#trying to replicate data that means FUCK ALL

[caninecowboy]

feeling increasingly discouraged about my research YEEHAW

[indigosabyss]

so the story of nanbaka pre-canon is... fucking insane. and given that some details were obviously not fleshed out at the beginning, I'll try to boil down the important bits:

(Obvious nanbaka spoilers under cut)

Rokudo is several hundred years old, awakening togabito without a care.

One of the people he turned into togabito is Mutsuki Mashiro (aka the Man With The Scar), granting him the ability to transfer thoughts and memories.

Mashiro became obsessed with the potential of togabito, envisioning a world where they reigned supreme.

He extended his life by creating a clone of himself and transferring all his mind into them, and then repeating the process once the clone has aged too much.

This process is repeated at minimum 115 times.

In his extended life, Mashiro gathers more togabito into the organization Shiki, and carries out experiments.

Also in this time, he has a daughter somehow called Touko.

This daughter grew up, fell pregnant after some sort of tryst with Rokudo, and then died mid-pregnancy

Mashiro (being a very normal guy) decides to clone Touko and implant memories and sensations to rebuild her to the exact state she was in before she died, with the goal of getting Rokudo's kid

This experiment failed fourteen times

Simultaneously, one of the clones Mashiro is using to extend his life has become an anomaly.

Clone Number 116 becomes the first Mashiro Clone to have an ability different from Mashiro's. He can create handcuffs and chains.

Because of this anomaly, Mashiro doesn't take over C#116, instead saving him for further research.

The fifteenth version of Touko is introduced to C#116, who gives him the name Hiiro.

She tells Hiiro that she loves him. He specifically calls the love between them romantic. (Yes, yes, I know)

Touko dies. On this fifteenth attempt, her son survives. (This our main character)

For the first six years, Number Fifteen is raised by Hiiro, who was entrusted with his care by Mashiro

Isou (the Shiki doctor) experiments on Number Fifteen, gathering data on his development and powers

By the age of six, Number Fifteen still can't speak.

A more pressing concern is that Number Fifteen's arms have a tendency to fall off. His body is constantly falling apart due to him not having any attachment to his body.

Number Fifteen is an empty container in the shape of a human; unable to recognize that he is alive.

Because he has as much attachment to his own body as he does with a random wall, he can also assimilate random walls into his "body", hence allowing him to listen in on Mashiro, and to share that with Hiiro.

Isou and Mashiro are disappointed with the lack of data from Number Fifteen, and consider storing him away and trying to clone Touko a sixteenth time.

Hiiro is reeling from the shock of Touko's replicability. In the panic, he yanks Number Fifteen at a force that would regularly have his leg come off.

However, the leg remains sturdy.

One of Hiiro's shackles have latched onto Number Fifteen's ankle, and held it together, giving the skin a better complexion.

Hiiro places Jyugo's thick black shackles around his ankles, wrists, and neck. This results in suppressing his ability and granting him awareness. His first words are: "Who are you?"

(Also. This all might have been happening in the window of time between World War One and Two???? But maybe they're just ignorant of world events w how old they are)

Mashiro creates Elf, a togabito capable of curing any disease, while also seizing control of the target's body by replacing all its cells.

Elf cells are injected into Jyugo, with the intention of taking him over.

Mashiro reveals that Hiiro's ability changing to suppress abilities means that Jyugo has the secondary ability to mutate other togabito's abilities; and he wishes to research this.

He also wants Elf to try and break down Hiiro's shackles from the inside of Jyugo's body.

Hiiro runs away with Jyugo

Mashiro vows to find them.

Hiiro goes on to form Kaazu, an international organization in charge of managing prisons.

This is to promote the incarceration of togabito, to then channel them from all prisons into one maximum security prison called Nanba Prison, to kill the creatures that Mashiro held to such high regard

Shiki starts to target unusual people in prisons, too, taking advantage of the disenfranchisement of felons like Hiiro is doing too.

At some point, Jyugo meets Nico, Uno, and Rock for the first time. This encounter ends with his death(?)

Hiiro crafts Nanba to be as interesting and amazing as the real world for Jyugo.

To put off the progress of Elf working through Jyugo's body, Hiiro wipes his memories. This is done multiple times over, with the help of Nishimiya.

He recruits Jyugo's near-killers into supporting him as they went through prisons, until they're finally transferred to Nanba.

Rokudo is still wandering around, now guarded by a Shiki bodyguard.

And from there the manga starts!!

[brucewaynehater101]

In a response to an earlier ask, you said that you believe some non-human entities try to disguise themselves as human in order to blend in. Yes, very much so. HC that if H.A.R.D.A.C. is a thing in this universe (Silken Emperor AU) there's still a couple of Duplicants just sort of...minding their own business and praying Batman doesn't catch wind of their existence.

Cause, hoo boy, their creator was insane, and it's actually kind of logical that a sudden uptick in Duplicants from "0" means H.A.R.D.A.C. is back, but they don't want to revive him, he was a douchebag. Heck, maybe some of the Duplicants don't figure it out until they get mugged in an alleyway and stabbed and instead of blood and flesh, they see sparks and wires.

What are Duplicants, you might ask? (SKIP THIS SECTION IF YOU WISH TO AVOID SPOILERS FOR A TV SHOW THAT RAN IN THE EARLY TO MID 90S, OR IF YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT) They were these pliant robotic clones from BTAS, sort of like Synths from "Fallout 4", that H.A.R.D.A.C. tried to replace key Gothamites with in the 2-part episode "Heart Of Steel", as a prelude to replacing all of mankind with them, thus "curing" mankind of all its ills. In the follow-up episode "His Silicon Soul", (SPOILER ALERT FOR THE FULL PLOT OF THE EPISODE) a Duplicant of Batman wakes up in a crate in some warehouse in Gotham (there's a lot of those) and stops a robbery, and eventually finds out he's mechanical.

Poor guy goes through all this angst, thinking he's the real Bruce Wayne and is stuck in a robot body somehow, and in his detective investigations he finds A. He's not the real Bruce Wayne (according to the man who built H.A.R.D.A.C. in the first place) and B. A chip containing the last backup of H.A.R.D.A.C.'s consciousness that his programming forces him to put it into his data drive. (Literally, his hand moves of its own accord and he's trying to stop it with the other.) He then gets brainwashed by the H.A.R.D.A.C. remnant, fights Batman in a greenhouse (I think?) and almost uploads H.A.R.D.A.C. to the Bat Computer before the real Batman returns, Batman manages to convince him they aren't that different after all and both care about human life (Robo-Bats saved a dude while the greenhouse was collapsing), then there's this brief bit where the fight resumes and Robo-Bats thinks he killed Real Bats, he has a full on sobbing breakdown, and smashes the Bat-Computer so H.A.R.D.A.C. wouldn't be able to upload to the Internet and eradicate mankind, presumably killing H.A.R.D.A.C. or at least corrupting the fuck out of his files. By so doing, his circuitry was fried by electrocution. Robo-Bats sacrificed himself so mankind could live, and the episode ends with Real-Batman saying to Robin that he (Robo Bats), had a soul. "A soul of silicon, but a soul nonetheless." Roll credits.

I appreciate the explanation and the coverage of what happens in the show (as well as the warnings for spoilers for those who are trying to watch it).

It is an interesting dimension to add to where some Duplicants are unaware of their non-human status. To add onto their issues with identity (because suddenly learning you're not human would fuck with your mind), they also have consider the legal aspect of whether they have rights. They have to consider the social aspect of whether humans consider them capable of emotions and thoughts. It's so incredibly fucked, but in a compelling way.

I saw someone mention how cool it would be for an AU where Bruce basically pulled an Astro Boy (created a robot replicate after Jason dies) and thus creates Tim. You can add that idea, but instead H.A.R.D.A.C. tried made a Duplicate of Robin before Dick became Nightwing or before Jason dies.

I don't know much about this canon material, but there's a few ways to play around with what memories Tim does have:

He could have memories closer to the Tim of JJ so his backstory is closer to Jason's

He could only have the memories of "Robin" and this is how Tim finds out he's not actually Robin. He runs away, gets adopted by the Drakes, and "grows up" that way

Tons to play around with.

Anyways, Tim, who was supposed to be Robin's duplicate, knocks on Bruce's door post Jason's death. This causes Angst, obviously, especially because Tim looks eerily similar to a younger Jason or Dick.

[septnautical]

“I’m sorry, Marvin… I’m not sure there’s anything I can do,” Dr. Danan said quietly. 

“W-What does that mean?!” Marvin squeaks in fear, holding his mask tight in his hands. “There’s nothing you can do?! I have fucking white suit words scrolling across my eyes!!” 

Danan sighs. She’s already taken Marvin to get x-rayed and to run some scans on him but… 

“It’s… architect technology, Marvin,” She says, turning to the panicked merman and his brothers. 

Jackie tilts his head, “…architects? Who are they?”

“Isn’t that like… a human word for someone who builds?” Chase asks. 

Marvin stiffens up, pink appearing in his eyes as he drones out, “Architects is the name given by Alterra to a species of highly advanced and ancient beings that arrived on Planet 4546B approximately one thousand years ago, searching for a cure for the Kharaa Bacterium. Most information surrounding them is currently unknown.” Then he shudders and curls up smaller, blinking the pink out of his eyes. 

Schneep looks at him sympathetically and then looks back at Danan desperately, “There must be something we can do for him… some way to stop uh- these fits of knowledge?” 

“…sounds like a PDA,” Jamie observes sheepishly. 

Marvin chokes on a quiet sob and curls his tails up to his chest. 

“It’s beyond anything that we know.” Danan says, looking at Marvin with worry. “We’ve been trying to study it for years but… all our attempts to replicate their technology falls short. I have…no idea how to even begin to approach this.” 

“I-If this is just architect stuff then… w-why do I suddenly have knowledge that Alterra has?” Marvin asks shakily. 

Anti nods, “Yeah… s-some of the stuff he’s been saying is stuff I used to hear back at HQ…didn’t remember it until he said it but…” 

Danan hums in thought, “Well… there was an attempt to make an Alteran Warper facility like the one in the lost river- where you just were, Marvin. Maybe… in an attempt to merge technologies… it’s not out of the question that they might have set up a data hub there that links our Alterran PDA database to the one the architects held there. There’s a very large power supply down in the depths…” She shakes her head, “I’m sorry boys… I’m a doctor- a Xeno-biologist. This is going into technology which is not my speciality.” 

“Zara is good with tech!” Jackie tries to add.

Dr. Danan just shakes her head again, “She wouldn’t know about this… I’m so sorry, Marvin.” 

She swims over to the x-Ray display and points to the place where Marvin’s warper chip is. “…on the bright side? It seems that your chip is no longer broken! So… you don’t need to wear your mask anymore or get into those warper fits…?” 

Marvin’s lip warbles, “But I finally was liking my mask…!” 

“You can still wear it Marv…” Chase tries to say encouragingly. “Everything’s gonna be okay. We’ll figure this all out.” 

Marvin looks up at his older brother with a warbling lip. Then he turns away and curls up smaller. “I… I need to clear my head…” and then in a quick burst of blue and purple ripples, he’s gone. 

“Wait Marvin!” Schneep tries to say then curses once he’s gone, “Damnit-! We have to find him! Being alone is how he got into all of this-!” 

Chase swims over and places a hand on Schneep’s shoulder, “…let him be Henrik… I… I think he just needs some space.” 

Jamie looks concerned, “…what if he gets hurt?” He whispers. 

“…We’re just gonna have to trust him…” Chase replies. 

Jackie looks very worried out the window of the lab… hoping his twin was okay. 

————

Marvin warps around for a bit, trying to find a place that could help him feel better. But… somehow- he ended up back in the lost river. This time though it is a completely different place. One he hadn’t seen before- with beautiful glowing trees and waterfalls of green glowing brine. He lets himself swim aimlessly, marveling at the sights. He even smiles as he sees the ghost rays swimming above, singing their ghostly wails. 

But, then- he hears a roar that has him stiffening. He turns around as sees the terrifying lavender glow of a ghost Leviathan-! He cries out then quickly swims as far away as he can- and finds himself in a very strange cave. He blinks, looking around the walls. There’s… bent metal right at the entrance… was this an Alteran site once? …if it was it might be abandoned now. They tend to avoid places that get filled with water. And based on the dents… seems like the ghost Leviathan wouldn’t bother him here. 

Marvin swallows shakily then goes to explore around- better than just… warping from place to place. He doesn’t want to tire himself out and be left in a bad spot. 

“…maybe this was dumb…” Marvin mumbles to himself, “I… what if I get in trouble and the others can’t find me?” He then shakes his head out and looks out in determination, “…I-i'll be fine though! I…I can handle myself. …mostly-“

Truthfully though- since reuniting with his brothers… there’s not a lot of time he spends completely by himself. And if he is- it’s usually within eye or earshot of one of the others. Maybe that’s why this was so scary… he hadn’t been truly on his own since… 

He shakes his head out again. This is fine- he’s a tough hybrid. He doesn’t need his brothers to baby him… Anti is already able to be on his own. He should be able to too! 

He swims for a while, following a winding path that seems to be made out of the roots of the ghost trees. It was kinda eerie… 

But then- at the end of the cave, there’s not an exit. Instead… There's a hollowed out cavern and- some kind of white suit machine. It’s a diamond frame on top of a triangle that’s sunk into the sand. And inside the frame is a glowing green field of energy.  

“What… is this thing…?” Marvin wonders. Then he stiffens as his eyes shine with pink, “An Alien Arch is a large construct used by the Architects. All auxiliary arches connect to the Primary Containment Facility.” 

Marvin quickly shakes off the trance and then backs up from the arch, shaking, “T-That’s where they had Jack…!” 

He starts to swim away but then finds himself pausing, looking back at the arch. …it was Architect technology, huh? And… the new things he can do are because of them. Is there some way… he could make this arch… go somewhere else? So it wouldn’t take him straight to the white suits. And then, Maybe… maybe it could help him find more answers about the architects and who they were- maybe he can find some way to stop what’s going on in his head! …maybe he could even find a way to help Jack! 

Narrowing his eyes in determination, Marvin swims towards the arch. He looks at its massive size and is momentarily intimidated before shaking himself out and touching the frame. He closes his eyes and tries to summon that weird feeling he felt when he got scared back in the cove- when he made his mask move! 

Slowly, the energy field starts to shimmer and shift as blue energy lights up over the frame. And then the field turns from green to a light shimmering blue. 

Marvin swims back and then looks down at his hands in wonder. “T-That worked?” He breathes. 

Then, he braces himself, going to tie his mask around his neck before he swims through the energy field. 

When he appears on the other side… he’s in another cave. With its own alien arch but the blue energy quickly dies down and leaves the frame empty. 

“…Strange,” Marvin says, holding his arms as a chill comes over him. 

it feels… colder here? He doesn’t usually feel the temperate changes too much but here it is very stark. He holds his arms then tries to look for any hint of sunlight- or someway out of here. He eventually looks up and sees a shimmer of light up further above. He ventures through the labyrinth of twisting rocks. Huh- this kinda felt like home. But… these rocks were darker and were… glowing? They look just like Jack’s tails! 

This gives Marvin hope that soars in his chest. He quickly swims faster- finally breaking into the light and-! 

This… isn’t even close to home. Those strange twisting rocks make up the landscape, strange plants he’s never seen growing along the shores of flat sandy plateaus. And there’s things that looks like creepvines flowing with the current, but they’re… yellow? And then- a fish swims by. Marvin thinks for a second that it’s a peeper but… it’s not! Or… maybe it is? It looks just like the ones back home but this one is glowing- with blue tips and it’s white and purple! 

“Where… the hell am I…?”

[darfeld]

Star Trek Wars

Trying to escape some remnant of the Empire, Luke jump to hyperspace a bit too close from a Black Hole. When he emerge into regular space, his hyperdrive is fried and his computer can't say were he is in the galaxy. In fact, it seems he actually jumped galaxy. With no frame of reference he doesn't know he also traveled through time.

Fortunately, a huge spacecraft soon arrives. Communication between ship take some time to establish, but with the help of R2 (and presumably from the people on the ship working on the problem too), they are able to establish audio contact. The troubles aren't over, however, since they don't speak the same language or any language known to Luke, who regret the absence of 3PO. Finally, the huge space craft decide too invite Luke to fly his X-Wing into the shuttle bay, through means of elaborate shuttle dance. Luke, having little options at the moment and sensing no ill intention from the people of the big ship, accept. With the help of a woman which Luke later learned she was counselor Deanna Troi, Luke's language is analyse by the computer of the space craft named Enterprise. R2's "binary" language is also deciphered and know Luke can hear him speak in basic, which is weird. He suspected his robotic friend had a flourished language but he did know half of it as it turns out. R2 is equally weirded out to hear Luke speak in binary. Picard allow Luke to stay on board as emissary of another culture, and promise to help him get back to his galaxy if the occasion arise. It might take a while. Luke allow the engineer of the Enterprise to have a look at his X-Wing. Geordi is baffled as it is not like anything he has seen before. Even stranger than Borg tech. Luke learn about the federation of planet and is amazed by the post-scarcity society in place on earth. Also by the replicator. He spend a not insignifiant among of time trying to make it replicate blue milk. Data and R2 have long conversations about their experiences as robotic sentient being. Along the way, the Enterprise stubble upon a new civilisation with some fucked up shit going on. Luke want to do something about it. Picard explain to him the prime directive.

Luke is like "You know what, I'm not Starfleet."

Picard is like: "I can't let you go down there wreck havoc, I would violate the prime directive by proxy."

Luke is like: "Yeah well, try and stop me then."

Obviously Luke gets down there, solves the problem of the day. Picard is pissed off. Say if Luke is going to be like this he can't let him stay on the Enterprise. He still commit to help Luke go back to his galaxy if he find something useful while exploring the galaxy. Luke says well if that's how it is, you can leave me to the nearest outpost, because I can't let injustice happen doing nothing, so it will happen again. Luke and R2 are left at the space station DS9. He make friends with Jadzia, Worf (Worf immediately respect him as a warrior), Quarks (he missed having a scumbag in his life), Garak, even Benjamin once they get to know each other a bit better. He has an interesting relationship with Kira. They talk about religion, fighting an empire, being in the resistance, etc... They flirt a bit but nothing come out of it. Partly because Luke learn about the Maquis at some point and decide to go check on them.

In the Maquis he meet Chakotay and join his crew, just before they are sent at in the delta quadrant. It baffle him to learn the voyage home is suppose to be 70 years long. Sadly he doesn't know enough about hyperdrives to help with that. He has a lot of heated discutions about the prime directives with Janeway, and he end up in the bring a few times for disobeying orders, though nothing serious enough Janeway would actually leaves him behind. He plays with the limits often enough though. All in all, even Janeway get a quite nicer experience than normal out of the arrangement, and the Voyager even arrives home in half the time. At home, with the data from Voyager and the reverse engineering done on the X-Wing's hyperdrive by Geordi, a solution is found to send Luke in his galaxy far far away. Luke thanks everyone for the help and the experience, and come back to the new republic with a lot of interesting idea for a new form of government and society, and a stolen replicator.

[3liza]

there's also a tendency on this website to reflexively reject any hypothesis about anything that could possibly worsen behavioral or cognitive aspects of ADHD and autism, which is also completely reasonable because most of it is bullshit. that doesn't mean that ADHD and autistic people are impervious to chemicals and environmental factors, in fact we know for certain that it is the opposite. that majority of ADHD and autistic people will THEMSELVES offer this information without knowing anything about "the science" on the topic. yes eating certain things makes me feel weird. yes certain noises and smells and places make me act crazy. yes i can confidently identify many many actual replicable triggers in my environment that cause problems for me. if hundreds of us have noticed eating red food dye causes problems that's not just bullshit from Facebook parent groups who want to "cure" their autistic children. it's just regular data. studying this phenomena in a lab is possible and it's not always a scheme by Big Autism Speaks to oppress us, sometimes this information is actually useful to real people who are trying to be less stressed out all the time. I've gotten more helpful information about myself from reading papers on PubMed than i have from anyone on Tumblr and certainly from any fucking doctor (doctors as a rule do not read any research that came out after they graduated lol)

[robbie-roo]

oh man I wad gonna make a super cool science / zoology post and I forgot I took an edible and now I can't remember anything

like I can I know what I wanna talk about but I can't think hard enough to explain to people who may not have the background knowledge

like do you know what a phylogenetic tree is? because if you do- THEY RESTRUCTURED AVIAN PHYLOGENY BECAUSE OF WHOLE GENOME SEQUENCING

W H O L E. GENOME.

which for birds is over 8.1 BILLION base pairs and they did the ENTIRE GENOME that's coding and non coding that's all the viral history, mitochondrial dna, and all the ancestral history like that's so fucking coooooool but anyways they redid the phylogenetic tree!!!

and we were surprisingly close before this study (which like JUST came out- I'll try to find it when I'm sober) but now we have things like flamingos and pigeons or hawks/owls/eagles being all shifted around- I'll try to explain this later when I can THINK

also guys. I need to stress again how cool the WHOLE genome sequencing thing is especially in birds!!!

birds are ANCIENT much older than mammals I mean they're reptiles after all but with that comes like a fuck ton of genomic data

majority of these strands are "non coding" which means they just kinda exist and don't do any work but this is also composed of your genomic HISTORY which means it has your viral data

viruses inject their DNA sequences into your chromosomes and then they get replicated by asexual reproduction and those slow gradual injections of these viruses over time will change the phenotypic traits- that's what evolution is! (kinda- don't forget that babies also combine new DNA together so then you have mom/dad and their viral history allllllll mixing together- kinda?? man idk)

do you catch what I'm throwing here??? this shows the history of all viruses since the age of birds!!! (kinda... sorta? don't think about it too hard- I'm not! I can't think)

jeez I got off topic.... but the point is (I think) that they have 8.1 billion base pairs in a modern bird wanna know how many a human has? a human who can be like 100x the size of one of those little bitty bir-

guys, we have 3 billion.

THREE

and birds have 8.1!!!!

science is cool- don't do drugs kids

peace

-xoxo,

rob dog <3

[thegeminisage]

it's TNG UPDATE TIME. last night* we watched "birthright" parts i & ii. just this once, i'm not combining them because i can distinctly differentiate between the episodes, they were actually (after all that angst) kind of unconnected, though i would have DIED to have left it on that cliffhanger

* time changed i'm scheduling this to go up when people are awake

birthright part i (tng):

DS9 CROSSOVER! i wish it could have been for both halves. also, i kind of wish odo could have been the one to talk to data even though he has no reason whatsoever to leave. it just would have been so much autism in one room

human brent spiner HORRIBLE to look at. the faces he makes as dr soong (which...why would dr soong be white...was that old man white idr...) remind me of lore's.

however: thrilled that data can dream now. i was so happy also that everyone treated him really niceys. except bashir who microaggressed him one time but i forgive him because it was funny

it was WWWWILD to see tng characters walkin around ds9. i hated tng in my ds9 but i loved ds9 in my tng. i wish they had a budget for a proper crossover. did sisko have to be in the same room as picard again? did o'brien go aboard and say hello? i miss him so bad.

minor deanna and worf moment in this ep when she comforts him over his dad potentially being alive. mwah. i feel like the tng side characters have been non-existent for awhile...first we stopped watching tng as much for ds9, then we got that deanna-only ep, then that picard-only ep, and now the ds9 crossover and the worf-only ep...can we PLEASE get the gang back together

final note i love that worf loves shitty replicator food and also riker's terrible cooking. king.

birthright part ii (tng):

i have complex feelings.

worf's dad plot as a means to get worf to be the pov character for the ethical dilemma of this episode kind of undermined the entire ethical dilemma

the ethical dilemma tng THOUGHT it was presenting was, "if klingons and romulans have escaped the war to live peacefully together, is it right to disrupt their way of life just because their children might choose differently?"

THE ACTUAL DILEMMA IT PRESENTED WAS. IF YOU HAVE SEVENTY-THREE KLINGON PRISONERS OF WAR. actually that's not even a question. they just have them. let's break this down

this romulan guy, unclear if he was the one actually in charge at the khitomer massacre or not (i thought he looked familiar, i looked it up and he previously played a totally different romulan on tng lol), but this guy is running this fucking prison with seventy-three klingons completely at his mercy. yes, they ""asked"" to stay, but they WANTED to die, they ATTEMPTED to die, and they would have CHOSEN to die had the option been given to them, but they're doing this instead in order to keep from bringing consequences down on their families heads. so he has total power over them and he... "marries" one???

i am going to start discussing conception via rape please consider this your warning.

this is of course coming after tasha yar had a FUCKING BABY VIA RAPE in a romulan prison and then got killed for trying to escape. he "married" a klingon woman. ALL RIGHT

even if she thought she loved him and consented to everything SHE IS A PRISONERRR. SHE WAS NOT ALLOWED TO DIE. SHE IS NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE.

like, when worf kissed that girl and realized she was half romulan his revulsion should not have been from the fantasy racism but from realizing she is a rape baby. like, this whole sitch is horrifying

and it really brings into perspective too how lucky worf must have been...he was so young when khitomer happened and yet he's very in touch with his heritage, but something as simple as old klingon stories are considered dangerous by the romulan warden

AND HE IS A WARDEN. again: nobody is allowed to leave where they are. this isn't a peaceful group of equals, conscientious objectors who chose a different way of life. THEY ARE PRISONERS. they're not allowed to look at or even touch any of their old things. they have to find fun and entertainment with old weapons. klingon tai chi classes are NOT allowed

in fact, the REAL ethical dilemma is, is it right to try and force this half-romulan half-klingon girl out of her "home" when it is clear she is happy in here and will be reviled out there? i argue yes because her home IS A PRISON CAMP like girl if spock did it u can too but what do i know

it makes no sense also that these people would be choosing to procreate. if this prison camp is only marginally better than death, or worse than death in some ways but a necessary evil, why bring kids into it??? unless the romulans are the ones making the babies

god this dude even sat at the head of the table and had everyone bring his food to him and then was ready to execute worf for bringing klingon culture into and i repeat the KLINGON PRISON CAMP

anyway, this episode did pop off at a few points. it was cool to see worf help them get back in touch with their own culture and doubly cool to see him get "even" with his like...sort of enemies. ALSO fun to watch that little bootlicking klingon who was sucking that romulan guy's dick finally come to his senses and stand w/ worf

i also loved the part where worf was perfectly happy to die as a klingon rather than live as someone with dishonor...it felt so different from the episode where he tried to kill himself because this time he WAS being honorable and not cowardly. he would have had nowhere to go had he run and he would have been leaving those other klingons behind

i am disappointed though that after all that. worf's dad really was dead. also, how did that guy know where the camp was and why did he tell. ALSO also, how are the klingons gonna get by when they can't tell anyone what bloodline they come from...that's like your picture ID in the klingon world

the point is, as usual, tng almost had something really cool but couldn't get out of its own way and as a result dropped the fucking ball.

NEXT TIME: ds9's "move along home" and "the nagus."

[nhaneh]

You ever thought about why these generative "AI" models have such a propensity towards plagiarism?

Obviously there's one half of it that's basically just down to that it's what a lot of their users are explicitly using them for - they want something that explicitly looks, or sounds, or otherwise appears at least superficially to be in the style of another thing. But there's also an underlying problem at the heart of these models that's basically about understanding - or specifically, the lack of thereof.

When you ask a person to mimic someone or something, they tend to go about doing that by trying to figure out what it is about that particular person or style that's noteworthy, how those things are achieved, and then how they themselves might approximate that given the tools and expertise available to them. You try to identify a pattern, or a series of patterns, and then figure out how to replicate those patterns within your own skillset.

The problem with generative "AI" is that it only does the first half.

See, the thing with stuff like Large Language Models and similar is that they're basically patterned on a rather simplified model of how human learning works - you have a kind of simulated neural network that processes data and builds internal models of how various elements relate or interconnect to each other not all that dissimilar from how our own brains do. The big, huge, really important difference is that the models we build incorporate this nebulous little concept called meaning.

I've made this example before but, consider my cat. My cat is, in my estimation, likely of fairly regular levels of feline intelligence - meaning she has but a single braincell that is sometimes capable of unbelievable acts of apparent intellect and at all other times is only slightly smarter than a fence post. But, the important thing for this example: my cat knows what a door is.

Consider that for a moment: my cat can not only visually recognise a common group of sometimes quite disparate objects as all being roughly The Same Thing™, but, more importantly, she knows that if an object looks like a door, it can probably be opened. There is probably something on the other side. She might be able to either open the door, or enlist a human to open the door for her.

And again, "AI" only does the first half: you can train them to recognise doors, and quite easily at that, but they don't infer any kind of meaning from it - they can match images of doors to a statistical model, but they can't do anything with that model other than looking for things that match it. There's no introspective model to consider what it means for a match to be a match, no thinking about the context in which matches are found and what it might mean to find a match in an unexpected place or situation... and I mean, thank fuck for that because none of these corporations are at all capable of even a fraction of the amount of responsibility necessary to be allowed access to the on-off switch of a potentially sapient emergent entity.

But basically, this is why they indulge in so much obvious plagiarism: without the ability to comprehend meaning, no detail is more important than the other, the presence of a black pixel in the top left corner can be just as important a detail as what a finger tends to look like - they don't generate things based on an understanding of what is asked of them, they generate based on what is statistically associated with the prompts they're given, no matter what those associations are or what they're like. It's why "text" in "AI" art looks the way it does: it's a statistical representation of what lettering looks like by something that lacks the ability to comprehend meaning - it replicates the shapes and forms, the flows and designs, but fails to recognise any of the symbols as individual objects with distinct meaning.

It's basically what learning without understanding looks like - the ability to find patterns without the ability to infer meaning from those patterns. It's finding faces in the clouds without ever knowing what a face is.

And of course, at the end of the day, the problem with generative "AI" is not actually generative "AI" at all - it's that a bunch of rich assholes with way too much money and power in society think they can, and should, just replace the rest of us with mindless automatons.

[sburbian-sage]

Okay, dreamselves are really pissing me off.

When I started playing the game, The concept made sense to me. A version of yourself that's a little more honest to who you are inside, and maybe has some minor anatomical differences, like a trans player having a dream body that matches their gender instead of sex.

Even this kind of annoyed me. There were all kinds of tweaks I wanted to my body that I would call similarly minor, but that didn't show up. But whatever, I guess.

But I have this one lady this session. A Witch of Hope. She has this really complicated instrument that's basically a hunk of junk when she's awake, but she can play it perfectly when she's asleep.

Why?

Because she can apparently just decide to temporarily GROW EXTRA ARMS AS HER DREAMSELF.

What. The. Fuck. WHY is my dreamself not my fursona then, if the changes can be so major? I sure as fuck don't want my current body, I feel at peace when I look at art of how I want to be, I feel like I've imagined the differences in how my muscles would work and so on such that it wouldn't render me useless with dysmorphia...

So why? And for that matter, I can't even replicate the extra arms trick, and apparently it's so easy for her that she can't advise me, she doesn't know how she's doing it.

I checked the glitch FAQ, and it mentions the extra arm thing. Says it's related to your class, and that there's a list of class dreamself differences in chapter 26. There isn't.

I'm a Maid of Heart this session. Is there anything cool my dreamself CAN do? If I roll Witch, will I be able to edit my dream-body freely? Do you happen to have a list like the FAQ implied should exist?

Yeah, the Sburb Glitch FAQ is pretty comprehensive, but between the data errors and GG getting into edit wars with himself, sometimes information gets scrambled. No offense to the guy but I still have the "Title Gender ratios" article archived because it was really fucking funny watching him earnestly trying to dive into the game's math and then it accidentally devolves into like, gender phrenology.

I can't help you with the body image/dysmorphia stuff. Or wanting to become a furry, or whatever it is that's going on here. So I'll just move on to the parts I can help you with.

On the topic of the Witch, first of all you're kind of goofy for asking the Witch to explain how she did something. "Doing weird shit and not explaining how it works" is literally her job. Second of all, if there would be any class particularly adept in doing weird stuff with their dreamself, it would be the cryptical classes. Dreamselves are mildly mutable, and prone to flights of fancy, which gels well with the imperative to complexify and interact with weird, unclear things. In any case, Witches growing extra arms is pretty consistently reported, so that's one mystery solved.

As far as Maids of Heart go, I can't say that I immediately know what "Maid" or "Heart" means for dreamselves (then again, "multiple arms" doesn't exactly scream "this is intuitively a Witch thing" either). But putting that aside, you have the ability to edit your own Heart Thing/Soul/some people call it the "Shine" or "Shiny" but I don't do that. That's literally your sense of self, and while most Heart abilities are turning the Soul into an attack, or applying a temporary effect to it, you can also edit that. Since the Dreamself is a lightly idealized version of yourself, you could try directly editing your own self-image to be closer to what you want to look like. Not a dog, but something else. Of course, that is if you think "plunging my own hand into my chest and doing psychic self-surgery to induce dysmorphia so my dreamself responds to it" is a good idea. Which it probably isn't, but nothing ventured nothing gained.

The dreamself abilities are fundamentally gimmicks though. Walking through walls (pretty sure this is a Void thing even though my first thought is that if anything this should be Space) is a more useful gimmick, but despite every Witch being able to start cosplaying as Asura's Wrath, I haven't seen any Witches incorporate this into their Sick Strats. I imagine either because it's situational (it only works if you need more arms), or because dreamselves act kind of stupid if you don't have a high sleep ratio. Speaking of which, you might unlock or notice any abilities your dreamself has if you improve your sleep ratio, which you can do by improving your sleeping skills, which you can do by, essentially, properly tiring yourself out so you want to get a restful sleep. I'm just frontloading the "it's all gimmicks" statement because you seem weirdly upset about a feature I've never really noticed. I can get the wish fulfillment of your dreamself making you look like The Man Your Man Could Look Like, but temporary extra arms sounds kind of lame.

Oh, and speaking of being upset, if you really want your day ruined, try grabbing a pencil as your dreamself and writing or drawing something. Your dominant hand flips when you're dreaming. Pretty weird, huh?

[team-mavericks]

[ Cool, haven't lost any followers yet. Now let's talk about the A.I. stuff.

So, the recent event is that someone was rejected to be RP partners with. And their response was to threaten (or did they succeed?) turning their portrayal into an A.I. so they can write with the A.I. instead or potentially trying to replace them? I'm sorry, but that's sad. You chose a platform that's made to be creative and make friends, and you chose to be a loner and outing yourself as not someone to be associated with. We can talk about how uncool that is, but I'd rather point out how pathetic you are. Whoever you are. Good luck doing that to me though, I just mentioned I had a spreadsheet, no A.I. you can ever make will be able to replicate that so even if you succeed on me it won't be the same experience and thus you already failed.

But I think we should talk about the difference in definition of A.I. because there's TRUE A.I. and what we currently have: A.N.I. (Artificial Non-Intelligence, thank you Arden)

Real A.I. is like a separate entity. It's what we see in movies, and it's what scientist and programmers are trying to accomplish. It might be artificial, but it's a fully functioning brain. Jarvis, Friday, The Epsilon Unit, whatever the hell was in TRON. It's not something that stops all thought when not spoken to, it stays active and formulates/calculates it's own thoughts and opinions. That's rad as hell, and I want to see the day that we can pair A.I. with mentally unhealthy people to regulate decision making because I need 4. I am not smart, and I could DEFINITELY use that kind of help that won't bother a real person at random hours of the day.

A.N.I. is brain dead, you press a button and it turns on like a toaster. It's not where I want A.I. to stop because we all know it's a data scalper. But I do think we should talk about healthy ways to use it. DON'T BOO ME JUST YET, HEAR ME OUT.

Using ANI to come up with an idea when you’re stuck in a writers box? That’s good. Using ANI to write your posts word for word? That’s bad.

Using ANI to generate a music playlist fitting a specific vibe? That’s good. Using ANI to generate actual music? That’s bad.

Using ANI to generate art in a private setting to help expand on ideas or visuals like costume ideas or landscapes (because we can't art good)? That's fine. Sharing that art and trying to sell it as your own? That's bad.

Using ANI to generate scam phone calls that call you from constantly changing numbers? I will kill you. I will actually fucking kill you. I will put myself on a fucking list to hire people to find your ass and I will go to your home and rip out your throat with my fucking teeth. I HAVE CHANGED MY WORK NUMBER 3 TIMES NOW, COMPANY POLICY REQUIRES ME ANSWER EVERY CALL BECAUSE IT MIGHT BE IMPORTANT, FUCK YOURSELF.

Writers burnout happens to all of us, but we shouldn't depend on it to be active. Use it to help you expand, or help you refresh. In a RP setting, we always want the real person. If we wanted a bot, we wouldn't bother being here. I don't want to write with a bot, I want to form a connection with someone on a creative level.

Bottom line is, everything is okay in moderation. Don't think that just because it currently exists means it's the apex of what we can do. We are smarter than that, we are better than that.

If there's something I just said that needs clarification or correction, let's discuss it in a healthy setting. I'm not calling to arms against helping tools, I'm calling to arms against laziness. ]

[seriously-mike]

Is There Something Flux Cannot Do?

Yes. A fucking lot.

Even with the improved dictionary that correctly parses a lot of stuff and a data model that finally can draw someone holding a weapon mostly correctly (70% of the time, it works every time!), forcing anything resembling an art style out of Flux is a pain in the ass.

It boggles the mind why the fuck that ornery bastard software has so much difficulty imitating stuff that's been in the public domain long before it was established. I tried the major names, Leonardo, Rembrant, Vermeer, Delacroix, and got shit. The best I could get was some vaguely 19th century pap and hyper-realistic 1950s poster work, and that's mostly thanks to the face-swapping workflow that I'm using. Who the fuck would be bothered about training the data model the basics of art history, digital reproductions of which are either under CC or Public Domain licenses? While still, fucking still replicating people's digital signatures on stuff rendered in generic digital painting style that might have been drawn by anyone and everyone?

It still doesn't do vampires. That portrait of a woman with moon in the background was supposed to depict a vampire. The SD1.5 face swapper failed miserably, of course, I know, but neither Flux nor SDXL could draw vampires with fangs correctly, either.

It wipes the fuck out on all attempts of drawing remotely furry stuff. Ask for a realistic animal, you'll get it. Ask for a cartoon animal, you'll get it. Ask for a fantasy painting of a chinchilla barbarian in a crown... Oh Jesus fucking Christ, you have to see that abomination yourself to believe it, and that's the absolute fucking best I could squeeze out of that algorithm.

On the left, you have a DALL-E 3 rendering that I used for one of my song covers. That is very much a chinchilla. Dressed as a barbarian. Triumphant. Holding a sword. And it even has a fluffy tail.

On the right, you have Flux. A very apt name, because it looks like an explosion of runny shit. It's dysentery, it's bloody diarrhea, it looks like a lot of things, maybe a mouse, maybe a Tasmanian Devil, maybe your neighbor too. It can hold a sword, sure. But even considering that machines don't have fantasy, whimsy or imagination, DALL-E 3 is still able to put together something that looks as ridiculous as an average user wants: that guy's a beefcake, but he's also fluffy. Flux drew something overly aggressive, mangy and overweight.

It can't do NSFW. The publicly available online implementations already block NSFW words in the prompt and throw an unbelievable shit-fit every time, just as expected, but if you try doing some horny art on your home install... I can't post an image, but I will describe it to the best of my ability. If you're lucky, you're gonna get weird pasties in place of nipples. If not... you'll get clown noses. I mean, fuck. I have no idea what they did to that algorithm, but imagine your nipples being replaced by weird, shiny, squishy red spheres looking like cherry tomatoes or rubber balls. I wish I was fucking joking.

It can't do celebrities. It knows an approximation of Marilyn Monroe and that's it. It can't do Keira Knightley, it can't do Jenna Ortega, it can't do Timothee Chalamet, it can't do Tom Holland, it can't even do that posturing old bitch John Wayne. Imagine this: you get the first version of an algorithm that can draw hands and feet correctly more often than all the previous ones combined without being blackboxed on some corporate server farm, and to draw the likeness of any celebrity, even a long-dead one, you have to fall back on the rickety old tech that is now a laughingstock even among the laymen, because that one at least knows how Elvis looks.

Plus, those are two results of asking Flux for a fat old Elvis. It literally can't draw a fat Elvis with sunglasses on. Remove the sunglasses from the prompt and bang: banana and bacon sandwich overload.

It doesn't do body jewelry, and to a degree even larger than the previous versions of Stable Diffusion. At least those could do several earrings at once, and Flux either doesn't do that at all, or I don't know the magic word. "Multiple earrings" doesn't work, and I got it on one picture where I haven't even asked.

I also caught it doing some weird Midjourney kind of bullshit. Like, ask it for a Pepsi can, and you'll get a Pepsi can looking like it was freshly fetched from Google Images. But to get a parody or at least a pastiche of a Pepsi can, you can't say "Pepsi". The prompt to get the design on the right is:

photo of dark blue drink can with round wavy red and blue logo above the word "benzi"

If you're familiar with the "Bepis" meme, you know what to do with the name. If not, it's still a good name for a drink if you're marketing it in Europe: "Benzi-Cola: the fuel for you!" But still, with the pointers of the logo being round, wavy, red and blue, sometimes it tries to avoid violating the trademark, while other times it... doesn't. The legal department is going to have a lot of fun with this one, again.

Also, like I said, that data model is MASSIVE. The first version was about 24 gigabytes in total, they first slashed it down to 16 gigabytes so it runs on higher-end video cards without problems (if you don't try rendering four images at the same time, because then it's gonna go tits-up anyway), and now they're aiming for 8 GB, unfortunately, not compatible with cards that have 8 GB because they're too old already.

[ideahat-universe]

Not your hard drive, not your data.

There's been a lot of bad news regarding actually owning anything that was digitally acquired. From Funimation to Sony. A lot of stuff people bought just stopped existing.

Ross Scott from game dungeon is trying to end the perma death that takes place with Live Service games.

It's gotten people to really talk about buying physical media again.

And to me, this is a flawed thought process. Owning the physical device won't save it forever. In fact, most media does have a physical form. Companies typically keep a master copy of whatever is created and sold/broadcast. A lot of that content becomes essentially lost media but in reality, we're just looking for someone who is willing to digitize the only physical copy that exists for that item.

You're thinking "Oda, one copy is good. It's better than no copies, and all we want is to own a copy and we're willing to pay for it to and that will preserve it better in the end." And that's a convincing argument. But we need to talk about how things are preserved.

CDs are how most TV shows and video games are saved and copied and CDs can last anywhere between 20 to 100 years.

Did I say 20 to 100 years? I mean to say, 1 day to whenever you scratch it accidentally. Sun damage, dropping on the floor, having it sit on a surface and gather dust, hell, running the CD wears it out after awhile.

This is the same issue with books. Of course we need to keep books. Books are valuable and priceless, but if you aren't keeping your books maintained by rebinding it, touching up the faded ink, and keeping the book basically unmolested in a temp controlled container, it's going to rot on your shelf and become useless. Hell, forget about extremists burning your books. Bugs are going to eat it first.

Having multiple physical copies is the way but it should be in a format that is easily transferable. CDs are quickly becoming obsolete and once CD drivers stop being built it will be a pain in the ass to rip data from a CD (This isn't even including Blueray CDs which are even harder to extract data from).

What you don't want is to just have a CD of the game or TV show. You just need physical data on a hard drive. Once you have a copy on your hard drive, you can copy that data onto other hard drives, you can copy that data onto a cloud service that you use like Dropbox or Megaupload. You can also illegally torrent or re-upload your copy so other people can have it.

I see this argument a lot in digital currency spaces. Just because it's effectively invisible doesn't mean it doesn't exist physically. Physical ownership should not mean becoming a very organized hoarder.

It should mean dumping and ripping everything you buy whether it's some CD you bought at Best Buy or it's some show you bought legally on a online store that you don't really own because the fine print said you were just renting it long term but fuck them, you bought it, therefore you should use video rippers to make whatever you bought actually yours (and if you are wondering, no, I don't use those specific methods but the method I use I had to actually pay for).

And once you have it. Make a backup, Make a backup of that backup, make a remote backup, and make sure when your time comes someone can find your copy of it.

With video games there are data dumpers and ROM sites galore. The really hard part is getting a emulator that runs the games effectively. Citra was caught in the AOE when Nintendo Ulted Yuzu and they just Surrendered at 20. Even when Citra was alive though it wasn't replacing a 3DS in a lot of ways. There are a lot of games that were dependent on the various software and hardware functions that a 3DS had that the Citra doesn't accurately replicate. You CAN play Tomodachi Life on a Citra but good luck not destroying your OLED from your miis asking for sneeze assistance. Forget using the AR camera or even the normal camera. Citra crashes or creates scrambled images when taking in game screenshots.

The mic doesn't work either so mic related games just don't work.

But Tomodachi Life can be generally played. It gets uglier when you think about games like Rusty's Real Deal baseball. A game that requires you connecting to the store to make a purchase. An action that is completely impossible now. How about all the games that were Mii related? Spotpass? Streetpass?

Eccentric games that requires specific hardware and software to run are basically easy to copy but impossible to run. Real preservation is in completely replicating the environment they used to function in which is a level of techno wizardry most people don't have.

Which brings me to the Sisyphean task of making sure games with dedicated servers gain the ability to live forever as a zombie.

When a multiplayer game is kept alive through user owned servers, it lives in only the most literal sense. Imagine all those failed live service games that had their audience dwindle down to zero before closing forever. Would those games have been saved if you just gave players the ability to set up their own server? No, because most of those games require several hundred players to really function correctly.

Similar to how just owning the ROM to Rusty's Real Deal Baseball doesn't grant you the ability to play it like it originally was. A live service game that has lost 99% of its audience is not saved by having it's existence put on life support via the one person willing to host a server for it and maybe five other people willing to play it for a few hours a year.

It is unfortunate but in order to actually preserve Live Service games we have to let them die and allow for the idea that made the game to be reborn into something more sustainable. Instead of a Live Service or an MMO it's just a single player experience. Maybe it is multiplayer but the other players are just sophisticated AI and the occasional human player.

Preservation isn't just about having something sitting around and rotting. It's about acquiring something at it's most functional, and then replicating that and if something truly cannot be saved, it must be remembered and remade. CDs, Books, even Hard Drives die.

But ideas are forever.

[i-upset-to-dead-65]

I fhink the thing that frustrates me the most about AI and the discussion around it is that people just don't understand that it doesn't create. AI copies and replicates what humans have already done. Yes, it come to some conclusions that may have been unexplored, but it's all a farce.

And AI "art". That term needs to die right the hell now. Nothing, and I mean nothing is art without intention. A person can slap a urinal on a stool and that would still be art because there's a fucking REASON the urinal was put there, even if that reason was to challenge art itself.

All AI can do is follow instructions. It doesn't have its own ideas. Trying to discount AI "art" by saying it's bad art isn't enough, you're still calling it art. It's not bad art, it's a hashed together image made from data of real art.

What's the human equivalent? I take a bunch kf photos of Van Gogh's art, cut them up, and create something new with the pieces? Is that art? The answer is yes, because A) I made something new (obviously the description would include Van Gogh as a part of the process) and B) because I would have done it for a reason. The image i created I made for a reason.

AI "art" is like a commission. I give a prompt to an artist, they interpret it, and I purchase the finished result. It is not my art. No one calls it "Catherdral of Florence's Statue of David" because it's not, it's Michelangelo's Statue of David. The big difference between AI and commissions is that an actual person made the commission.

[danwhobrowses]

One Piece Chapter 1065 - Initial Thoughts

And we are back from the break to jump into another chapter of the Vegapunk arc

Red is out in more theaters (I still haven't watched it though which is painstaking), and it's a round number chapter after a break which means something is going down.

Let's see what Oda has for us this week

Spoilers for the Chapter, Support the Official Release

Cover page is a Red colorspread of the Straw Hats, Red Hair's 'Top Officers', Koby, Oven and Katakuri, with Uta in the middle

Zoro and Brook note their reason of staying to start with, since it's a Government island they are keeping their guard up and staying back to help bail the others out

Caribou is still on-ship, but he doesn't want to be dropped off on a Government island, even though they agreed to drop him off to the next island

Zoro isn't having his bargaining though, he thanks Caribou for helping Luffy (in a soft manner) and says bye

The Lab group marvel at the use of escalators

Seems that Vegapunk is powering everything by fire (fire being a key element of the story) but natural resources to burn are limited

Lilith is looking into options though, she would love to create her own Sun, not sure if literal or metaphorical

Lilith walks through an entire wall too, is it a hologram?

As Lilith talks to Edison, the Straw Hats also try to grasp this door, which returns to being solid when they go through it

Edison is now chatting with the group via comms

Nami back into burglar mind, it has been a while since she stole anything

Usopp gets a future kick for calling Nami 'either a child or an old hag'

Oh...Seraphim Jinbe

Since they've never seen a Seraphim they try to understand what's going on; actual Jinbe? Long lost son? Coincidence?

Franky though knows it's a Pacifista

The irony that Zoro - the only one of the group who has fought a Lunarian - isn't here to fight the Seraphim

Realising they've been lured into a trap ('tis a Government island after all) the group enter battle stations

Oh...Jinbe has Senor Pink's powers!?

Is it just replication or is Senor Pink dead? Because the Mihawk and Boa Seraphim didn't have fruit powers

Seems Seraphim Jinbe has the Star eyes

With Nami in its clutches, Sanji hits a Diable Jambe Vega Shoes and all

Giant Naked Kaiju Robin also comes out for some more Fishman Karate attacks

Seraphim Jinbe can use Fishman Karate too, so Usopp uses Skull Bombgrass to attack but again it keeps using the Swim Swim powers to escape

Now with Usopp in its clutches, Franky aims for a Radical Beam

Seems the Jinbe Seraphim is called 'S-Shark'

Of course Edison and Lilith are watching the battle unfold, had a feeling it was more of a test run for both the Straw Hats and the Seraphim

Naturally, Edison's design is unexpected, tiny little creature

Edison laments that the Seraphim hasn't been tested for lasers, it also causes Lilith to go a little more feral about the cost

Edison though runs off to have more ideas, leaving Pythagoras - also very robot looking - to collect the battle data

Still kinda hoping Edison's a fraud just because of historic reasons but he gets catto assistants so that's already unfair

We also see York, who is being the Punks' feeder it seems, hive mind and hive stomach I guess

Pythagoras notes how the lineage factor of the Seraphim adapts during the fight, but does that mean that S-Shark recognizes his crew? Or is there like a DNA cutoff point and this was before Jinbe met Luffy?

Also Pythagoras is tiny, he's just got an extra remote body

How can you use the bathroom you're a cue ball with arms??

York again seems to be the bodily needs one, thinned down to regular size and taking a nap

Shaka arrives to call off the Seraphim, and make sure his fellow Punks have had their fill (Lilith remains annoyed that there was not enough bloodshed)

I FUCKING CALLED IT! The Vega Shoes do have restrictive capabilities, since the Lab group are magnetically locked to the floor

I said it here just in case you missed it, since it only got one heart and no reblogs ;_;

Usopp's had it to here with all the people saying they're Vegapunk

"Do you think this island looks like the future?" ...Oh.

Even though Franky's fanning out, Shaka reveals that this is an island of the past

As Luffy's group discovers (Luffy carrying a pipe as his walking stick) with an overgrown mecha, the technology of Egghead isn't new

This is technology from an Ancient Kingdom 900 years ago: Void Century period

Of course Luffy sees something gigantic and wants to play with it XD

Welp, couple of Theory Confirmed moments here

JoyBoyTheories entertained the idea that Vegapunk was being targeted for death because he, like the ancient kingdom, was growing too advanced and the WG prefer to keep the best tech only for themselves, and it seems he was onto something there.

Also I'm still buzzed that my Dom Shoes theory was right like the immediate chapter after XD

We got to see the rest of the Punks too. Honestly, I feel weird about the fact that Oda made all the male Punks look like robots while the female Punks all look like humans (or at least humanoid in Atlas' case). It's not a bad design but it is unusual, at first I thought it was something like the earlier ones look more like robots but Lilith is 02 so that went quickly out of the window. We'll see how it goes though, Shaka does pose an imposing figure and York seems to be the black sheep somewhat - it seems like they use her to bypass other bodily needs and keep working, which would mean if CP0 kill her it'd probably be immediately noticed by the others. I dunno I think I'm still a little thrown that Edison and Pythagoras look like Eggman minions.

Caribou being let off the ship is probably unwise, he is a thief after all, plus it is the last slither of Carrot hope I have because it still pisses me off if we're leaving her ending like that.

Seraphim Jinbe using Senor Pink's Devil Fruit opens a new can of worms about who the World Government have at their disposal, is it really just Warlords? And are they replicating, homaging or using Devil Fruits? The fact that they sent a Jinbe Seraphim means there was definitely a play to not only see how the crew reacted to fighting a child version of their crewmate but to see if any lineage factor impulses have come to play.

The Laputa energy is not lost on me either, my favourite Ghibli movie is getting a lot of similarities in this arc, mainly revolving around the super advanced ancient civilization and near-indestructible mechas, plus we literally have a pirate gang and the government getting involved too, all we need is Franky to do a flex-off with someone.

Simply put Oda's left a lot on the board to sink our teeth into, but still never enough answers to them

[argumate]

there are two separate but related problems here, the first of which is bad while the second is terrible.

rowhammer is an example of the fact that all abstractions are leaky (Joel Spolsky), which is trivial to prove in full generality because the very process of abstraction involves disregarding details of the underlying substrate on which that abstraction is ultimately implemented (the universe, teeming with cosmic rays and subject to irreversible entropy and just generally a fucked up place to live but the only place we have).

but since that general proof can seem facile (sure, your correctness proof may not help your code once the expanding sun swallows the earth, and yet) it's actually more convincing to list all (some) of the ways in which our tower of abstraction crumbles: solid state DRAM modules can fail and silently corrupt data (it happened to me!) in much the same way that magnetic media invariably does, cpus can implement division wrong or get stuck on unexpected opcodes or fail to uphold memory protection or leak information by trying to be clever with branch prediction, each layer of our systems contains bugs and design flaws and unanticipated physical failures that impact the next layer up and can cause its guarantees to break down in turn.

so that's bad but ultimately manageable, or it would be if not for the second problem: that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology (argumate), with all that this implies!

although multi-user computing dates back to the 1960s, it was reasonable for most of the 20th century to imagine "a computer" (singular) running "a program" (singular) and that is obviously no longer the case, our modern computing environment resembles a teeming ecosystem where every computer contains dozens of interconnected subsystems that are each full computers in their own right, with a layer of virtualisation on top so that each program can imagine it still has its own individual machine, and then we connect these billions of behemoth contraptions into a networked jungle of jungles and let the software flow between them like a river seething with piranhas, more code than anyone could ever read subject to the policies and whims of a thousand different institutions whose goals work at cross purposes to each other and to the user they purport to serve.

in the 20th century we had "viruses" that spread by disk boot sector replication and "worms" that used simple tricks to propagate across insecure UNIX networks (which is to say, UNIX networks) and these led to arch comparisons with biological mechanisms but software today bears much closer resemblance to the kind of insane complexity that biologists have to grapple with, except we brought it entirely on ourselves.

technology as biology means that every leaky abstraction is a semipermeable membrane waiting for a spike protein to ruin its day (or however these things work, I'm not a biologist) and the way we fix computers these days seems closer to taking a course of antibiotics than it does to rigorously understanding a problem.

large language models only compound the problem now that systems are explicitly grown rather than designed and include black boxes that you actually need to argue with, we've regressed from commands or gestures to needing persuasive rhetoric to encourage a machine to do what we want it to do! at this point we're probably months away from needing to put our computers on antidepressants and worrying about their dopamine levels when they're running slow.

this is the part where I would smoothly transition into explaining how matters can still be saved, but no: economic imperatives demand that things can only get worse, ever worse! we can never escape the curse of biology, only recreate it, faster!

As @argumate and others mentioned, Rowhammer was (and still is! it didn't go anywhere even though people mostly stopped talking about it; newer DRAM chips have some additional mitigations built in but it's unlikely to ever go away entirely) experienced as a shocking, innocence-upending betrayal by a lot of programmers, because it yanked them out of the world where bits are mathematical abstractions, and into the one where the security isolation "guarantees" provided by hardware are more like polite suggestions.

Stories like these two do make me wonder if the futurist dreams of energy and technology and AI, even if they come true, will crash against the same rocky shore of existing in the real world with lowest-bidder contractors, corner-cutting, and regulatory capture.

This isn't really a new observation. Normal Accidents made all these same points in the 80s (including the "reality gap" between the abstraction of the system and its instantiation in the physical world). Which could be encouraging— the world kept turning despite Perrow's book— or discouraging— we never actually figured out how to fix the problems he discussed.