AI isn’t “emerging.” The industry is new, but we’ve had neural networks for decades. They’ve been regularly in use for things like autocorrect and image classification since before the iPhone. Google upgraded Google Translate to use a GPT in 2016 (9 years ago). What’s “emerging” now is just marketing and branding, and trying to shove it into form factors and workloads that it’s not well suited to. Maybe some slightly quicker iteration due to the unreasonable amount of money being thrown at it.

It’s kind of like if a band made a huge deal out of their new album and the crazy new sound it had, but then you listened to it and it was just, like…disco? And disco is fine, but…by itself it’s definitely not anything to write home about in 2025. And then a whole bunch of other bands were like, “yeah, we do disco too!” And some of them were ok at it, and most were definitely not, but they were all trying to fit disco into songs that really shouldn’t have been disco. And every time someone was like, “I kinda don’t want to listen to disco right now,” a band manager said “shut up yes you do.”

“So be it. I shall be the Fellowship of the Ring.”

Especially during the Council of Elrond, when Merry and Pippin burst in and it cuts to his reaction shot. You almost expect him to spontaneously grow a pair of Ray-Bans out of his head.

The only thing that solves fascism is incredible violence.

That’s not exactly true.

• The deposition of the Greek junta in 1974 resulted in the deaths of 24 protestors (estimated) at the hands of a fascist tank, but no large-scale violence broke out. Infighting within the junta and the junta’s invasion of Cyprus caused far more death than the revolution did.

• The Carnation Revolution in Portugal that same year only resulted in 4-6 deaths, total, all caused by the reaction of the regime being overthrown; no one was killed by the revolutionaries.

• In Spain, just a year later, Francisco Franco died of natural causes; and while I wouldn’t call what happened over the next few years “peaceful,” it wasn’t quite two years from the death of Franco to the new government’s first successful election, and that time wasn’t marked by anything I would call “incredible violence.”

• Uruguay transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy in the mid-1980s. It was a little over a year between the first General Strike and the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president of the new government (though some elements of democracy had been filtering back into the government for the previous few years). No one was killed by the anti-fascists.

• Pinochet’s incredibly violent rule in Chile ended with an election and a peaceful (albeit extended) transfer of power between 1988-1990.

Today, all of these countries have a score of 85 or higher on the Freedom House index.

There are other similar examples: Argentina in 1982, the Philippines and the People Power Revolution in 1986, South Africa defeating apartheid in 1994, even South Korea last December. Not all of those are great examples, whether because they didn’t stand the test of time or because they weren’t “quite as bad” to start off with, but it certainly seems that in the modern era, defeating fascism can be done nonviolently.

Will it be done nonviolently in the US? I don’t know. All I know is, every fascist regime in history has either fallen or is in the process of falling. It’s just a matter of time, and how many people die along the way.

theres going to be a lot of suffering and misery inflicted on us all

Definitely true. One way or the other, this isn’t going to be a fun time.

Whoooaaaaa I heard the next update is gonna be HUGE

The leaks say they’re adding millidays and a whole new second

So is cayenne, though. For someone with a high enough CON score, poisonous blood might as well be a seasoning.

In my name?!

Because if they announce that they’re running Trump again this early in the game people might get wise before they can get hyped.

I believe it. But like…if the story was “Americans’ cluttered bedside tables are hurting smartphone adoption, study says,” we would rightly consider that story downright insane.

Where were all you awesome people with these great suggestions back in May?!

I regularly do something similar to the second one: depending on the vibe, when a Lord of the Rings rewatch is happening, I’ll often answer Elrond’s “Welcome to Rivendell” with “…Mr. Anderson.”

And your counter suggestion is what, rolling over?

The mayor of NYC has a lot more power than the governor of, for instance, Wyoming. More power than the prime ministers of a lot of sovereign nations, even.

When I was looking into this earlier, I was explicitly searching for markdown clients, so it didn’t come up, but thank you. I’ll look into it!

Nice, thanks for that info. I do use vscodium, so that could work.

Unclear, at this point, and it’s been a while since I looked.

It’s been a while since I read the details, but as I recall it stores them primarily in a database. The .mds are mirrors or something, maybe?

In any case, it looked to me like they could get desynced pretty easily.

Theoretically, I think AI used to generate content within parameters would be pretty interesting; like procedural generation, but more so. NPCs could have more realistic, fully-voiced conversations with you and with one another that reflect the state of the world and actions you performed; landscapes and creatures could be more realistic and fantastical; side quests could be generated within some parameters to fit your play style or your character’s build; faraway locations that aren’t a part of the main storyline could be generated as you explore them rather than built by the developer. It could be used to make a world feel more expansive, but also more personalized, while simultaneously freeing up developers from the pain of crunch by letting them focus their time (and the game’s gigabytes) on stuff that everyone will see, rather than on the stuff that only a few will see.

In reality, I don’t think that modern LLMs or diffusion models are well-suited to such a thing, and AAA companies are more likely to use it for more efficient microtransaction monetization and cutting development jobs anyway.

Actually, it may be that it quite literally can’t take any time inside a singularity! As you approach a singularity, the spacetime curve representing the passage of time approaches zero, meaning that from your perspective, the universe outside the event horizon moves more and more impossibly fast, and from an outside perspective, you move more and more slowly until your motion appears to stop entirely.

At the singularity, our understanding of spacetime basically just shrugs in an infinite manner, puts on its hat, and clocks out for the day. It may be that, for the singularity, the entirety of time between the collapse of the star that formed the black hole and the eventual evaporation of the black hole due to Hawking radiation are compressed into a single instant, and no time at all passes for it.

So you might not need any books at all, because by the time you reach the singularity (which wouldn’t take a particularly long subjective time), it may well be the end of the universe. Hope you paid the meter.

(Edit to add: Now, probably not. Hawking radiation has to come from somewhere, meaning the particles that have been absorbed had to be converted into them at some point, and that can’t happen if those particles are also still matter (or whatever) in an eternal conga line at the singularity. But hey, our understanding of physics literally can’t be confirmed or denied inside of a black hole, so your fanfic is as good as anyone’s!)

Well, the end of it is, at least.