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Previously I said an average politician is smarter than the average voter. But Steve Witkoff is not a politician, so it's only natural he's so completely and utterly retarded in the head. His recent 28-point Ukraine peace plan was created by a child, or as a joke, or both. All of the points there are laughable, but let's focus on just one right now: "NATO will not expand." It's so senseless I don't even know how to explain it to the humans who don't see it. With an allegory, perhaps?
Imagine you walk round the block and notice this fat bully kid fighting some other scrawny little kid. At first you're like, "Go go kiddo, fight back! Raise your arms! Okay, here, take this little stick, but please don't aim for the head. Just swing it around!" And you are this grown-ass man the bully hates and sometimes flicks boogers at. You pretend you don't notice it, and he pretends he's not afraid to look you in the eyes. And then, something clicks in your head, and you utter: "Okay bully, listen up. If you promise you won't attack this kid again, I will castrate myself. I will fucking do it, man! Just say the words!"
What?! Why?? If you want to help the victim, help the victim. If you are tired of helping, go the fuck home. Why act like a mentally ill lunatic? What would've happened to Witkoff had he been out and about like that 50 years ago? Is this 5D chess? Is this retardation being normalized?
It's not the fact that some rando wrote this text that is so baffling, of course, but the fact that the world leaders are like, "Yeah, this guy is important. His plan is worth considering."
It could be as simple as russia paid Witkoff and his friend to promote this plan in hopes it would be ridiculed and laughed at, but people understood the game and decided to be subtle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLZWbUjNQWI -
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"Trump doesn't work for Putin. He just doesn't give a damn about how wars resolve, as soon as they resolve during his term." We can assume the popular today assessment above is true. If so, Trump would be willing to use both sticks and carrots, and it's only reasonable that, considering his admiration for Putin and his early belief in the russian strength, he would first use all the carrots he could muster. Despite the intense political pressure, he denied Ukraine U.S. intelligence, cancelled the previously scheduled military aid, discontinued U.S. assistance in identifying and cataloguing russian war crimes, used the Ukraine-blaming rhetoric, sent his personal friends to Moscow, promised control over the occupied territories, ignored the international arrest warrant, forced the American soldiers to roll out the red carpet, etc.
But he's running out of carrots. And we're now seeing the first signs of a stick. If so-called russia were a rational player, which Trump might have assumed, they'd take all the carrots they could hope for and call it a day. But it doesn't seem to be happening here.
But Trump might not be the only one who makes this mistake. Now that Ukraine gains the capacity for symmetrical responses, those are actively advertised. The degenerates hit Ukraine's natural gas facilities—a few days pass, and we see the news about their natural gas facilities being hit in return. The degenerates hit Ukraine's power plants—a few days pass, and we see the news about their power plants being hit in return.
The tit-for-tat strategy is efficient in game theory, but only when your opponent is a rational player. So-called russia is not a rational player. It's a deranged monkey on a tree with grenades instead of bananas. When it frantically screams at you, would you really scream back? When it crazed and enraged gropes for things in the vicinity and throws them around, would you really mirror that? That would be asinine. What you should do instead is render it incapable of argession ASAP. Hit it when and where it cripples most. If anything, the russians would be elated to get the symmetrical responses, not least since their tolerance for meaningless suffering is so high. Let's hope it's a mere political facade for the clueless worldwide audience.
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Boy do I want some nice Weyland-Yutani merchandise. The corporate motto, "Building Better Worlds," is preferable. Not the Japanese version perhaps though, despite the xenomorphesque aesthetic of the script. I don't want that association with cringeworthy kids' cartoons. The Japanese are winning the cultural war, but they are losing a lot of the battles.
Nov 6, 2025
No, I totally want the Japanese version. I wanna help them break that association. My stern face will ennoble the thing. People will look at it and think, "No way that's some weaboo shit. I suppose those squiggly lines can, just like English, denote an employment for an expansionist highly ambitious morally gray bleeding-edge techno-industrial megacorpration!" -
For a while I've been wondering why there's no good AI tool for creating music. Sounds like there's finally something promising, suno.com.
It's not as impressive as image or text generation yet, but I can totally vibe to some of the songs already.
What a time to be alive!Yes, all of these are AI-generated. -
Many of the entries here are at least partially motivated by the desire to educate humans on the topics they might be struggling to comprehend. There's going to be less and less of it.
Recently, I realized most humans don't seem to understand why a writer cannot create a character who is smarter than they are. They parry it with blind aggression and an ardent belief all they need is to make a character memorize tons of information, crunch big numbers, or invent sci-fi tech. I thought it was interesting. I played around with some ideas, jotted down a few lines. And then I halted. Would ChatGPT know the answer? If it were perfectly capable of providing the exact same reasoning, why would I need to explain it? I ran the necessary query, and indeed its response was quite sound. It even used the same freaking chess analogy I wanted to use in my explanation.
But there's one area where I still excel, I believe. I don't suffer from the bothsidesism most AI models currently suffer from. They often provide safe middle-ground answers to appeal to the widest possible audience and cater to the contrarians and doubters. So while it seemed to understand the topic and agree on the premise, it also muddied the waters. It wasn't able to impale the doubters efficiently, in my opinion. It gave them credit and said they could still *fake* a character's intelligence convincingly. This made ChatGPT miss an important point.
Here's the thing: all this faking of the character's intelligence will be ultimately bottlenecked by the author's reasoning ability.
Imagine a story. An alleged genius breaks into his neighbor's house through the window while the whole family's on vacation. Having done what he needed to do, he heads out. But—oh no!—the door is locked! He's stuck! He'd better use all his wits now, lest he die here of starvation. Time to prove to the readers he's the real deal. Using nothing but kitchen utensils, he crafts a teleportation machine. It's an uncharted territory. He may die most gruesomely! He panics, but there is no other choice. He double-checks his calculations, inputs the coordinates, presses the button, and... Swoosh! He's outside the house! Triumph. And all the readers are humbled by his unparalleled mind... Oh, wait. They're not! They say the protagonist was as dumb as a calculator. They ridicule the author for not realizing windows can also be used as an exit.
I tried to come up with the simplest possible example, but I hope it's obvious a more elaborate story can and will have many such windows. Whether a character chooses to use a window or to invent a sci-fi machine, it's still a single decision, a single move of a chess piece on the chessboard the writer assembled. And one of the moves is clearly better than the other, and the readers can see them all.
That's why Trisolarans, despite all their technology, felt so incredibly dumb in Liu Cixin's Three-Body series (as did humanity, as did scientists, as did everyone else for that matter). That's why, I assume, many authors choose to endow their smart characters with crippling flaws that force them to act irrationally sometimes. Technically, such a character still won't be smarter than the author, and their smartest decision will still be limited by the smartest decision the author can come up with. But at least this way every bad decision, either deliberate or resulting from the author's mistake, can be blamed on their, say, mental disorder or terrible personality, and not lack of intelligence.
There's only one sure way (that I know of) you can (on your own) create a character who's marginally smarter than you are, and I know some well-established writers use this technique. You have to painstakingly analyze your chessboard. You have to take your time. Use placeholders where the smart moves are required, and return to them regularly. Once you've analyzed everything, once you've taken your time to calculate your best move, make your character execute this move on a whim.
