The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
Have the router ask the server if there’s an update available when turned on. If none, proceed as usual; if there is, force the update, regardless of the time of the day. Problem solved.
Of course, for that you need to acknowledge that you violated the “ask, don’t be an assumer” rule, instead of bossing customers around with “golden rules”. You won’t change their silly and pointless habits anyway.
Here in Curitiba it’s this church:
It’s constantly maintained and renovated, but the building is 287 years old, built in 1737. (For reference the city itself is 331yo.)
It’s kind of funny that people here don’t typically remember the name of that church, Igreja da Ordem (Church of the Order; the “order” in question are the Franciscans). Instead they remember the name of the square that the church faces, named after the church - o Largo da Ordem (lit. “Order Plaza”, but more like “the plaza of the church of the Order”).
Siegfrieda also liked to sleep on sinks, although she grew out of the habit:
yes it’s raining on this side of the house too.
“You can never be sure!” - cat logic.
Perhaps she associated bathtub = attention and feeling good afterwards? Cats do show some sort of weak “past cause, present effect” connection.
In Kika’s case I don’t have an idea, as the place changes from time to time. It used to be on the stairs, then on the sisal mat, now the box. It’s kind of annoying when I’m taking my morning yerba though, as I’m in the kitchen and she’s meowing constantly.
Kika (16?yo): she likes to be petted, but she’s wants to be petted in a very specific corner of the house - currently her cardboard box, but it changes over time. So she begs me “pet me, pet me!”, then as I move my hand to pet her she runs to the box, and keeps meowing. Until I go pet her in the cardboard box.
Siegfrieda (7?yo): I don’t know what’s weirder: looking at the rain and meowing at me as if saying “can’t you stop it?”, watching anime with me, or the “overly attached girlfriend” face that she does when someone is eating yoghurt.
They probably could, indeed - but you’d need multiple different applications, each for one use case. In the meantime a LLM offers you a tool that won’t hit all the nails, or screw all the screws, but does both decently enough in the lack of both a hammer and a screwdriver.
It’s a great analogy though - Linux users aren’t deemed profitable by the A³ companies, just like offal is unjustly* deemed yucky by your typical person.
*I do love offal though. And writing this comment made me crave for chicken livers with garlic and rosemary over sourdough bread. Damn.
The backlash to this is going to be fun.
In some cases it’s already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.
It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.
It is not completely useless but it’s oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a “trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!” A bike is still useful, even if they’re building a scam around it.
Here’s three practical examples:
None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don’t require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It’s either things that you wouldn’t use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say “yup, that’s bullshit” (#1, #3).
I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.
Amen.
Indie games might not be flashy, but they’re often made with love and concern about giving you a fun experience. They also lack all those abusive DRM and intrusive anti-cheat systems that A³ games often have.
It’s interesting how interconnected those points are.
Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.
Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on “our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it” and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.
Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?
I’m predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.
I don’t see this as an unpopular opinion, but I do agree with it - at least here (Brazil) Twitter was evolving into a containment cage for nutjobs and morons, until it was blocked. (And it’s damn easy to find who’s who in the Bluesky diaspora, as the nutjobs/morons miss Twitter while the saner people are glad to see it locally gone.)
This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.
From a conlanger perspective I feel like the time reference could be split into four, to account time travel. For example: let’s say that both of us travelled to 3100, I remained there and you came back to 2024. Then you write me a letter, that I’m going to read as soon as we arrive in 3100, telling me about your experiences. You could use:
Any given language could pick any of those references to model their tense around, or many of them, or even none (plenty languages IRL lack grammatical tense). If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).
There was a time that people prefixed my nickname with “Wiki-”, because apparently I stand out for knowing a bit about everything. I don’t quite agree with it but hey, at least it’s something nice.
My accent (when speaking Portuguese) also stands out, apparently. Outside my city people are quick to identify where I’m from; and yet in my own city people often ask me where I’m from.
You know, the ban here was enlightening for me, about certain people from my social circles. Four examples:
But I digress (as this has barely anything to do with the OP). Those people like Musk are bound to “creatively reinterpret” the words: in one situation orange is yellow, in another it’s red, both, neither. Sometimes it isn’t “ackshyually” related to red or yellow, it’s “inverted blue”. And suckers fall for it. That’s what Musk is doing with fascism.
In the second hypothesis it wouldn’t be self-inserting; it’s more like the author explaining something to the readers, outside the story.
I’ve never noticed this usage of the past tense in the appendix about Newspeak - you’re right, it does. And it’s also written in standard English, so interpreting it as written in a world after Oceania fell is viable.
And following this line of thought we could even interpret the main story as a narrative within another.
Another possibility is that the appendix is not written in-universe, and uses the past tense because it’s how people expect storytelling to be written in English, with Orwell speaking directly to the reader instead of Winston Smith.
This is not exactly what you’re asking for (media inside media), but it’s really close in spirit (nested narratives), and I really like it: a book written in Portuguese in the XIX century, called Noite na Taverna (Night in the Tavern).
The book has an overarching story of friends telling each other stories in a tavern, over booze; with all those nested stories being about love, despair, and death (it has a strong gothic vibe).
And, as each character tells the others a story, there’s always that fishy smell that the story might be actually bullshit; and other characters do raise some doubts about its in-universe veracity (like Bertram does to Solfieri). And you, as the reader, do the same - but in no moment you question the veracity of the overarching story, and you feel like you’re inside the tavern alongside the drunkards.
So it’s a lot like the author is toying with your suspension of disbelief - redirecting it from the overarching story to the nested stories, and as you doubt the later you get even more immersed into the former.
If I must use an example of media within media, then my choice would be “The Book” within Orwell’s 1984. I think that it’s a great piece because it shows Orwell’s views on politics and society, while still serving narrative and worldbuilding purpose - for Winston it’s a material proof of the Inner Party’s bullshit, for O’Brien it’s a tool of the Inner Party to sniff out dissidence. (Note: 1984 is extremely misrepresented nowadays, I’m aware, but I still like it.)
To prevent the empire would be more complicated than it looks like, since you got multiple rebellions and civil wars popping up as early as 135 BCE. They ultimately boiled down to
And those are all problems that are damn hard to address without leading to plebeians being manipulated, local peoples being suppressed, and cutting down the power of the patricians by a central, strong government. That’s basically what Caesar tried to do, and Octavian achieved.
Front right, keys and lighter. Front left, cigs. Rear right, wallet. If I must carry my phone with me it’ll be probably in the front left pocket alongside the cigs.