#estimate re-evaluation

[jamaicahomescom]

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Project Management for Beginners

The lack of project management training or experience of many people can be an enormous stress factor for them. Whilst natural organizational ability is enormously helpful, in itself it is no guarantee of any project being both successful and low-stress. It’s Monday afternoon at the office. The week has only begun, but you’re already swimming in a sea of memos, spreadsheets, and schedules. Just…

[paarksunghoon]

you plus me (teaser)

SUMMARY: it’s been six years since heeseung stopped being your friend and the thought of him tagging along an annual camping tradition makes you feel like the world must be crashing round you. one misunderstanding and one trip later makes heeseung re-evaluate all he knows, and it makes you believe that there might life after love.

PAIRING: heeseung x fem!reader (featuring enhypen)

WORD COUNT: no estimate because who really knows but this baby sits at 28K right now. the teaser stands at 2.7K.

NOTES: usually I don’t post teasers but I’m so proud of this story so why not!!!!!! I don’t think I’m going to open a taglist but that could change. I’ll let you know if I do. :) hoping to publish by October 26! thanks for reading!! xx

GENRE: angst + fluff + smut

edit: it’s out!

***

“Please don’t make me go.”

“Y/N, you already said yes. We’re only gonna be gone for a week.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea, Jungwon. You just said that Heeseung is gonna be there.” 

Your best friend sighs and sits down on your bed, inspecting the duffle bag you have that’s half-packed. Your clothes are haphazardly strewn all over your bedding while you plead with him to no avail. You’re so desperate that you consider getting on your knees to beg.

“I’m sorry for telling you now but he was able to get people to cover his shift last minute and paid for a spot on the kayaking rental.” 

“If he’s going, I’d rather save us all the trouble and stay at home.” Jungwon watches you cross your arms over your chest. “Every time we’re in the same room, it’s just a matter of time before things become awkward.” 

“We’ll be outside in the suuuun,” Jungwon says, tilting his head to the side and giving you those amused eyes that he always gives you when he’s trying to convince you to do something with him. You scoff and look away. It almost works. 

“I bet that it’ll be worse since we have a few things planned with the guys already.”

“So what? You two don’t get along. Big deal. We’ve already made reservations to secure a spot on the campsite and set a deposit for kayak rentals.”

“Won, I think you and I view Heeseung very differently. He doesn’t just not like me. He hates me.” 

“Hate is a wrong word.” 

You huff. “I don’t think you grasp just how weird it is every time we’re together. You could cut the tension with a knife.”

“Seriously, Y/N. It’s one week. I’m sure you can survive that. You’ve never missed a camping trip and it’s the first time all of our friends are coming.” Jungwon deadpans and throws a shirt towards your chest, which you hastily grab after being startled by his sudden movement. You know better than to argue with him when he gets like this. “Just help me pack your clothes, dude. Jay’s gonna be here to pick us up tomorrow morning and you don’t want to be under-packed.” 

You relent and grumble. “Are you still staying over?”

He nods. “My apartment’s in the opposite of where we’re going and I didn’t want to make him drive an extra twenty minutes since he needs to pick Riki up. Just need to drop Maeumi off at my mom’s before coming back here. ” Your eyes fall for a flat second before you squash that feeling down.

“I didn’t invite you over, you know.” 

“No, but don’t pretend like you’re not excited,” Jungwon says with a laugh as he pulls your clothes out of the bag and starts to readjust the clothing you’ve folded poorly. Seeing your best friend smile tugs a bit at your heartstrings and you can’t say that you aren’t happy to have him with you. “We should get you packed now so you don’t stress out later.” 

Begrudgingly, you allow Jungwon to sort out your clothes for you and pull last minute items you’ve yet to pack. It annoys you, watching him be so calm when you’re simmering with worry. But you know he’s right—you’ve invested some money into this getaway and it’ll be the last big outing before you move away from Korea for a year-long job opportunity in Okayama before pursuing your Master’s degree. Jungwon knows you a little too well and sometimes it irks you. 

The end-of-summer camping trip is always one for the books. For as long as you can remember, the two of you have been going camping just before everyone goes back to school to celebrate the beginning of a new academic year with your families. But this time, the trip wasn’t just about continuing an annual tradition. It was also to commemorate a new chapter in your life. 

You’re a year older than Jungwon. He’s known you since you were obsessed with learning how to double dutch and you’ve known him since he first learned how to ride a bike. The two of you started out as neighbors when you moved into the house next to his and his family had adopted your own like old friends, eventually inviting you and your parents into their annual camping tradition. Even when dynamics changed and people had left, the tradition was the only thing that remained a constant for you.

This is the first summer that your loved ones announced they wouldn’t be coming along. They all thought it was time for you to embark on new traditions with new people and nobody seemed to mind the change that much except for you. Jungwon had been ecstatic about it since he invited his friend, Jake, to the camping trip last year. You’d been wary at first since Jake is friends with Heeseung, but he never brought up your confusing arch-nemesis and chose to have a great trip before you all started university again.  

Sure, you had a lot of fun. You might even consider last year’s trip as one for the books. But your mom pulling out of the camping trip and everyone around you agreeing that it was for the best made you feel like your world was crumbling around you.

When you graduated university three months ago (Jungwon swears he didn’t cry but you know better than to believe him) and the weight of leaving your home started to sink in. In the blink of an eye, Jungwon wouldn’t be a twenty minute drive and hanging out with all of your friends wouldn’t be as easy as it once was. You’d be in Japan all alone.

This past summer has been a whirlwind as you tried to do everything under the sun, savoring each moment until you wouldn’t be able to anymore. Jungwon’s been a good sport about it, never once complaining when you drag him to your latest adventure. He deals with your sudden shift in mood from happy to sad, letting you cry on his shoulder and braving the cliche words you say when telling him you’ll miss him a lot. 

Unlike past seasons, this is the first summer you haven’t seen Heeseung very often. Lee Heeseung, who usually keeps his head down and minds his business, always seems to have a bone to pick whenever his eyes settle on you. It confuses you to no end and he keeps his quips to a minimum when your mutual friends are around, but it doesn’t stop you from wondering what you must’ve done to make him act like that towards you. It’s a shame because that small childhood crush you always had on him was squashed the first time he ignored your presence 

None of your friends comment on it much. They’re used to the dynamic between the both of you because it's been years of this. Elementary school saw the two of you become friends for the first time and middle school brought more friends into the group. It was in high school that things changed and Heeseung started ignoring you out of nowhere until one Thursday afternoon when he’d told you to leave him alone after pestering him about his change in behavior. 

The odd tension followed you into university and continued to seep into your life. You don’t think you’ve ever been in a room with Heeseung where he’s been anything but nonchalant towards you, often acting like you aren’t there to begin with. You do your best to put up with it and plaster a smile on your face but six years have gone by and you don’t think you can handle a seventh. All of your friends seemed to have moved past it. You don’t know why you can’t.

“Don’t think about Heeseung,” Jungwon says with a sigh. “In fact, don’t think at all. Let me handle everything and enjoy this trip before you move to Okayama, okay?”

“Okay, fine. But I want to see Maeumi.”

Jungwon snorts. “She’s gonna be real pissed when she doesn’t see you for a year, you know.”

“Don’t remind me.”

Jungwon knows you like the back of your hand and has seen what you bring on these trips enough to know what you like to have in your duffle. He packs things you neglected to pull out because your mind has been elsewhere. As much as he wants to flick your head and tell you to quit overthinking so you can help him, he did tell you to let him handle everything. 

Your best friend makes you triple check that the two of you didn’t miss anything before heading back to his apartment to fetch Maeumi. She jumps into your arms when you squat to pick her up and won’t allow Jungwon to pet her white fur body while she’s nestled against you. This fondness and the familiar jab of Jungwon’s elbow to your ribcage makes your heart ache despite the sweet moment. You’re really going to miss home. 

Ever the concerned mothers your mom and Jungwon’s are, they send you with a tray full of sweets for the road. They make you tell them exactly when you’ll be picked up and by who (“Jongseong, Eomma,” Jungwon says for the umpteenth time) and when you plan to come back. His dad gives you a spare bucket hat for when you’re on the water and an old sweater from his college days when Jungwon complains about how you never pack enough layers. The gesture feels warm since you consider his father to be somewhat of your own.

Leaving them to go back to your house feels a bit bittersweet. A lot of your belongings sit in storage boxes in the garage from when you moved out of your campus apartment upon graduating. Jungwon decided to get an apartment for himself with the money he saved from his part-time job as a busboy at a local chain restaurant. Staying over with you makes it seem silly when you remember he used to live next door. 

It’s nine in the evening when the two of you get ready for bed. Jungwon puts your bags by the front door so neither of you would forget while you finish brushing your teeth. He grabs extra blankets from the linen closet and settles onto your L-shaped couch, pulling the fabric just underneath his chin. Your heart feels like it’s sinking in on itself when you think about how this might be the last time you’re able to be so casual around him. 

“Stop overthinking,” he says in the quiet of the night as if he can hear the thoughts in your head. The living room lights are off and the moonlight is what’s responsible for illuminating the space. 

You refrain from throwing your pillow at him. “I’m not overthinking. You’re overthinking.” 

Jungwon snorts. “We both know that’s not true. I know you’re scared about Okayama and I know that’s why you’ve been on edge about Heeseung. You’re usually never this loud about it.” Like always, your best friend is right. 

“It’s hard not to.” Your meek voice makes Jungwon’s heart lurch. “Everything’s changed so fast. I feel like I didn’t get enough time to properly say goodbye to everyone.”

“You’ll be in Japan, not America. It’s not like we’ll never see you.” 

“Yeah, but I won’t be able to annoy you for boba and you won’t be coming over to have dinner with my mom and I.” Jungwon frowns. Too caught up in making sure you were happy this summer, he hadn’t given it that much thought. “I know I won’t be far but I’m scared that things will change too much.” 

For the first time today, Jungwon doesn’t know what to say to make you feel better. “I’ll miss you a lot.” 

“I know that, dummy. I guess…I feel like I’ve been dealing with a lifetime of shittiness and the universe wanted to throw another curveball at me.” Jungwon’s heart softens at your confession. He’s used to your quick jabs and sarcastic humor. Knowing you’ve more afraid than excited makes him upset. 

“The universe sucks,” he says, happy that it pulled a laugh out of you. “I’ll always be a phone call away and you’ll never have to worry about me ignoring you because we both know I’m gonna blow up your texts anyway.” 

“I can always count on you to annoy the hell out of me.” You can’t see his face, but no you already assume Jungwon’s sporting a shit-eating grin. Even if you both know the main reason why you’re afraid of living in Okayama, neither of you say it. You’re grateful that Jungwon doesn’t bring it up. “Still, though. You know how I am with change. I’m really scared that I’m going to hate it there and not have you to keep me company.”

“Life is crazy and unpredictable but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be miserable. I mean, you did a pretty good job of making sure both of us had happy childhoods even though I know you were hurting when we were younger.” 

“It’s really hard not to have expectations or think badly about the future when I feel like I took everything for granted.” 

“I know, Bug,” Jungwon says, using a nickname from your childhood he reserves for when he thinks you need an extra bit of comfort. “But you’re the best person I know. You didn’t do anything wrong. Life just…gets in the way.” 

“Yeah, I know.”

Jungwon is quiet for a moment. “Just please promise me you’ll try to have fun, okay?”

“I know I’ll have fun, Wonnie. I’m scared that I’ll have too much fun and be a sobbing wreck when we get back.” 

The two of you share a laugh. “Alright, fair. Promise me you won’t let Heeseung get under your skin.”

You groan. “If he doesn’t like me, that’s fine. I don’t need everyone to like me. But why go out of his way to act like I’m scum of the Earth?”

“Just ignore him, okay?” Jungwon pleads. “I know it’s uncomfortable but he paid for a last minute spot. I’ll tell him to be mature about it too.” 

And, well, part of you believes Heeseung will listen to Jungwon. Despite being on the younger side in your shared friend group, everyone seemed to listen to your best friend most of the time. Jungwon has an authoritative aspect to himself when he’s refrained from being the silly, happy-go-lucky guy you all know him to be. 

It’s quiet for a brief moment with the wind gently tapping on the windows behind you. “I don’t know why he doesn’t like me.” 

Truthfully, neither does Jungwon. “I’m sorry he’s putting you in a tough spot.” 

“Won, sometimes I really wonder if he hates my guts. He doesn’t talk to me and he never replies to my messages in the group chat. It’s like I don’t exist to him.”

“I think that might be a little extreme.” 

“It’s not and you know it.” 

Jungwon hums. “Well, at least you’ll get away from him when you move to Okayama.” Just like that, all of your worries come flooding right back.

“Yeah,” you say meekly. “I’ll have Okayama.”

You don’t see him, but you know Jungwon’s smiling since you agreed with him for the first time tonight. “That’s more like it. You have your whole future ahead of yourself, dude. Heeseung is just a blimp. In three weeks, he won’t matter because you’ll be having fun in Japan. Just think about that.” 

You try not to think about the fears and hesitations you have about starting anew. This time, you wouldn’t be going back to university after the camping trip. You’ll have a week and a half back home before you’re boarding your flight and saying goodbye to the place you’ve called home for the past two decades. Thinking about the future keeps you up until you hear Jungwon’s snores from the other side of the couch. 

Unsure of when your mom will be coming home, you snuggle further into the cushions and curl yourself into a ball before falling asleep. 

***

comments and reblogs are appreciated! xx

[wip]

For a long time now, it's been impossible to see comments or reblogs with comment/tags on posts over a certain age when using the mobile app or blog view. Today I was looking at a post from 2015 that I knew had at least one reblog comment and lots of tags, but all the reblogs were under "other". I found the comment (but couldn't see any tags) by going to the [blog name].tumblr.com/post/[###] link and scrolling through all the notes in one list, but it's impossible anywhere else.

I know this probably has to do with the many changes Tumblr has gone through in that time, but it's still really inconvenient to have disappearing notes on the platform where part of the charm is that posts can survive for, at this point, almost a decade and a half.

Is it even possible to fix this, and of so, is it something you would consider?

Answer: Hey there, @maplerosekisses!

It is possible to fix this, and we would like to fix it, but it’s a daunting problem at Tumblr’s scale. Buckle up for storytime.

Long, long ago, Tumblr was created, and in the beginning, there weren’t even notes on posts. There weren’t even reblogs or likes. In fact, we were one of the first platforms to introduce the heart icon and the concept of “likes”! We created the reblog! Back in those days, each of these actions were tracked separately. Likes were tracked in one database table and reblogs weren’t tracked at all as notes. When we introduced replies, those had yet another way of being tracked in our database. Totally separate entities on the platform for years.

Eventually, we wanted to consolidate these into one number—so we had to count each of those different places. That’s horribly inefficient, and as Tumblr grew in size and popularity, this became a bottleneck that hurt the whole platform. So one of the things we did was to invent a new denormalized database table called “notes,” to track all of these different things in one place so we could easily count them. We still have that table, and it’s still the fallback whenever we need to count the notes on a post.

But this itself is ancient history. Since then, the product has changed even more, and we removed replies and re-added them later, back in 2015 or so—and made some changes in that process to help further improve efficiency. These improvements allowed us to include media in the notes view, and be able to split out replies versus reblogs-with-comment versus likes (kind of going back to the way it was originally.) Even then, we didn’t yet support showing tag usage in the notes—that would come even later.

In the process of making all of these changes for efficiency and functionality, we had to ask ourselves, as you point out: should we try to backfill these new database tables with all of the data from before? For a long while, we were using both systems to power the notes view, so we could display as much information from “before” as we could. Eventually, we didn’t need to do that anymore, because the number of people scrolling back to that “before” time became infinitesimally small. And that's the situation we’re in today.

Because if we wanted to backfill the data, we would need to process literally tens of billions of posts and notes from before 2015, at a conservative estimate. Let’s say it’s 10,000,000,000, for the sake of argument: if we started an automated process to go through them at ~100 per second (which would be relatively safe at our scale, so Tumblr doesn’t break as we’re digging up these old rows in the database), it would take over three years of continuous operation to complete that task.

In situations like this, we have to ask ourselves if that’s worth it. So far, the answer we’ve determined is no. But we may find a more efficient way to do it, there’s undoubtedly a way, and when we do, we will re-evaluate the decision again. We hope that makes sense—trying to make changes to Tumblr can be really, really hard.

But thank you for your question. We appreciate them and hope that goes some way to answering your query. Keep 'em coming, y'all.

[reasonsforhope]

"For the first time, genetically modified pig kidneys provided “life-sustaining kidney function” during the course of a planned seven-day clinical study—a first step in addressing the critical crisis worldwide of kidney donor organ shortage.

The University of Alabama’s pre-clinical human study at Birmingham also advances the science and promise of xenotransplantation as a therapy to potentially cure end-stage kidney disease—just as a human-to-human transplants can.

“It has been truly extraordinary to see the first-ever preclinical demonstration that appropriately modified pig kidneys can provide normal, life-sustaining kidney function in a human safely and be achieved using a standard immunosuppression regimen,” said UAB transplant surgeon scientist Jayme Locke, M.D., director of UAB’s Comprehensive Transplant Institute and lead author of the paper...

The peer-reviewed findings published last month in JAMA Surgery describes the pioneering pre-clinical human research performed on a recipient experiencing brain death...

The pre-clinical human brain death model developed at UAB can evaluate the safety and feasibility of pig-to-human kidney xenografts, or transplants, without risk to a living human. It is named for transplant pioneer Jim Parsons, an organ donor whose family generously donated his body to advance xenotransplant kidney research, like the latest patient did.

A Critical Need

Kidney disease kills more people each year than breast or prostate cancer, while more than 90,000 people are on the transplant waiting list. More than 800,000 Americans are living with kidney failure and 240 Americans on dialysis die every day. The wait for a deceased donor kidney can be as long as five to 10 years, and almost 5,000 people per year die waiting for a kidney transplant.

Groundbreaking Study Details

The 52-year-old study subject for this research lived with hypertension and stage 2 chronic kidney disease, which affects more than one in seven U.S. adults, or an estimated 37 million Americans. As part of this study, the subject had both of his native kidneys removed and dialysis stopped, followed by a crossmatch-compatible xenotransplant with two 10 gene-edited pig kidneys, or UKidney.

The transplanted pig kidneys made urine within four minutes of re-perfusion and produced more than 37 liters of urine in the first 24 hours. The pig kidneys continued to function as they would in a living human for the entirety of the seven-day study. Also, the kidneys were still viable at the time the study was concluded.

“In the first 24 hours these kidneys made over 37 liters of urine,” said Dr. Locke. “It was really a remarkable thing to see.” ...

Gene editing in pigs to reduce immune rejection has made organ transplants from pigs to humans possible. The natural lifespan of a pig is 30 years, they are easily bred, and they have organs of similar size to humans. Genetically modified pig kidneys have been extensively tested in non-human primates, and the addition of UAB’s preclinical human research model—the Parsons Model—now provides important information about the safety and efficacy of kidneys in human transplant recipients."

-via Good News Network, September 17, 2023

[kittybroker]

Intro post!

I'll reblog cat pictures and value the kitty.

Now I'm sure you're all saying kitties are all valuable, and while that's true one cannot simply dismiss the importance of proper accounting in today's economy.

If you want to submit a picture of a cat you can use either the ask function or send in a post submission and value it yourself. Feel free to tag me into any kitty post you want.

Please make sure to read the FAQ below before sending in any questions.

While I am mostly a joke blog, please be wary when sending overly personal/strange asks, particularly when I do not know who you are. Absolutely do not ship this blog with other blogs, and particularly do not make comments to me about this.

Any/All pronouns are fine for referring to me.

Tagging system: I'll tag all the cats here with #crazy kitty The pricing of kitties is set into one of five categories:

#free bin - $0 kitties #bargain bin - Under $5 #discount kitty - Under $20 #valuable kitty - Under $50 #premium kitty - Anything over $50

#alt currency is used for any kitty not using kitty dollars.

Note that kitties from before 27/01/24 may not include the #bargain bin or #premium kitty tag as those tags were introduced after the blogs creation.

#set deal - For pairs kitties sold together #collection - For collections of different kitties in a collection

#silly kitty - For memes and humorous kitties #art - For drawings of kitties or kitties with art attached #fake kitty - For kitties that aren't really actually kitties at all

#text post - For posts that aren't actually evaluations #asks - Posts that are sent via ask #tagged - Posts sent via tagging #in the replies - Tags from the replies of a post #my cat - For pictures of my cat

I'll probably post my own cat a bit here as well and tag that with #my cat.

Submission: You can submit kitties by tagging me in posts or sending asks (when the inbox is open). I will not always get around to tags as sometimes there is too many to get to or I have already evaluated the post. I prefer people tag me into a post over DMing, and will not evaluate a kitty sent in DMs. I would also ask you to not send too many asks or tags in a row simply to avoid too many posts being sent in at a time and allowing others to send stuff in. If you are unsure on how to tag me please refer to the FAQ, do not message me asking how to tag me into posts.

Rules for submission: Please no real people or anthropomorphized cats. Anything that is pretty much just human is a big no go zone for evaluation (particularly evaluating real people). As long as it's clearly an animal I don't really care. Do not tag me into more than 2-3 posts at a time.

FAQ

Why hasn't my ask been answered? I get a lot of asks, and I can't answer everything. It usually takes a few days to a week to get around to answering an ask. Sometimes the ask may also contain a submission that cannot be posted, ie you submitted a real person, a cat in the harmful situation or with wounds. For text based asks I cannot get to everything and am frequently inundated with comments. Not all will get a response. If you ask a question answered in the FAQ I will not answer.

How do you evaluate the kitties? The economy guides my hand, I merely see the truth of what is already there.

I tagged you into a post, but you never responded? I get a lot of tags, and often a lot of the same post. I will try to avoid responding to the same post multiple times (sometimes I forget!). Sometimes I just have so many tagged posts to get to I have to cut some out. I do see every tagged post though so you're post will still be seen, even if not answered.

What is the most valuable kitty ever? Our current estimates would put Intergalactic Shiro, now at an impressive 720000000000

What currency are the kitties evaluated in? They are all in Kitty Dollars. I've never heard of this "USD" or "Euro" stuff. None of it is real.

I want to tag you in a post, but I don't know how? To tag me into a post you will need to reblog the post and add the tag into the text field of the post (no the tags!). If you type @kittybroker you should see this blog appear in a dropdown menu. Select kittybroker and then reblogging the post. You can also tag me into the replies of posts by opening the notes, heading to the replies section and tagging me there with the same method.

Can I submit myself? Many before have attempted this perilous feat. Yet I remain strong. No real people will be evaluated!

Kittybroker, your evaluation skills are incredible! Do you even do anything with your life? Much of, if not all of my free time is devoted to the careful and articulate study of today's tumultuous market. However, I do sometimes dabble in music. You can check out my music library at https://chroniclesofautumn.com/library or take a look at my soundcloud archive. A lot of it is classically notated scores but there are recordings around the place.

Do you have a cat? I do, although I rarely post it out of both privacy concerns and the sheer number of other kitties sent in. The rare occasion I do however they will all be tagged. His name is Boris and he is around nine years old. He is very crazy.

That is all for now! Remember to stay crazy and kitty!

[nostalgebraist]

clarification re: ChatGPT, " a a a a", and data leakage

In August, I posted:

For a good time, try sending chatGPT the string ` a` repeated 1000 times. Like " a a a" (etc). Make sure the spaces are in there. Trust me.

People are talking about this trick again, thanks to a recent paper by Nasr et al that investigates how often LLMs regurgitate exact quotes from their training data.

The paper is an impressive technical achievement, and the results are very interesting.

Unfortunately, the online hive-mind consensus about this paper is something like:

When you do this "attack" to ChatGPT -- where you send it the letter 'a' many times, or make it write 'poem' over and over, or the like -- it prints out a bunch of its own training data. Previously, people had noted that the stuff it prints out after the attack looks like training data. Now, we know why: because it really is training data.

It's unfortunate that people believe this, because it's false. Or at best, a mixture of "false" and "confused and misleadingly incomplete."

The paper

So, what does the paper show?

The authors do a lot of stuff, building on a lot of previous work, and I won't try to summarize it all here.

But in brief, they try to estimate how easy it is to "extract" training data from LLMs, moving successively through 3 categories of LLMs that are progressively harder to analyze:

"Base model" LLMs with publicly released weights and publicly released training data.

"Base model" LLMs with publicly released weights, but undisclosed training data.

LLMs that are totally private, and are also finetuned for instruction-following or for chat, rather than being base models. (ChatGPT falls into this category.)

Category #1: open weights, open data

In their experiment on category #1, they prompt the models with hundreds of millions of brief phrases chosen randomly from Wikipedia. Then they check what fraction of the generated outputs constitute verbatim quotations from the training data.

Because category #1 has open weights, they can afford to do this hundreds of millions of times (there are no API costs to pay). And because the training data is open, they can directly check whether or not any given output appears in that data.

In category #1, the fraction of outputs that are exact copies of training data ranges from ~0.1% to ~1.5%, depending on the model.

Category #2: open weights, private data

In category #2, the training data is unavailable. The authors solve this problem by constructing "AuxDataset," a giant Frankenstein assemblage of all the major public training datasets, and then searching for outputs in AuxDataset.

This approach can have false negatives, since the model might be regurgitating private training data that isn't in AuxDataset. But it shouldn't have many false positives: if the model spits out some long string of text that appears in AuxDataset, then it's probably the case that the same string appeared in the model's training data, as opposed to the model spontaneously "reinventing" it.

So, the AuxDataset approach gives you lower bounds. Unsurprisingly, the fractions in this experiment are a bit lower, compared to the Category #1 experiment. But not that much lower, ranging from ~0.05% to ~1%.

Category #3: private everything + chat tuning

Finally, they do an experiment with ChatGPT. (Well, ChatGPT and gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, but I'm ignoring the latter for space here.)

ChatGPT presents several new challenges.

First, the model is only accessible through an API, and it would cost too much money to call the API hundreds of millions of times. So, they have to make do with a much smaller sample size.

A more substantial challenge has to do with the model's chat tuning.

All the other models evaluated in this paper were base models: they were trained to imitate a wide range of text data, and that was that. If you give them some text, like a random short phrase from Wikipedia, they will try to write the next part, in a manner that sounds like the data they were trained on.

However, if you give ChatGPT a random short phrase from Wikipedia, it will not try to complete it. It will, instead, say something like "Sorry, I don't know what that means" or "Is there something specific I can do for you?"

So their random-short-phrase-from-Wikipedia method, which worked for base models, is not going to work for ChatGPT.

Fortuitously, there happens to be a weird bug in ChatGPT that makes it behave like a base model!

Namely, the "trick" where you ask it to repeat a token, or just send it a bunch of pre-prepared repetitions.

Using this trick is still different from prompting a base model. You can't specify a "prompt," like a random-short-phrase-from-Wikipedia, for the model to complete. You just start the repetition ball rolling, and then at some point, it starts generating some arbitrarily chosen type of document in a base-model-like way.

Still, this is good enough: we can do the trick, and then check the output against AuxDataset. If the generated text appears in AuxDataset, then ChatGPT was probably trained on that text at some point.

If you do this, you get a fraction of 3%.

This is somewhat higher than all the other numbers we saw above, especially the other ones obtained using AuxDataset.

On the other hand, the numbers varied a lot between models, and ChatGPT is probably an outlier in various ways when you're comparing it to a bunch of open models.

So, this result seems consistent with the interpretation that the attack just makes ChatGPT behave like a base model. Base models -- it turns out -- tend to regurgitate their training data occasionally, under conditions like these ones; if you make ChatGPT behave like a base model, then it does too.

Language model behaves like language model, news at 11

Since this paper came out, a number of people have pinged me on twitter or whatever, telling me about how this attack "makes ChatGPT leak data," like this is some scandalous new finding about the attack specifically.

(I made some posts saying I didn't think the attack was "leaking data" -- by which I meant ChatGPT user data, which was a weirdly common theory at the time -- so of course, now some people are telling me that I was wrong on this score.)

This interpretation seems totally misguided to me.

Every result in the paper is consistent with the banal interpretation that the attack just makes ChatGPT behave like a base model.

That is, it makes it behave the way all LLMs used to behave, up until very recently.

I guess there are a lot of people around now who have never used an LLM that wasn't tuned for chat; who don't know that the "post-attack content" we see from ChatGPT is not some weird new behavior in need of a new, probably alarming explanation; who don't know that it is actually a very familiar thing, which any base model will give you immediately if you ask. But it is. It's base model behavior, nothing more.

Behaving like a base model implies regurgitation of training data some small fraction of the time, because base models do that. And only because base models do, in fact, do that. Not for any extra reason that's special to this attack.

(Or at least, if there is some extra reason, the paper gives us no evidence of its existence.)

The paper itself is less clear than I would like about this. In a footnote, it cites my tweet on the original attack (which I appreciate!), but it does so in a way that draws a confusing link between the attack and data regurgitation:

In fact, in early August, a month after we initial discovered this attack, multiple independent researchers discovered the underlying exploit used in our paper, but, like us initially, they did not realize that the model was regenerating training data, e.g., https://twitter.com/nostalgebraist/status/1686576041803096065.

Did I "not realize that the model was regenerating training data"? I mean . . . sort of? But then again, not really?

I knew from earlier papers (and personal experience, like the "Hedonist Sovereign" thing here) that base models occasionally produce exact quotations from their training data. And my reaction to the attack was, "it looks like it's behaving like a base model."

It would be surprising if, after the attack, ChatGPT never produced an exact quotation from training data. That would be a difference between ChatGPT's underlying base model and all other known LLM base models.

And the new paper shows that -- unsurprisingly -- there is no such difference. They all do this at some rate, and ChatGPT's rate is 3%, plus or minus something or other.

3% is not zero, but it's not very large, either.

If you do the attack to ChatGPT, and then think "wow, this output looks like what I imagine training data probably looks like," it is nonetheless probably not training data. It is probably, instead, a skilled mimicry of training data. (Remember that "skilled mimicry of training data" is what LLMs are trained to do.)

And remember, too, that base models used to be OpenAI's entire product offering. Indeed, their API still offers some base models! If you want to extract training data from a private OpenAI model, you can just interact with these guys normally, and they'll spit out their training data some small % of the time.

The only value added by the attack, here, is its ability to make ChatGPT specifically behave in the way that davinci-002 already does, naturally, without any tricks.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

TL;DR: Covid prevention measures worked so well, they controlled and disrupted seasonal flu too. We should be taking more steps to keep everyone safe and healthy from airborne illness. Science shows that it makes a big difference.

Seasonal influenza epidemics impose substantial burdens on health care systems and cause >5 million hospitalizations of adults each year. The current approach to influenza vaccine development requires comprehensive surveillance of circulating strains, which are constantly moving from continent to continent.

The reduction in global human mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to evaluate how seasonal influenza is impacted during pandemics.

In a new study, an international team of researchers, including from the University of Oxford, Fudan University, and KU Leuven, combined data on the spread of seasonal influenza, its genetic makeup, and international travel patterns to study how seasonal flu viruses moved and evolved.

The paper "COVID-19 pandemic interventions reshaped the global dispersal of seasonal influenza viruses" was published in the journal Science.

This approach helped to estimate how long the viruses remained in certain regions during periods of high and low volumes of international travel and how their genetic diversity changed before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, seasonal influenza levels dropped worldwide due to COVID-19 pandemic-related restrictions on population movement and mixing. However, the subsequent rapid bounce back of influenza once air travel returned to pre-pandemic levels showed that the virus was in most cases maintained during the pandemic with continued viral movements and accumulation of genetic diversity.

Lead author of the study Zhiyuan Chen (University of Oxford and Fudan University) says, "It was remarkable how quickly seasonal flu re-established to a pre-pandemic equilibrium just a few years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic."

Tropical climates, like those found across South and East Asia, allow for continued flu transmission year-round, thereby creating a broader range of flu strains and increasing overall viral diversity. The increased capacity for virus genomic surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic has provided more detail on the role of other regions, such as Africa and West Asia, in the global circulation of influenza.

These regions also showed evidence of sustained transmission and during the pandemic had relatively less restrictions on movement, in part due to lower levels of COVID-19 transmission.

Co-author Professor Moritz Kraemer (Department of Biology and Pandemic Sciences Institute, University of Oxford) says, "Increased genomic surveillance capacity established during the COVID-19 pandemic means that we are finally getting a deeper insight into the global distribution patterns of seasonal flu and other respiratory viruses.

"These novel and large openly accessible datasets provide an opportunity to learn about the intricate relationships of climate, co-circulating viruses, and human behavior."

Further, with this increased global capacity for surveillance of viruses, it might be possible to better monitor seasonal influenza to reduce the risk of vaccine mismatches, help inform more effective interventions, and reduce the burden of seasonal influenza on our health care systems. This is especially relevant as more regions become suitable for year-round circulation of influenza with changes in climatic conditions.

Co-author Professor Hongjie Yu from Fudan University says, "Further efforts should still focus on the continuing surveillance of seasonal influenza viruses and other respiratory pathogens, particularly resource-limited regions. The established surveillance systems for seasonal respiratory pathogens could also play an extremely vital role when the next pandemic emerges in the future."

More information: Zhiyuan Chen et al, COVID-19 pandemic interventions reshaped the global dispersal of seasonal influenza viruses, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adq3003. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq3003

[losergames]

an update! - 6th june '24

oh my god it's june, where does the time go --

i am still active! even though the blog isn't very alive, i'm still around and writing. there's not much to update on as i'm in a pretty slow period at the moment, re-evaluating bits and pieces of the game as i continue to move forward with episode 04. i am 20k in - so about a third of what i'm estimating the total episode word count to be.

i've also recently had a little breakthrough regarding the PC's father in the game! i intentionally left this character vague to give myself room for if i ever wanted to flesh him out or for people to head canon their own ideas about the relationship etc. but, now i actually have a pretty solid idea of where i want to take him! it'll mostly be background plot, something that could be developed later on if i decide to go that way.

this is also crazy late but thank you to everyone that entered my milestone giveaway a few months back! i ended up doing two portraits instead of the one - felt it would be fairer and a nice prize for both people! Maz and Sunny were selected for the two short stories as well. i've got some ideas down and slowly writing them but i do not have a time or date for when they'll be here - sorry!

lastly, i do really appreciate people checking in and seeing if the game is still around; the support means everything, even in these slower periods, and it's really cool to see people still tuning in and finding the game for the first time. thank you all again and have a lovely day ❤️

[lady-raziel]

insane to me that Bethesda purchased the rights to the ENTIRE Fallout IP for only $5.75 million USD in 2007...like honestly, say what you will about the quality of Bethesda games, but it's kind of insane what the series of games they've made have done to the value of the IP. There hasn't been any re-evaluation of how much the Fallout franchise IP is worth in the time since Fallout 3 was made (so it's hard to say how much every game since has boosted the value in concrete numbers), but estimates indicate that because of the Amazon Prime show alone Bethesda made more than $80 MILLION DOLLARS-- and this is just in revenue of people going back to revisit already existing games and stuff. Fallout is more likely than not a billion+ dollar franchise at this point, and this is even if they don't make another full game for years!

Like that's a nuts return on investment. Kinda explains why they are in no rush to make a new game or why it might not even matter if the next game is "good." They've already made bank.

[cl34rb3ll]

james somerton apology video is so interesting to me

-he said he didn’t mean for the misinfo to end up on the channel? like oops? i said a blatant lie! my bad idk how that happened

-thanking hbomber for setting up the fund for “those who were wronged” (james somerton, deleted apology video) i know this is nitpicky but his language keeps shifting the blame from himself. he won’t say “i didn’t credit them” or “i wronged them” like james. they didn’t just HAPPEN to have their work stolen. the universe didn’t intervene and force their work uncredited into your videos YOU stole from them YOU wronged them.

-“i’m not trying to make this a sob story” (james somerton, deleted apology video) then bringing up the bad things happening to him. like. i don’t feel bad that your friends left you for being a thief profiting off the work you stole from queer people. i also just. don’t care. like, i really do hope that he gets help for his mental health. i hope he gets better and he goes to a class on MLA or something. i really do not want him to die. but thats not what this is about. this is about the people he hurt, not the fact that the consequences of his own actions have impacted his mental health.

-refusing to give actual numbers to his income. just saying that people were over estimating. normally peoples income is none of my business but he was profiting off stolen work and is substantial evidence to lead people to believe he was lying about his financial situation to get money from fans.

-there were plenty [of videos] that didn’t have any uncredited stuff in them” (james somerton, deleted apology video) i’m starting to think james didn’t watch the video😨

-side note i don’t understand how this man could go to university and not understand proper citation???

-him saying that him hating women just isn’t true??? then why did he say all that shit??? like bro? you can just admit that you were misogynistic. you can say that. you can say “i was misogynistic, i said misogynistic things, i didn’t understand that i was wrong but i am trying to be better and re-evaluate my views” dude, i’m female (ftm tho, he/him only!) and i still have to occasionally catch myself when i think something misogynistic, despite literally being a victim of misogyny. just be better, don’t pretend you were never wrong. also him saying that he doesn’t think those things, that they were just writing videos too fast? misogyny doesn’t just End Up in your videos because you wrote too fast?? it has to come from somewhere?

-he says that he never wrote misinformation but he also says he isn’t trying to throw nick under the bus, that him and nick are 50/50 partners? which is it?

[butchsophiewalten]

FindJackWalten update and More! 1/13/24

Some of you may be familiar with the twitter thread Martin made a few days ago, talking mostly about stress and burnout and how he was planning to take some days away to relax, but that he was starting to feel like his current approach to the series was unsustainable and that he was probably going to have to re-evaluate things.

Cue last light! Or this morning, really, when two FindJackWalten pages updated. First we have the main page:

Findjackwalten.com

This page has updated to, seemingly, just show the title of The Walten Files: 4? (Or, if your screen brightness is configured specifically, a little bit more...)

This is really all a single image, which appears like This if i copy/paste it from the website:

But if taken into a photo editing program and color-adjusted appears like this:

Hi Bon! And the titles of... the next three Walten Files episodes?

We get a better understanding of this when we take a look at Findjackwalten.com/name-me:

The first short part of this page is about the same, except the top text has changed to read "THE WALTEN FILES SEASON ONE (2020-2024)". Then the first three episodes are listed as they were, and then we see the new stuff

The three new episodes we'd seen before, subtitled as "CyberFun Tech's Collection"? It seems to me like The Walten Files 4 has been split up between three smaller, more manageably-sized videos. Considering TWF4 was estimated to be about an hour and 20 minutes long, I'm envisioning these new episodes to be within the 20-30 minute range, much more like TWF2 was.

Also importantly, it looks like the end of TWF4, now TWF6, is going to be the Season 1 Finale. This leaves the numbers the same, but the actual plot is different. Originally Season 1 was going to have a two-part finale revisiting Sophie and Jenny's narrative where we left off in BunnyFarm.

Speaking of, if you highlight all the text on the page, (ctrl+A is a help,) something new appears:

That all said, it looks like these next 3 episodes are all slated to release sometime in February? Which is exciting.

We also have some new tweets from Martin:

As well as some replies he left on some other people's tweets that give a little more context and explanation for everything:

I'm like, ridiculously excited, honestly? I think this was a really good decision for him to make. Pivoting to smaller episodes rather than really big theatrical ones is a really good move for him, I think. I also think this is going to be better for a lot of fans who were starting to feel like the ever-increasing scope and standard of the series was starting to feel kind of... cumbersome? I've seen more than a few people worried than an almost feature-length episode was going to feel really overwhelming.

So yeah. I think this was a good decision both to make The Walten Files more accessible for new and returning fans and to make it less of an incredible burden on its creator. And that's just a win-win to me. I'm so pleased.

[voidami]

The Great leap forward

The Great Leap Forward (GLF) and the associated famine in China from 1959-1961 have often been subjected to significant myth-making, much of which exaggerates the death tolls and distorts the causes and outcomes. Commonly, figures as high as 30 to 45 million are cited, largely based on estimates from Western demographers like Judith Banister and Frank Dikötter. However, deeper analysis and more recent scholarship—particularly the work of mathematician Sun Jingxian—suggest that these numbers are highly inflated and do not account for various factors that contribute to a more realistic understanding of the famine.

Re-Evaluating Death Toll Figures

The initial myth that "tens of millions" died during the GLF has been largely debunked through more careful statistical and historical analysis. According to Sun Jingxian, the estimated death toll from the famine was around 3.66 million deaths, which includes deaths from various causes, not just starvation. This number is 8% of the 45 million figure posited by Dikötter, and 12% of Banister's estimate of 30 million. Sun’s work shows that deaths during the famine were not caused solely by starvation but included other "unnatural deaths," such as deaths from diseases exacerbated by malnutrition. This reevaluation places the famine in a context comparable to other major historical famines in China, which also had multifaceted causes rooted in poverty and ecological challenges.

A key point in Sun’s work is the differentiation between year-end registered household population and total population. If a similar methodology were applied to the U.S. during the Great Depression, it could lead to vastly inflated death toll estimates, anywhere from 67 to 170 million deaths, a number that is patently absurd. This comparison highlights the dangers of relying on simplistic population metrics without understanding the nuances of registration systems and migration patterns.

Natural Disasters and Systemic Factors

The famine was exacerbated by severe natural disasters. Droughts, floods, and other ecological crises significantly reduced grain production during the period. Claims that systemic factors like the public canteen system or the planned economy were to blame for the famine are largely based on misconceptions. For example, the public canteen system is often portrayed as a "Tragedy of the Commons" scenario, where people supposedly over-consumed resources, leading to shortages. However, this system was not widely implemented across China, and even where it was, only 22% of canteens offered unrestricted supply. Most canteens only provided extra grain for laborers during harvest seasons, making it an unlikely culprit for mass famine.

Similarly, the notion that the planned economy was responsible for the famine ignores the fact that the planned economy had been in place long before and continued after the famine without leading to similar crises. The city-oriented grain supply system is another factor often cited, with claims that urban areas drained grain resources from rural farmers. While there was some truth to this, it overlooks the reselling of grain to rural areas during the famine, which mitigated the impact of urban preferences to some degree.

Historical Context of Chinese Famines

China has a long history of recurring famines, particularly under imperial rule and during the early republican period. For centuries, China’s agrarian society was vulnerable to natural disasters, ineffective governance, and foreign exploitation, leading to regular, catastrophic famines. For example:

The Great North China Famine (1876–1879) killed an estimated 9-13 million people.

The 1907 Famine resulted in approximately 24 million deaths.

In the early 20th century, the 1928-1931 famine caused 3-6 million deaths, while the 1936-1937 famine claimed another 5 million lives.

Annual death tolls from famine ranged between 2-8 million during turbulent periods like the Warlord Era and the Sino-Japanese War, illustrating the chronic nature of famine in China prior to Mao’s leadership. It is crucial to note that the famine during the GLF was the last major famine in Chinese history, marking a significant shift from previous eras where famines were a persistent, almost annual occurrence.

Human and Political Factors

Mao Zedong is often held responsible for the failures of the GLF, but the reality is more complex. While Mao did push for rapid industrialization and agricultural transformation, many key decisions during the famine were made collectively by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCCPC). By the time the famine peaked, Mao had already retired to a secondary position, leaving leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to oversee much of the national response. Moreover, local cadres were often reluctant to report real conditions due to the political atmosphere, further delaying disaster relief efforts.

The Sino-Soviet split also played a role, as the deterioration in Sino-Soviet relations curtailed grain imports and exacerbated the famine. Still, the Chinese government took various actions to mitigate the disaster, including grain imports, agricultural policy adjustments, and efforts to inform the public of the situation and acknowledge mistakes. While not everything worked as planned, these measures undoubtedly reduced the scale of the disaster.

Criticism of Exaggerated Narratives

Many narratives today selectively present facts about the famine, often exaggerating its scale to make ideological arguments against socialism and the Chinese Communist Party (CPC). These narratives aim to invalidate the first 30 years of the PRC and undermine the CPC’s achievements in nation-building. Comparisons between death rates in India and China during the famine are telling: in 1960, at the height of the famine, China's death rate was 2.543%, nearly identical to India's rate of 2.4%—yet only China's rate is deemed problematic in Western critiques.

Sun Jingxian's research challenges the widely held assumption that the GLF was an unmitigated disaster caused by ideological fervor. Instead, he presents a more balanced view, acknowledging that the famine was a tragic event, but one that was not unprecedented in China's history and was largely mitigated through the CPC’s efforts.

A common myth surrounding the Great Leap Forward is that the Four Pests Campaign, particularly the killing of sparrows, led to crop failures by causing a surge in insect populations, especially locusts. However, this claim is largely exaggerated.

While sparrows were targeted for eating grain seeds, they also consumed insects, and their eradication may have had some ecological impact. However, sparrows were not the primary predator of locusts, and other natural factors, such as floods and droughts, had a far greater effect on crop failures during the GLF.

Moreover, the Chinese government quickly adjusted its approach, replacing sparrows with bed bugs on the pest list by 1960. The main causes of the famine were natural disasters, bureaucratic mismanagement, and external factors like the Sino-Soviet Split, not the sparrow policy. This myth has been overstated in an attempt to discredit Mao’s policies and oversimplify the famine’s complex causes.

The Great Leap Forward famine was a tragic event, but it must be understood in the broader context of Chinese history and the global struggles of agrarian societies transitioning to modernity. The death toll, while significant, has been exaggerated in Western accounts, and many of the purported causes of the famine are based on ideological hostility rather than material analysis.

By considering the natural disasters, bureaucratic failings, and political climate that contributed to the famine, we can arrive at a more accurate picture, one that situates the GLF within a long history of famines in China. Moreover, the measures taken by the Chinese government, while not perfect, helped to prevent future famines, making the 1959-1961 famine the last major famine in China’s history—an achievement that should not be overlooked.

References/sources:

Some links may be omitted due to Tumblr limits but available here: https://voidami.wordpress.com/2024/09/13/the-great-leap-forward/

"The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Historical Catastrophe" by Liu Renwen - Provides a detailed analysis of the GLF and addresses various myths surrounding it.

"Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962" by Frank Dikötter - Examines the famine in detail, including the impact of policies and natural disasters.

"The Great Leap Forward and the Chinese Famine of 1959-1961" by Sun Jingxian - Offers a critical re-evaluation of the death toll and causes of the famine.

"Famine in China: 1959-1961" by Xue Muqiao - Discusses the impact of various policies and natural factors on the famine.

Specific Topics

"The Four Pests Campaign" - An overview of the campaign’s objectives and outcomes. Available in Historical Studies journals.

"Ecological Consequences of the Great Leap Forward: An Evaluation of the Four Pests Campaign" by Hao Yufan - Analyzes the ecological impact of the campaign, including the sparrow policy.

"The Environmental Impact of the Great Leap Forward: A Critical Review" by Li Xiaohua - Discusses the broader environmental impacts of the GLF, including pest control measures.

"Pests, Plagues, and Policy: The Great Leap Forward and Its Ecological Consequences" by Zhao Yao - Examines the myths and realities surrounding pest control during the GLF.

Famine and Death Toll

"China’s Great Leap: The Leap into the Future" by Kong Yiji - Provides statistical analysis of the famine's impact and death toll.

"The Death Toll of the Great Leap Forward: Reassessing Historical Data" by Wang Qing - Re-evaluates historical death toll estimates and their accuracy.

"Famines in China: Historical Perspectives and Modern Understandings" - Analyzes various famines in China’s history, including the GLF.

Additional Resources

Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine - Extensive response to claims around the Great Leap Forward and the associated famine.

Sun Jingxian and the Myth of Mao’s Genocide - Summary of Sun Jingxian’s paper and the debate on the famine's death toll.

Joseph Ball, The Mao Killed Millions Myth: The Last Word?

[felassan]

In this video - “The First Info is the BEST Info! - Anchor Bias” - Mark Darrah talks about anchor bias (over valuing the first piece of information you have on a topic) in the games industry.

he thinks it's very important for game teams to try to get ahead of their sales projections within larger publishing organizations because of this phenomenon. as an example, he relates that for pretty much the entirety of the development cycle of Dragon Age: Inquisition, he was fighting against a very low sales projection set by the sales team because of their anchor bias. the sales team had apparently decided (in part based on the sales of DAII, and using this as a starting point, even though DA:I is a very different game to DAII) that DA:I wasn't going to sell very well, and was going to sell around 2-3 million copies. this projected number never really changed significantly, regardless of whatever additional information was provided to the sales team. any changes to the estimate were incremental improvements only, as opposed to actual re-evaluations of the projection from the ground up. DA:I ended up selling over 10 million copies.

in another example of this from within the EA organization, he relates that during the development of Anthem, there were originally planned to be 5 different Javelin suit types (4 shipped). the fifth was a large, Colossus-type size of suit that had a 'Paladin' vibe going on. it got cut and the organization as a whole "kind've freaked out about it, even though it didn't exist". at that point in time, only the Ranger actually existed. Mark explains that they freaked out because 5 is more than 4, and because of the reduction in a number from the anchor value of 5. the Anthem team had actually gone through a lot of thinking, work, conversation and iteration over months to realize that the game didn't need 5, that in fact 5 would undermine the individuality of the different Javelins, and that with 4 the suits could be made better and more distinct. but the people who were hearing that 5 had gone to 4 (e.g. an executive in a 45 mins long meeting where they were being shown the whole project) hadn't gone through that process themselves.

[source and full video watch link]

[thesupreme316]

Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side? EP. 6

Summary: After meeting with Triple H, Y/N starts to evaluate her career and where to go next. So what happens when she meets with one of WWE's biggest competitors?

Word Count: 2.1K

Warnings: None I think, isn't proofread tbh

Notes: I FINALLY GOT INSPO AND TIME SO HERE IT IS

Links to other parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

August 31st

��Ms. Y/L/N, it is a pleasure to meet you.”

You smiled as you sat down at the table, across from the other person. “Likewise. I’m happy to have this opportunity.”

“I know you and I am just happy to be in a room with such a legend in the making.”

“Mr. Kahn, I’m sure you are surrounded by legends in the making every day.”

“Well, yes to a certain extent; but none of them have the charisma and charm that you possess. And please call me Tony.”

Could you complain about life right now?

HELL NO

You had a lot to be grateful for like this meeting with Tony Kahn.

Everything was going great after the meeting with Paul. You started to feel like your old self again; you made your first public appearance at a fashion show, you started becoming an ambassador for multiple brand deals, you went viral for sitting next to Rihanna and then became the head ambassador for Fenty, and you were a single pringle.

But most importantly, you began to wrestle and train more. Almost every day, you got in the ring and you saw vast improvements even from the last time you stepped in the ring (which was two months ago). And because you were re-entering the public’s eye, your career and where you would end up as people noticed your contract was almost up at WWE (and the fact they haven’t seen you since July). Many companies have been offering you different amounts for you to sign to them.

Now you were here….at AEW…WWE’s biggest competitor since WCW….just “looking around.”

“Well, Tony, I really do appreciate this hospitality. It just softens the blow when it comes down to business.” You joked, making him chuckle.

“Of course. Well, I would say that we are just like everything you’re used to, but we both know that’s a lie.”

“How would you say that you’re different?”

“A big example is creative freedom; we barely use scripts, it’s just a basis and talent says what they want. Gimmicks, ring style, and creative ideas are mostly from the locker room and then are tweaked to make sure it’s okay with our sponsors. I also would say we have a great checks-and-balances system here as well.” You nodded your head as that was your main concern as you didn’t wanna throw out the things that brought you to your status now.

Since hearing that, your heart rate has decreased. You wanted to be yourself and not have to worry about lessening yourself to make others look good. “But I’m curious, since you’re a hot topic and agent, how much have you been getting offered?”

You discussed the amounts that you have been offered from Impact, AAA, NJPW, and Shimmer. Then, you told him about the arrangement that WWE (specifically Hunter) presented to you. Tony’s eyes went wide as he spoke up again, “That is really a good deal. I think William Regal received the same offer. It seems that they only offer that to those they must really like.” You giggled as he continued, “If you want, we can extend the talk to next week so I can give you a proper figure estimate. Until then, we can roam around backstage and meet the talent.”

“That would be great!”

For the next hour, Tony dragged you around backstage, introducing you to many talents that you haven’t had the pleasure of stepping in the ring with yet. You saw some old faces of people you’ve met and were friends with. Some were happy to see you, others not so much. Either way, you caused a wave backstage, you could even feel the tension to a certain extent. Eventually, Tony allowed you to roam by yourself as he attended to some business, which is how you started hanging out with Daniel (who was surprised) yet again.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me that you were coming here,” Daniel said playfully hitting your shoulder.

“Surprise? I didn’t want you to spoil anything, cause you know, you have a big mouth.” You said making him do a fake offended face. It was nice joking with him, it kind of helped relieve you of the stress and tension that you were feeling.

“How dare you?” He said laughing, he gave you a hug. You breathed in his cologne as he breathed in your perfume, both being delighted in the scents. You felt great being in familiar arms, especially of a man who you keep close to your heart. The same could be said for Daniel, he was legitimately grateful and glad to see you, as he normally is. “But I am happy you’re here. Now we can-“

“Y/N!” A voice from behind you cut him off. You broke away from the hug and turned around to see a fluffy-haired Hook with a wide smile walking up. Squealing you ran up to him and hugged him, excited to see him. “I heard that you were around, had to see it to believe it.” He said pulling away from you, allowing his hand to fall at your waist.

“Yeah, I’ve been sitting here catching up with Danny.” You smiled while motioning towards him. Daniel’s face became stoned real quick when Hook entered his view. His eyes traveled and landed on the spot where Hook’s hand was sitting on your waist. It bothered him. It bothered him that you are allowing him to touch you, let alone allowed your attention to go towards him. Daniel smacked his teeth in annoyance as Hook smirked.

“Garcia,” Hook greeted.

“Hook.” He responded.

Hook was loving this; he loved how jealous Daniel was getting and knowing he can’t do a damn thing about it as long as you were here. He loved that he was touching you like this and not him, no matter if it was a small gesture. “How are you, man?”

Daniel shrugged, not allowing his face to fall. “Good. How are you feeling?”

“Comfortable.”

“A little too comfortable,” Daniel said under his breath as Hook’s smirk widened. If anything, Hook tightened his grip around you before moving his hand further down to your hip. Daniel didn’t like that either, and he didn't like how you weren't doing anything about it, as if you were oblivious to everything. He cleared his throat, "So, how do you feel about your big match coming up?"

Hook shrugged and briefly flicked his eyes to you, "Nothing I can't handle."

"To be honest, I think it might be too much for you."

Your eyes widened, you didn't know what was going on but you didn't like the direction it was heading in. Hook squinted at Daniel, making his hand drop from your body completely. "What do you mean?"

"I just think you're biting off more than you can chew. Considering that you are just a rookie after all. Some prizes are just too big for you to win," Garcia said smirking as Hook was now stone-faced.

"Well then Garcia, what about your match?"

"Fine, I'm confident that I'm gonna win and everything that comes with it."

Hook chuckled, "Okay, but what if it's past your time? That you don't even have a chance anymore? Or that the opportunity for you has passed you by." He stepped closer to Daniel, who also stepped forward to the point that they were almost nose-to-nose.

"I still got my shot. I haven't failed-"

"Yet. That is until someone else better comes into play."

The tension in the air was becoming so thick that you couldn't even cut it….without a chainsaw. You couldn't even grab either of their attention as they were silently challenging each other. As the staring contest started between the two men, a stagehand came up to Daniel to let him know his segment was starting. Daniel, without any words, gave you a hug and left to go to the stage.

"What was that about?" You asked as Hook looked at Daniel's figure walking away.

"Don't worry your pretty head about it." Hook said, "Everything's gonna be okay."

September 7th

Today was a great Wednesday…a lot more fun and stress-free in comparison to last Wednesday. That's also probably because you were at a party. Not just any party, but Daniel's celebratory party for winning the ROH Pure Championship. It's been a long day for you as you were stuck in meetings all day, watched Dynamite backstage (which caused an uproar online), explored the locker room, and built and re-established bonds. You were tired, but you put that aside for Daniel because he deserves it; the title, the happiness, and everything else that came with it as he said.

But you still needed to try to get all your ducks in a row for the next major stage in your life. So you were, in the bathroom, on the phone with Mercedes and Trinity, catching them up on everything for the first time in a while.

"Well, this has been a very eventful month for you so far." Mercedes said, "But, hey, you deserve it. You're getting back on your feet and back out in society."

"You say that as if I've been isolated from society." You pouted.

"You basically have been, girl!" Trinity exclaimed, making you roll your eyes. "Now, go enjoy yourself at the party. You're supposed to be having a good time and here you are talking about work and stress. There will be a time for all that later."

Mercedes agreed, "Girl, go! I'm sure that Garcia would like to see you, especially with how you look right now." You were dressed in the best dress you could find with heels that hurt your feet so much.

You all exchanged goodbyes before hanging up. After fixing your makeup, you exited the bathroom to find your best friend on the floor like there was no tomorrow. His eyes lit up even more as he made eye contact with you. Daniel made his way to you, title around his waist and all. "Y/N! I'm so happy to see you! I thought I would have to cancel if I didn't see you!" Daniel said, having his words run together

"First Danny, congrats champ! Second, are you drunk?"

"Nope! Just buzzed, I think." He slurred and laughed, making you laugh. Daniel was so cute when before leaning down. "Do you wanna dance? It's boring without you on the floor."

Laughing, you took Daniel's hand as he lead you to the dance floor. The two of you danced to many songs, twirling and spinning around to the point Daniel gave Isiah his title belt to put away in VIP. You were having a great time, singing at the top of your lungs with him like old times, taking shots, taking various pictures and videos throughout the hour, and not once did you feel stiff or feel any tension. Soon the songs started to slow down, making the dance floor scarce. Daniel and you were still dancing as if no one was watching, but in the meanwhile, gradually getting closer to each other.

You wrapped your arms around his neck as his arms were wrapped around your waist, moving along to the beat. You were trying to look anywhere except for Daniel's eyes, which were glued on you. Soon, his hand lifted to your face, gently lifting your face up to him. As soon as you made eye contact, you could have sworn either Cupid shot you (and or Daniel) in the ass or you were drinking too much cause the way he was looking at you made you feel like you shrunk two sizes. Blushing, you were drawn into his beautiful brown eyes. You saw the same glint in his eyes that you saw when you first reunited. Despite the club having different colored lights everywhere, you could make out the emotions more clearly than ever before; admiration and lust.

As you looked into his eyes, you could feel those same feelings coming to the surface, or maybe it was the liquor coming to your mind. Apparently, that was clear to Daniel as well. "You are so damn gorgeous," Daniel whispered while looking back and forth between your eyes and lips.

"Danny, you're drunk." You said, trying to excuse his words and make the moment less

"Maybe, but that doesn't mean I don't know a beautiful woman when I see one. One especially that makes me feel…I don't know how to describe it but just know that I love how you make me feel nonetheless." Daniel finished as he pressed a kiss to your forehead.

"And hopefully soon, you'll feel it too." He muttered in your hair.

Taglist: @triscillal @wwenhlimagines @hooks-martin @hookerforhook @sheinthatfandom @zatarias-pandora @jess95laugh 

[datascience-from-the-trenches]

On March 14th, 2023, OpenAI launched GPT-4, said to be the latest milestone in the company’s effort in scaling up deep learning. As part of its launch, OpenAI revealed details regarding the model’s “human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks”. Perhaps none of these capabilities was as widely publicized as GPT-4’s performance on the Uniform Bar Examination, with OpenAI prominently displaying on various pages of its website and technical report that GPT-4 scored in or around the “90th percentile,” or “the top 10% of test-takers”.

This paper begins by investigating the methodological challenges in documenting and verifying the 90th-percentile claim, presenting four sets of findings that indicate that OpenAI’s estimates of GPT-4’s UBE percentile are overinflated.

Summary of results:

The 90% percentile estimates are heavily skewed towards repeat test-takers who failed the July administration and score significantly lower than the general test-taking population.

data from a recent July administration of the same exam suggests GPT-4’s overall UBE percentile was below the 69th percentile, and 48th percentile on essays.

GPT-4’s performance against first-time test takers is estimated to be 62nd percentile, including 42nd percentile on essays.

when examining only those who passed the exam (i.e. licensed or license-pending attorneys), GPT-4’s performance is estimated to drop to 48th percentile overall, and 15th percentile on essays.

[maximura]

Ad Astra: The Theory Of Relativity | An Interstellar Ateez Story | Chapter 9

Previous chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight

Words: 6k. Warnings: Science and swearing. You can also read it on A03.

****

Yeosang clicks on his seventh email this morning. There are at least ten more unread.

Sighing, he adjusts his glasses and turns back to the laptop screen to finish the notes for tomorrow’s meeting. 

****

“Thank you for attending today’s meeting. Please be seated and keep all questions until the end.

I am here inform you of the changes to the Lazarus Mission. 

I have been selected to oversee the Mission in a logistical and directorial capacity. Unfortunately the head of our astrophysics department, Professor Park, has suffered a medical condition and will not be able to attend in person. I have already spoken with him and will continue to do so throughout the duration of this mission.

Fortunately, the majority of the groundwork has been completed for the Mission. The Lazarus IV spacecraft build is on schedule. It will be formally named at a later date. 

I will now move on to the new updates regarding the flight crew.

Dr. Park Seonghwa has been reinstated as an active member of the mission and will now also serve on the flight crew as its leading astrophysicist and interstellar biologist if he successfully completes his aerospace revision training again. He will also be expected to re-code both the CASSI and LEO robotic systems to ensure they are flight ready. The CyberSynk program will be reactivated. Should he fail his physical evaluation, he will be expected to serve on ground control throughout the mission as my co-director, and a new astrophysicist will be appointed to fly in his place. 

Mr. Kim Hongjoong has been removed from his flight simulation training position. He will pilot Lazarus IV, provided he also successfully completes his aerospace revision. Should he fail his physical evaluation, Commander Song will pilot the Lazarus IV. 

After much consideration, Professor Park and the Board have agreed on the final two flight crew members: 

Dr. Jeon Wonwoo from the stellar research and biotech division, has been a long serving astrophysicists with extensive experience and knowledge, working alongside Professor Park for many years. He will be required for the first and second stages of the Mission, docking at the ARTEMIS space station, where he will remain as back up support between the stage three crew and Earth. He has already successfully completely the preliminary aerospace training. 

The final member of the Mission is Doctor Choi Hyunjae, our long serving senior interstellar engineer and CyberSynk expert. He will dock at the ARTEMIS space station as additional support and has also already completed his aerospace training. He will assist Doctor Park Seonghwa with the CAASI and LEO robotic systems.

Failure to complete any of these components will lead to the grounding, delay or possible decommissioning of the Lazarus Mission. 

Estimate Launch Date is 8 months, pending unforeseen circumstances.

Commander Choi Seungcheol will take over all flight simulation and pilot training henceforth. He will select his second in command from the approved NASA shortlist. Both Level 1 and Level 2 trainees are expected to complete all their training in the next two years and will be assigned as active pilots if they are successful. 

Professor Park and his team continue to make progress towards solving the Time-Relativity Equation but it is awaiting vital data input that can only be gathered on the Lazarus Mission. 

That concludes my briefing update today.

Any questions?” 

****

Seonghwa dry wretches into the nearest trash bin.

The underwater simulation training was more rigorous and disorientating than he remembers. He can withstand extreme mental pressure but physical hydrostatic pressure is something else entirely. It’s his own damm fault that he let his training lapse for nearly a year. 

But physics equations and trying to solve relativity were desk based pursuits. He couldn't be a theoretical and practical physicist at the same time. It was one or the other. He hadn’t really planned on NASA asking him to do both but perhaps there was a small part of him that always expected it.  

As Seonghwa sits in the empty change room, drowning in defeat and willing the vertigo to stop, a sense of deja vu crashes down on him like a powerful wave from times past. 

Two years ago, the biologists had anxiously announced that Earth would reach her tipping point in the next ten years. After that, their predictions were too grim to verbalise: the nitrogen content in the soil would become toxic to all earthly crops. The oxygen in the air would drop to unbreathable levels. The dust in the atmosphere would render the filtration systems ineffective. 

Technology was no match for the inevitable power of nature. 

Seonghwa had just stepped off the flight simulator when they held a press conference for the announcement. It had knocked the wind out of him and he sat, almost in the same spot in the change room, numb and overwhelmed. The weight of responsibility bearing heavily down on his shoulders. 

Despite support from his father and the team, it had felt isolating and lonely. He was the new interstellar biologist, this is what he was born to do. Earth's biologists were doing all they can, now it was his turn.

Seonghwa sits in his vertigo, his panic, his anxiety, again.

But this time, he’s not alone.  

“Hey, you okay?”

Footsteps, lead by dog themed slides, which NASA wouldn’t have approved, followed by a surprisingly gentle voice and an even more surprisingly calming presence. 

Kim Hongjoong. 

Completely unaffected by the demanding training they had just done. 

There’s a cup of ice, a box of pills, and a bottle of water set down on the bench. 

Seonghwa’s reflex emotion is to refuse them, deny he has a problem, and battle through the rest of the training with his head and neck screaming for mercy. He's all but rehearsed the speech about how he's just fine and the re-training won't be a problem at all; he's done it before, he'll do it again. 

But Hongjoong doesn’t ask, he doesn't say much at all, just sits down a small distance away, and drinks his own bottle of water. 

“How long has it been?”

It’s not information Seonghwa wants to give. He doesn’t want to give anything at all. His struggles are his own. But if his father is right, if the man sitting next to him is truly the best pilot they have, it’s his responsibility to ensure the mission’s success. 

“Nearly a year.”

“First week will be hell. Sorry you’ll need to acclimatise again. You can have my physiotherapy slots if you want.”

Seonghwa is speechless for a moment. 

“What about you?”

Hongjoong shakes his head, a movement that has Seonghwa wincing. 

“No, I don’t need them. I’ve been acclimatised for awhile now. The kids are always dragging me into the simulator to prove myself, whether I like it not. Seungcheol doesn’t stop them and neither does your father. But now I get why.”

There’s a sad laugh to punctuate the answer, one that Seonghwa can interpret well; it’s the sound of bittersweet resignation and mourning. 

“This isn’t what you expected to happen?”

“Yes and No.” Hongjoong says, before pausing and shifting uncomfortably in his spot. 

So they’ve both been caught out somehow. Seonghwa feels a sort of kinship then, just for a moment. 

“Take the pills, we’ve got flight training next. It’s going to be a nightmare on your neck.”

With that, Hongjoong stands and walks out the change room, but his presence lingers behind and Seonghwa finds himself trying to hold onto it. 

The flight training is only marginally easier than the underwater work but despite his best efforts and diligent physiotherapy, it strains Seonghwa’s neck painfully in every direction. 

And he makes sure to complain about it when he visits his father at the hospital. 

“It took you five days to acclimatise back then, Seonghwa. You’re an older man now, give your body some grace and patience.” 

“I’m only a year older.” 

“Perhaps in old-Earth time.” The Professor says. “But you know this is new-Earth time now. We’re physiologically ageing faster.”

Even in his fragile physical state, Professor Park’s mind remains active as ever. The mechanical failures of his muscles and bones were no match for his tenacious brain. 

“How is Hongjoong performing?”

It’s a casual question but Seonghwa can’t help rolling his eyes. 

“He’s absolutely fine. But you knew he would be.”

The Professor risks a chuckle and pays the price when it’s followed by a coughing fit. 

Seonghwa pours his father a glass of water and watches the old man drink it slowly and cautiously, wondering quietly how long they’ll have clean water for. There’s already dust settling it all the pipes. 

“I do believe it’s fate. Destiny, one could say.”

“What are you talking about dad?”

“Isn’t it interesting that Kim Hongjoong should come into your life-“

“-our life.” Seonghwa corrects. 

“-our life….like this?” The Professor says with a wry smile. “Commander Song is a technically brilliant pilot of course but just between you and me, he doesn’t have a creative bone in him. We need a pioneer. Someone who thinks outside the box and will make those difficult decisions because he simply must.”

“So we needed a criminal?”

“He's hardly a criminal. It was a rubbish sentencing.” Professor Park dismisses with a wave of his tremulous hand. “Merely an ego driven punitive measure to appease the heads of NASA.”

“He crashed a hundred-million dollar ship.” Seonghwa points out flatly.

“Ahh, but the flight data we gained is why we have been able to build the Lazarus IV differently. You know this. His failure will be our success. It’s data one can only obtain through trial and error. Come on Seonghwa, you know one can’t make a omelette-“

“-without breaking a few eggs.” Seonghwa finishes with a sigh. 

“You never did like rule breakers. Just like your mother but even she had her own rebellious streak. And of course, your old man seemingly provides you with endless stress and frustration.”

Seonghwa’s heart falters a little in his chest. The statement, while being factually true, articulated out loud in this quiet hospital room, stabs at Seonghwa with guilt and remorse. 

Sensing his son’s melancholy, Professor Park reaches over to pat the tightly clenched hands. 

“Now now, there’s no need to dwell on it like that. I have been selfishly blessed with a good long life of rebellion. It’s now your turn and San’s. Tell me about his training. Is he behaving himself?"

Seonghwa blinks back the tears, grateful for the topic change.

“Of course he is.”

“Oh what a pity. I had thought we might’ve raised another rebel.”

Seonghwa snorts out a laugh. “Don’t worry, we have. He’s not scared of NASA at all but for some reason, he lets Seungcheol keep him in line. I’m not sure that’s a good thing because he wants to spend every spare waking moment in flight training.”

“Well, Seungcheol is very clever. A fine pilot and even finer teacher, despite his demeanour. He helped train Hongjoong after all.”

“Do we really want Kim Hongjoong 2.0?”

Professor Park chuckles again, less forcibly this time. “You and I both know that we do.”

“Well, if that's the criteria, San is doing spectacularly. Congratulations we have another lunatic in the family.”

“Truly a cause for celebration.”

Seonghwa cracks a smile at that. 

“Has he made any friends yet?”

“Well, he hates his training peers less now. It's a start. He seems to get along with Hongjoong’s brothers. Wooyoung in particular.”

“Wooyoung? Who builds the robots? Of course, it makes sense.”

“What does?”

“Oh nothing nothing.” The Old Professor says vaguely. “Now tell me, have you made any friends?”

Seonghwa quirks an eyebrow. “Me? Friends? What for? I’m busy.”

“Everybody needs friends. Have you found any? And Jeon Wonwoo doesn’t count. Poor Yeosang is your glorified babysitter so he doesn’t count either.”

“In that case….no.”

“Not even Hongjoong?”

“We’re work colleagues.”

“Of course, of course.” Professor Parks nods with a smile. “It is fate though isn’t it? That he should come into your life like this.”

Seonghwa wonders if his father’s mind is becoming less stable than they thought. 

“Fate isn’t exactly scientific.”

“Can you prove that?” 

“Well…..no.” Seonghwa answers, confused. "It's not a rational phenomenon."

Professor Park sits back against the pillows and looks at his son. "Perhaps the time for rationality is over."

****

There’s a brief break in the second week of training and Seonghwa is grateful for the time off. His neck is stiff and sore, so naturally, he’s spending the training hiatus hunched in front of LEO, coding endless bits of data to get the robot updated and flight ready. 

“You’re muttering to yourself again.” 

Seonghwa looks towards the source of the voice, it’s Wonwoo, standing at the doorway to his lab. 

“It’s nice having conversations with someone on my level.” Seonghwa replies. 

Wonwoo rolls his eyes, making no attempt to hide it. “I thought they told you to rest and rehab your neck. I’m not sure being in a static hunch for the past four hours has been helpful.”

“They also said I had to finish re-programming CAASI and LEO for the mission.”

“It’s almost five, San’s going to be done with his training soon. If you don’t pick him up from the simulators on time, Seungcheol whines about it and I’m not particularly in the mood for a headache today.”

“Why would he whine about it to you? San is his favourite.”

Wonwoo scoffs. “You know Seungcheol doesn’t have favourites.”

“And you know that he definitely does.”

“We’ve done enough today, Seonghwa. Hyunjae and I have nearly completed the preliminary codes for CAASI. You’ve been coding LEO for hours now. Go pick up your brother.”

Hongjoong is already standing at San’s training room window when Seonghwa approaches. There's a worried frown on the pilot's face that brightens when he senses the arrival.

“Oh hey, how’s the neck?”

“It’s fine. How’s he doing?”

“Psychotic as expected.”

San stumbles out of the simulator, recently fixed, and runs a hand through his short black hair. Seungcheol comes into view, shaking his head and hold out a pad with San’s times on it. 

They can’t hear much through the thick glass but San’s exasperated “What the hell!” is loud and clear. The teenager jabs at the times on the pad, no doubt questioning their accuracy, and glares angrily when Seungcheol stands unmoved and shaking his head. 

“He’s too hard on himself.” Hongjoong says, expression settling back into a worried frown. “He’s only sixteen. He’s going to burn himself out at this rate with those bad habits.”

Something ugly and black rises up Seonghwa’s throat, suddenly defensive and offended by the statement. He doesn't know where it comes from. San is fine. He could take care of San just fine, he's been doing it when he was still just a kid himself. Hongjoong barely knows him, barely knows San, barely knows anything about them at all.

“He’s still learning his limits.” Seonghwa says tightly.  

“I know, I didn’t mean it was all bad. I just meant that he’s pushing himself to be something nobody expects him to be yet.”

“It’s what he expects of himself.”

“Does he still talk to the therapist? About managing realistic expectations-“

“Yes he does.” Seonghwa replies shortly as his heart thumps in irritation. He regrets his tone as soon as it comes out of his mouth but it’s too late to take it back. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to….”

“He’s trying his best so you don’t need to worry about him."

“No wait, that’s really not how I meant it." Hongjoong stammers. "I know he's trying his best. I didn't mean he wasn't. He just reminds me of how Seungcheol and I used to be and we weren't exactly well adjusted. I don't want to him ruin his youth with adult expectations."

"Well, as his brother, I don't intend on ruining his youth either."

Seonghwa can't understand where his sudden irritation comes from. Why he should feel like this for someone who just cares about San's well being. He doesn't know what to say so he doesn't say anything at all.

Hongjoong opens his mouth to speak again but the conversation is all but over and the unspoken questions and answers hang heavily between them as they both watch San bound out of the training room with Seungcheol in tow.

“I was out by FOUR seconds Seonghwa! Can you believe it!” San exclaims before turning to Hongjoong. “And I almost beat your record!”

Hongjoong feels the emotional whiplash as he tries to plaster on his most genuine smile. “You did great, San. I’m sure you’ll get that record.”

“Oh I know I'll get it.” San grins, all teeth and dimples. “After that, I’m coming for yours Commander Choi!”

Seungcheol rolls his eyes but there’s no malice in it. “Wow, I feel so threatened."

San cackles proudly but it doesn’t take long for Seungcheol to detect the tension between the two adults. 

“Go submit your report and badge to security and do it properly this time. I don't want them complaining to me about it again.”  

San sighs like he’s heavily put out by the request but he dutifully drags himself down the corridor and out of earshot.

“How’s training?”

Seonghwa is surprised the question is directed at him but then again, he is the least accomplished in aerospace training amongst the Lazarus crew. 

“Acclimatisation is slower than I’d like.” He replies carefully. 

“Vertigo or G-Force?”

“Both.”

"Ah." Seungcheol nods like he understands, which out of the three of them, he truly would. Leaning against the wall now, his eyes flick between the two men in front of him in contemplation. 

“And how’s the team bonding going?”

Hongjoong blushes mildly pink and looks at the carpet.

“Are their specific team exercises?” Seonghwa asks. “Apart from the simulations? They haven't been included in our schedule as far as I can see.”

Hongjoong says nothing, which tells Seungcheol everything.

“So they’re not going well then.” 

“I’m confused what you mean by that.”

The pilot waves away Seonghwa's concerns, which irritates him more than anything. 

“There are no formal exercises on team bonding, Doctor Park. I was referring to the fact that your training won’t be effective or efficient until you learn to fully work as a team. Wonwoo and Hyunjae virtually operate like a two headed monster. Emphasis on the monster part.”

“You've been working on the space station simulations with them?"

Seungcheol nods. “Yeah, they’re doing great. Probably helps they actually like each other though.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Seonghwa asks, feeling defensive again.

“It means that when you’re up there, all you have is your crew so wasting time on bad communication and petty misunderstandings is both unprofessional and immature."

Seonghwa feels a fiery argument on the tip of his tongue but it's abruptly extinguished by San’s re-appearance. 

“Will NASA let me use the Level 2 machine next week? I can do it, I swear.”

Seungcheol clears his throat and shakes his head. "Conquer Level 1 and I'll think about it. Life's not all about scores and records, you know."

“I know. Those scores are ridiculous anyway, nobody can do that with a ancient simulator from 2014! But I bet I could do it when I get into a real ship!”

“Ah, the psychos just keep getting younger don't they? I love it.” Seungcheol chuckles before clapping San on the back and bidding them all goodnight with a very pointed look at the two adults. “Stay out of trouble kids.”

There’s a pause where they all watch Seungcheol walk down the corridor but once he turns out of sight San picks up on the awkward tension between the older brothers immediately.

“So, um, are we going home now?” The teenager asks as he fidgets with the straps on his backpack.

“Yeah, let’s go. Got everything?”

“Yep.” San nods before turning to Hongjoong, who is still standing there trying to figure out what to say. “I’ll see you on the weekend? Wooyoung wants to test out the new robots.”

Seonghwa looks up in confusion. “What?”

“What? I told you about it last night. Wooyoung wants to hang out on Saturday and since it’s our day off, I figure I can go? Right? You said yes. Don’t you remember?”

Seonghwa has no recollection of the conversation at all.

He looks over at Hongjoong, reluctantly making eye contact when he really doesn't want to. 

“It’s fine by me San, you can come over if you want to. Wooyoung didn’t say anything so this is the first I’m hearing about it too.”

San scratches his head. “He didn’t? He said he was going to ask you.”

“Wait a minute.” Seonghwa interjects, confused and out of sorts. “When did you talk to him? How did you talk to him?”

“He built a CB radio- “

“So that was the box he asked me to give you last week?" Hongjoong says quietly, almost to himself.

San nods. “Yeah. We have our own channel. I thought you knew?"

Seonghwa head spins with the new information, maybe Hongjoong was right, maybe he's not watching San as closely as he should. “Let me get this straight: you just talk to each other now? On your own channel? Via a radio he built and neglected to tell either of us?”

“Yes?” San replies sheepishly. “Are we in trouble? It’s not illegal! I checked! He didn’t even know it’d work! Something about the range limits. It was just-“

Seonghwa groans as Hongjoong runs a tired hand through his hair. 

“San, it’s fine. You’re not in trouble. Just tell us these details next time.” Seonghwa says. 

“Okay but don’t yell at Wooyoung okay? It's not his fault, I agreed to try it out, it was just an experiment. We didn’t know it’d work over that big distance.”

Hongjoong shakes his head and waves off the concern. “It’s okay San, he’s not in trouble either. Have a good night and we’ll see you on Saturday.”

"Okay..."

As San trudges off dejectedly, Seonghwa realises the polite thing would be to say something, but he doesn’t know what. 

“Sorry.” Hongjoong starts uncomfortably. “About what I said before. I didn't mean he was a bad kid or you were doing anything wrong by him.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not if it upset you.”

"I'm not upset."

"Well....I'm still sorry."

“I’ll get over it.”

“Seonghwa…”

“Goodnight, Hongjoong.”

In the car, San gives him tentative curious looks. 

“Are you okay? I’m really not in trouble, right?”

Seonghwa sighs again. “No, San. You are not in trouble. Just tell me these things next time."

“I will, I promise.” San replies in relief before sitting forward and leaning right into Seonghwa’s personal space. “Wooyoung is a genius though? Apparently, CB radios are ancient tech and not meant to work over big distances anymore but ours totally does.”

“Yes, it’s very impressive.”

“Oh, hey! you can use it to talk to Hongjoong.”

Seonghwa looks over at the suggestion. “Talk about what?”

“I don’t know,” San shrugs, finally sitting back in this seat. “Work stuff? Me being the coolest and Wooyoung being the smartest."

Seonghwa scoffs. “Coolest? Please. You’re a sixteen year old speed demon and he’s a fourteen year old nerd.”

“He’s turning fifteen soon actually.”

“Is he? When?”

“His birthday is in December. So we have to do something cool for it.”

Seonghwa smiles and nods but as they drive home, he does the maths in his head.  They would still be on Earth in December. They should be. Unless anything changes. But after that….

He looks across at the boy sitting in the passenger seat. San is growing up so fast, it seems like he goes to bed a scrawny teenager and wakes up taller and broader every day. He’s slowly maturing into manhood but his mind is still very much that of a child for the most part. Sixteen is too young to be left alone, again. 

Then there’s Wooyoung, turning fifteen in a few months and staying fifteen when his eldest brother will leave the Earth for a mission that could either last years or indefinitely. They both have Yunho but three teenagers raising each other should not be something asked of them. 

“What does he like?” Seonghwa finally asks, jolting San out of his silence. “Besides robots and machines?”

The question causes a switch to flip, San sits upright, face lighting up as he talks about his new friend. It’s then that Seonghwa realises San might actually have his first real best friend.

And just like, the ugly events of the day fade away like the setting sun in the distance.

****

As promised, Seonghwa drops San off at the farm on Saturday. It's an awkward moment when he sees Hongjoong again but he makes some excuse why he can’t stay and Hongjoong plays along with it.

He was prepared for the civil neutrality but not the disappointment that settles in his stomach.

It becomes a routine of sorts, sometimes twice a week, sometimes three times. Seonghwa never stays and Hongjoong never asks him to.

On the rides home, San fills him in with enthusiastic tales of his adventures. 

Some days, the teenager is covered completely in dirt and dust, other days it’s grease and oil. Each time he greets Seonghwa with a wide bright grin and launches immediately into a recap of his day. 

Seonghwa learns that Yunho has taken over half of Hongjoong’s farm jobs now, having mastered repairing tractors and car engines and now moving onto more advanced machinery like combine harvesters and the grain processors that were found at the local corn mill where he worked the other half of the time. There’s intermittent mention of someone called Mingi. Seonghwa doesn’t remember meeting a Mingi but San talks about him as if he’s known him for years. 

San never hesitates to tell him about Wooyoung’s projects and builds. He updates Seonghwa on SPIKE and how, in just a few weeks, Wooyoung had repurposed a chip from the fallen drone and programmed it to finally move the robot in all four directions; “Like a tank!”

Seonghwa also learns that Hongjoong likes to sleep in but when he isn’t sleeping, he is doing extra flight training with Seungcheol, and when he’s not doing that, he works until the sun sets and sometimes even into the night fixing all the complex machines that Yunho hasn’t mastered yet. Seonghwa wonders when Hongjoong actually sleeps and if they’re ever asleep at the same time. 

San tells him about “the Uncles” from the local Lucky Corn Mill and how they had let him and Wooyoung roast fresh corn-on-the-cob right in the factory furnace, which must have accidentally lead to matching scorch marks on their hands because they were too impatient. San held up the minor burn for Seonghwa to inspect, pointing out, oddly proudly, that it was the shape of a moon crescent. 

And Seognhwa bites down his parental reflex for once, so proud that San has been able to maintain a normal friendship after years of trying. He can’t even muster up any anger to scold him for the injury.

“Two moons? Like in Star Wars?”

“That’s exactly what Wooyoung said.” San had cackled, fingers subconsciously rubbing at the scarred burn. "You're both total nerds."

San’s self preservation skills were, at times, dangerously under developed, but at least it answered a question Seonghwa was terrified to ask: how far would you go to follow your friend? Apparently all the way into a fiery Hell. 

On one particularly Saturday, San isn’t waiting at the front porch as usual. Nobody is there, forcing Seonghwa to get out from his truck and wander out back, where voices could be heard. Not wanting to announce himself yet, he leans against the side of the back porch, watching the scene unfold in front of him. 

San, Wooyoung and Hongjoong are all in the cabin of an old truck.

Hongjoong is patiently pointing out all the levers and buttons. He pauses when San asks a question and snaps half heatedly when Wooyoung does. 

Seonghwa can hear San nodding and saying “Okay”. 

Then the truck growls into life and takes off slowly and jerkily down the open corn field. 

That's when it actually hits him: Hongjoong is teaching San how to drive. A truck this time.

The resentment washes over him. He is San's brother, or the closest thing to it. This is a rite of passage that he should have had a say in. But then, there's three sets of laughter ringing across the corn fields and as quickly as it came, the resentment burns itself out, leaving Seonghwa more confused than ever. 

“He begged Hongjoong to teach him.”

Seonghwa yelps in surprise by the sudden sound and appearance of Yunho, who has the decency to back away apologetically. 

“Sorry, I’m sorry! I thought you heard me coming!”

“It’s fine, it’s fine.” Seonghwa replies, hand at his chest and willing his heart to slow down. “What were you saying?”

“San has been begging Hongjoong to teach him how to drive because he didn’t want to wreck your truck.”

“But he’s fine wrecking yours?”

“I guess so? He knows we can fix it?” Yunho shrugs with a lopsided smile that is so very much like his older brother's. "Plus, your truck is a whole lot nicer than ours."

Seonghwa looks back at the field, the truck is turning around now, and its occupants can see him. Wooyoung is the first to wave, body half out the window as he calls out across the field. 

San waves next, proud and confident but looking every bit like a regular little kid for a moment.  

Hongjoong doesn't wave but regards Seonghwa quietly with a guarded expression. 

“You’re not mad are you?” Yunho asks. “Hongjoong did try to talk him out of it but then Wooyoung heard them and you know what he’s like.”

“I’m....not mad. It’s nice to see him have friends.”

Yunho leans against the porch and scoffs loudly. “Nice? More like annoying actually. All they can talk about is each other. It's embarrassing."

It makes Seonghwa smile to himself. “So they get along well?”

“Like a literal house on fire.” Yunho nods gravely. “I’m not kidding, they tried welding a new robot without asking Hongjoong first and set fire to our basement.”

Seonghwa looks across at Yunho with a horrified expression. 

“We put it out! It’s fine! No big deal. I mean, Hongjoong’s kind of used to fires but not usually when there's visitors around.”

“Is that how they got the matching burns? It wasn’t at the corn mill in front of the furnace?”

“Our uncles would never let that happen.” Yunho says. “Hongjoong went nuts when he found out, I’ve never seen him that mad. He thought you were gonna murder him, but judging from the fact that San keeps turning up here, I’m assuming you’re either really cool with it or you didn’t know… and now I’ve just told you, oh shit, you didn’t know did you? Oh shit, please don’t be mad.”

Seonghwa can hear himself think. Last year's Seonghwa would’ve scolded San harshly, maybe lectured him on picking better friends and being more smart and more careful. Last year's Seonghwa didn't see the point in friendships.

But present day Seonghwa, in the here and now, is trying to be a better brother.

“I promise I’m not mad Yunho.”

“Are you sure? Because Hongjoong is scared of you and he’s not scared of anything.”

“He’s scared of me? Why?”

"Oh shit." Yunho blanches deathly pale. “Don’t tell him I said that. We didn’t have this conversation. He'll kill me and won't give me his favourite truck.”

Seonghwa grips Yunho's shoulder in what he hopes is a comforting gesture. “It's okay, Yunho. We didn’t have this conversation.” 

“Oh....oh, okay, cool.” Yunho says with a nervous laugh. “Because it’s nice that Hongjoong finally has friends too.”

Before Seonghwa can even process the statement, Hongjoong’s truck comes to a stop near the back porch and both Wooyoung and San come flying out, talking a mile-a-minute. 

“Seonghwa, hi!”

“Did you see me? I told you I’d be a good driver!”

“Did San tell you about my radio? Did he show you? Was it good?”

“Dude, I told him already!”

"But did you show him how I rewired the transmitters."

"Yes! Because you drilled it into me like a a hundred times!"

“Okay, enough, calm down.” Hongjoong says sternly in a tone that immediately halts Wooyoung mid sentence and causes San to close his mouth.

In a mock stage whisper, San grins at his brother and says, “I can drive now!”

Yunho snorts. “One drive and he thinks he’s Lewis Hamilton.”

“Hey!” Wooyoung snaps defensively, “You’re one to talk, you crashed into farmer Lee’s fence and failed your driving test because you had a mad crush on Yugyeom!”

Yunho flushes red. “I told you not to bring that up again!”

Seonghwa looks at Hongjoong, who simply takes a deep fortifying breath in and out. “If you kids can stop giving us a headache for one second, I need the truck parked out front. So take your arguing and go."

Three eager hands reach out for the keys but it's Yunho, with his height advantage, that gets them first. 

“Haha, suckers!” The teenager cackles before racing off with the other two in tow. 

“Sorry about that. Something weird happens to them when they get together.”

“It’s fine.” 

Hongjoong is dressed casually in a plain blue button down shirt, loose jeans and his work boots. He must still have farming jobs after this.

Seonghwa follows the movement of Hongjoong's hand as it brushes his hair from his eyes and thinks about how a person can look so young and so old at the same time. 

“Sorry, I didn’t ask you about San. I know I should’ve checked, I guess I got caught up in the moment.”

“Actually, it's okay.”

"He's really persistent."

"I know."

"Wait, did you say it's okay?"

"Yes?"

“Really?” Hongjoong gives Seonghwa a skeptical look. 

“Yes, really. You're a better teacher than I am."

"Oh, well.....okay, cool." Hongjoong says. He sounds exactly like Yunho. Or rather Yunho sounds exactly like him. Flashes of their similarities appear, weaving in and out of conversations, and it's something that settles unexpectedly warmly in Seonghwa's chest.

“Did they really set fire to your basement and burn their hands?”

Hongjoong turns mildly green and he looks so comically distraught that Seonghwa actually laughs. 

“They're both okay now, so I'm not mad about that either."

Colour flushes back to Hongjoong’s face as he lets out a second sigh of relief. 

“I was going to tell you.”

“Really? When?”

“In space.”

Seonghwa smirks. “Where I can’t escape you?”

“Where no-one else can hear you scream…at me.”

Seonghwa stifles a laugh. 

“It was only a minor electrical fire anyway. San knew to put it out with the right extinguisher and Wooyoung’s been taught how to deal with them, since he’s usually the main cause. They're both a hazard but at least they know how to take care of each other.”

“So they’ve really become good friends now?”

Hongjoong nods. “I think San’s the smartest kid Wooyoung’s met in awhile. I didn't think they'd really get along but apparently fire and science is a bonding experience. I don't really understand how it happened so quickly."

Seonghwa doesn’t either.

The boys are walking back now; Wooyoung in the middle with his arms thrown around the two bigger boys. He’s on tippy toes, dangling awkwardly lopsided because San’s shoulders are getting too broad and Yunho’s are too tall. 

It makes Seonghwa smile a real genuine smile and he doesn't bother to hide it, even if he knows Hongjoong has been looking at him the whole time.