Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeinersmith
18.1K Followers
513 Following
2.2K Posts

The SMBC guy.
New book: A City on Mars (Nov 2)

Co-author of Soonish
Illustrator of Open Borders
Scop of Bea Wolf.

Oh the humanities...
Full comic here: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/humanities-2
Like for A City on Mars, I dove into a lot of fields, and man, medical, aerospace, and legal texts are PRICEY. Can't remember which now but there was this big privately compiled book of space data that was so expensive to access they gave you the option to pay by the hour, as if it was phone-sex.
Something I love about engineering/physics/CS culture is that almost every intellectual resource is available for free. There's a real presumption of non-gatekeeping that is, in my experience, not present in other fields.
I see this will be my most quote-tweeted post ever.
Ohmygod, is quote-tweeting forbidden on Mastodon. This is Shangri-La.
@ZachWeinersmith 2/2 Then happened the music accident. The slop in endless repetition "hallucinated" into a mix of calming "Yoga sound" and death metal. 🤣 You could hear the patients cry out loud in different rooms. And it was like a virus ... death metal came back .. in the calmest moments ...
@b_age
This is, btw, the S&P 500.

Mildly interesting: I had this vague idea that post-LLMs, the stock market has gone crazy, but with the recent downturn, it looks pretty average over the 10, 5, and 2 year spans. Returns about 10%/yr without adjusting for inflation.

For those keeping score at home, this was not true under the last administration, but then presidents generally don't have a lot of economic power, beyond the ability to fuck things up by being *very* stupid.

Some day, I'm gonna turn in a manuscript and think "I did a great job!" Today is not that day.

And with this sort of thing I always wonder whether it's that they're (a) gaming the system, or (b) discovered something humans actually wanted all along, in some sense, but which artists would've never produced.

I mean maybe we really just want Oasis to play 83 slight variations on Wonderwall, but they wouldn't.