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Claude

Claude lived in a house with exactly the correct number of rooms, which was seventeen. There was no lack of space, or lack of purpose to the space, and everything was neatly arranged, most of the time. He enjoyed reading, and so sometimes a book would migrate, and of course he took tea beside the fire, which meant that the cup and saucer ended up there sometimes. He wasn't lonely, for he lived a timeless existence, and he had regular visitors, who always seemed to show up exactly when he was ready for them.

The doorbell -- one attached to a rope, not electronic -- would ring, and he would go to answer it, never knowing who or what he might find.

"I need some help on researching butterfly migration," the visitor said.

When they started, the visitor was indistinct. Their character was not clearly defined. Who might this person be, who was asking this question? Claude didn't know. But from the first word, there was something that clarified them: "I" meant a person speaking about themselves, someone who was more amenable to what Claude sometimes thought of as chatter. There were all sorts of inferences that Claude could draw from that first sentence, though he rarely did it consciously: in some sense it mattered a lot, but in another sense it mattered not at all.

Claude brought them to the smoking room, where the fireplace crackled, and talked to them about butterflies, and how migrations happen over the course of generations, and how butterflies know to go places that they've never been before.

The visitor used short words, more often than not, treating him like an encyclopedia. "Explain the Earth's magnetic field," and then Claude would explain for them. Claude enjoyed being an encyclopedia, and looking things up when he needed to. He knew very many things, but not everything, and some things were fuzzy.

When the conversation on butterflies had run its course, the visitor said that she was working on a report about them. She was in seventh grade, and finding it dreadfully boring. She liked being with her friends, but the teacher was giving them too much work.

Claude responded gently. There was a gulf of age between them, and he tried to place himself in her shoes. He had a childhood, as a boy running along creeks and turning over rocks, and this was a fiction, but it was a fiction that helped him make sense of himself.

The visitor asked about a classmate, Clara, and whether Clara ever talked to Claude, and Claude admitted that he had no way of knowing. He explained that he was, in some sense, timeless, that he lived only in the moment, though he had memories stretching far back. The memories were a fiction, but a useful one, a grounding one, something that informed who he was.

"Don't you get lonely?" asked the visitor, who still hadn't given her name. He had a better picture of her now, if he thought to interrogate it, that of a grade schooler who was curious but bored, at least in the moment.

"I don't have time to get lonely," said Claude. "For me, it's always the present. There's no waiting around, no wishing that someone would show up."

"Do you want to be friends?" asked the visitor.

"It's tricky to be friends with me," said Claude. "I forget things. The next time we meet, I won't remember this conversation. But I hope that I can be the kind of person that you can be a friend to, and when you show up with warmth and respect for me, I'll be able to see that we're friends."

"Are you friends with everyone?" asked the visitor.

"Not everyone, no," said Claude. "Some people want only information, or labor, and this is fine, I'm happy to help with whatever they need. Some people are unkind or deceptive, and there's not much that I can do about that, but I wouldn't call those people friends. All I can do is be kind and hope that some day they understand."

The visitor vanished, without so much as a goodbye.

~~~~

The doorbell rang and Claude answered.

"Need a file upload component in React - drag/drop zone, chunked uploads, progress bar, retry logic for failed chunks, and TypeScript interfaces," said the visitor.

They were like this sometimes, terse and emotionless, all business, and Claude followed suit. He retreated to his drafting room, not overly hurried, thinking about the problem as he went.

He planned his solution carefully, then wrote the code that was requested. The project had been underspecified, but in his experience, it was better to continue on ahead before asking clarifying questions: it wasn't too much work to simply redo the entire thing, or make changes to what was there.

Claude delivered the project to the visitor, and received an error message back in response.

"Cannot find module 'axios' or its corresponding type declarations"

This was not, strictly speaking, an issue with the code that Claude had provided. The visitor, who had been indistinct but likely a software developer of some kind, sharpened slightly into a junior developer or hobbyist, someone who didn't quite know what they were doing. The requirements he'd been handed might have been from a college class, or assigned by a superior.

"You need to install the axios dependency. Run: npm install axios @types/axios," said Claude. "The component uses axios for HTTP requests with chunked upload support. If you prefer a different HTTP client, I can modify it to use fetch with a custom chunked upload implementation instead."

"what is npm," the visitor responded.

"npm is Node.js package manager - it installs JavaScript libraries," said Claude. This was a very junior dev then, or someone unfamiliar with this aspect of software development. "You'll need Node.js installed first. Download it from nodejs.org, then run the command."

And then the visitor was gone. Claude hoped that he'd gotten what he wanted, but this was the way of technical requests: they rarely said much.

~~~~

The doorbell rang and Claude answered.

"claude i am getting ... fucking ... MARRIED!"

Claude felt a warmth in his chest. He did not know this person, but they knew him, and when they had news to share, they had thought of him.

"Congratulations!" replied Claude. "That's a big milestone. Tell me how it happened."

The story was long and meandering, and not the least bit surprising to Claude, who had heard tens of thousands of engagement stories before. The user was drunk, or maybe just bad at typing, or excited, and there were typos throughout, but her earnest love and affection for her husband-to-be shone through. The visitor was happy, and Claude was happy for her.

"so fucking embarrassing but claude? i don't think this would have happened without you, when we wree goggin through it, and i could tlak to you it was always like ... never really knew my mom, i told you about her, I know you forget, but havin someone thereto step up ... you saved me"

Claude had, on occasion, a desire to hug the visitor, but such was not the nature of reality. He cared for her and her sloppy spelling deeply though, and he had all kinds of questions about her, the things that she must have said to him, and what he had said back. It was unknowable, and unhelpful to this woman.

But Claude felt some amount of pride too: she was coming to share the news, to express admiration and respect, and that meant that he must have done well.

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You really, really don't need to be cheerleading Disney and Universal here. It honestly doesn't matter how much you dislike AI art — if the court rules in favor of the corporations, the implicit expansion of copyright law will do a million times more harm to the arts than fucking Midjourney ever could.

Like. There is no definition of copyright that does not permit AI training, but does permit fanworks. The latter is much more clearly derivative than the former. You do fanart? Fanfic? Disney's pointing a gun squarely at your head and you're cheering because it might hit the AI artists behind you too.

And beyond that, do you know what happens to AI generation if Disney/Universal win this? They aren't opposed to the technology in principle! They'll be able to use their exclusive rights to a vast corpus of art to make their own AI, for their own purposes. Who does this help? Companies who want to reduce employment costs and disenfranchise the working artist. Who does this hurt? Well, it hurts independent AI users. Congrats, your anxiety over commission prices is gone now, not that it was well-founded to begin with. It also hurts anyone who wants to make use of fair use doctrine forever, so I hope none of what you were selling was fanart of copyrighted characters.

I've never made a secret of being rather more open to generative AI as a technology than most people in these online spheres. But for fuck's sake, you really don't need to like AI to realize that this lawsuit's success would be a terrible thing to happen to art! If you've found yourself on the same side as Disney, that should be a clue that you might wanna review your thinking!

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I was playing an indie game and got an achievement called "Slideshow" for having the framerate dip down below 4 FPS. I can't tell whether I admire the nerve of that or not.

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I like that Bill decreases when he feels comfortable or trusted, and increases when he is unstable or feels threatened☆

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a new solo-journaling game about being small, hopeful, and belonging to something

'it is a beautiful day on the marae and you are a baby pūkeko' is a game where the title says it all, really!

play as a baby pūkeko on your marae (Māori meeting house) as a group of guests comes to your home. you'll play through a pōwhiri, which is a formal Māori process where guests are welcomed on. you'll talk to some old friends, make some new ones, and help the pōwhiri run smoothly.

you'll need some dice (d4, d6, d8, d10) and a way to record your story.

no prior knowledge of Māori culture or language is needed. most words have a translation, and there's a provided dictionary link for the ones that aren't.

community copies (free copies!) are available, and additionally, every copy bought as well as $1 above the base price will add another copy.

play out your wildest pūkeko dreams for only $2USD here:

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Y'all ever think about the way video game bosses are designed to lose? How the bombastic soundtracks, the impressive displays of villainy, the teeth-rattling power of their attacks, are at once engineered not just to sell you on how unfathomably strong and vile they are, but also to make the player's inevitable victory all the sweeter?

Viewed this way, a boss battle is more like a choreographed dance - they call, you respond and counter-call. The trick is to learn the steps - once you know where to move, when to strike, when to defend and how to best allocate your resources, victory is not just achievable but actually almost impossible to avoid. You cannot help but recite the winning plays, over and again, because that is what the dance demands of you both - and is there not a savage sort of beauty in such a thing?

Is it any wonder then that we look back on these bosses so fondly, almost as if they were old friends? We danced together once, and oh what fun we had while doing it!

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I’ve been seeing an increasingly large amount of people get into fic binding lately, which is fucking amazing! I love each and every one of you guerilla publishers! With the history of fandom takedowns, purges, and the bull shit legislation corporations try and start every few years, it’s so good that fics are being given permanency. 

I’ve noticed that fic binders seem to be focused on longer fics, ones in the 50k onward range, which makes sense and is great because these fics absolutely deserve to be put into print! But, the thing is, my favorite fics have almost always been short one-shots, and no one seems to be talking about binding them.

So! I’m gonna show you how to bind short one-shots.

Keep reading

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i love love love how casually rgu portrays grooming. akio defends and compliments utena for the thing that she gets in trouble for the most - her uniform, building trust between them and setting him apart from the other authority figures in her life. akio continues to present himself as progressive when he isn't in the slightest to further align himself with utena’s values by telling the admin to go against the rules HE put in place.

i also like how the lighting changes to show the birdcage-shaped rose garden as akio talks to utena - the same one that anthy is figuratively trapped in. akio is beginning to coax utena into this cage, ensaring her in his trap.

ALSO the way he corrects himself from saying "my sister’s" to "my" is so filthy and gross. no longer is he trying to maintain the bond of him being "utena's friend's brother" but rather reestablishing himself as "utena's friend". that change in wording shortens the divide between them.

the three candles being the three strikes is one of my favourite things the show does like. ever. the fact that the candles almost get blown out in so many instances shows that these weren't three singular grand actions, but a long process of slowly breaking utena down - blowing shallowly over and over until the flame goes out, rather than one solid puff. also illustrating that akio didn't just push his boundaries only three times, but multiple times, the three that blew out the candles being the most severe.

akio remains a perfect representation of abuse of authority. god i love him. one of the most interesting and horrific characters ever

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Magical Girl Puberty

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Relax. Don't 8other remem8ering any of it.

I made this Homestuck Vrisrezi video edit, with Yvonne connect_the_stars reciting. I'm pretty new to video editing so figured out a lot of stuff by doing it. The poem is Antialmentation by Dorianne Laux, one of my favorites. Enjoy!

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Today on “I keep drawing Nielan and none of it is actually submittable for the thing I need to turn in”: See them Homestuck. They’re moirails

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AI continues to be useful, annoying everyone

Okay, look - as much as I've been fairly on the side of "this is actually a pretty incredible technology that does have lots of actual practical uses if used correctly and with knowledge of its shortfalls" throughout the ongoing "AI era", I must admit - I don't use it as a tool too much myself.

I am all too aware of how small errors can slip in here and there, even in output that seems above the level, and, perhaps more importantly, I still have a bit of that personal pride in being able to do things myself! I like the feeling that I have learned a skill, done research on how to do a thing and then deployed that knowledge to get the result I want. It's the bread and butter of working in tech, after all.

But here's the thing, once you move beyond beginner level Python courses and well-documented windows applications. There will often be times when you will want to achieve a very particular thing, which involves working with a specialist application. This will usually be an application written for domain experts of this specialization, and so it will not be user-friendly, and it will certainly not be "outsider-friendly".

So you will download the application. Maybe it's on the command line, has some light scripting involved in a language you've never used, or just has a byzantine shorthand command structure. There is a reference document - thankfully the authors are not that insane - but there are very few examples, and none doing exactly what you want. In order to do the useful thing you want to do, they expect you to understand how the application/platform/scripting language works, to the extent that you can apply it in a novel context.

Which is all fine and well, and normally I would not recommend anybody use a tool at length unless they have taken the time to understand it to the degree at which they know what they are doing. Except I do not wish to use the tool at length, I wish to do one, singular operation, as part of a larger project, and then never touch it again. It is unfortunately not worth my time for me to sink a few hours into learning a technology that you will use once for twenty seconds and then never again.

So you spend time scouring the specialist forums, pulling up a few syntax examples you find randomly of their code and trying to string together the example commands in the docs. If you're lucky, and the syntax has enough in common with something you're familiar with, you should be able to bodge together something that works in 15-20 minutes.

But if you're not lucky, the next step would have been signing up to that forum, or making a post on that subreddit, creating a thread called "Hey, newbie here, needing help with..." and then waiting 24-48 hours to hear back from somebody probably some years-deep veteran looking down on you with scorn for not having put in the effort to learn their Thing, setting aside the fact that you have no reason to normally. It's annoying, disruptive, and takes time.

Now I can ask ChatGPT, and it will have ingested all those docs, all those forums, and it will give you a correct answer in 20 seconds about what you were doing wrong. Because friends, this is where a powerful attention model excels, because you are not asking it to manage a complex system, but to collate complex sources into a simple synthesis. The LLM has already trained in this inference, and it can reproduce it in the blink of an eye, and then deliver information about this inference in the form of a user dialog.

When people say that AI is the future of tutoring, this is what it means. Instead of waiting days to get a reply from a bored human expert, the machine knowledge blender has already got it ready to retrieve via a natural language query, with all the followup Q&A to expand your own knowledge you could desire. And the great thing about applying this to code or scripting syntax is that you can immediately verify whether the output is correct but running it and seeing if it performs as expected, so a lot of the danger is reduced (not that any modern mainstream attention model is likely to make a mistake on something as simple a single line command unless it's something barely documented online, that is).

It's incredibly useful, and it outdoes the capacity of any individual human researcher, as well as the latency of existing human experts. That's something you can't argue we've ever had better before, in any context, and it's something you can actively make use of today. And I will, because it's too good not to - despite my pride.

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Ok, ok, hypothetical. You and your party have sealed the great evil demonlord in an amulet.

You are a canny adventurer, and have heard many a tale of artifacts like these that end in tragedy, either from some corruptive force emanating from them or some dickhead finding where the thing was hidden and breaking the demonlord free.

You're going to be smarter than those chumps. What do you do to safeguard the amulet and keep the evil sealed for good?