Schadrach

…and yet the elevator pitch “Seth McFarlane wants to be Picard” sounds like it would be awful. But it works.

they very likely didn’t know you were a woman,

I didn’t. I don’t usually check the user profile and comment history of whoever I am responding to to verify their demographics before responding.

It was info I already had (which a reader could glean from my comment),

Could they?

do cocaine (although I’m pretty sure it was speed back then, but I’d still take it).

…in response to a reference to cocaine cola. That doesn’t sound like you were aware cocaine cola was actually a thing, but rather sounds like you were saying people weren’t using cocaine much but were doing speed instead, implicitly suggesting cocaine cola wasn’t a thing, at least not commonly.

You did so in comparison to cocaine, in response to something that only mentioned cocaine in the context of cocaine cola. If you say it wasn’t cocaine but speed back then, how am I supposed to get that you are referencing diet pills and not at all contradicting the whole cocaine cola bit?

But yeah, diet pills were basically just speed back then too. I can’t argue that. Not sure why that’s related to cocaine in cola though. Turns out people do all kinds of drugs, especially when readily available.

Getting high as shit has had an important cultural role in most of the world at one point in time or another. Westerners got away from it post-Christendom but even then it’s been a thing basically everywhere at one point or another, unless nothing psychedelic grows there, and even then there are ways to achieve ecstatic states to roughly similar effect through extreme asceticism - if there’s not something to eat or smoke to get there then your shaman might have to starve and dehydrate himself then be suspended in the air through rods run through his chest, but you can get there either way.

Coca-Cola literally used to contain cocaine. It started life as a patent medicine made from coca leaf and kola nut, and expanded from there. By the 1950s they at least on paper were already cocaine free - they switched to “spent” leaves in 1904 (leaves that already had cocaine extracted and so only had what was left due to inefficiencies in the process) and later switched to extract made by a third party that was invested in being thorough in removing the cocaine since they were selling that for medical use as well so any cocaine in the extract sold to Coca-Cola was a loss in their higher-dollar product.

The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.

Then you put it beside a truck from 30 years ago that’s a quarter the overall size but has the same bed capacity and towing power along with much better visibility instead of not being able to see the child you’re about to run over. And then you understand what people mean when they say massive trucks - giant ridiculously unnecessary things that are all about being a status symbol and dodging regulations rather than practicality.

You underestimate the number of people you wouldn’t class as intelligent. If no one wanted massive trucks, they would have disappeared off the market within a couple of years because they wouldn’t sell. They’re ridiculous, inefficient hulks that basically no one really needs but they sell, so they continue being made.

The individuals at the company are the problem. The internet tends to comment like they don’t get this.

You make it sound like if you make and sell a thing, people are required to buy it. If you tried to sell me an AI bed that would not function without an active internet connection, I’d laugh at you.

The thing is this was the first of its kind election for this district, so where did those estimates even come from? If you give a number it’s got to be from somewhere right?

So, this board has never since it’s creation had to have an actual election? It’s always been someone running unopposed?

I could see low expectations from the registrar of voters for turnout, but 60 people in the entire city? And they just didn’t have any kind of plans if more showed up?

This is the kind of election where usually only people who specifically are invested in the thing bother, I wouldn’t be surprised if the last time one of these happened they literally did average about 20 votes per polling place, and their plan if more showed up was supplying 15x more ballots than they needed last time, just in case. Which wasn’t remotely enough.

The more I see him in the real world the more very upset I become that I genuinely really liked his story. HPMOR is a banger, possibly one of my favorite pieces of amateur literature in existence.

If you enjoy ratfic, I suppose I have to point you at the standard other fare that tends to be enjoyed by fans of HPMOR, like Ra by qntm, Yud’s other works like Three Worlds Collide, and the assorted works of Scott Alexander especially but not limited to UNSONG (an utter masterpiece of foreshadowing), Sort By Controversial (one of the most realistic horror stories ever), Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person (which alternates between nonsense poetry and the narrator trying to convince the entities in his DMT trip to prove they are real by solving a math problem, complete with explaining enlightenment with a car analogy) and Samsara (about the last unenlightened man being driven to enlightenment by sufficiently stubborn refusal of it).

Going away from the ratfic standards, there’s also some overlap between fans of those and the works of Wildbow/J.C. McCrae. Wildbow is a fantastic author, but wouldn’t understand the value of brevity if asked to write something to hit him over the head with repeatedly. If you want to try his stuff and like superheroes and deconstructions thereof, start with Worm. If you prefer biopunk, try Twig. If you prefer urban fantasy, then either Pact or Pale. He’s also got Claw and Seek, which I haven’t yet read myself.

I didn’t know the author was a wanker at the time of reading, and now that I do, I want to make myself retroactively un-like his work, but I can’t.

He was so good at HP fanfic that he managed to illicit a similar response as many have to the JK’s original.

One of the key things to enjoying it is realizing that Harry is very often wrong about astoundingly obvious things because he’s not half as bright as he thinks he is and has massive, glaring blind spots. Rather like watching someone with a PhD who thinks that means they know much about things wildly far away from their specialty.

Specifically it will only be real if it becomes real and you didn’t support it becoming real.

It’s like the inverse of the notion that the proof of God’s omnipotence is that he doesn’t need to exist in order to save you - the whole idea of Roko’s Basilisk is that if the AI super-intelligence machine God comes to be, it might decide to punish everyone who worked against it coming to be, as an incentive for people to help it come to be in the first place. For exactly the right kind of host, this is an effective memetic infohazard, despite essentially being “God will be angry if he don’t assist in his apotheosis”.

He’s best known for a blog on rationality called LessWrong, Harry Potter fan-fiction written as a vehicle for his notions on rationality called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and being more than a little obsessed with AI risk and being behind the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He’s also written some other fiction that’s broadly not bad, including a piece about first contact called Three Worlds Collide and an isekai Japanese-style light novel called A Girl Corrupted By the Internet Is the Summoned Hero?!. He once wrote an April fools post where he claimed to be from an alternate universe and for a one off April fools bit contained a surprising amount of world building.

None of the above implies he is actually human, let alone is familiar with where common human foods grow from. I could totally see him being exactly clueless enough to assume that since holy fuck are a lot of foods technically cultivars of wild mustard, that potatoes and apples are similarly related.

Classic poor folk food. You take some kind of starch (rice or potatoes are common choices), two cans of veggies, optionally a finely chopped or ground meat and shredded cheese if you’ve got it and a can of some kind of soup or similar as a binder and to help keep it from drying out. Mix everything thoroughly but the cheese, top with the cheese, bake. It’s filling, cheap, makes enough that you probably have leftovers and will last a few days if it needs to. Most combinations under this formula are also pretty tasty. The whole point is to stretch a little meat and veg a lot.

It’s “make a filling meal off whatever you got last time canned stuff was on a sale and still have in the pantry” food, aka food for poor folk.

Used to have an office that was an addition to the building, with no room to connect it to the main HVAC. I had one of these to myself. The window on my office door fogged up frequently because I set the thing to give-visitors-frostbite-cold.