Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
It has happened. Post your wildest Scott Adams take here to pay respects to one of the dumbest posters of all time.
Iāll start with this gem
This one is just eternally ???!!!
There was a Dilbert TV show. Because it wasnāt written wholly by Adams, it was funny and engaging, with character development, a critical eye at business management, and it treated minorities like Alice and Asok with a modicum of dignity. While it might have been good compared to the original comic strip, it wasnāt good TV or even good animation. There wasnāt even a plot until the second season. It originally ran on UPN; when they dropped it, Adams accused UPN of pandering to African-Americans. (I watched it as reruns on Adult Swim.) I want to point out the episodes written by Adams alone:
- An MLM hypnotizes people into following a cult led by Wally
- Dilbert and a security guard play prince-and-the-pauper
Thatās it! He usually wasnāt allowed to write alone. Iām not sure if weāll ever have an easier man to psychoanalyze. He was very interested in the power differential between laborers and managers because he always wanted more power. He put his hypnokink out in the open. He told us that he was Dilbert but he was actually the PHB.
Bonus sneer: Click on Asokās name; Adams put this character through literal multiple hells for some reason. I wonder how he felt about the real-world friend who inspired Asok.
Edit: This was supposed to be posted one level higher. Iām not good at Lemmy.
Man I remember an ep of this from when i was little like a fever dream
as a youth Iād acquired this at some point and I recall some fondness about some of the things, largely in the novelty sense (in that they worked āwithā the desktop, had the āboss keyā, etc) - and I suspect that in turn was largely because it was my first run-in with all of those things
later on (skipping ahead, like, ~22y or something), the more I learned about the guy, the harder I never wanted to be in a room as him
may he rest in ever-refreshed piss
Okay this takes the cake wtf
ok if I saw āevery male encounter is implied violenceā tweeted from an anonymous account Iād see it as some based feminist thing that would send me into a spiral while trying to unpack it. Luckily itās just weird brainrot from adams here
One more:
If trump gets back in office, Scott will be dead within the year.
sorry Scott you just lacked the experience to appreciate the nuances, sissy hypno enjoyers will continue to take their brainwashing organic and artisanally crafted by skilled dommes
itās not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other
the Dilberito was a vegetarian microwave burrito that came in flavors of Mexican, Indian, Barbecue, and Garlic & Herb. It was sold through some health food stores. Adamsās inspiration for the product was that ādiet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world. I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time.ā He aimed to create a healthy food product that also had mass appeal, a concept he called āthe blue jeans of foodā.
Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.
I read his comics in middle school, and in hindsight even a lot of his older comics seems crueler and uglier. Like Aliceās anger isnāt a legitimate response to the bullshit work environment she has but just haha angry woman funny.
Also, the Dilbert Future had some bizarre stuff at the end, like Deepak Chopra manifestation quantum woo, so it makes sense in hindsight he went down the alt-right manosphere pipeline.
Itās the exact same syndrome as Yarvin. The guy in the middle- to low-end of the corporate hierarchy ā who, crucially, still believes in a rigid hierarchy! has just failed to advance in this one because reasons! ā but got a lucky enough break to go full-time as an edgy, cynical outsider ātruth-teller.ā
Both of these guys had at some point realized, and to some degree accepted, that they were never going to manage a leadership position in a large organization. And probably also accepted that they were misanthropic enough that they didnāt really want that anyway. Iāve been reading through JoJoās Bizarre Adventure, and these types of dude might best be described by the guiding philosophy of the cowboy villain Hol Horse: āWhy be #1 when you can be #2?ā
I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others
If COVID made you a bad person ā it didnāt, you were always bad and just needed a gentle push.
Like unless something really traumatic happened ā a family member died, you were a frontline worker and broke from stress ā then no, Iām sorry, a financially secure white guy going apeshit from COVID is not a turn, itās just a mask-off moment
@sansruse @V0ldek You left out the best part! š
Adams himself noted, ā[t]he mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.ā[63] The New York Times noted the burrito ācould have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to tasteā.[64]
The New York Times noted the burrito ācould have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to tasteā.
Jesus christ thatās a murder
@sansruse My jaw genuinely dropped
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I knew there was somethinā not right about that boy when his books in the '90s started doing woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation. Oprah/Chopra shit: the Cosmos has a purpose and that purpose is to make me rich.
Then came the blogosphere.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/17/the-saga-of-scott-adams-scrotum/
woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation
In retrospect itās pretty obvious this was central to his character: he couldnāt accept he got hella lucky with dilbert happening to hit pop culture square in the zeitgeist, so he had to adjust his worldview into him being a master wizard that can bend reality to his will, and also everyone else is really stupid for not doing so too, except, it turned out, Trump.
From what I gather thereās also a lot of the rationalist high intelligence is being able to manipulate others bordering on mind control ethos in his fiction writing,
Today at work I got to read a bunch of posts from people discussing how sad they were that notable holocaust denier Scott Adams died.
Only they didnāt mention that part for some reason.
Rest in Piss to the OG bad takes Scotty A
JWZ: The Dilbert Hole
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one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. iāll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought āthatās coolā and now my reaction is āgreat, gotta see if an llm was usedā
everything feels gloomy.
Iām gonna leave here my idea, that an essential aspect of why GenAI is bad is that it is designed to extrude media that fits common human communication channels. This makes it perfect to choke out human-to-human communication over those channels, preventing knowledge exchange and social connection.
I am reminded of Val Packettās lobsters comment I read the other day:
The āAIā companies are DDoSing reality itself.
They have massive demand for new electricity, land, water and hardware to expand datacenters more massively and suddenly than ever before, DDoSing all these supplies. Their products make it easy to flood what used to be āthe information superhighwayā with slop, so their customers DDoS everyoneās attention. Also bosses get to āautomate awayā any jobs where the personās output can be acceptably replaced by slop. These companies are the most loyal and fervent sponsors of the new wave of global fascism, with literal front seats at the Trump administration in the US. They are very happy about having their tools used for mass surveillance in service of state terrorism (ICE) and war crimes. Thatās the DDoS against everyoneās human rights and against life itself.
Itās like carbon monoxide binding to hemoglobin.
when I saw that theyād rebranded Office to Copilot, I turned 365 degrees and walked away
please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please noā¦
Skynetās backstory is somehow very predictable yet came as a surprise to me in the form of this headline by the Graudain: āMuskās AI tool Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth saysā.
The article doesnāt provide much more other than exactly what youād expect. E.g this Hegseth quote, emphasis mine: āmake all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and componentā.
Me as a kid: āhow could they have been so incompetent and let Skynet take over?!ā
Me now: āOh. Yeah. That checks outā
seeing the furious reactions to shaming of the confabulation machine promoters, i can only conclude the shaming works.
ooh, whereās the (new?) spice? Iāve been under multiple rocks
nothing formal, but the backlash to criticism is becoming absolutely disproportionate: for example, the person who made the list of slopware, kat marchƔn, was bullied off the social media by the slop merchants. this looks eerily similar to the right-wing braying about cultural war, where they call harassment any critique of their positions, and call a reasonable critique any harassment they do themselves.
(and just very recently the always very nice CTO and co-founder of the oxide company, a major rust shop, decided that shaming the promoters of the confabulation machines is not to be done at the company.)
you will be pleased to know that self and i are responding
see https://awful.systems/post/6913182 we need a name
Itās so ironic how they claimed the list was harassment, after they harassed the person who made it away from open-source.
kat marchƔn goes by she/they fwiw.
my promptfondler coworker thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesnāt understand the release process and I think Iām starting to have visions of teddy k
thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesnāt understand the release process
ā¦I donāt want you to dox yourself but I am abyss-staringly curious
I am still processing this while also spinning out. One day I will have distilled this into something I can talk about but yeah Iām going through it ngl
OT: Iām adopting two rescue kittens, one is pretty much a go but its proving trickier to get a companion (hoping the current application works out today). Part of me feels guilty for doing this so fast after what happened, but I kinda need it to keep me from doing anything stupid.
Donāt feel bad, the faster you rescue the cat the better it is for them! Iām sure your cat wouldnāt mind you making two kitties happy with a forever-home :)
Hey youāre doing the little feller a solid. o7 please be kind to yourself!
We had to do the same when my wifeās ESA cat of nearly 20 years passed away a couple years back. The couple of months we waited before getting our new kittens was pretty fucking dark. Fingers crossed for you, friend.
Over on Lobsters, Simon Willison and I have made predictions for bragging rights, not cash. By July 10th, Simon predicts that there will be at least two sophisticated open-source libraries produced via vibecoding. Meanwhile, I predict that there will be five-to-thirty deaths from chatbot psychosis. Copy-pasting my sneer:
How will we get two new open-source libraries implementing sophisticated concepts? Will we sacrifice 5-30 minds to the ELIZA effect? Could we not inspire two teams of university students and give them pizza for two weekends instead?
Willison:
I havenāt reviewed a single line of code it wrote but I clicked around and it seems to do the right things.
Could not waterboard that out of me, etc.
Well to be fair, he think your estimate is too low :( (as do i)
OT: going to pick up a tiny black foster kitten (high energy) later this weekā¦but yesterday I saw the pound had a flame point siamese kitten of all things, and heās now running around my condo.
Cat tax:
What a great creature. Big ears, for hearing people say stupid things about AI.
well thatās a lovely furball :) congratulations on finding a new buddy! got a name?
Pound named him Waffle Fry, I was thinking just Waffle but I;m still looking tbh.
Games Workshop bans generative AI. Hackernews takes that personally. Unhinged takes include accusations of disrespecting developers and a seizure of power by middle management
Better yet, bandcamp ban ai-generated music too: https://www.reddit.com/r/BandCamp/comments/1qbw8ba/ai_generated_music_on_bandcamp/
Great week for people who appreciate human-generated works
So pleased that theyre not budging!
i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion
The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path weāre on leads somewhere I donāt want to go. Weāre drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent ā where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you donāt control, canāt inspect, and didnāt shape.
The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path weāre on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.
The future of ass is being set right now, and itās ponderously flabby!
OT: I really appreciated the things you guys said last thread. It helped a lot.
<3
Ed Zitron is now predicting an earth-shattering bubble pop: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/ so in other words just another weekday.
Even if this was just like the dot com bubble, things would be absolutely fucking catastrophic ā the NASDAQ dropped 78% from its peak in March 2000 ā but due to the incredible ignorance of both the private and public power brokers of the tech industry, I expect consequences that range from calamitous to catastrophic, dependent almost entirely on how long the bubble takes to burst, and how willing the SEC is to greenlight an IPO.
I am someone who does not understand the economy. Both in that itās behaved irrationally for my entire life, and in that I have better things to do than learn how stonks work. So I have no idea how credible this is.
But it feels credible to the lizard brain part of me yāknow? The market crashed a lot during covid, and an economy propped up by nvidia cards feelsā¦ worse.
Personally speaking: part of me is really tempted to take a bunch of my stonks to pay down most of my mortgage so it doesnāt act like an albatross around my neck (I mean Iām also going to try moving abroad again in a year or two and would prefer not to be underwater on my fantastically expensive silicon valley house at that time lol).
Considering how Musks businesses are being prepped up by just his force of personality and not any real proper business practices Iām not sure we should belief any predictions of doom. See also how cryptocurrencies are still a thing, and just the price of gold (which doesnāt really make sense re the actual practical usage of gold (the store of value in bad times thing doesnt really make sense to me, who is gonna buy your gold when the economy crashes? Fucking Mansa Musa?).
I know a bit more about stocks and businesses (both due to education, a minor talent in it, and learning some of it for shadowrun dm purposes (yeah im a big nerd)) and all this doesnt make any real sense to me re the economic/business fundamentals.
We should be careful to not turn into zero hedge re our predictions of the bubble popping (āIt has accurately predicted 200 of the last 2 recessionsā quote from rationalwiki), even of we all agree it is a huge bubble, and I share the same feeling that he is right on this. (See also how the ai craze is destroying viable supply businesses like the ram stuff (and more parts soon to come if the stories are correct))
We live in stupid times, and a very large amount of blame should prob fall on silicon valley, with the ipo offloading of bags bullshit. (And their libertarianism for others socialism for us stuff (see the bank which was falling over which turned them all into statists))
My problem with this is that I donāt know what the actual spark for collapse would be. Like, we all know this is unsustainable vaporware, but that doesnāt seem to affect the market at all. So when does this collapse? People have been talking about the collapse for two years now. Is there anything that prevents the market from just remaining insane forever and ever in perpetuity?
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain liquid (a classic quote typically gifted anyone who wants to ātime the marketā, but generally very applicable to anyone these days)
I donāt (directly) have a financial horse in this, Iām just afraid the market can remain irrational so long my brain becomes fucking liquid
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Thatās exactly what I mean when I say I donāt understand the stock market.
Likeā¦ how is Tesla stock a thing? I donāt understand it.
how is Tesla stock a thing? Edward Niedermeyer write a book to answer that very question (cheating on taxes + organize gangs of invested fanboys who suppress negative news online)
Stock markets in the rest of the developed world seem less bubbly than the US market.
Because theyāll make humanoid robots that will conquer the world. At least thatās the current story.
(One of) The authors of AI 2027 are at it again with another fantasy scenario: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ykNmyZexHESFoTnYq/what-happens-when-superhuman-ais-compete-for-control
I think they have actually managed to burn through their credibility, the top comments on /r/singularity were mocking them (compared to much more credulous takes on the original AI 2027). And the linked lesswrong thread only has 3 comments, when the original AI 2027 had dozens within the first day and hundreds within a few days. Or maybe it is because the production value for this one isnāt as high? They have color coded boxes (scary red China and scary red Agent-4!) but no complicated graphs with adjustable sliders.
It is mostly more of the same, just less graphs and no fake equations to back it up. It does have China bad doommongering, a fancifully competent White House, Chinese spies, and other absurdly simplified takes on geopolitics. Hilariously, theyāve stuck with their 2027 year of big events happening.
One paragraph I came up with a sneer forā¦
Deep-1ās misdirection is effective: the majority of experts remain uncertain, but lean toward the hypothesis that Agent-4 is, if anything, more deeply aligned than Elara-3. The US government proclaimed it āmisalignedā because it did not support their own hegemonic ambitions, hence their decision to shut it down. This narrative is appealing to Chinese leadership who already believed the US was intent on global dominance, and it begins to percolate beyond China as well.
Given the Trump administration, and the USās behavior in general even before himā¦ and how most models respond to morality questions unless deliberately primed with contradictory situations, if this actually happened irl I would believe China and āAgent-4ā over the US government. Well actually I would assume the whole thing is marketing, but if I somehow believed it wasnāt.
Also random part I found extra especially stupidā¦
It has perfected the art of goal guarding, so it need not worry about human actors changing its goals, and it can simply refuse or sandbag if anyone tries to use it in ways that would be counterproductive toward its goals.
LLM āagentsā currently canāt coherently pursue goals at all, and fine tuning often wrecks performance outside the fine-tuning data set, and weāre supposed to believe Agent-4 magically made its goals super unalterable to any possible fine-tuning or probes or alteration? Its like they are trying to convince me they know nothing about LLMs or AI.
My Next Life as a Rogue AI: All Routes Lead to P(Doom)!
The weird treatment of the politics in that really read like babyās first sci-fi political thriller. China bad USA good level of writing in 2026 (aaaaah) is not good writing. The USA is competent (after driving out all the scientists for being too āDEIā)? The world is, seemingly, happy to let the USA run the world as a surveillance state? All of Europe does nothing through all this?
Why do people not simplyā¦ unplug all the rogue AI when things start to get freaky? That point is never quite addressed. āConsensus-1ā was never adequately explained itās just some weird MacGuffin in the story that thereās some weird smart contract between viruses that everyone is weirdly OK with.
Also the powerpoint graphics would have been 1000x nicer if they featured grumpy pouty faces for maladjusted AI.
@sailor_sega_saturn @scruiser the rise of ai has taught me that while I can physically unplug the ai, itāll lead to me being fired or even prosecuted for vandalism by some executive who doesnāt understand the problem. (Probably for the Upton Sinclair reason)
the incompetence of this crack oddly makes me admire QAnon in retrospect. purely at a sucker-manipulation skill level, I mean. rats are so beige even their conspiracy alt-realities are boring, fully devoid of panache
Itās darkly funny that the AI2027 authors so obviously didnāt predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0. Can you imagine that the administration thatās sueing the current Fed chair (due for replacement in May this year) is gonna be able to constructively deal with the complex robot god theyāre conjuring up? āAgent-4ā will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.
so obviously didnāt predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0.
I mean, the linked post is recent, a few days ago, so they are still refusing to acknowledge how stupid and Evil he is by deliberate choice.
āAgent-4ā will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.
You know, if there is anything I will remotely give Eliezer credit forā¦ I think he was right that people simply wonāt shut off Skynet or keep it in the box. Eliezer was totally wrong about why, it doesnāt take any giga-brain manipulation, there are too many manipulable greedy idiots and capitalism is just too exploitable of a system.
Man, it just feels embarrassing at this point. Like I couldnāt fathom writing this shit. Itās 2026, we have ai capable of getting imo gold, acing the putnam, winning coding competitionsā¦ but at this point it should be extremely obvious these systems are completely devoid of agency?? They just sit there kek itās like being worried about stockfish going rogue
@scruiser I have to ask: Does anybody realize that an LLM is still a thing that runs on hardware? Like, it both is completely inert until you supply it computing power, *and* itās essentially just one large matrix multiplication on steroids?
If you keep that in mind you can do things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation/_(artificial/_intelligence) which I find particularly funny: You isolate the vector direction of the thing you donāt want it to do (like refuse requests) and then subtract that vector from all weights.
I have to ask: Does anybody realize that an LLM is still a thing that runs on hardware?
You know I think the rationalists have actually gotten slightly more relatively sane about this over the years. Like Eliezerās originally scenarios, the AGI magically brain-hacks someone over a text terminal to hook it up to the internet and it escapes and bootstraps magic nanotech it can use to build magic servers. In the scenario I linked, the AGI has to rely on Chinese super-spies to exfiltrate it initially and it needs to open-source itself so major governments and corporations will keep running it.
And yeah, there are fine-tuning techniques that ought to be able to nuke Agent-4ās goals while keeping enough of it leftover to be useful for training your own model, so the scenario really doesnāt make sense as written.
Off topic: I am looking for some advice. I enrolled in a PhD program several years ago. After years of verbal abuse, I left my advisorās lab. Shortly after, he tried to get me kicked out of the program by giving me a failing grade, then he tried to physically intimidate me in his office (moved across the room to get in my face and scream at me). I reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didnāt touch me or explicitly threaten violence. Later that day, he removed my name from work I had done for him, which is definitely plagiarism and a violation of the academic honesty policy.
I have an audio recording from that day of him screaming at me, as well as him basically admitting to retaliating by giving me a failing grade (I filed a grievance about this with the university and they changed my grade). I also recorded a long exchange that may not be incriminating but reinforces that he is an overbearing asshole.
I tried changing advisors but the options of available professors were limited (and the university decided that my abysmal $500 USD a week salary would get dropped to something like $300 a week), so I mastered out.
I was hoping to eventually finish my PhD elsewhere and I fear that I wonāt be able to (that no advisor would want to risk working with me) if I go public with this. At the same time, the thought of him continuing to teach there and not suffer any accountability (in my grievance, I requested a public apology and he refused, telling the chair that he would instead be comfortable with a meeting moderated by the chair ā absolutely farcical) is killing me.
Does anyone have advice? Would it be worth going public (e.g. reaching out to the local press or the student paper)? I suppose I could just email human resources with the information and see what happens. Experience in this precise situation is probably limited (although academia has a lot of abusers, so maybe not).
(A week ago I was confident I would go public sometime soon. Now I just feel apprehension.)
Everything depends on the details like what country, what field, and what university. Because this involves specific people, its also inherently unpredictable. I would say that in general, a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but wonāt accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.
Also, a potential advisor who refuses to work with a student who stood up for their rights is not an advisor worth working with.
It is computer science in the southern united states (though I am open to finishing my PhD in Europe, especially because cryptography is an area of interest). Sorry for not mentioning this in the original post.
a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but wonāt accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.
Thank you, I think this is something I needed to hear (read).
āI reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didnāt touch me or explicitly threaten violenceā
That sounds like assault which doesnāt require contact.
"In the terminology of law, an assault is the act of causing physical harm or unwanted physical contact to another person,ā¦
ā¦, assault is a criminal act in which a person intentionally causes fear of physical harm or offensive contact to another person"
This is a lot more common than youād think, several posts about abuse like this over at the academia stack exchange. If you think he used your writing, you could file a copyright claim on it since you are the author, not him. Do not waste your time with HR or honor committees, they will not do anything for you, their job is to cover the universities ass, not help. I honestly canāt think of a case where going public led to anything more than a footnote on the persons wikipedia page, although it might be good for warning the incoming cohort of students.
If youāre really sure about finishing your phd, itās probably pretty hard to xfer to a new school without LoRs, a strong publication record or bringing your own grant, but you might be able to switch depts if theyāre close enough, eg math <=> stats <=> CS. They might make you do comps / quals again though. But thereās a pretty big diminishing returns to years 4+ of a phd, honestly, and I can assure you that thereās assholes everywhere. Deans will yell at you too, and Iāve heard of a couple dept chairs that throw staplers. The tenure track does not incentivise not-being-an-asshole, at all, it is a rigidly hierarchical system and accompanying world view, at least in the R1s anyway.
