#clearing out drafts

[allgremlinart]

next year of sheep is 2027... why so far away... you hate me. make it tomorrow. MY year.

[asteroidaffection]

you think you can hurt me? my dad was catholic and my mom was baptist

so…… probably

[diamond-rings-and-gutter-bones]

the thing about mary in season 12 is that she does not see grown-up sam and dean as her Real Sons

[whatalcser]

Richie + Colours

[thisfuckingdeadlife]

[thorinsbeard]

[deputy-sennaviste]

"Jacob, please."

"No."

"Would you just listen to-"

"I'm done listening."

His words were clipped, final, silencing any protest that may have tumbled out of her. His shoulders were tight and his jaw worked roughly. He wouldn't look at her, though. She wrapped her arms around herself, staring down at the floor as if she could will herself to melt thought the boards and disappear.

A long moment stretched between them. His breathing evened out and his posture cooled as he turned to look at her. She was worrying her lower lip with her teeth, a habit he'd noticed in her weeks ago. Her warm brown face was dark with heat and he could just barely see tears building in her eyes.

"Rook, I-"

"No, it's fine." She snapped, brushing an arm over her face and meeting his gaze solidly. "I understand. What you say, goes."

"That isn't fair."

"No? Is that not correct?"

"No, it's not. But what you're asking for is...it's something I can't give you."

She dragged in a hard breath, holding blistering eye contact. Normally, he would expect her to drop her eyes, but this was defiance. He had never seen her this braced before.

"All I want," she began, voice shaking with emotion, "is for you to come with me and talk to Eli. Please, Jacob."

"You know how much like a trap that sounds?" His temper flares again and he stepped towards her.

"Why would I trap you? I've been helping you!"

"Or forcing my guard down so I don't suspect you."

That stung. He could see it the moment he spoke the words. The way her eyes widened, her breath hitched, her hands tightened around herself.

"That... was unfair." There was no venom in it, no fire, just a bruised and aching grief that he didn't expect. Jacob winced before he could stop himself and moved to try and pull her against him. She resisted, he knew she would, but he kept a steady pressure until she caved, crushing her to his chest.

"I don't mean to imply that I don't trust you. I only mean that I cannot trust Eli. After everything..."

"We have to start somewhere, Jake." Her voice was muffled into his shirt, the heat of her breath spreading over his chest as she spoke. He rubbed her back slowly, thinking. He knew she was right. He knew that, for there to be relative safety for his people, his family, someone needed to take the first step.

"Jacob?"

"Hm?"

"Are you angry?" He breathed, long and wearily. Tipping his chin down, he kissed the top of her head, squeezing her a bit tighter.

"No, pup. I'm not. Just a moment of weakness, that's all."

[commanders-sole-braincell]

furious they got me doing the bigfoot pose during the climax of the fight

[nerd2614]

I had the weirdest dream but it gave me a cool idea

Marinette is spiderman instead of ladgbug

[jencsi]

"I think I know"

[allgremlinart]

Pikmin gets a little too Rudyard Kipling for me

[mitigatedchaos]

What’s the/a capital matrix?

I don’t have an opinion on use frequency regarding ‘matrix’, by the way

Well that's the problem. Looking back at that post, it's not clear that it's the best choice of words.

Though this is not just about capital, the average American is benefiting from the energy equivalent of about 12 full draft horses working continuously, 24/7, being channeled through the capital matrix. Cars, aircraft, milling machines, excavators - just flick a switch and off you go. (Because it’s low-dimensionality, it isn’t the same as real labor, but in terms of overall production, it’s astounding.)

Matrix A

Officially, according to Merriam-Webster, a matrix is a material ("such as soil or rock") within which some other object ("such as a fossil") is embedded. Some figurative uses are from this basis - for instance, in the movie The Matrix, the human population are kept in virtual reality pods, and the context that they live in is a computer simulation... called "the Matrix."

Matrix B

A mathematical matrix is a two-dimensional array of numbers. Basically just think of it as a grid of numbers.

This is also used figuratively, often to describe things similar to a table (the document element), or a spreadsheet.

To quote Merriam-Webster quoting Forbes,

And in the two-by-two matrix of men and women being warm and not warm and competent and not competent.

A mathematical matrix is usually composed of vectors. You can think of a 3-dimensional coordinate, which consists of three numbers (three "elements"), as a common variety of vector.

The Social Matrix

We could imagine a "social matrix" where we represent each person in a community's relationship with each other person in that community as an element in a vector.

For instance, maybe Alice, Beth, and Carol all live together in one house. Alice hates Beth (1 out of 5 stars) and likes Carol (4 / 5 stars), so: { -, 1, 4 }. Beth is neutral on both Alice and Carol: { 3, -, 3 }. Carol loves Alice and mildly dislikes Beth: { 5, 2, - }

We can arrange this as a grid:

[4] [3] [-] [1] [-] [2] [-] [3] [5]

Though it's only a model (relationships don't reduce to a single 5-point scale), this has the effect of being both a mathematical matrix and describing the social context within which Alice, Beth, and Carol are embedded.

To quote a Rationalist Tumblr user who I am not going to name because they are not a discourse participant and I am not going to drag them into the discourse:

I was enmeshed in a social matrix where lots of people are dating each other and making new connections happens almost automatically once you’re plugged in enough into the network.

We could map out who is dating whom in this Tumblr user's life with a matrix in this style.

Now, as for capital...

Capital Matrix A

We can actually model the economy as a whole using 2-dimensional matrices, and solve for the equilibrium, assuming that we can describe the production function for each enterprise or sector in linear terms. Think of it as a static ratio, the sort of thing you might see in a video game like Anno 2070. "2 apples + 1 wheat = 1 apple pie," that sort of thing.

Energy is a key term in this system. We would channel energy through this system in order to transform inputs into outputs.

In reality, production isn't static, and input-output ratios are not linear (due to many factors, including economies of scale), which means that you can't just solve the problem of economic planning by feeding everything into a single big table in a computer.

That's our first matrix analogy for capital. In some ways it's very similar to the idea of the social matrix, as the capital matrix is also the context that we're working within, and is modeling the relationships of the production systems through the use of vectors.

Capital Matrix B

We can also view capital, such as a metal stamping machine, as composed of two components - the material it's physically composed of, and the configuration of that material.

While the actual physical material is a solid, thick, physical object, the configuration is a simplified construct that humans dreamed up. If you're using high-resolution voxels (volume pixels), you could mark the material at each point using a 3-dimensional matrix, and then simulate the flow of energy and materials through that system to produce an output.

Another definition given by Merriam-Webster is a mold from which a relief surface ("such as a piece of type") is made, or a die (such as used for metal stamping), or an impression of a phonograph used to duplicate it.

Mathematical matrices can also be used to transform the contents of another matrix, such as rotating the points, flipping, or scaling.

One way to view capital is as a reusable pattern used to gain leverage in reordering the environment according to some intention.

So, from the metaphorical perspective, we could view capital as applying an ordered sequence of transformations to an initial input, exerting forces on an objects, which would be modeled with vectors.

This is where the analogy breaks down a bit, because that's not a matrix. That's a sequence of matrices. And we're not doing a scaling operation; we're often doing a lot of destructive editing.

(I still need to get through more of the textbook I have about matrices.)

So, to come back to the quote...

Though this is not just about capital, the average American is benefiting from the energy equivalent of about 12 full draft horses working continuously, 24/7, being channeled through the capital matrix. Cars, aircraft, milling machines, excavators - just flick a switch and off you go. (Because it’s low-dimensionality, it isn’t the same as real labor, but in terms of overall production, it’s astounding.)

For the first analogy, I think we're fairly solid. (Even though the actual production functions aren't actually nice simple lines.)

For the second analogy, I feel I'd want @regina-bithyniae 's opinion on whether it's a fair use of the term.

Matrices as New Metaphor

What I was actually getting at with my question about whether other people are using matrices as a metaphor is a bit weirder, though.

As you know, the new deep learning AI systems are based on matrices, and specialized hardware that allows massively parallel execution of matrix operations.

I don't know if you can sense it, or if others can sense it, or if it's just me, but the limitations of Llama2-70b, the text-based large language model, feel like the limitations of Stable Diffusion, the image-based model that "predicts" images from noise.

It's frustrating, because I can't put it into words, but after fucking around with Stable Diffusion long enough, you can feel the way you're reaching in and probabilistically pulling things out of its training data. This includes a sense of when you're requesting things that are less represented in its training data, and so are less 'probable,' gradually sliding into things you can't make it represent because they're not in the training data at all.

With LLMs, it feels like you're reaching in to a library in the same way, trying to influence which part of the library it's pulling from.

Both have issues with abstractions, being able to depart from their training data to a degree, but requiring human assistance to work out more complex subjects in layers of intermediate reasoning.

Metaphors or frames of viewing the world often come from real life, and our descriptions of more abstract phenomena are often based on abstracting more concrete real life meanings.

New technology provides new real-life concepts, leading to new ways for humanity to understand the world - new metaphors. (And "the brain as computer" is better than "the brain as clock," for instance.)

Obviously, describing things in terms of a bunch of vectors has its uses. (I have described max1461 and I as 'using different weights, but on similar models.')

If describing things as a 'matrix' is becoming more common, I'm wondering if it's related to underlying exposure to the new technology and its description as working based on matrices, or if this is part of our demographic cohort aging (as Tumblr becoming more nuanced seems to be).

It might also be that it isn't becoming more common. There probably isn't a good way to separate out the metaphorical usage using Google Trends, though.

[urboymutual]

angel in a motel room what will he do 🤪🤪🤪

"divinity is not something you can grasp" he tells me.

a pause.

"but you can try the vending machine outside."

[pysslala]

What they don’t tell you about being a bisexual woman is that you are constantly fetishized by men, undermined by women and ridiculed by everyone. It won’t stop me from kissing girls and sleeping with guys but damn am I sick of this treatment! Heartbroken that I’ve been out for so long and I am still being abused and neglected by those I thought were close to me and don’t care about who I am sharing my body with… Bisexuals have so many problems that nobody seems to think twice about

[carnivorousghouls]

I’m sorry why is he shocked at all that he broke up with him after trying to eat his brain??????????????

[samueldays]

Any tool, technology, custom, or other social element that helps Jews to evade persecution is good for helping criminal syndicates do the same;

and likewise, any legislation, surveillance, or other government program for catching criminal syndicates is good for catching Jews.

Bitcoin is the headline example here, but it applies more generally. Humans in power can make decisions who to persecute and where to point cameras; but surveillance technology and secrecy technology are far less selective about who picks them up.