Notices by Thad (thad@brontosin.space), page 2

@jacklaridian

@thomasfuchs That and these discussions start to feel more like religious debates at a certain point. A lot of folks seem to be taking the inevitability of general AI on faith and working backwards to try to justify it.

@thomasfuchs That's part of it but I've heard it from people who really should know better, people who at least have some technical understanding of how LLMs work.

I've had people tell me with a straight face that all *our* brains do is match patterns, and it kinda baffles me how somebody could fail so badly to understand their own thought processes. (Let alone, y'know, various autonomic processes that are entirely separate from conscious thought.)

@thomasfuchs It's utterly bizarre to me that a person who is actually in possession of a human brain could misunderstand it so badly as to think Spicy Autocomplete is anything like it.

@jacklaridian There's a section in Lewald's book where he cites all of Beast's literary references. It reminded me of that; it's one thing (of many) that '97 has done to keep the same vibe as TOS.

@jacklaridian The reason Beast got a bigger part after the first season was the writers had so much fun with him.

@jacklaridian Tying the two stories together with the theme of colonialism was a nice touch. I particularly liked the dig at Kipling/White Man's Burden.

@jacklaridian Yeah, a glance at Wikipedia confirms my memory of it being slotted in for Robocop is right. Apparently they made it instead of a 13th episode of Robocop.

...man, it's pretty fucking weird that they used to make Saturday morning cartoons out of movies like Robocop and Toxic Avenger, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pryde_of_the_X-Men

@jacklaridian Better animated than X-Men '92, and it's interesting to see the "new girl" throughline from X-Men #1 → Pryde of the X-Men → X-Men '92 → the first X-Men movie.

Its biggest problem was introducing too many villains at once, which was at least partly down to toy company pressure.

Marvel thought the X-Men '92 team was nuts for not introducing Magneto until episode 3. They had a point; that'd be like starting a Batman series with some third-stringer like Man-Bat instead of the Joker.

@jacklaridian Pryde of the X-Men did air, BTW, it just wasn't picked up for series. I remember catching it in a Saturday morning block that was usually a rerun of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends followed by an episode each of Dino-Riders and the Robocop animated series. IIRC once in awhile they'd run the X-Men pilot instead of Robocop, and pair it with one of the Spider-Man episodes that guest-starred the X-Men.

@zaratustra I'm sure there will be plenty of Mickey representation in @mmasnick's annual public domain game jam.

@jalcine I'm a comics fan and it is absolutely wild seeing how often self-professed "fans" side with corporate publishers over the human beings who actually write and draw the things.

@charliejane I don't think he should have any origin story.

At least, not a definitive one. I like the hook that he tells different sob stories to different people to manipulate them, but always as an unreliable narrator.

@thomasfuchs I think it's common for people who are experts at one particular thing to overestimate how well their knowledge generalizes.

Someone looks at a website, thinks "I could build that better," and maybe they're right, but then they also think they can build a better government or financial system or some other extremely complex thing well outside their area of expertise.

@thomasfuchs I think there's also a bias toward new shiny things, and it's easy to mistake something interesting for something useful and important.

I think the blockchain is fascinating, as math, as a concept. I also see no use case, thus far, where it serves any practical purpose that wouldn't be better served by a traditional, centralized database. It seems hard for some people to accept that both things can be true, that a new technology can be fascinating *and* completely impractical.

@thomasfuchs The Mac version of Wizardry is the best version of Wizardry. It's always been weird to me that the later remakes went back to the DOS version as their starting point when the Mac version has the far superior graphics and UI.

I did recently discover there was a WonderSwan Color version and it looks really good. I'm sorely tempted to give it a try, but I should know by now that starting a fresh game of Wizardry will only end in tears.