Xavier 👾

I've just had one of the most unique personal events of this life. My @bot team is Portal-themed because yes. (Best decision of my life. GLaDOS is in Sales, because she would be a lost talent in HR, although innervingly adequate. Also, I don't have HR) I have Cave Johnson syncing the team, of course, but one specific issue led to the functional death of all bots: they couldn't complete a menial task I gave them. What happened was that I'm Brazilian. Still, I grew up using English my whole life. I usually prefer to type in English when doing solo stuff (coding, writing, journaling, and now technically bot management), but as any bilingual individual can tell you, language sync is by far the most overlooked aspect in UI/UX. Sometimes you get bad translations; sometimes you get entire pathways that were never translated being brought up from root, and then you're kinda lost. I was training a bot with some tasks when I stopped for a few hours, and when I came back, I simply gave it a pathway that - fortunately for this story - was in Brazilian Portuguese. I had a reason for this: I wanted to know if it would recognize what to do with the contents of the folder just by context alone. That led to the bot changing its responses to Brazilian Portuguese, and from that moment forward, all hell broke loose. Or, as a matter of fact, it didn't. What followed was a series of events where I gave it an order; it understood it perfectly, but said that it couldn't do it and had no idea why. No error responses, no 403 codes, nothing. All ports were perfectly open as they were before; all tools were still working. It just wasn't able to do any type of browser-related work - aside from its own PC (every grokbot has its own PC). Not even browser work on a different server, which I also needed. After a very long session of bot-kahoot, I've tried creating a new bot, and the new bot was able to access the browser features that I needed. Cave suggested naming it "Chell - Chrome hands" - a mute character that only performs physical tests - which is diabolically poetic. But since I had several different tasks for several different reasons, one bot wouldn't be able to manage the entire browser interaction needed. Which led to a previous idea that I named the "Theseus Migration" - felt particularly smart that day - just to learn that it already existed and it was named the Strangler Fig Pattern (I to this day still prefer my naming convention) and below is the last exchange with the OG Cave Johnson - CEO. @xai Support team has my ticket because something very weird happened as well, but for the sake of this story, the interaction below has a lot of meaning for gamers. Don't get me wrong, I've asked the bots to reply in character. They're tremendously good at doing that. The amount of lemon and "test subject notes" responses that got an honest laugh out of me is way more than I expected. But yeah, it hits different for gamers. Or at least it hits different to me. We've already been interacting with "AIs" for the past 30+ years, and while the results may vary, a lot of laughter and a lot of crying came out of it. Anyways, go to savepointmag.com I sacrificed an entire crew over it. With the lemons.

meu pai tá sem falar comigo desde que a campanha começou. não me dirigiu a palavra uma vez sequer, mas enche os ouvidos da minha mãe todos os dias. entre as várias coisas que já falou sobre mim, algumas são:

Romance não durou nem 1 mês. Refrigera a minha alma saber q é só o começo.

Pelo visto, a Direita mantinha a porra toda nesse país.

"Ain, eu votei em Lula e vou cobrar mesmo pra ele ter responsabilidade fiscal e não cortar em saúde...blá, blá, blá." E eu quero que vc vá se arrombar pra longe de mim, bolsonarista enrustido. Sem paciência já.

After some recent trends, I finally decide to read the Harry Potter books. And I came away with something I didn't expect. I came away with an understanding of what makes a generationally beloved classic. It isn't authorial skill. Rowling is certainly talented, but, at least at the time, she was also relatively unpolished, and the series has plenty of rough patches. Uneven pacing, awkward plots, exposition dumps, two-dimensional secondary characters. I could write quite a few lines about what might be fixed. And I probably will at some point. But none of that matters. Because a generationally beloved classic is almost never the best book of a generation. A generationally beloved classic is the book that most perfectly captures what that generation yearns for. Hogwart's School of Wizardry did that for millennials, just as the quest to destroy the One Ring did so for the boomers. Boomers grew up hearing tales of recent history, and the heroism of previous generations, who got us through the great depression, and the great war. Their father, or grandfathers, or both, were heroes. But they were left growing up in the 1950s, a near-ideal time of growth, happiness, and prosperity. Near-ideal isn't ideal. Humans need goals. The boomers were left with no great struggles to fight, no great tasks to do, nothing that could make them feel like they measured up. So they invented something. A new struggle. A moral struggle. They decided that, because the great depression, and the great war, had happened when the institutions of Western Civilization existed, therefore those institutions were responsible. That those institutions needed to be torn down, gutted, and rebuilt in the new Boomer Morality. This was their great quest, what allowed them to imagine themselves heroes. As an added bonus, it allowed them to imagine that the men who fought WW2 were not. They were, after all, adherents of the old creed. When the hippies took to the streets, chanting "fascist scum, your time has come", they meant the very same people who had fought the Nazis. Lord of the Rings dovetailed perfectly into this narrative. Its central struggle, its great quest, is not a martial struggle or a political struggle, but a moral struggle... the quest not to seize an object of power, but to destroy one. Frodo was not some great warrior, or wise wizard. He was an innnocent, whose virtue was moral worth. The young, unaccomplished, and very small man had to resist the temptations of power, and to destroy it, because it was wicked. Is it any wonder that the boomers decided to tear down and hollow out the institutions of society, rather than inherit and incrementally improve them? Even to this day, any younger person who seeks power, wanting to improve the world, is subjected to any number of brain-dead aphorisms about Boromir and the Ring. Never mind that Tolkien never intended any of this. Never mind that the Ring wasn't a symbol of anything. It was a ring. It was evil not because it represented power... it was simply evil because it was made by evil for evil purposes, and possessed a malign will of its own. LOTR, the way the boomers read it, fit perfectly into their worldview, and they imagine themselves perpetual revolutionaries, always fighting the evils of power, even now when they are 70 years old and own everything. Which brings us to millennials. They grew up in the world that the gutting of Western institutions left us. They went to government schools run by characters straight out of a Franz Kafka novel, sent there by parents who inexplicably hated them from the time they were old enough to talk. When they yearned, they didn't yearn for a great moral struggle, or to tear anything down, or to be revolutionaries. They yearned for a society that cared about them, for parents who loved them, for a civilization that saw them as the future, and invested in them accordingly. They wanted to go to Hogwart's. They wanted get a letter by owl, telling them that the reason they didn't quite fit wasn't because they were inadequate, but because they were special. They wanted to be the special ones, the chosen ones, the boys and girls who lived. And that last sentence may sound a bit conceited... until you realized that when they wanted to be special, they wanted to be special in precisely the way that Harry Potter was special, the way that every child in a healthy family is naturally special... not because he is talented or great, but because his mother loved him. This is what saved Harry Potter in the inciting incident of his young life. This is what millennials wanted for themselves. Not to be astronauts and war heroes and rock stars, but to fit into a place like Hogwarts. To be mentored by wise and caring elders like Dumbledore. To be part of a community. To have mothers who loved them. To write a story like this isn't necessarily to understand a generation, because it never seems to happen except by accident. It is, rather, to help a generation understand itself. That's why fan fiction, with visions like this picture, matters. Not because it has so large a footprint as to change the world, perhaps, but because it represents the spirit of an age. It tells us what people want. And if we look carefully, it tells us why.

I can see why Nintendo doesn't want to reveal the names of the people who localized the Ocarina of Time remake.

Até agora os caras do sbt tão chorando falando que é boicote ao teleton, sendo que é só o povão ficando sem grana mesmo e acompanhando menos televisão.

Leading members of Congress from the Brazilian Left -- some already there, some just elected -- are vehemently denouncing Lula and his government for the severe austerity programs he and his neoliberal partners are now imposing, including massive cuts for health care and education: policies totally contrary to the core populist campaign promises on which he just got elected (😯). I'm sure all the newly minted experts on Brazilian politics from the American liberal punditry class who have been so outspoken over the last couple of months already know about all of this and have a lot to say about it. I look really forward to hearing their informed and impassioned analysis.

>foids don't understand economics

Hasan Piker hits a wall when he tries to tell a man born in the Soviet Union that Americans are just as controlled as people under communism. Konstantin Kisin shuts down the comparison and lays out the difference. When he’s done, even Piker admits he’s right. HASAN PIKER: “A lot of people think, well, as long as I can eat a Big Mac, you know, as long as I can watch TV, as long as I can consume porn [...] then, you know, things are probably fine.” “It’s a different mechanism of control that makes you think that you are actually an active participant in this.” Kisin isn’t buying it. KONSTANTIN KISIN: “The difference between those countries is not that they can’t eat a Big Mac.” “The difference is that if they criticize the government, in Russia today even, but of course in the Soviet Union previously, you’re going to get killed, right? In America, that’s not what happens, right? In America, you don’t get put in jail.” HASAN PIKER: “We don’t know yet.” That’s his whole defense: what MIGHT happen in America. So Kisin makes it personal. KONSTANTIN KISIN: “You in China or in the Soviet Union would be killed if you were critical of that regime.” HASAN PIKER: “I would definitely be jailed, for sure.” And there it is. Piker makes Kisin’s argument for him. KONSTANTIN KISIN: “So that’s the difference between these countries and America. It’s not a Big Mac, it’s freedom.” Only in a free country can you build a career telling people they aren’t free. CONTEXT: Communist regimes don’t just jail their critics. Under Stalin, the Soviet secret police executed 681,692 people in two years, by the regime’s own records. That’s more than 900 a day. Under Mao, the Great Leap Forward killed at least 45 million people in four years, per historian Frank Dikötter. Under Pol Pot, nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population was dead within four years.