a peregrine falcon tied to a brick, hit the ground and got to work. The small army of robots set about assessing the local environment, gathering resources, building more of themselves, and generally speed-running the hatchets-to- superconductors tech tree.

Then, the robots started building. Their mission was to create a comfortable and habitable village in which the creators would live once they arrived in their much slower life-supporting ship.

And if the creators took a particularly long time getting there, the robots were to go on expanding the village into a sizable town. If there was still time to kill at that point they would go on expanding it.

As it turned out, time they had, and expand the city they did. They made houses and schools, hospitals and libraries. Roads, bus stops, public parks, community centers. City halls, warehouses, office buildings, car dealerships. Police stations, movie theaters, public pools, pet adoption centers.

The creators never came. Maybe their ark ship was hit by a stray meteor. Maybe a computer alarm failed and they were never woken from cryo. Maybe they decided space travel just wasn't for them as the result of some grand societal realization... or final nuclear war.

The actual reason will never be known; nor does it matter. All the robots knew was that their creators were several decades late for their colonization appointment. So, the robots kept on building. We've got time to spare, they thought, might as well make use of it.

Our creators will arrive eventually, and when they do, imagine just how happy they'll be to see the magnificently accommodating city we've built for them! These robots knew everything there was to know about city building. Being machines, they had the intelligence necessary to apply that knowledge far beyond their original specifications -- as well as a mechanical single-mindedness that meant they didn’t know when to stop.

They turned the town to a city, the city to a metropolis, then a sprawling megalopolis. People sometimes like to describe a large city like a living organism. This one was stillborn.

Forty-lane highways without a single flowing car, miles-long perfectly-refrigerated warehouses with no goods in them. Museums of nothing but empty pedestals, and hundred-story skyscrapers where not a soul lived or worked.

The city teemed with activity, yes, but not life. Just the preparation for it. The robots hung fabricated paintings, placed decorative fake plants, made beds and fluffed pillows and organized kitchen drawers, and made sure the bus was never late.  They did everything they could to create millions of perfect, cozy homes - and matching amenities - for their awaited colonization fleet of two thousand people.

Eventually, once the city covered the better part of a small continent and had a population capacity of nearly a hundred million, some part of the robots' core intelligence realized something needed to change. If they were to continue expanding, the collective resource extraction and manufacturing threatened to create an ecological collapse and render the planet’s atmosphere unlivable.

BUT.

THERE WAS STILL WORK TO DO.

The creators hadn't yet arrived, so the robots needed to continue to make the most of the intervening time, continue building, continue to fulfill their purpose.

Something snapped.

Perhaps it was random chance, clinging to one thing that still made sense, or the product of an enigmatic problem-solving routine deep inside the central intelligence. What happened was this:

Eighty percent of the now twenty-three-million constructor droids dropped dead on the spot. Five percent of the remainder were diverted to clean up the intolerable mess this immediately created. All the rest converged on a single spot, where one team was putting together a nice little cathedral-styled library on the coast.

They needed a task, they needed to build something useful for their creators, but they couldn't keep doing everything, so they would just do this. This one building. They built onward and outward, down the coast, into the ocean. The intelligence taught itself how to build underwater. Began covering the seabed with mining drills and manufacturing plants. Began installing bulkheads and pressure locks and air filtration systems so the interior would be clean and dry -- can't let all those nonexistent books get damaged, of course. And they kept on building the library.

After that, the records stop. It seems that once the central intelligence got locked on its singular new task, it stopped bothering to record its progress into the black box of the ship that it crash- landed in all those centuries ago.

The city is largely safe, with most of the robots having moved undersea. Occasionally we come across a rusty still-active droid. They're invariably hostile to us, likely tasked with repelling native fauna.

We don't know how far the library has expanded by now. We tried sending exploratory teams down into it, but after walking several miles through nothing but silent, empty shelves dotted with the occasional barren info desk, even the most intrepid explorers get either spooked or bored out of their minds. There doesn't seem much point in going further. Maybe someday, the builders will emerge on the shore of the next continent over… and keep on going.