aspenmayer

I think the sexuality of Kusanagi works on multiple levels. She is a full cyborg, and she could present however she wishes. She explicitly uses her appearance toward social engineering ends in the Stand Alone Complex series. I’m not very familiar with the manga, from what I do remember, Kusanagi is bisexual and is likely “fully functional” sexually, but her body as depicted isn’t really her own, as she relies upon regular maintenance provided Section 9.

I view the portrayal of Kusanagi as being steeped in aspects of the male gaze in a metatextual way. Japanese society has a high emphasis on traditional beauty standards, and the artists depicting her as a character use her beauty as a foil against the audience, by contrasting her beauty with her strength, and by subverting the desires of the audience by drawing our attention to her humanity by alienation through destroying her body at multiple points in the series. Her desire to protect her comrades at the cost of her body shows us how she is willing to sacrifice her femininity, being forced to regress to a childlike body.

The series have a lot of fan service, but I believe that it’s intentional so that the audience is forced to confront their own biases and stereotypes about women and about cyborgs/robots. The cyborg nature of her body as it is destroyed reads to me as a visual metaphor for the Madonna/whore double standard women are subject to society.

I guess I don’t disagree with your view, so much as I think that how she is depicted works on multiple levels in-universe and with respect to the viewer, and said depictions serve multiple functions in the text.

What's your point with this line of argumentation? Are you disagreeing with my definition of "corporate war", or are you disagreeing that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate one by my definition?

It’s a discussion board. I’m discussing the topic and trying to get to know what you think and believe, and thanks to your prompting, I got to know what I think and believe a little better myself. I don’t have any desire to disagree with you, as I don’t think that either one of us are making statements that have an objective quality to them, as the context is too subjective and subject to interpretation.

I don’t know enough about your definition of “corporate war” in the context of this thread, since you said we’re using different definitions, so maybe you could share a little bit about what that term means to you? What would it take to make the Ukrainian war a corporate war, to you? What are qualities of corporate war, and how would you or I know it when we see it? Can you think of some examples that meet your definition of corporate war, either in fiction or in real life?

It’s more corporate than any past war, and for the reasons stated, it is hard to imagine how it could be more corporate if the belligerents tried. The direct involvement of startups in weapons dev combined with the points system creating a market for material driven by individuals and small groups rather than a traditional procurement process is hyper capitalist. The absence of direct conflict between corporations à la Shadowrun doesn’t meaningfully change the calculus for my determination that the Ukraine was is a corporate war.

Regarding your edit:

I won't let you move the goalposts.

I don’t know what this statement is referring to, but I haven’t changed any of my positions regarding what I perceive as cyberpunk or whether or not I view the Ukraine war as corporate (and cyberpunk).

Perhaps you view the discussion as one where points are scored, but I don’t. I view the discussion as a collaborative enterprise where we both express ourselves and develop our own ideas in the context of a wider discussion.

If there’s something specific I said you would like me to address, please let me know, as I don’t know what you mean.

The points system whereby Ukrainian soldiers’ units earn credits for confirmed kills (with a bonus for live capture) of Russian and other nations’ hostile forces, which can be redeemed for drones and other materiel from plethora of international and domestic startups competing with established arms megacorps, as opposed to top-down procurement diktats reads to me as cyberpunk. The growing usage of (semi)autonomous ground drones on both sides also seems fairly cyberpunk in a Terminator sense. The participation of forces from other rogue states like North Korea in exchange for food and arms is cyberpunk.

Reasonable people can disagree, as I alluded to above, but I wouldn’t say that disagreement on the points or in itself is pointless or wrong, which seems to be where we differ. Whether something is cyberpunk is in the eye of the beholder, a subjective experience in the reader of art and of literature and of history. I don’t see how you can say what something seems like to others, as that is to second guess their own experience of reality (or as mediated by fiction, in the the case of artistic works).

To me, the cyberpunk ethos can be summarized as high tech, low life. Utilizing literal convicts as frontline soldiers by Wagner in Ukraine seems to fit that description to a tee.

In light of the above combined with the routine usage of AI on all sides, the conflict in Ukraine as a whole seems to be a literal expression of “sustainable war” as depicted in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, which is widely regarded as a cyberpunk work.

https://breezewiki.com/Ghostintheshell/wiki/Sustainable_War

In effect, the G4 nations went to war with each other in a "sustainable" manner managed by AIs: fighting deliberately avoided damaging major cities and essential infrastructure, mercenaries, and autonomous war machines were heavily used, and the goal of most battles was to destroy enemy structures, vehicles, and equipment while taking reasonable measures to capture rather than fatally harm human combatants when possible. In other words, the conflict would be sustainable as almost all losses could, in theory, be perpetually replaced by the military-industrial complex.

Considering how the former leader of Wagner countermanded orders from above and was recalled, as well as Wagner’s usage of press-ganged convicts straight out of gulags, the unit was fairly irregular compared to the Russian military proper. Wagner’s other activities such as natural resource diversion from their legitimate owner/lessor seems to firmly put the organization proper in cyberpunk territory.

Cyberpunk as a concept is fairly subjective and subject to interpretation. Perhaps your conception of cyberpunk is more exclusive and prescriptive than others’? I wouldn’t interpret a difference of opinion about the tropes or ethos of cyberpunk in a normative way.

Just because folks see cyberpunk aspects in society or literature that you do not is not a contradiction of your own perceptions. It might be a case of prescriptivism vs descriptivism.

Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art, or both (or neither)? You seem to be saying that cyberpunk is only a literary genre, which is somewhat limiting the discussion when so many cyberpunk works have been adapted to other media, which then inspires other works which were never in written form to begin with. To limit your own discussion to written works is your prerogative, but it seems a needlessly narrow scope for the discussion of others who don’t share your view.

To say that we’re wasting our own time is to discount the fact that others are participating in the discussion in good faith for their own reasons. HN writ large isn’t a means to an end, HN and the individuals of HN are ends unto themselves.

Since the conflict began in 2014, Wagner Group PMC has been involved in many operations in Ukraine, which seems to contradict your line of reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_activities_in_Ukr...

I'm saying the thing you just declared "never under debate". The only one having a debate here is you.

The thing that isn’t under debate (that the flips are independent) is the thing which we both agree upon, and I believed no declaration was previously necessary because it is beside the point and obvious, and it also has no bearing on anything else you claimed. It doesn’t support your argument that the coin, the flipping mechanism, and output of the process as a whole can be assumed to be fair after 500 same flips.

The context of the original discussion is the question of bias in hiring, and whether AI introduces unknown or unpredictable bias. If we used a coin flip instead of AI in hiring decisions, and that coin had the property of resulting in 500 heads in a row, it would be fair to re-examine our test setup as well as the coin in the context of using it to make hiring decisions, because that result is not consistent with our prior belief that the coin is fair.

Due to disparate impact, the result of using such a coin in hiring decisions, even if said coin itself in isolation were measured to be fair, would still result in an unfair result as part of a larger decision-making process, which was the point I was getting at.

The purpose of a system is what it does. If a coin flipping system, or an AI, used for hiring or any other decision-making results in such an astronomically improbable result as 500 heads in a row would imply, it is not fit for purpose.

I intentionally chose a really high number to make my point, it's not meant to be realistic it's meant to make a point.

Choosing a high number undercuts your argument or is tangential to the flip events being probabilistically independent, so that’s why I commented in the first place, in order to draw out your point, because what was meant by what you stated originally was unclear to me.

I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing, honestly I haven't even really bothered reading your comments because you're just off on your own little tirade and I have no interest in it.

Framing our discussion in such terms is strange to me. I thought your coin flip example was interesting as a metaphor in the context of a potentially unfair AI used for hiring decisions, and I genuinely thought you were earnestly discussing the topic, and I still do, though it’s hard to read your admission of not reading my comments as anything but an explicit admission of not arguing in good faith.

Bro just assume there's been a billion flips right before my example indicating it's close to perfectly fair, the only point of my comment was to illustrate that previous flips don't influence future flips.

I agree: the events are independent in probability, which was never under debate, and is a separate matter to whether or not the coin is fair.

As for your edit:

Pretend I said 5 instead of 500 if it makes you feel better.

At this point, wouldn’t you say that’s a bridge too far? It’s uncharitable to ask of your interlocutor as that changes the entire context and implications of what you originally said upthread.

Asking me to just pretend that you made a different argument than you originally made, when the mathematical implications of your original argument are the context under question, is literally moving the goalposts.

If you had said it was 5 flips in a row instead of 500 flips, then I wouldn’t have said what I said, because there’s a difference so wide between the two statements in their degree of probability as to be different arguments entirely. You didn’t say that though, and so I don’t know what you’re trying to say now.

I already said the coin is known to be fair.

The coin can be assumed to be fair before the flips, but after the flips we have no mathematical reason to believe that the coin is fair, as our results heavily suggest that it quite simply isn’t fair.

However, for the purposes of discussion, assuming an ideal coin, the probability of 500 same flips in a row is so statistically unlikely that fairness of the flipping process and/or flipper must then be called into question.

Even if the coin, flipping process, and flipper are all ideal (which wasn’t stated, but we will also assume for the sake of argument that we have ideal immovable goalposts), the likelihood of the 500-in-row event is so improbable as to be unreasonable to use as an example or even a metaphor, because it doesn’t have much predictive power in a conversation, as ideal coins don’t exist any more than ideal coin flippers.

Even a coin designed to be fair would be fairly deemed defective after so many same-side flips, and any reasonable gambler would demand that the coin be replaced with another; at that point an argument could reasonably be made to also change the coin flipper and/or the venue.

Presupposing that the same coin is used for every flip (which is implicit in the example), it would be fair to question whether the coin could possibly be a fair coin after 500 heads in a row, even (and especially) if the flipping process were ideally fair.

I’m not a whiz with the math involved, but I am of the opinion that 500 consecutive same-side flips is a large enough sample size to calculate that the coin in question is biased, so it would be unreasonable to assume that the next flip is 50/50.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fai...

The scan at the time of purchase is just for tracking what the store owes to the state for the lottery system. The last ticket in each roll of tickets is scanned by the dedicated lottery terminal prior to being placed for sale in an admin mode activation function. The terminals themselves I am familiar with are Linux-based and seem to be thin clients which do everything remotely in real-time, because nothing works if the terminal is offline, from activation to redemption of tickets to win/loss checking. The terminal has its own dedicated wired Ethernet connection to a stand-alone Cradlepoint or other competitor brand cellular modem/router, which along with the terminal is all outsourced to a third party management company. (SGI is the only one I’m familiar with; there are likely others.) All of this is public info which could be gleaned from observing the terminals and their installation/operation, but I probably can’t say much more about them, but they are pretty neat and seem to work fairly reliably.

Now that you mention the auditing etc, a lottery system would probably be an easy way to get people to literally buy into an online ID scheme, not because it would necessarily be privacy-preserving, which would depend on implementation details, but because a not insignificant number of folks seem to like the chance to win money. Considering many states already have lottery systems, the ID code tickets could probably be provided alongside lottery tickets for free or nearly free, and employees already have the training to check/scan IDs. If there was an incentive such as the possibility to get discounts, win prizes, or tie-in purchases of some kind, I think it could work.

Many stores that sell lottery tickets also sell gift cards, so that technology could also be used instead or in addition to ID tokens at the point of sale. There are a lot of sponsorship opportunities available for cross-promotion.

“Please drink a verification can” was probably more prescient than was at first apparent. Mike Judge saw this whole thing coming from a mile away.

HN is part of YC, which are VC. What are VCs if not market activists?

I’ve worked in the industry, so just adding some extra info, as I agree with you that the ticket system is not really less tracked than other systems, just differently tracked:

Lottery tickets don’t “fall off of trucks” or get “lost in the mail” because they aren’t valid for redemption until they’re activated at the POS terminal of a licensed store, and the lottery company knows which store receives each ticket roll, because they are shipped to known locations with tracking numbers and delivery verification and/or delivered in person by lottery employees. Even the rolls of blank lottery ticket receipt paper have different serial numbers every few inches, and it’s forbidden by policy to swap receipt paper between stores. All of these things are audited both regularly and randomly by state lottery officials.

It's the exact same process by which you buy lottery tickets in a world where they don't need to verify your identity when you redeem them.

I’ve sold lottery tickets, and you have to be legal age to both buy and redeem them, so I’m not sure that this analogy or hypothetical solution is comparable to lottery tickets, nor is it likely to be the panacea you think it is.

I don’t think that the nascent online age verification schemes are good for society in general, either, but that’s not really the point you were making in your comment, so I don’t assume that you believe they’re good or bad, but simply advocating for a more privacy-preserving implementation. Which is kind of the whole point of the argument against bad implementations, but those who mandate and implement the systems likely view uniquely identifying people as a boon, whereas you and I probably don’t, which is why I am not hopeful that your ticket system will be used, because it will be higher friction for more people than uploading scans of their IDs and/or their face.

The ticket system, if implemented, would be used by so few people that the folks who do could likely be re-identified by Bluetooth tracking beacons and facial recognition in the same stores which they bought the ID tickets you suggest, and so I think the number of people who would escape tracking by any such means to be so few as to be a rounding error.

Those folks who do pursue this privacy hobby/fetish are statistically likely to ultimately mess up on their opsec eventually on a long enough timeline, so it’s hard to even imagine a scenario in which it matters either way what individual privacy activists do or don’t do from the point of view of the panopticon designers or implementers. Those not identified to a desired confidence interval by the mass surveillance system will just be retargeted for more sophisticated surveillance measures.

Despite how we rage, we’re still just rats in a cage.

More and more, the privacy debate feels like a quixotic struggle against giants, when everyone already knows that those giants are actually windmills; the majority of society now lives on reclaimed lands which rely on those windmills’ continued existence, and so no one cares about privacy in the way that you or I might care, because they are incapable of perceiving windmills as giants, nor do they have the intellectual or philosophical or political beliefs which would allow them to even entertain such perceptions even for the purposes of discussion. The privacy debate is beyond their ken.

It’s not really helpful in furthering good discussion, though, and it assumes too much.

To compare a reply to being akin to/belonging on Reddit is to say that it is low-effort or not intellectually rigorous, but this critique is self-defeating because it is itself low-effort and is usually not substantiated or justified, so it just rubs people on HN the wrong way.

This is especially true when it nearly bumps up against the part of the HN guidelines which admonish us to not compare HN itself to Reddit.

When saying an individual comment belongs on Reddit or is like those on Reddit, that is against the guidelines’ spirit in the small scale the same way as saying HN proper is becoming like Reddit is against the guidelines by the book in the large scale, so I don’t really think the comparison is helpful or defensible. It adds little to nothing to the discussion it accompanies, but rather undercuts it. When stated absent any other discussion, it’s nearly impossible to read it as anything but a bad faith swipe and/or flamebait.

Nippon Sangoku and Witch Hat Atelier are worth mentioning, on the strengths of both their animation quality and generally amazing storylines.

Trigun sequel is coming out this year.

Aren’t there a few Trigun sequel series already out (Stampede (2023), Stargaze (2026)), or do you mean something different?

That’s an interesting idea. I think that folks have already built something like this for internal use or as a service, but I’m not sure if it exists as a free service.

This might be enough to get you started if you wanted to roll your own (h/t @simonw):

Summarizing Hacker News discussion themes with Claude and LLM

https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/claude-hacker-news-themes

For something similar at the story level, but without any kind of sentiment analysis, there’s this:

https://hnrankings.com/

Edit:

Some (AI?) comment analysis summary per story on this site, but I don’t know how the site works or how often it might re-analyze the comment thread, if at all:

https://hackyournews.com/

via https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news

In good faith I feel obligated to point out the following, so that those who may read this thread in the future don’t interpret any lack of a response on your part as an confirmation of your claims:

HN threads close automatically after a few weeks, so I don’t think that you would be able to do that even if you intend to do so.

Based on your own rhetoric, I am not convinced that you would even if you could, but I admit that parsing tone in text is difficult, and I may be mistaken. What comes across as sarcasm and hyperbole to me may be earnest and sincere to you.

In good faith, I must assume that you don’t know that HN threads close automatically, otherwise I must admit the possibility that I’m wrong, and that you do know this, and are exploiting the fact that others may not know this fact as part of your argumentative strategy.

Joining two cliches: $1

Knowing which two cliches to join: $2.49M

It’s also fair to say that there’s another possible world you haven’t mentioned: one where you’re both right.

In such a world, you would have looked it up before posting, and your comment, their reply to you, yours to them, and mine to you, wouldn’t exist.

Perhaps they were trying to send a reward signal to all of us in this thread in order to induce a shift from where we find ourselves now in order to arrive upon the “look it up before posting” world line?

Accounts with zero karma don’t have the ability to downvote comments.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...

After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment.

Your mention Hot Ones reminded me of Nardwuar, who has been doing similar “social cache busting” interviews of musicians and other celebrities for literally as long as the Hot Ones guy has been alive.

I appreciate them both, so that isn’t meant as a slight to Sean Evans, but rather a compliment of the depth and breadth of both their research and staying power as interviewers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nardwuar

https://youtube.com/@nardwuar

Surprisingly (to me, anyway, as I didn’t know this prior to looking it up for this comment!) Evans even credits Nardwuar specifically as one of his influences in this Brother Ali interview, which would explain a lot of the similarities:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9bGXwvyyvGU

I can’t say for sure, I’m just taking them at their word. Given what OP omitted due to possible spoilers, it’s hard for me to second guess either of you.

It seems fair to say that you might be right about the conclusion that you’re drawing from what OP said, and OP could be honestly mistaken about which story they were referring to, but it seemed charitable to assume that they know better than I do.

I don’t mean to assume that you were wrong, either, as it’s entirely likely that you’re right, or at least that it’s reasonable for you to assume that the story you mentioned fits your interpretation of what OP referred to better than the one they mentioned. You’re the authority on what you believe and understand about what you read from OP’s comment, and I can’t disagree with another’s opinion about what something seems like to them.

Given what OP omitted and stated, I don’t disagree with your assessment, as I haven’t read the story OP mentioned, and it’s been a while since I read the one you referred to, if I remember correctly.

To be honest, my first thought was that you were both referring to the same story, and that the title differences were due to one or the other of you reading the story in a different language.

My point in commenting was to perhaps add context in hopes that it would bring clarity to the discussion, as it seemed that you were bringing into question whether or not the story OP mentioned existed at all as such, and I myself wasn’t sure that you and OP were referring to two different independent stories rather than the same story with different titles in different languages.

This comment has probably gone on Tlön-g enough, and is leaning more Borges than anticipated. I apologize for perhaps coming across more definitively than intended in my original comment.

Not OP, but they probably mean the novella that they mentioned, which is also new to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...

barrad owl

I am not an ornithologist, but I’m assuming that’s a typo for barred owl?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barred_owl

Demon Seed is schlocky, but it’s perhaps worth watching once. That said, I will readily admit that the film is bad for many reasons. Though horror films aren’t generally known for being inoffensive, the ending is disturbing in content and gratuitous in presentation. Perhaps the film works best as a warning and as a critique, though I’m really scrounging and scraping here. I blame Dean Koontz for the premise of the original novel, though I have no idea why anyone thought that the book needed to be adapted to film, but here I am talking about it.

I’m glad you brought up Demon Seed all the same, as I was reminded of it while reading TFA.

When the computer system from the film commands a character to “open that door, and clean these lenses” in a particular scene, the absurdity and mundanity of being commanded to clean a camera by an AI is subtly horrifying.

For a modern analogue, I’m reminded of DoorDash workers being dispatched to close doors left ajar by passengers of autonomous Waymos.

https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y

HyperNormalisation (2016) is a documentary film by Adam Curtis; the word/concept is from a book, so maybe that's what you're referring to? I have only seen the film myself.

As to your question about Soviet collapse, I don't think I could coalesce the views of the 166 minute documentary to this comment field while doing it justice. I'm not sure that there is a direct casual relationship or arrow of causality between the collapse and use/misuse of language, as much as there is a feedback loop between the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.

The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation. It has since gained further resonance in the social media era in 2025 in the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y

I think you might also like to check out another Adam Curtis documentary series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that, ironically (or not), after the fall of the USSR, the government no longer controlled the media directly. Oligarchs appear to have taken over nearly everything under privatization, including the media and the nominally democratic government, so it's hard to say that it was better or worse than before the fall, rather than differently bad. Certainly many lost their lives, and that's lamentable to say the least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjQL8MYniTTLA3wnZ25U-s6R...

In researching this response, I learned of a new Adam Curtis doc series that came out last year, which I just started watching. The "talking computer" at the crisps factory with a phone based ordering system was interesting to see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)

Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy." The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.

Shifty depicts the changing landscape of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, including a shift of focus from politics to finance that saw the collapse of industry in the UK.[8] Curtis argues that this shift towards individualism and consumerism has incurred a dismantling of democracy over the last 45 years.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPSo2fAdxXUW-y5xCATilyzBO...