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Comment by MichaelZuo | Hacker News Reader

A joke about… what?

The thing not yet defined?

Yep! Ever seen Pulp Fiction? Do you know what's in the briefcase? No one does. It's a McGuffin. The Torment Nexus is also a McGuffin, it's a poorly defined thing that the actual definition of is irrelevant to the plot, only how it creates motivation for the characters.

In this joke the "Torment Nexus" by name is clearly something you don't want, no one wants to be tormented. It's also the McGuffin because something named a Torment Nexus would HOPEFULLY be something someone wouldn't build, but the joke is "hey this guy went and built the horrible thing we didn't want!"

Ever heard anyone make a Soylent Green joke? Same thing. All we know is that "soylent green in people" but we don't know HOW it's people, but it doesn't matter because we simply don't want to eat people under any condition.

I’m pretty sure some religious extremists intentionally seek out torment and pain…?

Plus all the other oddball personalities that don’t mind suffering.

So clearly some might want it.

Small but important correction: the actual quote is “Soylent Green _is_ people!”. Agree with your broader point about the Torment Nexus being a McGuffin, but we do actually know how Soylent Green is people in the film - it’s explicitly revealed that it’s made from processed corpses due to overpopulation.

Yep, that’s a typo, you’re completely right. But when I say how, I mean literally “what is the manufacturing process that turns dead humans into a food product people don’t know is former people?” If it’s protein bars or “synthetic tofu” or maybe what looks like blueberry muffins, it doesn’t matter to the story.

It's already defined as an abstract archetype! Those aren't supposed to be concrete individual objects in the first place, they are shaped placeholders. In particular, "Torment Nexus" is a placeholder for any hypothetical (or real) high-tech invention which involves a disturbing amount of human suffering.

In other words, it's just like discussing "the Hero's Magic Weapon" or "the Wise Wizard" or "the Weird Place Where Ships Vanish".

Suppose I stated: "Captains hate to pilot their ships near the Weird Place Where Ships Vanish." Does it make sense for someone to complain that the coordinates of the Place haven't been defined, or that nobody has done a statistical analysis of Ship Vanishing rates?

So then how do you know some other HN user is joking about roughly the same thing?

Perhaps they read it as a joke about something quite different.

Yes. It is, in fact, possible to make jokes about abstract concepts and fictional entities.

At least until the Torment Nexus outlaws it.

> A joke about… what?

"Torment Nexus" comes from (and is used as a concise reference to) a two-sentence tweet [0], and I think it makes clear what the joke (or, perhaps, "dystopian observation") is about:

  Sci-Fi Author: In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus 
  as a cautionary tale.

  Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment
  Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create The
  Torment Nexus.

[0] https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538

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