detectivesoup

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everybody’s always on writing prompts like “what if there was a world where everyone had a timer ticking down to their death… but you met someone whose timer said infinity!” or “what if everyone had their cause of death tattooed across their forehead… but you met someone whose forehead said THE CREATURE!” Enough -

enough. stop with the shock value. there is no need to insert THE CREATURE; the benign concept of such a world is horrifying enough. not even in urgency, but just in banal, everyday interaction. imagine you meet someone and their timer says two years. not tomorrow, not urgently soon, but two years. enough to do quite a lot. they could fall in love in that time - could they get engaged? have a baby? you might otherwise get to know them, befriend them, but perhaps you opt not to, make a conscious choice not to invest in your own grief. what balancing act would every individual person have to participate in - I have ten years, is that long enough to be a good mother to children? is that long enough to secure a caretaker for my own mother? my wife will die a few months before me. my newborn’s timer reads nineteen years.

and cause of death. you interview for a job and emblazoned across the healthy, smiling face of the HR lady is MALNUTRITION. your country is prospering, safe, but every person you meet on the street from the babies to the old women read BOMB. BOMB. what kind of havoc would fate wreak on the world? what about the loss of privacy? how would that shape our notions of hope? idk man I think a lot of those ancient poems were right, and the fates are monsters. I’m interested by the framing of these ideas as trite horror tales when the premises themselves are so much more disturbing if simply taken to their logical ends

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vampire rio to water your crops 🩸

unglazed uhd version | available in print

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ihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyorkihatenewyork

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@zipquips

Summer vibes.

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irish coworker: *is back from a month in italy*

me: the weather must have been great, you're looking so tanned!

irish coworker: *stares down at his arms, which are a shade of eggshell white i associate with tasteful wedding table settings* i suppose i am!

welsh coworker: *enters room* wow, youre looking so tanned!

ghanaian coworker: *looks around like hes on the truman show*

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One day I woke up and everybody knew what a labubu was

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ive been tryin to slowly train myself out of my various bug phobias via exposure and i earnestly reccomend tryin it. like yeah okay i'm still screaming and crying and shitting when im coaxing a spider into a cup but the fact i can do that much without hurting them is a 100% improvement for everyone involved. its not their fault they ended up in my bathtub y'know. they're just a little guy.

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I do feel like what should have happened is that AI would spark conversations about water use and power use in the general tech/internet sphere, and how so much of the labor needed to keep it running is exploitative of people in the Global South. However, it feels like what has happened instead is a bunch of people have convinced themselves the problem isn't the industry or anything, but actually it's because AI has evil magic powers that make it the only problem. Once we defeat AI, everything will be okay again :)

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Trying out screenprinting

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Deradicalization isn't just for people who got into MAGA BS.

It's for your leftist buddy who got in with a leftist group that promotes eugenics.

It's for your feminist friend who was lured into radical feminism with "divine feminine" rhetoric.

It's for you when you fall into something that you thought you were too smart for, because it never crossed your mind that fascism could be repackaged in a way that would appeal to you.

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im sending you telepathic messages btw are you not getting them are you ignoring me hello pick up

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It's not like I like you or anything! P-Pendejo!

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ok turns out my period was abt to begin. many such cases.

dear god WHAT is my problem

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Something that’s never properly laid out in seasons 4-5 of POI - and, as a consequence, limits the nuance of the debate - is the difference between an open ASI and an interventionist one.

In essence, an open system is one with its workings exposed, as opposed to the “black box” closed system. This is demonstrated through the journey of TM throughout the series; in the beginning she can only spit out SSNs and analyses everything according to the relevant/irrelevant protocols, being a closed system. Later on she becomes an open system, both feeding the team non-SSN info and (eventually) becoming directable towards specific tasks as in Reassortment and other season 5 episodes.

An interventionist system - as opposed to an isolationist one - is capable of taking action itself; this is a critical difference between TM and SAM. With the possible exception of acting through Root, the vast majority of the time TM is isolationist system. She doesn’t act on the world to achieve her goals, instead feeding info to human agents and letting them make the decision about what to do (it just so happens that her human agents tend to act in ways in line with her goals). SAM is interventionist, directly altering digital systems like the stock market as well as giving unquestionable orders to its human agents. It’s worth noting that for a system to be interventionist, it must be open; the key thing about SAM is that it’s self-directed intervention.

Using this framework, and taking it as read that in S5 the show often conflates “open” with “interventionist”, it’s much easier to see why Harold is terrified of TM being an open system and also why Root disagrees. Take, for example, the clash between them in Reassortment over whether TM should be an open system; Harold is nervous about TM being an interventionist open system, while Root demonstrates the usefulness of the isolationist open system (though she trusts Her enough that I doubt she’d have a problem of an interventionist system either tbh). They’re talking at cross-purposes the entire time.

The show itself is, imo, pretty clear about its stance in the end: open system good because it allows us to leverage the godlike computing power of TM to help people, interventionist system bad because ultimately people still need free will. Like I’m not gonna go into this here ‘cause I feel it’s pretty tied up in the show’s major themes, but I will say that it would be an asston clearer if they’d made this distinction.

Anyway I’ve spent approx 60% of this meta on definitions lmao but tl;dr open system != system capable of influencing the world, and that mixup muddies the show’s discussions of ASI ethics.

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soooooo tired of the celine bashing in kpdh fandom. say you have a black and white mentality without saying it. sometimes... parents fuck up immensely and it still doesn't mean they're bad people or that they don't love their kid. they awere human beings also and it's very clear that celine *thought* she was doing what was best for her. celine was very wrong, and yet it is worth mentioning that "our faults and fears must never be seen" is repeated far too much like a mantra for it to have originated with her, and that people are complicated and healing generational trauma doesn't necessarily mean just fucking. cutting ties with your entire family.