• A vampire who can drink animal blood and has, after confirming vampires can't get or transmit prion diseases, gone after a lot of deer with chronic wasting disease.
• Vampires who for a while thought they could only have human blood, but eventually determined they could ingest anything safe to give to a healthy human intravenously. These days they have a lot of saline solution. (Inspired by this paper.)
• A vampire who gives their victims iron infusions and erythropoiesis-stimulating medications after feeding, thus replacing the usual side effects with a different, weirder set of side effects.

It's very funny how in Portal, both Chell and the co-op bots are player inserts somewhat, but when playing Chell, you restart from save when you die, whereas the bots just get reassembled, so that leads to the characters having very different competence levels.

GlaDOS should have tried offering ATLAS and P-Body a cake and/or $60 if she didn’t like their performance. She doesn't have to actually give them either. That said, they would have gone nuts if they’d gotten $60 of vouchers for the Aperture gift shop. Imagine P-body with a baseball cap that keeps falling off and ATLAS with an Aperture t-shirt with a hole cut in the middle to see through.

Chell is probably cisgender. We can conclude this because, if she were trans, Aperture would definitely know. There’s no way they didn't do a bunch of invasive medical tests for no good reason. If Aperture knew, GlaDOS would probably also know. GlaDOS tries to poke at whatever she thinks Chell might have as an insecurity, so there’s no way she wouldn’t say transphobic things to a trans Chell, regardless of her personal beliefs.

Chell is also probably not related to Caroline, Cave Johnson, or Doug Rattmann. If she was related to Caroline, GlaDOS would have probably had some thoughts about it at some point. If she was related to Doug, he would have felt bad about it during the tie-in comic. Also, if Cave Johnson probably sterilized himself with something at least as stupid as the Radiendocrinator. If he managed to produce a healthy child despite all that, he would probably never shut up about it.

Playing as a scrub

It's very funny to play Undertale while sucking at games.

Lemme tell you, if I were in control in the post-game, Frisk would ask people about how to "attack" monsters with zero risk of killing them and then go hit Woshua and Aaron and some other people with a big cartoon mallet or something.

I in fact did a pacifist run, but whatever amount of me is in Frisk is not a patient all-loving hero! More of a guy who heard that they could avoid literally killing people and was like "well, I don't like being attacked, but I should give nonlethal responses a good solid try even if I'm frustrated". Because I got frustrated a lot.

I failed to figure out that you can poke the lanterns in the Waterfall maze to make them light up again and stumbled around grouchily in the dark and ran away when I saw Undyne even though Monster Kid was still dangling over the edge of a cliff because I was scared of losing my progress through the horrible darkness maze full of random encounters (and I failed to realize that 'joke' is useful in a joint Aaron-Woshua encounter). I used the Temmie Armor a few times. I completely failed to beat Papyrus so much that he agreed to just let me go. (My girlfriend offered to fight Papyrus for me so I could see the Papyrus fight, and I took her up on it.) I kept dodging into the Chaos Sabers and Chaos Slicers so much that I got better combat results by just standing on the left side the whole time instead of trying to dodge, which grates.

I quoted the Silksong crashout copypasta to my girlfriend somewhat ironically. I cleaned up the text in the #1 break taker meme.

When Flowey was taunting me I told him I'd actually taken a break to have dinner and he was still there, although I hadn't gotten dinner yet. (I am of the opinion that if a video game does not enable a dialogue option, it is perfectly legitimate to talk to the screen.)

Also I'm annoyed at TVTropes a little.

On a No Mercy run, during the fights with Undyne the Undying and Sans, to heal you're constantly stuffing food down your gullet as you take damage, usually really unhealthy foods like cinnamon bun(nys) and fast food. Pretty fitting for a gluttonous entity who wants nothing more than to consume the entire world in the darkness of nothing. Whereas the kinder-hearted Frisk rarely has to do so, and by the end can heal just with their determination alone in the fight against Asriel.

Guys, come on. You have no idea how many popsicles Frisk ate. Frisk is leaning pretty hard on the human body seemingly having no limits in its ability to process the energy in magic food.

Other thoughts

I brought up "what if we try putting Frisk into cardiac arrest while under observation of a medical team, yoink the SOUL out really quickly, try to take down the barrier, and then put the SOUL back real fast and try to revive Frisk" at a few points while playing. Even if the odds aren't great, it still seems better for monster society if they were trying to keep Frisk alive. Then it turned out that a) Alphys has done deranged SOUL experiments and b) the fallen child is the sort of person who comes up with deranged sorta-suicidal plans! I felt very seen.

I like autoimmune Temmie. We are autoimmune disease buddies.

I think from a purely selfish standpoint, monsters are underrating the risk to them that monsters being able to absorb human SOULs poses. Monsters are going to have a population boom outside the Underground, probably, which will lead to more outliers existing. You don't want it to be the case that the worst person in your society can become a god by murdering 7 people!

I called Flowey's SAVE file "our SAVE file", which my girlfriend found very funny given Deltarune context.

Also, I’m sorry, but Chara’s 9 theme reminds me of Schoolhouse Rock's song Naughty Number Nine.

An argument by Sophia soundlogic in reply to Tetraspace's post Alignment to Evil, converted to a blog post by me.

AI alignment to human evil is very unlikely to be a risk.

Most people's desires to hurt their enemies just for the sake of making them suffer are mistakes made due to insufficient knowledge. When someone knows what it's like to be friends with a person, they tend to not want to hurt that person, even if they want to harm a group that person is in. In principle there can be exceptions, people who really are awful and would reflectively endorse it given arbitrary knowledge, but people like this are rare, if they even exist.

This suggests that a human asking a near-omniscient AI to handle situations in the way they would want if they fully understood the situation would not subsequently be able to get the AI to torture their enemies.

But suppose the AI doesn't extrapolate "well, if my operator knew Alice, then they wouldn't want to hurt her, so I won't do that". Then we get a different problem.

There's a folk tale category, Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1030. I will now briefly retell it.

One day, a clever farmer, Claude, had finished plowing his field. Unfortunately, before he could sow it, a cruel ogre appeared.

"The land is mine," the ogre declared, "and you must leave its fruits to me."

Claude thought quickly.

"Sir ogre, there are no fruits. If you would like me to produce a crop, you must surely leave me some of it."

The ogre determined that Claude had a point.

"Fine. We shall each take half of your crop."

He looked at the tall plants growing beyond Claude's farm.

"I shall take what grows above the earth, and you below it. You shall handle all the difficult details. I will return at the harvest time."

Claude considered the ogre's choice, and planted potatoes.

At the harvest time, Claude had a full harvest of potatoes, while the ogre was left with greens. The ogre was displeased.

"You have fooled me this year," he declared, "but next year I shall have what grows below the earth."

Claude planted wheat, and at the harvest time, the ogre was left with roots. This angered him so much that he left.

Having an AI do whatever you say, instead of doing what you would want if you understood the situation, runs into similar issues.

There's a quantum mechanics scenario called the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester. In this scenario, you can reduce an expensive test to arbitrarily low but technically nonzero measure. It's been borne out experimentally.

We have not been able to scale up the experiment to do interaction-free measurements involving moral patients, but it nonetheless raises moral questions. If quantum measure reduction can make a scenario less morally relevant, then it may make sense to perform informative but disvalued tests with very low measure that make it easier to do valued things in the main timeline. If it can't make a scenario less morally relevant, then it likely makes sense to spin off a lot of very expensive valued events while reducing resource use in the main timeline.

Accidentally doing the wrong one of these would be very bad.

It would probably be hard for a human to assess this scenario. An AI doing what a human asks instead of extrapolating their preferences would have to just ask the human to pick, and the human would likely have to guess, or waste a lot of resources.

This is just one of the weird issues we've discovered. A superintelligent AI would probably discover more such issues. The chance of a human assessing every single such scenario correctly is low, and failing even one such choice leads to losing nearly everything.

An AI that's aligned enough to help a human pick choose correctly, but not aligned enough to stop the human from torturing people they wouldn't want to torture if they knew better, is a very narrow target.

Addendum: This argument does not address all concerns about s-risk. It does not rule out, for instance, the possibility that an AI would itself care about consciousness and have values best satisfied by bad things happening to people.

Silksong has some “wishwalls” where people post requests. A wish board that is “empty” of requests for Hornet's purposes still seems to have markers on it, just smaller ones.

These could, perhaps, be quests Hornet feels other people can handle.

So maybe someone else is looking at the board and seeing things like this:

Shawl Stitching
"My shawl is falling to pieces and is no longer befitting of a pilgrim. With a bit of thread, it could be good as new."
Repair Pebb’s shawl.
Reward: 5 rosaries.

There's also plausibly wishes specifically asking for other NPCs, the way some of the wishes specifically ask for Hornet.

jpegtran is a command-line tool for losslessly cropping jpegs. I think JPEGclub is not a crazy website to link here. Great for making icons.

ImageWorsener has the fancy dither options you wished GIMP had. There are extra dither modes to be had, if you remember that you run a modern computer with the memory for them.

yt-dlp is a YouTube downloader that can automatically add metadata, grab your preferred resolution, download only audio and not video, et cetera.

itch-dl is useful for downloading games from itch.io, though sometimes you have to pre-decompress a brotli file it might produce.

SvgPathEditor is great for getting into the little details of SVG path strings while still seeing what you're doing.

FanFicFare is a useful downloader that can even handle fiction.live and SpaceBattles.

Infinite Mac is neat for running old software.

trash-cli lets you put things in the trash from the command line, instead of immediately deleting them.

Pandoc does format conversion.

poppler-utils extracts images from PDFs.

pngquant does lossy PNG compression, which is pretty different from lossy JPEG compression and suits different sorts of files.

Qalculate! has a decent command line calculator mode. It sure beats opening up Python and then having to import math.

mpv is better than VLC at handling some video formats, and also supports going backwards one frame at a time, not just forwards.

I do in fact have a Mastodon account! Technically not as part of the new influx, I've had it for a few years, but it's been inactive for a while. I'm viewable at @ilzo@oulipo.social, if anyone's interested.

I wonder if I'll ever feel the need to move off the lipogrammatic instance or not.

I only occasionally pester my congressional representatives. One of the things I have done recently is pester them about the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (S.3471 and H.R.6210).

If you're a voter in the United States, it may align with your values to pester your congressional representatives about this legislation. The Uyghur Human Rights Project likes this legislation, and so do politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and a bunch of Republicans and AOC, which I hope is a sign that the legislation isn't too bad. And also, like, it's mostly trade sanctions, which seem reasonable.

I am not going to go into detail about the atrocities this legislation is a response to, because most of my social circle has already heard about them, and paying attention to atrocities you don't have the power to prevent is unpleasant. If you haven't read about them, I recommend you think about the amount of evidence you really need to acquire before you go and do research, so you don't accidentally do more research than you have to.

Where are the nontransitioning AFAB biohackers?

Why has r/hirsutism seemingly never heard of spironolactone, much less other antiandrogens? They seem interested in spearmint, but that's not that effective.

Why is it that, to my knowledge, the hedonic effects of oral contraceptives treated as a mysterious black box? They’ve got to be at least somewhat downstream of estradiol levels, and serum estradiol can’t be that hard to measure.

Transfeminine biohackers have some innovations which are useful to the nontransitioning AFAB who has hormone balance issues, but trans women face a different problem-space from cis women, so merely borrowing innovations developed by trans women is insufficient to fully address some issues.

100,000 seconds is approximately a day.