Photo by Puck Fennec! A cosplay of gangle and zooble from the amazing digital circus at Uproar. They’re both stylized in punk gear, leather, and PVC. Gangle is also wearing cat ears and a tail, to celebrate the occasion.

Okay, some professional photos of these guys- This was a joint cosplay project between @yendy.bsky.social and myself!

📸: @puckfennec.gay
Gangle: @yendy.bsky.social
Zooble: ME

I think you're concerned with the emotional harm that could be avoided if they don't internalize and believe what their parents are telling them. That's valid, but that's not what I'm talking about.

My point is that other people can impose real costs for failing to meet their expectations.

Would it be easier for you if I put it in financial terms? If someone's parents withdraw financial help with student loans or promised help with a down payment, & so on, because they aren't advancing fast enough, are they worse off then?

Every time people get excited that home prices have gone up, especially when they do it pointed at me, I point out that those gains are effectively unrealizable because I would need to buy or rent a new place to live under the inflated price regime.

Somehow this doesn't reach them.

And it definitely seems easier to fix the economy, because help to adjust your parents expectations is just not coming.

If your parents are shriek screaming in your ear that you'll never be an adult because you didn't buy your first home by 30, or constantly reminding you that you don't really own it while you have a mortgage, that's bad, and a result of economic conditions. And of your parents being terrible.

This is actually a pretty easy case to make. Someone who is losing relative position can be worse off than they were before, even if they don't directly personally care about status. Other status sensitive people, of which there are many, will treat them worse.

"If my 50 persona, 0 person company isn't real then I'm not a successful small business owner, and then who would I be?"

God, small business brain is for all-AI businesses is going to be horrible. Can you imagine the anti-union propaganda they'll cook up for themselves?

What this actually reminds me of is the anti-D&D moral panic. Specifically the desire to invert the situation and cast anyone who _can_ navigate fantasy and reality as if they're the ones who are confused and dangerous.

All these "Hire AI employees" things feel like a LARP with Claude in 18 hats. Bonus points if the human starts roleplaying HR violations in 60-90 business minutes.

LARPs are great! Until people are coerced into playing, among other failure modes.

Oh. Gosh.

look at this baby beaver and feel better briefly

(@ wildheartrescue on TT)

The people they're mad at are basically everyone whose existence makes their simple and/or totalizing solutions not work. If you think you have an obvious solution, then it's easy to feel like everyone who exists contrary to that vision is doing it _at you_.

I had to look this person up, but they're a software engineer turned venture capitalist? I can make a good guess what this view offers them.

They're basically trying to stuff reality, especially social reality, into a lower complexity class, and they need to eliminate subjectivity to do it.

As a side note, I developed this idea reading historic recipes and other texts. Many of the things they choose not to explain are implicit knowledge they assume readers have, but many of them are things authors assume the conditions of the work will force readers to know or figure out.

Many, many people would rather self-destruct and take the whole world with them than acknowledge that they were _choosing_ anything they perceive as soft.

Technology can reveal limits that were obscured before, and to a certain sort of person that looks like getting weaker.

As email and other tools like Jira sped that up, the work intensified to to the point where "do work whenever it's available to be done" would burn people out and reduce quality. You have to _choose_ to include breaks that the nature of the work previously included for you.

I've thought about a general form of this for a long time, I tend to think of it as "environmentally encoded" practices. For example, before email there was a functional cap on how fast someone could work if they depended on communicating with other people, there were natural breaks.

yoshi is living a better life than all of us

An action figure of Miles O’Brien from deep space nine

I like how they captured O’Brien’s deep discomfort with the universe in the sculpt. He doesn’t wanna be there. He wants to be at home. He knows something bad is about to happen. He just wants to be at home.

I'll spare you an analysis of the challenges of using AI for interdisciplinary research, but I will tell you the inappropriate cross-disciplinary comments are why I left academia.

It's just as an example, my discipline, software engineering, decided that data sets never count as research. This causes people to be incredibly jealous of anything that was difficult to gather or process and makes data gathering needs hard to meet, because there will be little credit.

Coming into the conversation with a different definition than you may be very frustrating, but it isn't goalpost shifting because we never changed our own criteria.

Arguing that whatever we're doing qualifies as research is a huge part of academia, which means we all think about what doesn't.

Yes, I already agreed that AI can be useful for looking things up.

I came to this post through a professor. Many of the people who were replying to you are also phds or candidates. We applied the definition of research that we use in our lives and disciplines.

If you feel up to it, I'd love to know where you think I was using a different standard. I included looking things up as something it was good at, but that wasn't research, in my original post.

That's cool, why didn't you mention it when people ask you for examples?

I didn't ask you for examples. I said the fact that you failed to provide them when asked suggests you don't understand what people mean when they say research. I still don't think you do, but thanks for the example.

What you're describing would, in an academic context, usually be called something like a literature review. It's usually something you have to complete before your research will be approved. And yeah, AI can be somewhat useful for this, I described it in my original post.

What an incredibly solipsistic worldview, but no. Knowledge generation refers to the production of new insights. When you look up things that other people already know, you don't generate anything. That is the whole point.

Research needs to be novel to the discipline, not the individual.

You do understand that Wikipedia will flag and cut an article for containing original research, because an encyclopedia isn't the appropriate place for it, right? If AI was exactly like a bespoke Wikipedia, that would just mean it's not good for research.