Star wars is stupid as hell

It really is. Lucas had a few good points, and maybe some writers have done something interesting with the setting, but it's ultimately just vibes based slop and even Lucas didn't do a very good job of articulating his points.

I think the most impressive thing about the franchise is that a janky sci-fantasy samurai cowboy movie about Space-WWII-Vietnam-War-mashup in space managed to mainstream and legitimize sci-fi as a genre.

It's in the movies, if not directly addressed. The imperial command structure is exclusively human, as are their footsoldiers, and in A New Hope Luke sees joining onto this as a more desirable career path than anything to do with non-human cartels or businesses. It also seems like at least some of its foundational support comes from humans that had directly been oppressed or threatened by non-human institutions, between Naboo and its invasion by a non-human federation being a rallying point for Palpatine's bloc and Anakin having literally been enslaved in a society that seemed to put humans on the bottom.

Like this is clearly part of the worldbuilding, especially given that per Lucas the Empire is a mashup of America and Nazi Germany with the human dominance angle being a clear analogue to the white supremacism of its inspirations, it just doesn't do a good job of addressing or articulating it.

Just from the movies, I'd assume it was mostly just "business continues as usual" except with a centralized federal military. The Republic didn't seem to even be a state so much as an extremely weak federation with no coordination and no central powers, so a power bloc that had the actual material capacity to wield power and which had the tacit support of most of the component states wouldn't really face much in the way of real resistance. Like I don't even get the impression that it really disrupted the ruling class much at all, it just made it a bit more human-centric bit by bit and gradually escalated the suppression of non-humans and dissidents.

I kind of assume the Empire's long term base of support mostly came from human revanchism and supremacism along with the usual sorts of benefits compradors get for collaborating, and there'd probably be some planets or at least regions on some planets that get to be imperial cores and benefit from wealth extraction from all the subjugated planets, but with the series being written by libs it's not like they really do material analysis or think about things beyond just vibes like "the Empire is powerful because narratively that makes it an interesting and threatening antagonist and they're bad because they're the bad guys and scowl with their frowny faces and are mean and stuff." George Lucas was a bit better about that but despite having a clearer vision of what was going on and why he still leaned heavily on vibes to convey it and when he tried to make it more explicit and show the political side of it he didn't do a very good job and he got panned for it.

I do not like the progression of time and would like it to stop.

That concept lives rent free in my head, not least of which because I see how it could actually be made to work: by layering the game space over three parallel settings--an idealized vision of a cozy small town, a dying rustbelt small town, and a neighborhood in a cyberpunk city--that the game just sort of flows between day-to-day without skipping a beat, with a protagonist that's just "what if Akko from LWA was a burnt out grad student with a substance abuse problem and a god complex," and also the cat smokes cigarettes and becomes your sidekick after the first act because it's the only other character that can see how completely fucked everything is. Just really lay on the tonal dissonance without acknowledging it while playing with themes of how the idealized past was also fucked, the hopelessness of decay, and the seeming absence of a future that's anything but an intensification of that hopelessness and decay.

So basically the exact opposite of what the pitch is intending.

Because he's sunk billions into his shitty ai service and he's hellbent to use it even if he's the only person on earth doing so.

The image generation is either just base Flux (open source model developed by a completely unrelated research team) or some in-house finetune of it that reasonably wouldn't take more than a hundred thousand between buying the equipment and paying one person to poke at it and feed it training data (shitty memes posted to twitter, presumably), but knowing who we're talking about he's probably been throwing millions at some lucky grifters for work that a single hobbyist could do with a few thousand dollars worth of server time from a service like civitai.

Americans when American capitalism: "imagine, if you will, the perfidious and mystifying orient you may have heard about in the fantastical tales of the media..."

and this type of generative AI will be sort of the speech component of the brain

This is my take as well. Like it's good at parsing and predicting text and could be an invaluable component of some more comprehensive sort of AI where it's serving as this translation layer between it and people. More broadly, the same math involved seems to be applicable for a broader set of data parsing tasks which is neat, like how machine learning is being used to create a sort of OCR for imaging systems that can penetrate into carbonized scrolls so it turns inscrutable charts that only a single digit number of people are capable of interpreting into images that a much larger number of grad students with the relevant language knowledge can study.

But "maybe if we keep making the language predictor bigger it'll eventually become god by correctly predicting all text all the time!" is an absurd dead end that's being hyped up by scammers.

It kind of works as an allegory for well-intentioned socdems being radicalized into becoming actual leftists by watching how openly monstrous and ruinous liberals become as their system is placed under strain. The leftist distrust and opposition to liberals isn't idealistic, but rather is built on paying attention to history and looking past all the prevarication to the actual actions being done. Some people need to see that in action for themselves before they start to understand why leftists take the positions they do.

who uses the ultimate liberal move (a strongly worded letter)

It wasn't even a strongly worded letter, it was a note containing what was basically just a snarky twitter post that he tricked Superman into reading, and his snark was such a cognitohazard it made Superman abandon all of his values and beliefs instantly.

Read the edit, I realized after posting I oversold it with that summary.

No, it was some weird Cold War allegory in space that I can't remember the title of, focused on a refugee from the Space Dominican Republic who became the popular dictator of Space America before being killed by a Yeti while hunting Space Nixon in the Space Soviet Union.

Fuck, that sounds way more interesting than it actually is. It was all just dreary low sci-fi drama with a lot of extremely creepy relationships and problematic soapboxing about sexual mores, and the actual story beats are more just dumb and cringe than wacky and interesting.

There's also the author-insert character in Time Enough for Love having this "hmm, yes, I thought about going through a magic future sci-fi tech sex change, but ah, alas, it doesn't work at the genetic level!" reflection scene and his reaction to learning that even that "flaw" could be fixed is interest followed by dismissing it when the suggestion is genetically engineered and artificially grown clones, a mind copy, and killing the original body. Although the clone thing still happens and the female clones of the author-insert join his weird incestuous harem because this is a later Heinlein novel and they're all really fucking weird and horny like that. But overall that whole sequence is such a "no cis man sits contemplating becoming a woman and agonizing over every little flaw before rejecting it for the dumbest and most trivial of reasons" moment.

Tbh I thought he was dead, but no

He's still alive? I read some of his even weirder and more obscure books (they were all awful, both in content and also, like, just narrative structure and prose) 15 years ago and I thought he was dead even back then. I thought he was one of those old authors who didn't make it through the 90s or early 2000s.

3. They died more and if anything was gonna make them sick they wouldn't have survived till old age so the survivorship bias is stronger.

It's sort of this, but also the fact that risk factors are probabilistic and there are, to put it bluntly, a very large number of people. Some might theoretically have a small mutation that makes their system more robust in some indefinable way, but mostly it's just a matter of there being so many people that some of them are going to win all the "risk of imminent death" dice rolls for a very long time.

Stable Diffusion 1.5 tended to produce sort of quasi-brushstrokes that look a lot like the shading in Arcane, but that's not what I think of when I think "obvious AI slop" anymore. Now the cliched AI look is either that shitty Pixar look or "what if hyper detailed mixed media Artstation concept art was even more uncanny and also had serious and obvious errors in its scene composition."

I think that has to do with consoles: when a console generation is outdated mid or low range hardware that forces more general optimization and less added bullshit, especially when that generation drags on way too long and means devs are targeting what is basically a decade old gaming computer towards the end. When they're loss leaders and there's a shorter window between generations or upgraded same-generation versions, it means devs are only optimizing enough to run on a modern mid range gaming rig and specifically the console configuration of that.

Although there's some extra stuff to it too, like the NVidia 10 series was an amazing generation of GPUs that remained relevant for like a decade, and the upper end of it is still sort of relevant now. NVidia rested on their laurels after that and has been extremely stingy with VRAM because their cash cow is now high end server cards for AI bullshit and they want businesses to buy $5000+ cards instead of <$1000 ones that would work good enough if they just had a bit more VRAM. GPUs have also gotten more and more expensive because of crypto and AI grifters letting NVidia know they can just keep raising prices and delivering less and people will still buy their shit, and AMD just grinning and following after them, delivering better cards at lower prices but not that much lower since they can get away with it too.

As they say, post hog ergo property of hog. It's a main logical phallus or something.

It's definitely weird for Ciri to be chugging mutagenic poison instead of teleporting around doing Ciri things, to the point that when watching it I questioned if it's even supposed to be Ciri instead of some new/generic female witcher who just looks sort of like Ciri. Especially in the context of all the speculation that they'd make the protagonist a customizable character like V from Cyberpunk 2077.

Divide your forces into fleets that can clear easy things like starbases and one that can hunt and kill their fleet, then just grind them down. Take systems with like a corvette stack and casually bombard or invade the planets in their wake, while being ready to hop on their main fleet with your doomstack when it shows up.