• he/him

Coder, pun perpetrator
Grumpiness elemental
Hyperbole abuser


Tools programmer
Writer-wannabe
Did translations once upon a time
I contain multitudes


(TurfsterNTE off Twitter)


Trans rights
Black lives matter


Be excellent to each other


UE4/5 Plugins on Itch
nte.itch.io/

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

a couple years ago i bought some paperclips online.


APOAPSIS
@APOAPSIS

You really gotta order your products from a company that, if you look into it, was actually a titanic American conglomerate like Rockwell or Gulf and Western at some point in the 1960s but the only surviving department that keeps the name is the facility that just makes random doodads now


SamKeeper
@SamKeeper

you know, we all love that paperclip ai game but boy I think it's worth at least pondering the way it plays (very explicitly in the liner notes) to this rationalcult MIRI company line of "ai is going to be sapient but dangerously alien unless we make it Friendly". we live, however, in the real world of observable, actually existing paperclip optimizers. it's just The Free Market baby and it turns out the most optimal way to produce paperclips is to just scam people with fake paperclips. we're just doing it to ourselves with algorithms quite literally dumb as rocks we taught to sort of resemble thinking entities, the way celebrity psychics resemble Paul Atreides. that's probably, all things considered, one of the core appeals of the game: it's much cooler to imagine the fleets of hypnodrones than to imagine the actual future that computers have made possible: faster and more annoying games of three card monty replacing whatever it is you wanted to do.

(which is basically a very condensed way of saying stuff I said in an article on my blog a few years ago, which I'd link to, except Google Analytics bricked my entire blog, so you have to read it in wayback instead sigh)


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

There are definitely fancy paperclip companies out there, like prestige Japanese pen companies making paperclips they sell in 10-packs for $7 that are so nice you never ever want to use them.

It seems like it's that or the somehow-still-a-ripoff cancer wire.

Oh darling please, take a rubber-sheathed banana shaped paper clip with you! I insist! What good is living rich if you don't let your friends and neighbors indulge every now and then? This two bedroom apartment is just so spacious, I simply delight in entertaining your good company.

Carbon Steel laser etched designer paperclip, NRA Good condition. Minted in Spring 2008, mild wear. Comes with the box and paper manual, FFL transfer required, serious offers only. MSRP $0.015 adjusted for inflation to a reasonable $300.

Our local office supply place went out of business so now we order everything from Amazon, which sucks, and has led that that exact scenario! Although we also got some rectangle Fake Post-It Notes that have the sticky edge along the "wrong" side and they've actually been surprisingly useful, so we purposely re-order those. I'm sure the next batch will be "normal" and not useful, though.

can't you just walk into a store and buy some alright paperclips? is that not a thing in the US? I'm only asking because I would never even think of ordering paperclips online, like the nearest supermarket probably has some, at least I bought staples there once

Every single sundry sold in a store is now from a non-brand and cannot be trusted. I was in office Depot the other day and every single product they had in the paper clip and other sundries aisle was office Depot brand, and visibly shitty. Thumbtacks with extremely sharp casting flash on the plastic part that choose your fingertips up, that sort of thing. Even if I bought some of their clips and they were okay, the next time I went to buy some I'm sure they would be shitty ones that break if you flex them. I wanted to find a reliable source of clips. Literally this is the purpose of a brand, there are just very very few actual brands left.

Staples are another particular thing, where I've practically given up on buying staples. Most of the time they snap while trying to staple, and that's if you're lucky enough that they didn't jam and break your stapler.