[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Upvote.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

"Rationalism" is to normal logical thinking what blindfolded multi-board speed chess is to tic-tac-toe: you can only see in retrospect how anyone could get there from here. The things which occupy a Rationalist's mind are completely divorced from ordinary concerns like ethics. Nobody would or could have predicted this quantity or quality of lunacy.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Explanatory spoiler for those who don't want to read Worm, a million words of deconstruction/reconstruction of superhero comics:

spoilerThe source of superpowers is a pair of gigantic multidimensional alien creatures. Their eternal mission involves finding a planet with intelligent life, infesting them with powers via brain tumor neural links, and encouraging them to fight so as to generate new ideas -- the aliens are profoundly uncreative, even stupid by human standards, but immensely powerful -- and when the planet is no longer producing, they reincorporate all the changed and combined powers, then eat the local sun to power their next FTL hop.

When their experimental subjects aren't moving fast enough, they open up their archive and resurrect the Endbringers -- superpowered kaiju which provide a stimulus for cooperation by destroying cities on a schedule. Each Endbringer is unique. The Simurgh, or Ziz, takes the form of a giant statue of a woman covered in angel wings, and wings-on-wings, and so forth. Ziz has primarily psychic powers: telekinesis; a 'scream' or 'song' that drives people to violent insanity over the course of an hour or so; and mind-control that seems limited to slowly changing supers into creative serial killers and mad scientists and so forth. Ziz floats in orbit, preventing space travel, and periodically descends to the surface to terrorize a city.

Everything escalates. Every trope is explained.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Tchah! Decker does not go far enough!

It is clear that there must be people better suited to raise children than a dimwit like him! He should arrange for his genetic superiors to breed, then give the babies to the perfect parents, and he should give them the one thing he has of value: money!

(and please have nothing else to do with children ever again, k thx bye)

[-] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I have seen some controversy about whether white-passing people of Jewish ancestry count as “white”

Let me clear that up: the people who ask if someone is actually white are racists.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

True, it's too advanced for my brain due to being poisoned by Perl at a young age.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

This is just shit.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Charlie Stross called the Singularity "the rapture for nerds".

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Is that actually true? Have they been audited? One problem with long-term storage is "long-term" is a thing that humans are bad at.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Mike is a fed, yes.

So is Steve. The snack thing is left over from his previous undercover assignment at NORML. That didn't end well, but he's pretty sure he can get Mike to agree to buy explosives, which will be a good bust.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Shorter: "Let's assume that I'm a godling. I will definitely be an evil god. Here's how."

[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

It's not that verbing nouns weirds language so much as the regreekification.

view more: ‹ prev next ›

dashdsrdash

0 post score
0 comment score
joined 2 years ago