blakestacey

This was bizarre to me, as very few companies do massive amounts of materials research and which also is split fairly evenly across the spectrum of materials, in disparate domains such as biomaterials and metal alloys. I did some “deep research” to confirm this hypothesis (thank you ChatGPT and Gemini)

"I know it's not actually research, but I did it anyway."

So, there's this new phenomenon they've observed in which text does not convey tone. It can be a real problem, especially when a statement made by one person as a joke would be made by another in all seriousness — but don't worry, solutions have very recently been proposed.

Banned from the community for advertising.

Here, have a community ban to enforce that self-proclaimed flounce.

Air so polluted it makes people sick, but it's all worth it because you can't be arsed to remember the syntax of a for loop.

The pro-child-porn caucus.

Science writer Philip Ball observes,

Just watched Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) say "We believe as an industry... that within 3-5 years we'll have AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as [big deal voice] the smartest mathematician, physicist, [lesser deal voice] artist, writer, thinker, politician ... I call this the San Francisco consensus, because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco... Within the next year or two, this foundation gets locked in, and we're not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that...There will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans"

"Everyone who believes this is in San Francisco" approaches "the female orgasm is a myth" levels of self-own.

Back in the twenty-aughts, I wrote a science fiction murder mystery involving the invention of artificial intelligence. That whole plot angle feels dead today, even though the AI in question was, you know, in the Commander Data tradition, not the monstrosities of mediocrity we're suffering through now. (The story was also about a stand-in for the United States rebuilding itself after a fascist uprising, the emotional aftereffects of the night when shooting the fascists was necessary to stop them, queer loneliness and other things that maybe hold up better.)

Being unsure of whether you want to fuck robo-Maria or be robo-Maria is a classic sign of bisexuality among reconstructors of lost film media.

Yes, it's a niche, but you know it's not an empty niche.

I've noticed the occasional joke about how new computer technology, or LLMs specifically, have changed the speaker's perspective about older science fiction. E.g., there was one that went something like, "I was always confused about how Picard ordered his tea with the weird word order and exactly the same inflection every time, but now I recognize that's the tea order of a man who has learned precisely what is necessary to avoid the replicator delivering you an ocelot instead."

Notice how in TNG, everyone treats a PADD as a device that holds exactly one document and has to be physically handed to a person? The Doylist explanation is that it's a show from 1987 and everyone involved thought of them as notebooks. But the Watsonian explanation is that a device that holds exactly one document and zero distractions is the product of a society more psychologically healthy than ours....