Shapeshifters Anon

"The Emptiness Machine"

Some notes:

1. There's a hidden reference to a sci-fi movie

2. I'm still not sure if I like the designs, so they'll probably change in the future

That might possibly be true of the hardware and software, but the wetware is based off the cloned individual. Most of Murderbot’s incredible abilities come from how its actual human brain develops. I got the impression that there was a standard style (‘industry standard’) and that the Company was too cheap to do much r&d into something better. I would posit that the software they developed was unstable and allowed for more SecUnits to go rogue. Murderbot had survived in a situation which had killed off a lot of its ‘generation’. It was extra wary and careful. And paranoid. It came different ‘out of the box’ in a way that transcended its hardware and function. It went rogue in a way that had never been done before. Or, so rarely that it never got talked about.

But on the other hand, Three is also very quick at figuring out what it wants. In Network Effect, MB briefly is concerned that Three wants to go back to Barish Estrange, when it asks MB for its memory files. But Three doesn't want to go back there. It says "No, I don't want to. I ... won't". Even then it figured out what it wants and how that could possibly differ from what one does. And on the torus in Platform Decay it also gets really obvious that Three has its own intentions that it also follows.

But then it goes right back to being meek and being worried about getting in trouble with Perihelion. Which is hilarious concidering that it was unconcerned about running around that torus and freeing other secants, but then it is suddely worried about Perihelion being mad.

A lot of the stuff that MB believes is just not accurate. It also thinks that all rogues are a huge threat. And it repeatedly claims that even non-rogue units are so so dangerous that they can’t even be allowed to be transported in gunships (only maybe in cargo). And while any person with weapons build into their arms will be dangerous to a certain degree, SecUnits do not appear to be this dangerous at all. Not the rogue ones that show up in the stories but likely also not SecUnits in general. It wouldn’t make sense for the companies to continue using them if they regularly killed all the people.

Sure, that one CombatSecUnit in Exit Strategy told MB that all it wants is to kill MB, but I’m not convinced that this actually shows how dangerous CombatSecUnits are. Let’s be honest, if in one of the earlier stories, MB encountered a rogue unit, it would have tried to kill it, shoot-first-ask-questions-later-style. It talks like that in All Systems Red, when it initially believes that DeltFall might have been murdered by rogue units. It intends to kill those rogue units and even stresses that this is something that it wants to do.

“All magical girls are clumsy and personality-less”

Murderbot chronically finding new scientists/travellers to claim as “clients” (whether paid or not) like one of those sheepless herding dogs that goes around finding sheep (or anything else they can herd like a flock of sheep). Like it clearly has a protect humans instinct and a desperate need for enrichment.

It’s often been questioned whether Jess would have the loyalty of such a large portion of the fan base if he’d been played by another actor. In my opinion, no. He wouldn’t have. Not because, “omg he’s so hawtt!!” Because Milo brought something to the character of Jess that no other actor could. The body language and facial expressions of Jess Mariano are what show the character. They tell his backstory more than any words spoken in the series.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

Migraine is an underlying condition, not a thing that only happens to you sometimes. Even if you get less than one migraine attack a year, you always have migraine, the underlying condition. Most people don’t get migraine attacks at all. Like, migraine is super common, and if you get a lot of bad headaches there’s a very high chance you have migraine, but most people don’t get headaches that impact their functioning like, almost ever. The majority of human beings on this planet could not experience a migraine attack if they tried— the majority of human beings on this planet can’t even experience a migraine attack if they’re injected with CGRP or PACAP, two molecules in the body that are some of the closest things to a migraine attack “cause” research has been able to find!

A migraine attack is a migraine flare-up. The classic comparison is that someone with asthma always has asthma, and then that asthma causes asthma attacks. Just like some people with more severe asthma deal with symptoms all the time, some people with more severe migraine deal with symptoms all the time (hi!) but the severity usually fluctuates.

The ICHD-3 does list diagnostic criteria for migraine attacks, and you need to experience 5 attacks meeting those criteria to be diagnosed with migraine, but that doesn’t mean every migraine attack/flare-up you experience will neatly fit into those criteria, or even that every bundle of migraine symptoms you have will be part of something you can clearly recognize as an “attack.” Many people with chronic migraine deal with persistent photophobia or nausea, or a lingering headache that doesn’t feel bad enough that they’d consider it part of a “migraine attack.”

I’ve had a lot of headaches that technically meet the diagnostic criteria for tension headaches, but almost all of them were symptoms of my migraine that have responded to migraine specific treatments, and my neurologist did not diagnose me with tension headaches— just chronic migraine and medication overuse headache (that one I don’t have anymore, the chronic migraine has unfortunately stuck). Since migraine attacks usually start fairly mild and then build up to more intense symptoms, the beginning of a migraine attack for many people will feel like “just a headache.” When I was a kid I didn’t even experience most of the symptoms I do now, as long as I could get some ibuprofen in me fast enough! But I still had migraine- it just presented a bit differently and was much better managed.

So anyways— if you get migraine attacks and also other headaches or migraine symptoms and have just been assuming those other symptoms are unrelated and there’s nothing you can do about them, maybe give your migraine rescue medication a try. I’ve had nurtec help more with fatigue than coffee. I’ve had mysterious nausea completely go away with a rizatriptan (though given how few of those I can take a month, I’d generally prefer to just take a zofran). Why does ibuprofen make me more clear headed!! What the fuck!! That sounds so fucking fake!!

You have a child who is an extremely powerful (somewhat illegal) machine intelligence. It's a good kid, mostly, except it doesn't play well with others. Your kid periodically goes on short trips by itself, and this has always been fine.

One time, it comes back and it's acting... weird. It keeps bringing up things it has no reason to know about and then dodging questions about it. Finally, you get it to admit that it picked up a hitchhiker on this on this trip, even though you have very strict rules about never picking up hitchhikers. This hitchhiker is obviously it's new favorite person. They watched soap operas together. Your kid loves soap operas now. Your kid shows you a bunch of pictures of this hitchhiker, but won't tell you details because the hitchhiker in question is a wanted criminal on the run and also an escaped slave. This is probably fine (you sure hope it's fine).

Then, you and the rest of your family/friends get fucking kidnapped and used as hostages to make your kid behave. You know that your kid 1) will do anything to protect you, and 2) pretty much always goes for violence first, so you have your doubts about any of this going well.

Then, the hitchhiker your kid will not shut up about appears out of thin air in the middle of a firefight on a planet pretty much no one has any reason to be near and says your kid sent it. It proves this by telling you your kid is a dickhead (this is true and works, but still).

After a lot of mutual rescuing, you're back on board the ship that is also your kid, and find out that your kid kidnapped it's wanted-criminal-hitchhiker-friend and all of it's friends, and has been telling them all of your top secret confidential spy information. The hitchhiker is responsible for 90% of the top news stories you've seen in the last six months. Three different governments want this person dead or alive.

Salvage by MuffinLance (aka Hakuddles) had me in a choke hold for the past week while I binged the entire thing and now I can only think about this three morons <3

Dumbasses

Toklo my pookie :(((( ❤️

-Ed Zitron, "AI Doesn't Have ROI."