stochastic ideas

I’m watching Micky D’s videos playing Fallout 1 and 2 with low intelligence and you know I’ve seen people praise the low intelligence dialogue in these games as being funny but frankly it just comes across as mean? The low intelligence player character just comes across as someone with issues speaking like they have brain damage or a form of autism that makes them semi nonverbal and everyone’s just mean to them and doesn’t give them any quests.

The low intelligence character can also have full conversations with other people that have similar speech issues and frankly I think that’s a result of them being willing to take the time to understand each other rather than them both being stupid.

There's two levels of "it was a different time" at work here. First is the obvious, it used to be socially acceptable to make inferences about people's intelligence and treat them differently based on little more than their speech patterns. I'm not trying to defend it - it did often lead to people with language issues being treated as "less than," and people that spoke English as a second language were often perceived as "dumb" over communication issues (interestingly, the etymology for the word "dumb" codifies this perception - being a term both for "intellectually impaired" as well as "mute/unable to communicate"). In pop culture, it was considered a source of comedy to have characters that didn't talk "right," whether that's Daffy Duck's lisp or the ubiquitous Forrest Gump impressions in the 90s (everybody used to say "bahcks uh chaw-klits" like they were a comedic genius). This sort of culminates with a joke in Tropic Thunder (2008), where a dramatic actor notes that if you lean fully into a speech impediment for a character, even in a dramatic role, the audience will inevitably see it as comedic. So some of the comedy is just "they sound like they have speech problems," and thankfully as a culture we've (largely) moved on from that being an adequate punchline.

If there's any proof we need that our reality is made of math, it's that graph function singularities exist as physical features of our world. Undefined algebraic points exist, we can see them, they float around space touching things and fucking them up beyond all recognition, and they look like marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured spacetime.

A billion and a half years ago, 2 black holes in a suicide pact of a too-tight orbit finally collided and merged into an even larger black hole.

Forever fighting other leftists tooth and fucking nail to get them to wear masks. Even a cloth or surgical mask is better than nothing.

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.