Khrux

I’ve seen quite a lot recently saying a particularly distracting aspect of phones isn’t that they’re a screen and a visual stimulus, but a tool and a haptic stimulus.

An increasingly popular way to combat checking your phone while watching TV is to busy your hands with something. If this works and is widely adopted, we won’t need shows to have second-screen writing repetition; our brains tell our hands to use the tool, and it just so happens that the tool is full of text and speech and occupies the language center of our brains, meaning we stop listening to the show.

Also, a whole separate thing I often think about, before 2010, there were very few high budget TV shows. TV was made on a much smaller budget than film, and the writing often took a hit too, and that was just the reality of watching TV. They were also designed to hook people who were clicking around channels with lots of recaps and narrative refreshers, for people tuning in halfway through, this is like the second-screen writing issues we complain about now on steroids, straight to TV movies were also terrible for this.

Movies that were designed for Cinema revenue weren’t impacted by this or course, but even DVD revenue movies often have simpler plots and reiterate their narratives for people who are half watching while chatting or stoned or whatever.

My overly ambitious Minecraft mod I long since gave up with was basically a pollution and yield mod to incentiveise a flow or early manual work > midgame automation > lategame manual work for the best resources.

I do agree entirely. If I could use the internet of 2015 I would, but I can’t do so in a practical way that isn’t much more tedious than asking an LLM.

My options are the least rancid butter of the rancid butter restaurants or I churn my own. I’d love to churn my own and daydream of it, but I am busy, and can barely manage to die on every other hill I’ve chosen.

Compared to crypto and NFTs, there is at least something in this mix, not that I could identify it.

I’ve become increasingly comfortable with LLM usage, to the point that myself from last year would hate me. Compared to projects I used to do with where I’d be deep into Google Reddit and Wikipedia, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers much more quickly, and far more tailored to my needs.

I’m getting into home labs, and currently everything I have runs on ass old laptops and phones, but I do daydream if the day where I can run an ethically and sustainably trained, LLM myself that compares to current GPT-5 because as much as I hate to say it, it’s really useful to my life to have a sometimes incorrect but overalls knowledgeable voice that’s perpetually ready to support me.

The irony is that I’ll never build a server that can run a local LLM due to the price hikes caused by the technology in the first place.

I heard a theory (that I don’t believe, but still) that Deepseek is only competitive to lock the USA into a false AI race.

I don’t really think there’s ever a pass to staring at anyone’s chest except a partner or a very specific friendship energy.

I mean as a first language speaker, it is.

As much as I don’t disagree, I think the “Apple is closest to Nazism” comment touches on something different. Other massive American companies have awful practices but they don’t care particularly how their way of making money looks. Apple wields a specific aesthetic power that generally dictates a hegemonic uniformity, that strays the line of being to their detriment at times. I don’t think any other big tech company would care in the same way if not for their desire to copy Apple.

He was actually just there in the water for the reference images, and got left in by mistake.

Funnily enough, when I do ask an LLM to rephrase anything I write, it changes any sentence with a semicolon to one with an em dash. I’ve probably always overused the semicolon because of its availability on a keyboard, but it appears a lot in my normal work.

Now I trust the semicolon, it’s an identifier of me.

Thank god I display my status amongst my peers by rejecting mainstream status symbols. Yay for counterculture being part of the system!

I’m in the UK too and the gradual shift to WhatsApp has been a relief considering it used to be WhatsApp, Snapchat, messenger, Instagram, iMessage and twitter about ten years ago, not that anyone did all of them.

It’s a shame it’s meta but it’s so nice that it’s not a huge pile of useless features, just a few.

I don’t even understand the purpose. Who the hell cares what colour your texts are?

Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.

When a medium’s shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.

It’s not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don’t miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it’s particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it’s false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.

Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that’s admirable.

People disagree because it’s still an abstraction of camo. Wearing it in the first place came from people fawning over militarism.

I actually think it can work with a queer look in one of two ways, so you are likely fine: Either it’s effectively teasing the pro authoritarian militarism camo types, or it’s a radical anarchy armed rebel look, which without praxis is really just the former look again. Either way these are fine.

Another reason maybe you’ve been downvoted is that people loathe the deep abstraction of modern, or rather postmoderm society. Camo was made for soldiers > Camo was worn by patriotic civilians simulating the soldier aesthetic > particularly under the Bush administration, it became less a symbol of soldiers, and more a symbol of patriots. Patriotism is nationalism.

Today when most of us camo in the military cosplaying way, we think ‘nationalist’. When we see a person in a little bit of camo, perhaps just some came shorts and a regular t-shirt, we think either ‘nationalist’, ‘okay with nationalism’ or ‘ignorant of nationalism’.

So when most people see someone in a blended queer and camo look, they probably assume one of three things: ‘ignorant of nationalism’, ‘critical of nationalism in a rebellious manner’ or ‘pro nationalist queer’. Of course one of these is fine, but one is very bad.

Making it up as you go along isn’t inherently bad. Nine times in ten I prefer a story which is planned out but basically any medium that’s open to additional seasons, novels, sequels, etc is capable of falling into this category.

It’s only really a sin when the medium promises a long form mystery while doing this, hence the fact Lost is #1 here. Sherlock Holmes was written as episodic mystery and Arthur Conan Doyle clearly never planned future stories as he went and nobody minded. Togashi, the manga author for Hunter x Hunter stumbled into his most famous arc just because he’d made his metaphysic and societies up as he went and the stars aligned, leading to the Chimera Ant arc. The Simpsons rarely ever changes it’s status quo between episodes, and therefore can be made up as it goes along, because it’s going nowhere. Breaking Bad literally changed the ending of season one to not kill Jesse partly due to the writers strikes and subsequent shortening of the season, and Mike as a character exists because Bob Odenkirk was busy.

Any medium that decieves the audience, promising a well reasoned, long form mystery without any planning of what that mystery is, is bad. Perhaps you’ll strike gold and have an epiphany as to how to bring the plot together perfectly, but that’ll just be luck. Ultimately this is an expression of consumerism; baiting the expectations of art and narrative to deceive the audience for nothing more than engagement, and therefore money.

I find it interesting how people talk about Abrams’s Mystery Box as a choice for a writing technique, despite the fact it’s objectively shit. I can forgiving it in D&D sometimes, but in a professional story, it’s ridiculous.

I’m normally a big defender of erotic content in otherwise non erotic fiction. Enjoying this kind of content is incredibly human and if you were to definite which part is a social construct, it’s deliberate inclusion or deliberate omission, clearly the latter is routed in something more artificial, in my opinion.

That being said, this panel is a lame. The cropped framing is particularly objectifying, and it feels very unnecessary, like it’s just here to have an ass in shot. It’s literally a pulp thirsty trap so people who see this page are interested in the comic.

This isn’t really the gen Z stare, I’d describe that as a very neutral expression.

Honestly I don’t actually think the Gen Z stare has much to do with the internet or COVID either, as much as it’s just something that caught on among people in school. I think another large element is that Gen Z culturally a lot less judgemental of people who don’t mask autistic traits.

The general nodding and 'mmhmm’ing we do to affirm we’re paying attention is something that’s effectively a social contract, although useful. The flip side of the Gen Z stare that people don’t talk about is that Gen Z also don’t mind recieving the Gen Z stare, and can converse through it.

I think it’s just a silly reading, pretending point 4 is madness over point 3.