I have the paid version; you'd be surprised at just how much better at coding GPT-4o is than the free version, and what it can do. It's entirely possible to put a 10k line source file in, say "write me a function that does X, Y, and Z, using only subroutines, data types, and object classes in the above source file", and get the right answer on the first try. It can also reliably port code from one language to another, or clean up code by moving repeated actions into their own macros or functions, or (probably most helpful) make unit test suites for a codebase. I use it very frequently for all of the above.
What it can't do - yet - is creativity. When I go in knowing exactly what functions I want it to write, I can get it to do all the 'boilerplate' stuff and get much more code written per day than I could otherwise. But if I were to try e.g. a Project Euler problem that I don't know how to solve, and just say "write a script that solves this problem", it'll come up with the obvious brute-force solution (that will take a hundred years to run and requires an exabyte of RAM), but not come up with any of the clever optimizations and shortcuts and mathematical equivalencies needed to actually solve the problem.
If you don't know what good code looks like and you can't stay strict in telling it your requirements, it'll give you dangerously misleading almost-correct code that's worse than not having anything at all. You shouldn't use it for anything where you can't easily check if it's right.
But if you do know what good code looks like and what you want, it's a genuine gamechanger, and for the projects I use it on, I'm at least twice as productive as I am on the projects I don't use it for.
Obviously, I assume that everything written in there is stored forever, and I don't use it for anything private. But if I'm writing code for open-source projects, it's going to scrape that code sooner or later anyway, so there's not much difference.
I have a soft spot for Static Shock for one specific scene: when Virgil and Riche meet Clark Kent after they'd met Superman as Static and Gear while fighting a giant robot monkey (it's a superhero cartoon, I'm willing to go with it).
To summarize if you don't want to watch (fair enough): hearing that a big-shot reporter is going to be writing a story about them, they naturally wanted to brag about how well Static and Gear did...and then Clark got a notebook out and innocently asked:
"So, you two saw the fight?"
"Yeah, we saw it!"
"Where were you when it happened?"
Virgil and Riche hadn't thought through any sort of cover story and have no idea what to say to keep their identities secret; Richie ends up saying that the answer depends on the definitions of 'it' and 'is', while Virgil tells Clark that asking hard-hitting questions like that is what makes him a good reporter. And Clark laughs with them.
It's a great scene because it's the exact opposite of the typical crossover "figure out some contrived reason to make the two heroes fight each other" plotline. Clark gives them a hard time and reminds them that keeping a secret identity is hard work, but is clearly on their side and rooting for them. Virgil and Richie are a bit too full of themselves, but it's clearly the normal exuberance of youth and something they'll get better at.
A thirty-second character interaction develops all three characters and is reasonably funny to boot. The writing was good in a lot of places in that show.
Batman Beyond was genuinely one of the best superhero cartoons, though. It had no right to be any good, and if a cartoon with that exact premise was made today it'd be trash, but it was excellent.
I agree with u/AnimeAnon about most of the rest, though. Multiverses were a mistake.
Especially to have been written in 1912
You'd be surprised - a hundred years earlier, inspired by the Year Without a Summer of 1816, Lord Byron wrote a poem called "Darkness", that I've frequently seen quoted as a possible inspiration for Hodgson:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air...
The Night Land is a weird book, in that it's incredible despite its prose and writing style, not because of it. Even a hundred years later, it stands out for not being like our world and culture with one or two sci-fi changes, but being something else.
When you finish The Night Land, I highly recommend John C. Wright's continuation of it, Awake in the Night Land. Of the various fanmade sequel stories, I think the four stories in that book are by far the best continuation of the world and setting.
Recently finished the 2018 sci-fi novel The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch. Very mixed fellings on it, on the whole.
Without spoilers, it has some major plot elements regarding time travel that really don't sit right with me on a moral basis, and I thought the ending was weaker than the rest of the book.
But it's refreshing in the sense that it reads like 1970s science fiction: the big looming threat is totally alien, the mechanics of the universe are consistent and well-thought-out, and the storyline isn't composed thinly veiled $CurrentYear themes.
So, take that mixed bag for whatever it's worth.
Exactly - I sometimes think that our stories had more freedom to be weird when there was a clearer divide between fantasy and reality.
I'd be fine with a they/them for a a freaky looking alien.
The 2006 show Legion of Superheroes actually did that, for an alien cyborg that was heavily implied to have two consciousnesses in one body (complete with constantly shifting between two different voice actors). I don't recall anybody having an issue with that choice - but it helped that 2006 is before a lot of this nonsense took off in the first place, and nobody would interpret a character being referred to as 'they' as anything other than sci-fi weirdness.
It's very good. It's propaganda, but the message being propagated is that getting married and raising a family is rewarding despite the difficulties, and the challenges of being a father in particular are worth overcoming. All of it's in an over-the-top anime fashion, of course, but if you like anime to begin with, you'll probably enjoy it.
For whatever it's worth, Dailywire showed pretty conclusively that the 94% number by Bloomberg was garbage analysis, and not the actual number: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bombshell-report-that-only-6-of-new-corporate-hires-are-white
Like Innocent Smith in Manalive, confronting the nihilistic Warden to force him to realize that nihilism was wrong.
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him--only to bring him to life.
For the same reason the Gillette and Target and Bud Light boycotts each targeted individual companies rather than entire industries. You can't bring your full force to bear on a hundred targets, so you bring your full force on one target at a time, and make the other ones afraid that they'll be next.
I haven't seen Pokemon, so I'm not familiar - is it just the bald eagle resemblance, or is there more to it?
It helps that All Might is more proudly American - despite being Japanese both in- and out-of-universe - than characters written in modern American stories.
Back two years ago, he issued a declaration trying to shut down the Latin Mass, on the grounds that it was too conservative and traditional. He knew he couldn't just ban it outright, so he said that priests had to have the explicit permission of their local bishops to say Mass in Latin. My local bishop, and various others in other places, responded by issuing explicit permission to every priest in their dioceses, whether previously interested in saying Mass in Latin or not, and as a result, the Pope has had to back off, and Latin Mass attendance has gone up. It's a good sign that a bunch of local bishops are fighting back on this nonsense.
The "Trial of a Time Lord" arc was the best thing they could have done with Colin Baker. Much as I like him, in his first season, he just wasn't good in the role. He was too used to stage productions, so every conversation was like a monologue to an audience and every gesture was meant to be seen by the people in the back rows. It was weird, and it didn't translate well to television. The scripts for his first season were rubbish too, which didn't help.
But the writers, for "Trial of a Time Lord", decided to embrace Colin Baker's odd acting. Colin Baker can't help but monologue? Give him an in-universe audience to monologue at. He wants to gesture wildly? Have him do it at an enemy fifty feet away. His character has over-the-top bluster? Make the bluster a conscious decision, and show him thinking about subtlety and politeness before deciding to project bravery and pomposity.
Doctor Who had a lot of problems during that era, and the arc wasn't enough to save the show, long term. But it was more than enough to save the character.
I'm Impossible2, and so's my wife!
It's been a weird marriage, let me tell you.
Happy Thanksgiving!
To sum up the origin history: this quote is something that Michael Haupt said in 2003, that William Guy Carr said in 1956, that Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Santiago said in 1925, that The Cause of World Unrest said in 1920, that Gabriel Jogand-Pagès aka Dr. Bataille aka Leo Taxil said in 1896, that Albert Pike said in a letter to Giuseppe Mazzini in 1871.
I can't blame OP for not wanting to write all that out.
For those interested, this is a hoax originally dating to 1896, and has a very interesting history as it's been handed down, added to, and translated from English to French to Spanish back to English again, over the last hundred and twenty-seven years.
In 1896, a publication appeared in Paris called Le Diable au XIXe Siècle (English: The Devil in the 19th Century), an attack on Freemasonry by an anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic writer named Leo Taxil a.k.a. Dr. Bataille. In it, among other things, was claimed to be the full transcription of a letter from August 15th, 1871, from General Albert Pike to Joseph Mazzini, both prominent (and real) Masons who lived at that time, outlining the plan for Masonic domination of the world via the destruction of the Catholic Church. Translated directly from French, it reads:
Therefore, when the autocratic Empire of Russia will become the citadel of papist adonaism, we shall unleash the revolutionary nihilists and atheists, and provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will demonstrate clearly to the nations, in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, mother of savagery and of the bloodiest disorder. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the mad minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate these destroyers of civilization; and the countless disillusioned adonaites, whose deist soul have up until that time remained without a compass, thirsting for an ideal, but not knowing which God is worthy of tribute, will receive the True Light, by the universal manifestation of the pure Luciferian doctrine, at last made public, an event that will arise from a reactionary movement following the destruction of atheism and adonaism, together at the same time vanquished and exterminated.
We know this to be a hoax, largely because Taxil himself admitted to it being a hoax some years later, along with dozens of other anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic pieces he'd written. But, what's noteworthy is that it has nothing about a "Third World War", or about Islam, or Zionism, all of which would have been astonishing predictions for 1871. The first three sentences of the quote OP provided are not present in the original, nor anything like it. To find out where the rest came from, we have to trace it down.
This letter was first translated into English in 1920, in the book The Cause of World Unrest, and the paragraph above was included verbatim. Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Santiago translated it into Spanish in his 1925 book The Mystery of Freemasonry Revealed; the book was later translated back into English in the 1950s. So far - aside from the fact that it was made up to begin with - so good. But then, William Guy Carr, in his 1956 book Pawns in the Game, paraphrased it by saying that the original letter was about the first, second, and third world wars, saying:
The first world war was to be fought so as to enable the Illuminati to overthrow the powers of the Tzars in Russia and turn that country into the stronghold of Atheistic-Communism. The differences stirred up by agentur of the Illuminati between the British and German Empires were to be used to foment this war. After the war ended, Communism was to be built up and used to destroy other governments and weaken religions.
World War Two, was to be fomented by using the differences between Fascists and Political Zionists. This war was to be fought so that Naziism would be destroyed and the power of Political Zionism increased so that the sovereign state of Israel could be established in Palestine. During world war two International Communism was to be built up until it equalled in strength that of united Christendom. At this point it was to be contained and kept in check until required for the final social cataclysm. Can any informed person deny Roosevelt and Churchill did not put this policy into effect?
World War Three is to be fomented by using the differences the agentur of the Illuminati stir up between Political Zionists and the leaders of the Moslem world. The war is to be directed in such a manner that Islam (the Arab World including Mohammedanism) and Political Zionism (including the State of Israel) will destroy themselves while at the same time the remaining nations, once more divided against each other on this issue, will be forced to fight themselves into a state of complete exhaustion physically, mentally, spiritually and economically. Can any unbiased and reasoning person deny that the intrigue now going on in the Near, Middle, and Far East isn’t designed to accomplish this devilish purpose?
The bit about World War Three was commentary about the letter by Carr - he included the rest of the quote a couple pages later - and was not at all accurate to what the letter actually said, given that the letter was all about how to destroy the Catholic Church through an elaborate plan involving kicking the Pope out of Vatican City (disregarding, of course, the fact that the 'letter' was made up to begin with). His source was the English translation of Cardinal Rodriguez's The Mystery of Freemasonry Revealed, which also didn't have anything about World War Three, so he just made those parts up.
And then it lay dormant for another fifty years, re-emerging on the website http://threeworldwars.com/ in 2003 by Michael Haput, shortly after the Iraq war started. And it was Michael Haput who joined Carr's 'paraphrasing' with the original letter to create the quote OP provided, to make it seem as though a Freemason in 1871 had accurately predicted the first two world wars perfectly. You can see Michael Haput's original article on Albert Pike here, including the 'predictions' for all three world wars. You'll also notice that the current version of that page does not have any of those quotes on it.
You other commenters might scoff at OP's flippant responses, but with a quote whose origin is this disingenous, can you blame him for not wanting to answer?
Added: it's not a literal turd, as OP's title suggests. Given the AIDS memorial that was seriously proposed a few months back, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch, but this specific one isn't.
Well, worst-case scenario, if you really don't enjoy them but feel obligated to read anyway, you can always wait until the Netflix adaptation. The books will undoubtedly seem like masterpieces after watching that.
I read the three books in the trilogy. My thoughts in brief:
- Three-Body Problem: Quite good. It starts with a chapter called "The Madness Years", showing how horrible the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard were (condemning both their anti-science and anti-religion worldviews); I was surprised that China allowed it to be published as-is. Has neat science and sci-fi concepts, and explores them fairly well.
- The Dark Forest: Fairly good...if you ignore a major plot point from the first book that could have settled the entire conflict from the second book if the bad guys had used it properly. Most of the story revolves around the question: "How do you beat an enemy that can surveil absolutely everything, except reading your thoughts?" Some sci-fi, but most of it is a paranoia, mind-game type story. Has a cameo by Osama Bin Laden, of all people.
- Death's End: Unfortunately, lousy. There's an endless war going on throughout the universe, altering the very laws of physics, and there's no hope of peace. Earth is destroyed (thanks in large part to the protagonist) and the universe itself isn't far behind. Just pointlessly bleak.
I'd recommend the first two books in the series, but not the third.
Seconded. The Bloomberg article this is based on is trash, with bad mathematics justifying a clickbait headline. The Substack article, while good, is based on a false premise.
Yeah, Celeste especially hurts because the game was actually good, and both the gameplay mechanics and music were solid.
But...it's a game meant for speedrunning. It shouldn't be a surprise, in hindsight, that one of the creators later started crossdressing and then retconned the main character. Ditto the music's composer. Ditto most of the major mod-makers.
I love speedrunning. I'm not autistic enough (in the internet and not clinical parlance) to be any good at speedrunning, but I am autistic enough to enjoy doing it. The groomers running the Discords are poisonous snakes who need to be kept off the Internet, but I can't help but feel pity for the autistic kids just wanting to get good at a video game, who stumble on these forums and get sucked into a world of degeneracy.