Here goes nothing...

like, as a treat, could we have an au where jason gets adopted but has a very antagonistic relationship with dick, to the point where dick outright yells at jason that he hates him and hates having brothers, and so out of spite and wanting to piss dick off jason just keeps. bringing back more brothers to get on dick's nerves.

they get into a screaming match about how much dick never wanted a younger sibling and the next day jason runs to the nearest house and convinces the first kid he finds there to join the family specifically so tim can sit across from dick at the dinner table that night and jason can give him the most spiteful/falsely innocent smile possible when bruce announces that as tim's parents are out of gotham for the rest of the year he'll be the kid's acting guardian, and dick just has to watch him and bite his tongue.

talia literally never planned for damian to be sent to live with his father so early in life, it's just that jason walked out the compound on his way back home, remembered the tradition, did a 180, and then grabbed damian so that he could force dick to deal with yet another younger brother. dick is literally so stressed out.

listen. dick was pissed when tim showed up, but by the time jason comes back with damian it's less anger and more just genuine stress. like. he knows bruce's capabilities. he knows that younger ones tend to look up to nightwing more than anyone else in the community. he knows that any child that 'bruce' takes in is just going to be another kid for him to worry about and care too much for and look out for, not even because bruce isn't doing moderately well as a parent but just because there's something about older brother figures that seem more approachable than an adoptive father.

and jason fucking knows it.

they're in an eternal battle of jason encouraging bruce's adoption addiction and dick desperately trying to stop jason from bringing any more children anywhere near the manor for his own mental healths sake.

it gets to the point where dick will call jason a fatass over the phone while jason's walking down the street, and jason will instantly hang up the phone, turn on his heel towards the nearest school, and just start yelling over the fence 'ANY OF YOU GUYS NOT GOT PARENTS?'

duke was just trying to eat lunch but this random man started calling over and when duke put his hand up the man asked if he wanted a new family with a free inheritance included, and like, normally duke wouldn't touch that kind of weird shit with a ten foot pole, but he did recently figure out he has a bunch of insanely cool meta-human abilities so really what were the chances this guy could actually hurt him? 2% chance it actually works out, 98% chance he gets a cool story; no downsides. he's in.

steph got adopted literally because while tim and jason were hanging out in jason's room, dick went in to ask a question and didn't shut jason's door on the way out. the second he left jason turned to him and demanded 'don't you have a friend whose dad is a rogue? get that woman over here right now.'

i think maybe cass just showed up in jason's apartment one day, because she remembered him from when jason worked with david cain a few times in the league of assassins and when she ran away from him she decided jason was the most trustworthy person to go to for refuge, and i think jason probably had to bite his cheek awkwardly at her just like 'ok listen i'm gonna help you and usually i would take you right over to batman to sort all of this out, but i kinda have a system i need to uphold here, so you might have to hide out in here until my older brother pisses me off, if you're alright with that. we have a game night tomorrow planned and we're gonna play monopoly so like, i guarantee you won't have to wait very long'.

So I'm here to say AI isn't programmed--not in the traditional sense of "a set of instructions written by a person that the computer executes." And in fact, Software Programming and AI Development are genuinely different fields. I am a software developer. I am not capable nor trained in AI development.

I have enough career exposure to both to understand core differences. But to be entirely clear, my statements about AI development are from a college-class level of understanding. But my statements about software engineering and AI in the tech industry are industry knowledge.

A key thing about 99.9% of software engineering--and a detail I very strongly like--is that code execution is deterministic. And deterministic means that, when knowing all the inputs, you can with absolute certainty know the output. This will not change unless one of the inputs changes.

And programs are--simplistically--a highly detailed instruction list. If something is going wrong with the code, you can walk through it at a granular level. You can see every individual step it is taking and identify and isolate what is wrong. There are a million ways this can be massively complicated, but deterministic execution pretty much guarantees this is possible.

AI is not deterministic. AI is not code written by someone. AI is a plinko machine 1 million feet high by 1 million feet long that folds over itself 1 million times and eventually spits the balls out somewhere. It is doing math that cannot be solved by a million people in a million days, and is the domain of GPU chips alone. It is fundamentally unknowable on the granular level.

Humans train the model by giving it known inputs with known desirable outputs and tweaking parameter weights as to reward the machines whose plinko peg configuration most leans toward the desired output. And then they iterate on generations and generations of that plinko machine until they get one that was trained to be tailored to that known data, and also yields good outputs when testing it on a new set of data.

And the human trainers may be trying to configure the rows and columns of the plinko pegs as mapping to qualifiable concepts, but by and large the pegs don't map to anything material. By and large the process becomes math weights. And even if you gave someone 1 million years to memorize every peg in the machine, the individual pegs don't mean something like the pieces of a written program mean something.

If you're using a product I worked on and the user icon rendering fails, there will be a definitive step of the program's process which is going wrong, and which I can pinpoint and fix. It is entirely possible for me to understand this whole program and know exactly why it does or does not do things. And as such, a human is capable of having complete knowledge and complete certainty about what this program is doing.

If you're using an AI product at work and it keeps making up a guy named 'Bob', well the 1-million-high by 1-million-wide plinko machine that folds itself over 1 million times spit its balls out in such a way that talks about Bob. Indirectly, the training this model went through accidentally rewarded false information in the trained pursuit of providing information. Data scientists can try to train a new model that more strongly punishes false information. They might struggle if this ends up degrading other behaviors. Absolutely no one is physically capable of understanding the exact inner details of the 1-million by 1-million plinko machine.

SHAPE HELL

Yes, well, old video shows him being held to the ground, beaten, and shot nine times. If his crime was agitation of federal agents, he could have gone to court but instead he got extrajudicial public execution.

140 MILLION YEARS BACK.

If you don't know how far that is, that's basically the start of the cretaceous. Let me simplify that for you even further. Chimpanzees and humans seperated, what, 5 or 6 million years ago?

This is basically like if humans could hybridise with THESE THINGS.

This is the sort of thing that should be impossible. They used those eggs to be ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN.

And then THEY GOT FISH OUT OF IT.

Like. You can quite clearly understand why they didn't think anything would happen. WE ARE MORE RELATED TO BLUE WHALES THAN THESE THINGS.

THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH AND THE STURGEON ARE SO COMPLETELY UNRELATED THAT THIS IS NOT PLAYING GOD. IF ANYTHING THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD.

THE SCIENTISTS HAD NO BLAME IN THIS BECAUSE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE

THESE THINGS, FOR HYBRIDS, HAD A REALLY HIGH SURVIVAL RATING. LIKE 70% OF THEM SURVIVED.

To put that into perspective, getting a blue whale and a squirrel and trying to hybridise them is more sensible, and that wouldn't produce anything but getting you banned from science. Most animals that aren't plants can barely hybridise two degrees away from each other.

BUT THESE TWO ENTIRELY UNRELATED FISH create PERFECTLY HEALTHY HYBRIDS.

And this is a Russian Sturgeon:

(glances at fish)

before the sturddlefish, a purple squale would have seemed more likely- and since that's ridiculous and obviously no one would think that's possible except as a joke, that should speak to HOW impossible this situation seemed, and why they thought obviously this will be perfectly fine. If you took squirrel eggs (the gamete) and tried to use whale sperm to fertilize them, you could reasonably expect that to not work. That should be a good control. The eggs would definitely not actually be fertilized, and even if sperm somehow made it into the egg and some kind of development started, you would expect them to not make it to term and definitely not make a whole ass new animal that's perfectly fine actually.