Does something technical in the Boston (MA, US) area. He/him.
Worm is great at what it does, which is to lure in people wanting to read power fantasies about being a superhero and then smashing every trope. (All the powers involve deep trauma. Everyone needs a therapist. Very few get any therapy. The world ends because we can’t take care of each other nicely.)
Every competent apocalyptic cult leader knows that committing to hard dates is wrong because if the grift survives that long, you’ll need to come up with a new story.
Luckily, these folks have spicy autocomplete to do their thinking!
I was going to make a comparison to Elron, but… oh, too late.
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.
“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.
Explanatory spoiler for those who don’t want to read Worm, a million words of deconstruction/reconstruction of superhero comics:
The 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.
You must prove yourself in the Outer Circle before being granted leave to study the Inner Mysteries. Or at least attend the right parties.
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)
It’s not just going to return quotes! It will return distorted quotes! I suspect you can get it to totally reverse a Singer position within five or six interactions.
With luck, you can then show it to Singer and cause him to die of shame.
We don’t have that much luck, though.
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.
Grew up in fairly rural upstate New York, where you can expect lots of snow and you can unironically envy neighbors who have working Franklin stoves when the power goes out.
I can confirm all of the above, plus: if you are lucky enough to have an Army-Navy surplus store around, one of your handmedowns is likely to be an N3B parka. Definitely not Russian or German or stylish. But it will keep everything above your thighs warm, except your hands. The pockets are uninsulated.
What would effective accounting even look like?
True, it’s too advanced for my brain due to being poisoned by Perl at a young age.
This is just shit.
A bunch of youse is thinking irrationally.
It’s them what go in front of the cannon.
Charlie Stross called the Singularity “the rapture for nerds”.
Good luck with that – I’m a pzombie this year for tax purposes.
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.
The main character commits rape because this isn’t a real universe anyway. You made the right choice.
It’s true, but they are still fairly easy to injure.
Try forming a fist and then hitting with the outside edge of the hand instead of your poor little fingers.
Or learn from your ancestors and become a tool-using mammal. I understand milkshakes have a distinct fondness for fascists.
Nah, they all consider themselves justified in sociopathic behavior.