#elite combination imo

[pressurewhatpressure]

i absolutely love being a football and f1 fan, just hits different

[mx-anthropy]

Mass Effect 2 feels like a real drop in quality in several ways over ME1. I'd only played 1 and Andromeda until last week, and almost every system in ME2 feels extremely B grade, like one of those XB360 games one might buy from a second-hand shop that has like a 4 hour campaign and slides from your memory afterwards.

The story is alright, although the fact that you're essentially forced to work with Cerberus after dealing with all of their evil shit in the first game feels like a really strange choice, especially if you played a Paragon in the first game. Most of the Paragon choices in ME2 feel pretty mid compared to the first game, and in general I feel like this one really just wants me to be a renegade and Paragon was just an afterthought.

Also the combat just straight sucks. It's not like ME1's combat was stellar, but at least there was a broader range of skills you could use and your companions could use. I also guess people complained about constantly scrolling through the equipment menu to equip better weapons and upgrade for Shepard and the squadmates in ME1, but IMO they went way too far in the other direction, because the weapon choices and upgrades in ME2 kinda suck. The weapons are basically unchangeable bar the different ammo type abilities. I liked being able to min max my assault rifle into a short burst high damage weapon that overheated really quickly, or an absolute bullet hose that could spray down enemies for ages.

I think they slimmed down the ability list for all the companions (and Shepard) so that players would actually use different combinations of companions more often (instead of just Liara/Tali/Ashley which is what I think a lot of ME1 players might have done, since just specialising in one of the 3 skill tree types and taking whatever combination of companions covered the other 2 meant you had every skill at a very high level), but now all the character abilities are so limited that combat just becomes very repetitive in every situation. Standard cover shooter style popping headshots on every grunt and then using like 2 abilities to completely stomp down the elite enemies every now and then. Barrier + Mattock AR + special ammo completely wipes 99% of enemies. Although I guess the same could be said of the later game ARs with HE ammo and frictionless materials in the first game.

[trohpi]

rating regulus black ships!!

jegulus | 11/10 - i love them so much. when i rejoined the fandom in 2022 and saw how the ship had blown up in the years id been gone i was really confused, but then i read just lovers and was immediately convinced lmao. they are the epitome of sunshine x grumpy and i adore them both

bartylus | 5/10 - theyre not very compelling to me, but theyre not bad by any means. i think they work better as friends but i understand why people ship them. i just prefer other ships personally, but ive read many great fics with them too!

jegulily | 20/10 - im obsessed with them. i love regulus, james, and lily separately, but together they balance each other out. plus it helps that its a combination of my two most favorite monoamorous ships (jegulus and regulily), like whats not to like? theyre definitely a top tier ship

moonwater | 10/10 - they are so cute and so overhated! theres so much potential here, like they could be friends to lovers or enemies to lovers or rivals to lovers, basically any trope you can think of lol. and think of the angst! the drama! i love them dearly

regulily | 1000/10 - yall already know how i feel about these two! they are literal soulmates and i love them to bits. their personalities mesh so well and, this might be a controversial take, but they make more canonical sense than jegulus does imo (not that canon really matters in this fandom lmao). i could wax literal poetry about this ship i love them so much

rosewater | 6/10 - i have other ships i prefer for both of them but theyre still cute and i can see why people ship them. honestly its a similar situation to bartylus, except they intrigue me just the slightest bit more lol

regumary | 4/10 - im sorry i just cant see this ship. i can see their relationship being platonic but not romantic. i also think mary is a lesbian, which doesnt really mean much considering i also love the trans girl regulus headcanon, but most of the time when i see this ship its very cishet and just not my thing. sorry yall!

regdora | 2/10 - i just cant see this ship either. its not bad necessarily, i just see the relationship between regulus and pandora as that of a sibling relationship. no hate to people who ship them, its just not for me lol

rosestarkillerchaser | 6/10 - i understand why people ship them, its combining three popular ships (jegulus, bartylus, and rosekiller), but im sorry i just cannot see james dating barty and evan. im not hating on people who ship them and its not bad by any means (i like them more than most other ships involving evan & barty) i just dont actively ship them. ive read some good fics tho!

rosestarkiller | 5/10 - similar situation to bartylus yet again, its just not compelling to me. i think regulus works better with evan & barty as his friends rather than lovers which you can probably tell given my other ratings lol

blackeclipse | 10/10 - ooooo i love them. all the best aspects of jegulus, moonchaser, and moonwater in one, its elite. james brings the buoyancy that regulus & remus need while regulus & remus help keep him tethered. they work so well together and i love them all dearly

xenoreg | 8/10 - a crackship ive come to enjoy recently! definitely a weird x weirder kind of ship which is the best. oh to be a fly on the wall of the slytherin common room when regulus told barty, evan, and dorcas that he was dating xenophilius lestrange, ravenclaws resident conspiracy theorist (pandora, of course, would have been overjoyed to have someone to trade ideas with)

regulene | 7/10 - they intrigue me tbh, like marlenes brashness and regulus’ coldness contrast in just the right ways. theyre like fire and water and i love that. plus the potential for a quidditch rivalry is phenomenal, especially considering that they could both be the seekers for their respective teams. theyre kinda similar to dorlene imo

regulilylene | 9/10 - im gonna be honest here i think i made this ship up, but i really like their dynamic. marlene and regulus are on the opposite extremes of hot and cold and lilys right there in the middle to keep them grounded, she evens them out

[transmutationisms]

what do you think of the roys & classism? obviously they are all classist but i think how it manifests is pretty interesting - shiv marries far below her station and seems ever-conscious of it, connor is defensive of willa and in an odd way seems to actually believe that sex workers deserve respect but still relegates willa to a prop in his life, logan is incredibly frustrated with his children & their inability to “act right” & married into nobility precisely to give them a pedigree, which is seemingly rendered useless by their mother’s second marriage (she’s known for marrying people who buy their own furniture!) - and i guess the biggest thing is that logan is right. his children do not know how to act right. none of them are cultured, all of them are power hungry and rude but not in the way rich people are supposed to be rude, everything about them screams new money. logan can’t stand it despite how he resents the pierces for their elitism and the kids don’t seem to aspire to any kind of decorum (they do relentlessly mock the social climbers for misbehaviour). i guess this all makes them come off as kind of pathetic. they can’t compete with more refined attitudes (the pierces), they lack european flair (mom’s wedding!), and they still get defeated by money so new you can smell the ink on it because they’re the children of a barbarian king that haven’t learned how to manage wealth the way like, actual nobility would (thus defeated by mattson and his nasdaq master race of vikings). i guess what i’m asking is how the roy’s position of new money is portrayed(?) in the story / how this affects them / what you think!

also do you hate tom? i hate tom.

ok, i think there are a couple different (overlapping) phenomena you're identifying here. one is the old money vs new money thing, which is more a matter of cultural capital than economic class. logan is absolutely insecure about this, eg he's still mad pierce ran that story calling him lowbrow, and he's clearly so embarrassed of his kids in 'tern haven' in particular, when they're contrasted to the old-money pierces. there's also the décor in his apartment, which is the closest the roys ever get to that old-money aesthetic; none of the kids know how to speak that aesthetic language, and obviously it's doubtful logan did any of his own decorating lol.

then there's the general sort of 'man out of time' quality that waystar and the roys have. some of this emanates top-down from logan's own insanity. like, his ideals of masculinity are this hodge-podge of american bourgeois productivity (modern), catholic dualism and body disgust (medieval), and the military (aesthetically a combination of ancient, modern, and early modern). imo this type of anachronism is what's going on with connor and willa—like, if connor lived in paris in 1730 he could just be a financier and have a kept woman, and there would be an established social script for that. but instead he's stuck in 2020 which means he has to use the wrong social form lol. also he like, doesn't think about willa's needs as separate from his own desires obviously, but imo that's more about his view of women and the family than sex work.

the third thing is their like, biological degeneration fears, which again are part of logan's worldview. he's basically a 'social darwinist' (spencerian i would say), which plays into how he wanted to find a 'good bloodline' for his younger three kids and how he worries about his sons being weak and soft and gay and not producing suitable heirs. obviously this is also related to the 'nasdaq master race' situation: it's this fear of like, nordic social and biological improvement, contrasted to a declining american empire. logan's specific degeneration fears about his kids are, i would say, deeply related to his belief that raising them with money made them soft and weak. basically a version of the degenerate idle bourgeois. so, the relationship to class here is complicated.

and then finally there is the actual classism. some of this is more or less what we would expect from billionaires (like roman and tom fucking with that kid in the pilot, or the ways the roys ignore or sometimes lash out at their domestic help / assistants). but there are some specific ways it plays out, like shiv thinking poor people are dirty (the 19th century social hygienist jumped out) and connor having, like, almost a fetishistic envy of (his rosy view of) true american working-class masculinity, hence his ranch situation or how he talks about the bar on his wedding eve. like, connor sees poor people as having more access to various kinds of experiential authenticity that he can't have, even though he's also the roy most capable of actually enjoying the material benefits of wealth.

i think this all adds up to a really potent stew of like, yeah the roys are wealthy and powerful and materially protected but they're also sad and lonely and pathetic lmao. like, they have varying levels of modernity anxiety despite being modern bourgeois, they're running a corporate empire that postures as a noble dynasty, they're wealthy but never fully accepted into the cultural élite. it's all hollow and soulless and unsatisfying, hence the glass-and-steel aesthetic of the waystar building and their horrible boring clothes. this is all part of how the show explores bourgeois alienation without falling into the trap of either softening the roys' repugnant qualities, or portraying their wealth as aspirational.

also in re: yr addendum no wkjdkwj i don't hate tom. i don't hate any succession character, except comfrey on the grounds of being totally superfluous and poorly written.

[tedturneriscrazy]

I have now completed Sea of Stars, including collecting all the Rainbow Conches and unlocking the true ending. Here are some assorted thoughts about it (spoiler warning for those who haven't finished it):

I like how the game encourages you to use everything at your disposal, which includes skills and healing items. The MP recovery with basic attacks combined with live mana is a good stopgap for when you're tapped out, and allows you to develop a sort of rhythm to combat. Recovery items are also relatively easy to get between the recipes and abundant ingredients, including the best ones in the game.

The Lock system offers a great deal of complexity and strategy to combat, and encourages you to use pretty much all skills and party members to the fullest

The combo system is great and offers a wide variety of techniques and abilities that helps keep the combat fresh and exciting. The fact that it clearly harkens back to Chrono Trigger doesn't hurt, either. (Just an FYI, I will likely be making a lot of comparisons to CT, because a) it's inevitable given it's a direct inspiration and even brought on Yasunori Mitsuda to compose a few tracks, and b) it's my favorite game, so yeah)

That said, I feel like each of the party members could have had two additional base skills to vary the combat a bit more outside of the combo system. Speaking of which, I kinda wish there were 3-way combos, as well. Just imagine what they could have pulled off with those...

On another critical note, there's a curious lack of status effects, which I felt might have added some nice flavor. I feel like this was mostly replaced by the Lock system, and odds are incorporating status effects might break the flow of the game. That said, I wouldn't mind seeing stuff like poison or sleep or whatever. This might just be a personal taste thing, as I'm sure plenty of people are glad that this was omitted.

The folks at Sabotage managed two incredible character feats imo: They managed to create a character who is widely beloved both in- and out-of-universe without going overboard (Garl), and they were able to have a character who is literally a cyborg ninja pirate without it being silly or cringeworthy, and in fact is one of the more serious and narratively dense characters in the game (Seraï)

In fact, I would say most of the characters are quite memorable and likeable, and it's easy to become attached and invested in their arcs. The main exceptions are, unfortunately, Valere and Zale, who I think suffer a bit from generic main character syndrome and being tied to a Chosen One narrative. Also, B'st comes in a tad late into the game for him to have much impact, and his whole trait of having a strong will kinda falls flat when not much time is given to his backstory or development. That said, these are relatively minor gripes on my part, and I definitely don't dislike any of them.

The soundtrack is fantastic, naturally. Standout tracks for me include Encounter Elite (boss battle) and Mountain Trail, though plenty of other tracks are also great.

I was able to recognize the Chrono Trigger-inspired narrative elements (time manipulation, post-apocalyptic future world, going back to a moment in time to swap out a major character to save them from death), and it made me happy to encounter these.

The art direction and character design are immaculate. To put it in as few words as possible, everything is appropriately appealing and appalling as is called for.

Overall, I enjoyed this game immensely, and it kept me occupied for a good long while. I would highly recommend picking it up for your platform of choice. If I were to give it a numerical score, I'd say 9/10.

[a-tale-of-legends]

Not sure this is a hot take but I think Karen and Piers are the more unique dark type users in the games. I don't mean this as in they're my favorite, or that they have the best teams or whatever. But rather in how annoying their teams could be.

Almost all of Karen's team is to wear the player down. Her umbreon is annoying with double team, her vileplume and Gengar can paralyze the opponents pokemon, I have actually used murkrow enough to know that it can be *very* annoying ( sadly it doesn't have prankster or tailwind, but sucker punch has caused me so much grief and super luck is pretty solid). And when the opponent gets through all of that, they have a Houndoom to face, which can just set up and sweep. I didn't even take into account how Karen is the last elite 4 member you gotta face, meaning by then ( if you're not prepared) your team will be bruised.

Her rematch team is just as annoying imo. The addition of Spiritomb, who is naturally bulky and can confuse the opponent and can heal itself and has sucker punch. Honchkrow has thunder wave, and Umbreon is another bulky pokemon that can just stall the player out if needed.

Honestly, looking at Piers' team now, he really is a traditionalist when it comes to battling. I would argue he's the most likely Karen in terms of battle style, and given the fact that he doesn't use any gimmicks adds to that( maybe he's a fan)

To start things off, his Scrafty. I should let y'all know that I love Scrafty, it's a really good pokemon and is a pretty good lead. It's fairly bulky, and during the gym challenge it has intimidate, meaning it can take a hit better( thanks to the cut attack). Fake out prevents the player from moving the first turns, and sand attack( if spammed) will give someone a headache. Malamar has contrary which is the best ability, though I do wish it had a move that actually took advantage of it, like superpower. But the combination of night slash and psycho cut means the chances of constant crits, and crits are annoying as hell, so I can forgive it. Skuntank is really good for it's typing, so it can easily resist the stuff that Piers' other pokemon are weak too. Screech lowers the users defense by 2 stages,making the target easier to hit with sucker punches. And toxic stalling is fun. This in combination with his toxtricity means that venom drench would lower even more of the users stats, making things even harder for the opponent. And finally, Obstagoon. Another physically bulky pokemon that has yet another move that can lower the opponents pokemon stats( obstruct ). Counter, if used correctly, can actually end a pokemons life. I should know. I have been a victim of it. Many times.

Now, again, I'm not saying that these two are the best of the dark type users, but I kinda noticed how these two actually but more effort into being annoying with their moveset and such. The other dark type trainers are hard, but they focus more on the offensive that defensive imo. Not a bad thing, of course! Just something I noticed.

Tldr( I'm just realizing I've been spelling that wrong LMAO). Karen and Piers made their teams to be annoying as hell and I love them for that.

[creature-wizard]

Scarlet and Teal share quite a few important similarities.

Teal has the entire base of what she is teaching people formed upon personal views and ways she used to cope with her psychological pains in her youth. In her book the completion process, she alludes to the fact that the abuse she endured was: 1. Something meant to happen/ chosen by her before incarnation to serve as a " trigger " in her awakening, and 2. It had to happen as well because she is a non human soul ( I think she identifies as an andromedan starseed) and she came on earth with extrasensorial powers and the elites, bad people and every lower vibrational human being on earth is after you if you are this kind of special. This is a burden to be encountered only by these special souls, so if you're abused then it's because you're so so special. ( do I need to say why this is not OK to believe? ) This is the exact same thing scarlet does as well, but in her book you're an angel or demon.

I'm not trying to say here that if someone says they endured some sort of abuse, be it physical, spiritual, psychological or a combination of these should not ever be trusted or taken seriously. The issue arise when someone is not finding a way to properly heal and goes on to preach about the methods they used to help themselves out a bit, which are highly personal and can actually be damaging to other people. Not everyone feels the same and both teal ans scarlet use their very personal experience as if its some sort of divine elixir.

Teal has a very weird way of telling people to get rid of s*icidal thoughts, by envisioning themselves in a world where they already did it. This is supposed to make you realise you actually matter and want to live. Speaking from experience, this is the worst idea you can have. This will push people to actually do it.

Scarlet on the other hand uses fear mongering and tells people they'll be punished if they do it, because they ended their life mission and this is some sort of transgression. They'll either have their soul shattered , many burdens in their next life , or become monster like spirits who remain on earth to torture others. The last thing someone who is fighting with pain in their life is to tell them that they'll endure more pain or that wanting to get rid of that pain is going to transform them into monsters.

Both have actually not properly dealt with their trauma( imo) and instead found some solace and comfort in spirituality(something I've seen many people do when faced with pain and difficulties), which now heavily shaped what they preach. I read teal s book a few years ago and I'm pretty sure she didn't mention going to therapy, but rather speaking to a glass of water and then drinking that " intention infused water " which somewhat healed her from inside out. And scarlet went on to identify as lilith and change her entire persona, because the reason of her suffering was that she was actually not knowing who she truly is.

I did struggle a lot with mental health and I can understand why you'd fall for this type of" help " , but it's not gonna do anything good for you - sincerely one of the anons who was part of scarlet s cult.

Yup, Teal Swan basically built her cult on starseed stuff, whereas Scarletarosa built hers on Lilith stuff. There's differences in what they believe, but at the end of the day they're both pushing incredibly harmful beliefs and practices with a similar "you suffered because you're special" angle.

[fancyshooting]

hi anons I'm going to combine you

"plain name... but I won't forget it" stfu your name is adam normalson!!

we don't know much at all about the children raised by the philosophers in that era other than what eva says - "back then they were collecting children from all over the world" - and how she was raised in a joint us-soviet-chinese facility. she's almost a whole decade older than ocelot, so her upbringing was probably quite different, especially as she lacked the status ocelot had by virtue of being the son of the boss. it's interesting though that she says these children were "collected" and not orphans who were "rescued" or even something neutral like "taken in". in the radio call about ocelot's parents, eva says there were a lot of MIAs during the war but we know that's not true in ocelot's case. he wasn't really an orphan and if her radio bio is anything to go by, neither was eva (everything else in there is true so why would the family section be a lie? none of that information is given as part of her manipulation of snake. it's not relevant to the story at all, so why even include it? both her parents are apparently still alive at the time of operation snake eater. she sounds sympathetic to ocelot in this call too, which is a rare thing)

if the goal of a philosopher upbringing is to produce cold, single-minded spies, would any of these "orphans" be allowed to retain their legal surname? would the children of the elites in command/support of the philosophers be expected to renounce their identities for the sake of service? if not, and they were mixed, there was probably a divide between children with full names and children without. is that part of why ocelot is so averse to the snobbery surrounding formal titles...? i.e. a name doesn't magically grant you good character or make you automatically deserving of respect. idk it sounds like a similar line of thought

young ocelot's deliberate estrangement from his parents points to him being legally known by a name meaning much the same as "john doe" or maybe even something like "tretij rebenok". something impersonal or on the more extreme end, dehumanising. boy a, boy b, child #352 - that kind of thing maybe? it's so hard imo to talk about ocelot and names because he was almost definitely raised in some sort of cold horrible facility, nameless and pliable. he was never supposed to know who his parents were. he was never supposed to identify with anything. personal identity is just a distraction from his purpose. a legal name doesn't really matter anyway when the philosophers have the power to manipulate information on a global scale. political position, military rank, social status: irrelevant. everyone's personal records can be altered if the philosophers so desire

I think if he has a legal surname it's going to be something russian but it won't be the same as the sorrow's. all that information was probably highly classified and ocelot would have had no access to it for a long time, if ever (the most likely time is after the formation of the patriots. zero probably told him). ocelot was quite literally born a bastard anyway so if no abduction took place then he would've probably inherited the boss' surname. the casting sheet that was leaked before mgs3 was released said that the boss was british-american so her surname is probably like... smith or something. omg I just looked up the most common british surnames and one of them is adams. what if his first name is her surname and that's why his name (adamska) is a surname (polish, female). what if that made any sense. wait actually a while ago someone on here suggested that the reason ocelot's name is adamska could be something of a mean-spirited joke by his american abductors who resent his russian father and traitor mother. like they just stuck -ska on the end to make it sound russian. mocking him :( could explain why he later drops the -ska but keeps adam...? he's adams' son?

as for his legal surname, it wouldn't be a problem for it to be an american name. his defection is a known event, a public event that was televised locally in moscow according to mgs4's dodgy database (why would you put your super secret spy's face onscreen when he's supposed to be undercover...? "hi can you tell me military secrets I'm adam btw I was on tv :3")

him having an american name would only be a problem in that it would likely hinder his naturalisation or whatever. it would be conspicuous. I think the philosophers raised him with the intention of eventually shipping him off to the ussr so if he was raised with a surname, it's probably russian. someone on here (possibly the same person as above ^^^ sorry I don't remember) told me that "kotov" is a genuine russian surname derived from one of the russian words for cat (kot!! like on his bike!!). he can have that :)

while we're on the subject of names, ocelot having no patronym (as far as we know) is another little thing that shows how cut off he is from his family and culture. yevgeny borisovich volgin. ivan ivanovich raikov. we need to know the sorrow's first name so he can have some sense of belonging and fitting in and being normal. mr adam sorrovich normalson

in mgsv he says he's "plenty used to working under aliases" and is the one to pass on fake documents to big boss. the only alias we know of ocelot's is "shalashaska" but it's in the shalashaska origin tape that he says this, so he must be referring to other names he's used in secret offscreen spy work... although even "ocelot" is an alias in itself. you can see the detachment he has from his codename when he wants naked snake to know him as "adamska"

I hope that's alright! ty for the asks :D

[terraliensvent]

You seem like a really non-biased and heartfelt person running this blog. I appreciate your honesty with every reply, it’s very commendable.

My time in the terra server has been confusing to say the least. I thoroughly enjoy it, and yet at least once a day something that strikes as off putting will happen. I am not one to vent, nor post on blogs like this, but, with the trial mods out there’s something on my mind that I just can no longer hold within. I am beyond, overly uncomfortable with Xiao being a trial mod.

This make strike weirdly, but I don’t seem them as a face, nor representative of how Terras should be. They are cold, unemotional, biased, and overall picky. They ignore you when they feel like it (and, apologies if I am misgendering, I do not know their pronouns at the time), and only talk to their friends; the staff, or anyone with “good art”.

It sucks? Because, I wanted to be their friend and they ultimately shoved me away. Maybe I am a little petty, but I just do not find their presence as a trial mod welcoming. It honestly makes me feel a little, no, very afraid to talk.

So, I’d like to know your opinion? On Xiao? What should I do? Can I even do anything??

i really appreciate the kind words anon, i try my best to give my genuine viewpoints, as i think a lot of owners of blogs like these can be too disconnected from their topic and it feels out of touch imo

on to the topic at hamd

i dont interact much in the server on a personal level anymore after the whole blowout with architechals, but what i will say is that i am never really too fond of the picks for staff

i wanna use bear and pokii as an example, since during that situation in the callout thread, they were incredibly heinous toward former mod milo (who i actually really liked, they were super down to earth and friendly), and that combined with the behavior exhibited by bear toward ponyzilla, like how can you clearly copy a design you offered on in the past and act like theres no similarity whatsoever

anyways

i dont know much about xiao (besides the fact i have them blocked lol, i guess they annoyed me at some point) but if your character assessment is true to your experience then i think thats pretty on par with how terra staff is in general. cliquey, disconnected, and cold unless youre someone they want to be associated with for clout.

for you specifically anon, id say keep talking how you want to, xiao seems like a person who really isnt the best to be friends with in your case, and if you find yourself being cut off or talked over or pushed aside by them in the public chat, i would politely but sternly point it out. people really love to ignore stuff like that in terras because you arent one of the elite staff members who everyone wants to talk to, but you deserve respect as well.

so in short, maybe stop trying to be friends with xiao and focus more on the friendships youre already cultivating, and dont be afraid to stick up for yourself if you feel yourself being pushed away from public spaces. terras has a lot of mob mentality and often will let things slide in fear of rocking the boat. if you feel yourself being unwelcomed by a member of staff, stand your ground and collect screenshots. if you get brushed aside, it just helps you build more of a case in the event that it becomes too overwhelming to even be in the same spaces as them

[eightyonekilograms]

lady-inkyrius: What even is urbit, all the information I can find about it seems to be written as confusingly as possible

It seems like that because it is like that. Urbit's design and all of its early documentation (more recently they're trying to improve, with IMO mixed results) are made to be as baroque and confusing as possible, as a sort of gatekeeping anti-normie "trial of worthiness".

Now, the tragicomedy of Urbit is that this approach is just utterly ignorant of the central lesson about winners and losers in the computing industry: technology which is free (as in beer) and easy to onboard to always wins over technology that is harder to get going with, even if the former is substantially worse.

There are countless examples of this. DOS was way worse than other consumer operating systems of the 80's, but Microsoft made sure it was cheap and available everywhere, so it won. Linux was worse than the commercial Unixes, but it was free, so it won. The World Wide Web was pretty inferior technologically to HyperCard, but Tim Berners-Lee gave it away for free to any platform, whereas HyperCard was only on the Mac, so it won. MySQL is better these days, but it was a dogshit relational database for years-- it didn't even have joins, ffs-- but it was free, so it won. And I have ranted before that in the era when it was normal to charge money for compilers and language specs, the worst programming languages rose to the top because they were free and the competition was not.

You can see where I'm going with this. Adding onboarding friction in the form of obscuratinist documentation might make you feel like you're part of an elite technopriesthood soaring high above the unwashed masses, but it's a guaranteed way to ensure your irrelevance. Even if Urbit was well-designed-- and it isn't, it sucks ass-- people wouldn't bother.

More recently they've kinda realized this and made some overtures in the direction of a gentler onramp, but while I'm not paying too much attention to these efforts (I only notice them when they occasionally do evangelizing on Hacker News), what I have seen seems pretty schizophrenic, like they're trying to have it both ways. And this still doesn't address the issue that even if the documentation is simpler now, they can't change the deliberately obscuratinist parts of the design-- those are locked in.

Ok, but I haven't answered your question-- what is Urbit?

As far as I can tell, it's a virtual machine on which you can run applications with certain cryptographic guarantees of immutability, combined with some protocol-level assurance of identity (you are who you say you are), living inside a fediverse of other people with the same. The idea is that it would enable a world where each person has their own private server and set of applications-- as you might have with a DO droplet or EC2 VM that you log into to manage your website, except these all talk to each other on a new virtual internet with cryptographic guarantees of... stuff.

Hope that helps.

[smuganya]

just finished cla$$, here are some of my final thoughts 

carla/christian/polo (koel/balli/sahran) were done so fucking dirty, both in the relationship between the characters, and the characters themselves. they’re all awful and the dynamic was awful and it really bummed me out

 along with that, all but one (can you guess which one?) of the dynamics between the characters in general kind of sucked. it didn’t feel like ANY of them even liked each other, as friends, as lovers, anything, except for dhruv and faruq (that was the one, ik ur shocked)

actually veer and dhruv (guzman and ander) did have a couple small moments that i liked, they were okay, but other than a couple private interactions just the two of them, it didn’t seem like they were friends? that was kind of a big issue with all of the dynamics, actually. they’d only interact privately, but none of them ever seemed to be a collective group? it was like they all knew each other from separately, but didn’t like, idk, all go to school and grow up together, it was weird 

idk much about indian culture tbh, so idk if some of the character changes were sort of to align with that, but a lot of them just seemed like they only changed things to make them different from the origin story, but they were changes that were kind of important to the characters’ backstories

(like who decided to make sahran’s parents heterosexual, i just wanna talk) 

& veer not being adopted, coming from where he did, when that’s kind of an important part of guzman’s story/reasoning for his actions/etc. imo 

instead of these characters being like, scared, impulsive kids, a lot of them are just straight up monsters, purposefully hurting people when that’s not what happened in the original story, and i hated that 

lu/sara (because that’s what she was, they fully just combined those two for some reason) was so fucking awful and cringy and i hated every time she was on screen. lucrecia montesinos sweetie i am so sorry 

basically, the story is interesting because elite season one is interesting, but honestly like... just go rewatch that tbh

the only reason worth checking it out imo is for dhruv and faruq, but i’m planning on making a little scene pack of all their things (both as a pairing and individually, though the majority of the limited screentime those two get is as a paring) , so if any of you are interested in that, please let me know and i’ll dm you the link once i get it all put together <3 

[cmdr-bullgod1997]

I get the joy of being in a ship that is doing what it excells at. The DBX is a fantastic explorer.

But more people have to engage with the idea that flying a ship suboptimal for a task is also just as good.

I saw someone in the elite dangerous mining reddit ask for a mining fit for a chally. The bulk of responses were, to paraphrase "chally bad, check stickies for good ships".

Awful responses.

Any ship can be a mining ship as can they be an exploration ship, and there's a certain level of challemge to using unconventional ships.

The problem solving amd theorycrafting, combined with seeing it come to fruition is, imo, a rewarding experience that you don't get by following meta builds.

[jcmarchi]

3 vs. 3: The Open vs. Closed Battle for Big AI

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/3-vs-3-the-open-vs-closed-battle-for-big-ai/

3 vs. 3: The Open vs. Closed Battle for Big AI

Big model announcements by Meta, Mistral and xAI.

Created Using DALL-E

Next Week in The Sequence:

Edge 417: We are getting to the end of our series about autonomous agents with a review of multi-agent systems. We dive into Alibaba Research’s AgenScope and LangChain’s LangGraph framework.

Edge 418: We take a second look at the new version of DSPy that is rapidly becoming one of the most important frameworks for building LLM apps in the market.

You can subscribe to The Sequence below:

TheSequence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

📝 Editorial: 3 vs. 3: The Open vs. Closed Battle for Big AI

When the open vs. closed weight model debate started a couple of years ago, many thought it was going to be a battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on one side, and hundreds of open-source models on the other. Reality turned out to be quite different. The open-source space for massively large foundation models has been reduced to three key players: Meta, Mistral, and xAI. This shouldn’t come as a surprise if we consider that training a multi-hundred-parameter model surpasses $100 million in training costs. Open sourcing that kind of investment is something only a few companies can afford.

So GPT-x, Claude, and Gemini versus Llama, Mistral, and Grok.

How will this shape up? When the first versions of these open-weight models came out, they were a couple of iterations behind the quality of the large commercial models. That’s no longer the case, and this week was a good reminder of how competitive the big open-source models can be.

Meta open-sourced Llama 3.1, a 402-billion parameter model that scored at GPT-4o levels in nearly every relevant benchmark. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that Llama 4 should completely close the gap with the state-of-the-art AI.

Mistral unveiled Mistral Large, a 123-billion parameter model with a 128k token window.

Elon Musk announced the “most powerful” AI training cluster in the world, consisting of 100,000 GPUs, and also mentioned that they are training the most powerful AI by any metric.

Big AI is a game for big budgets, and there might still be room for a few more competitors in this race (maybe Illya’s new company). However, the space is not going to change drastically. It’s OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic vs. Meta, Llama, and xAI. One thing is for certain: open-source big AI is going to be competitive.

🔎 ML Research

AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2

Google DeepMind published details about AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, two systems that combines to achieve silver medalist status in this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). AlphaProof is a reinforcement learning model for math reasoning while AlphaGeometry uses a neurosymbolic architecture that combines LLMs and symbolic models —> Read more.

The Llama 3 Herd of Models

Meta AI published paper detailing the architecture and processes for building the Llama 3 family of models. The paper also introduces a compositional approach to integrates image, video and speech recognition capabilities into Llama 3 —> Read more.

OpenDevin

Researchers from elite AI universities such as UC Berkeley, Yale, Carnegie Mellon and others published a paper introducing OpenDevin, a framework for developing AI agents that interact with environments similar to human programmers. OpenDevin agents are able to collaborate with human programmers in different tasks such as bug fixing, feature building, testing and many others —> Read more.

Model Collapse

Researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial Collegue of London and other institutions published a paper in Nature outlining a curious phenomenon in LLMs coined as model collapse. The thesis of model collapse states that LLMs will start showing irreversible degenerative behavior when trained in data created by other AI models —> Read more.

Visual Haystacks Benchmark

Berkeley AI Research(BAIR) published a paper introducing the Visual Haystacks Benchmark(VHS) for multi-image reasoning. VHS evalautes retrieval and reasoning capabilities across large collections of uncorrelated images —> Read more.

Pruning and Distillation in LLMs

NVIDIA Research published a paper proposing a set of effective compression best practices to build compact LLMs. The techiques combine the best strategies for depth, width, attention and MLP pruning with knowledge distillation-based retraining —> Read more.

SlowFast-LLaVA

Apple Research published a paper detailing SlowFast-LLaVA(SF-LLaVA), a video language model optimized for capturing the spatial semantics and temporal context in videos. SF-LLaVA uses a two-stream input design to aggregate features from different video frames in ways that facilitate knowledge extraction —> Read more.

🤖 AI Tech Releases

Llama 3.1

Meta open sourced Llama 3.1 including its 405B parameter model as well as complementary tools and applications —> Read more.

Mistral Large

Mistral unveiled Mistral Large, a 123B parameter model that rivals Llama 3.1 —> Read more.

SearchGPT

OpenAI unveiled a preview of a new AI-first search engine —> Read more.

NVIDIA AI Foundry

NVIDIA announced the availability of its AI Foundry to enable the creation of custom models for enterprises —> Read more.

Phi-3 Serverless Fine-Tuning

Microsoft unveiled new AI features in the Azure platform including a serverless infrastructure to fine-tune Phi-3 models —> Read more.

Stable Video 4D

Stability AI announced the release of Stable Video 4D, its latest video generation model —> Read more.

🛠 Real World AI

Orchestration at Netflix

Netflix open sourced Maestro, its engine for orchestration of data and ML pipelines —> Read more.

Product Categorization at Walmart

Walmart Global Tech discussed some of their work behind Ghotok, their predictive generative AI engine used for product categorization —> Read more.

📡AI Radar

Enterprise AI startup Cohere raised an astonishing $500 million in a new round.

Alibaba-backed AI startup Baichuan was valued at $2.8 billion in a new round.

Compliance startup Vanta secured $150 million to enhance their product suite with AI.

Sakana AI released its first two models.

Luma AI announced Loops to create continious video frames.

AI B2B sales startup Resquared raised $5 million in new funding.

Alphabet committed to invest up to $5 billion in self-driving car platform Waymo.

AI legal tech startup Clio raised $900 million in a Series F.

Another legal startup, Harvey, raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Robotics startup Mytra is coming out of stealth mode with $78 million in funding.

Elon Musk announced the “most powerful” AI training cluster in the world.

AI for dentists platform Pearl, raised $58 million in new funding.

Gen AI security startup Lakera raised $20 million to protect enterprises from LLM vulnerabilities.

Chinese AI video generator platform Kling is now available internationally.

AI cloud security platform Dazz raised $50 million in a new round.

TheSequence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

[centrally-unplanned]

@centrally-unplanned, a rationalist-adjacent(?) liberal of some sort

Larrydavid.meme.gif

Anyway, I don't think most of this is straight wrong or anything, but I think its a good example when you need to conceptually "move down another level" of analysis. So the 'national interest'...that doesn't, exist, right? Its a fake social construct - nations aren't real, they can't have interests. Now I'm not being a pedant, I understand its a perfectly fine shorthand for the right time, this or that military alliance against a bigger power, yeah sure national interest. But its still fake, which means you need to use it judiciously. Does the US have a national interest in idk supporting Ukraine against Russia? Ehhh maybe? I know the argument. But we have dozens of authoritarian allies and trading partners, and hell we have the world's largest military - how exactly is a norm of no military conquest "in our best interest" again? This stuff is all radically culturally shaped; within the project of building a liberal world order of independent nation states that US political elites & wider population believes is morally okay, its in our 'self interest' - and even then due to granular polarization factors half the country swapped sides in a year. Once you go deep enough the idea falls apart.

And this goes down to lower institutional levels:

Ok, the putative politicians supporting Israel for domestic political reasons are acting in their own self-interest, but the voters to which they cater are evidently not!

That first part probably isn't true! For some, sure, but I think most US politicians also just authentically support Israel because they think they are the good guys. Others don't care either way so go with the flow; some others roll their eyes at it but are outnumbered and don't fight it. The Republican party has a real, notable faction of evangelical voters who support Israel as part of fulfilling God's plan for humanity as outlined in the Gospels, shit is cray man. And this combines with wide voter support, strong lobby groups, the mismatch between median apathy and jewish-american's strong interest, etc etc.

To tie it up, you have phrases like "materialist" and "idealist" and "liberal", which I don't think are useless. But they are just tools, the large majority of ~reality are a mess of them, and imo nowadays social sciences have marched on and we don't use those as much, they have evolved. And what you don't want to do is get sort-of wrapped up in the 'meta' of these ideas, leading you to say things like this:

It allows one to avoid the conclusion that the rational pursuit of self-interest has lead the US to complicity in a genocide, which is not a very fun conclusion to reach if you endorse a political philosophy that at some level valorizes the rational pursuit of self-interest.

Most American people and the large majority of American politicians have no need to 'avoid this conclusion' because they don't think Israel is committing genocide. They just disagree on the object level; honestly they don't even disagree, they don't think this is a relevant debate and aren't paying attention to it. No one is doing the work of "justifying" or "sorting out ideology" like a CCCP Marxist Othodoxy Ministry, they think this is wrong, and probably don't have a lot of stake in the idea of the US being ideologically consistent to begin with. I understand what you are saying, I don't think you think there such a ministry or anything. But I do think its indicative of that sort of ideological trap, of valorizing - reifying, if you will - these categories of analysis that only loosely fit observed reality.

Which imo if people want to understand US support for Israel, you need to deal with that observed reality. You won't get far with ideas of "what is the US rational self interest?" because its a combination of not real, and not very relevant in this case.

Current debate being hosted on @triviallytrue's blog involving @metamatar and @centrally-unplanned is interesting to me on a meta-level. @metamatar, a Marxist, offers what I think would usually be called a "materialist" explanation for US support of Israel: the United States gets strategic benefits out of its relationship with Israel and thus wants to keep them as an ally. @centrally-unplanned, a rationalist-adjacent(?) liberal of some sort, offers what I think would usually be called an "idealist" explanation: the US supports Israel against its own rational self-interest for ideological and domestic political reasons. Triv, a left-liberal, takes an intermediary position.

Using the terms "materialist" and "idealist" in this way has certain Marxist undertones that I don't necessarily endorse, and is maybe not even technically accurate for one reason or another, but I just needed some quick and recognizable terms in which to frame the debate. Forgive me for this.

One way or another, I have some up-my-own-ass and navel-gazatory things to say about the discussion.

I don't know a whole lot about the US's relationship with Israel on an object level. But on the basis of my priors I lean towards the materialist explanation. I think this reflects, ironically, a kind of liberal view of human nature: I model people (and organizations) as basically self-interested and rational agents, at least to a rough approximation. But I have a fairly dim view of where this leads us. I think that rational self-interest often results in murder and plunder and cold-hearted slaughter, and indeed the notion that humans are approximately rational and self-interested agents comports well with the fact that the world today and for all of known history has been characterized by murder and plunder and cold-hearted slaughter. My default assumption is therefore that, again to a first approximation, whatever is going on between the US and Israel is another instance of this.

On the other hand, I think it's interesting that the idealist explanation is here favored by a liberal, although it suggests perhaps a less "liberal" view of human nature. Under this explanation humans are foolish, driven by irrationality, ideology, and superstition, to work against their own material interests. Ok, the putative politicians supporting Israel for domestic political reasons are acting in their own self-interest, but the voters to which they cater are evidently not! Naively this view might seem a bit at odds with a liberal political philosophy, but I don't think it really it. Especially in this case, where the belief that US support of Israel is driven by irrationality and superstition actually serves to rescue the notion of rational self-interest from what otherwise might look like a mark on its good name. It allows one to avoid the conclusion that the rational pursuit of self-interest has lead the US to complicity in a genocide, which is not a very fun conclusion to reach if you endorse a political philosophy that at some level valorizes the rational pursuit of self-interest.

All in all, what is my point? I don't really have a point. I don't think this kind of psychoanalysis of others' political opinions is a very useful endeavor. I suppose I'm saying precisely nothing: the leftists in this discussion have taken up a position that indicts rational self-interest, the liberals have taken up a position that exculpates it, the centrists have taken a middling position—everyone has behaved in exactly the way our cheap psychoanalysis of them suggests they would. Nothing has been learned about the world (in this post, I mean), because although we see that the participants in the discussion are making arguments that suit their ideologies, we cannot tell which direction the causality runs. And nothing has been learned about the participants in the discussion because this kind of psychoanalysis is a crock of shit.

Keep on posting, everybody.

[binesetakeout]

u know being more Into the technical side of gaming now the upgrades game devs are going to get (UE5) are going to amazing for artists.......but I really hope game devs keep in mind that not everyone has a $2K PC with up to date drivers and hardware that cannot possibly render even the lowest poly models or textures they provide and even then if your game is prided on being gorgeous....why bother if it's only on the highest possible settings to get that experience and get good frames...

also please GOD I want the "bigger is better" shit to stop if you give me 60gb of a game that sucks and all those gigs are for your art bc of above reasons or an obnoxious amount of unimportant side quests fuck you

[itsclydebitches]

Ever think about RWBY's weapons? Ruby's is a harvesting tool - she reaps Grimm to protect Remnant's eco-system. Weiss's rapier is the only non-transformative weapon and relies on her inherited Semblance and the resources her family exploited their employees to mine. Blake's weapon is versatile as she's internalised all the different ways of social protest but we never see this. And Yang's weapon is also her hand, implying a potential for violence and kindness but we never really explore this.

God yes -- I particularly like the first two readings. RWBY barely explores this, but what little we see of Patch appears a) fairly isolated (a small island) and b) full of forest with residents possibly getting by on personal/communal farms. Is it common then for Signal students, when given the opportunity to design their own weapons, to adapt their farming tools into deadly resources? Is Ruby nodding at Oscar’s throwaway comment about running the occasional grimm off with farm equipment like yeah, of course, those of us outside the major cities have always had to rely on whatever is on hand to keep ourselves safe. Uncle Qrow modeled his weapon after the Grimm Reaper, and I modeled mine after his, but Maria (or whoever inspired her) first adapted their everyday tools into a serviceable weapon. And we’ve been improving them ever since until we got “one of the most dangerous weapons ever designed.” We harvest grimm, cutting through them as quickly, efficiently, and in as large swaths as our crops.

Don’t get me started on how the ENTIRETY of Weiss’ style is tied to her family, so where does her desire to gain distance from her parents end and the love/determination to improve the Schnee name begin? She uses a rapier (elegant, sophisticated, associated with showy, formal combat more than “real” fighting) that she rarely ever uses to cut/stab with, instead relying on the dust mechanism because -- you guessed it -- her family owns the major dust company. She never runs out because of a combination of exploitation and the story forgetting that the characters need to buy supplies on occasion... But even that’s now taken a backseat to her genetically inherited semblance that she was instructed to unlock partly to escape her family. That's a loaded dilemma. Weiss’ go-to move is summoning up enemies she’s defeated, literally dredging up the past when she’s trying to move forward, even if these are technically celebratory moments.

RWBY’s weapons have SO many awesome themes and implications just hanging out on the surface, unexplored. Why isn’t Blake’s weapon versatile in the sense of coming from multiple, diverse communities? She’s a member of the faunus elite AND a former White Fang member AND an activist AND she grew up “outside of the kingdoms” AND she’s chosen a “normal” huntsmen route by attending Beacon. Why isn’t Yang’s weapon a part of her (now forgotten...) journey to improve her emotional control, with Tai pointing out that yeah, your style boils down to, “Punch the thing really hard in anger”? What are Jaune’s thoughts on changing an ancient weapon/shield to honor his fallen partner? How did Nora wind up with a hammer (because the characters don’t know they’re flimsily based on historical/mythological/fairy tale archetypes)? Will Ren use his father’s dagger in combat, or is it purely ceremonial now? Why is Qrow’s weapon inspiration reduced to a single line in Volume 6? Shouldn’t he be begging Maria for stories and advice? I love the contrast of our youngest character now carrying a cane, but no one ever comments on it. Does anyone have iffy associations given that a well known criminal (Roman) was using the same? Much more importantly imo, Oscar expresses no desire to have his own weapon, or discover his own semblance, despite supposedly trying to hang onto his identity. Penny got all of ten minutes with her Maiden-summoned swords. Blake’s weapon snaps and it’s just casually fixed off screen. Will the weapons lost to the Wonderland void be given any more attention? At this point I doubt it.

And yeah, as always, in another story this stuff would be purely cosmetic. Cool headcanons! But the show doesn’t have to get into all that. RWBY though is based around the combat and right from the start emphasized the importance of the characters’ weapons. From Ruby considering them more interesting than the people who carry them, to Jaune being the only one walking around with a hand-me-down, all the way to the fact that they need these weapons to survive every episode, you’d think they’d be at the forefront of our characterization... yet we don’t even know most of their names in-canon.