roystgnr
2hr ago
Citation needed? Last data I saw was that half of straight 18-34yo women in Britain were "unwilling" to date a bisexual man. Presumably some significant percentage of the remainder are at the "bisexuality is a negative, just not an utter disqualifier" level.
That "unwilling to date a bisexual" percentage is dropping fast from generation to generation, but I'd be very surprised if there was any age group for whom "unwilling to date a non-bisexual" exceeded it.
roystgnr
1d ago
For a game of that scope I wouldn't worry about the price. If it's worth spending 30+ hours on then it's almost certainly worth spending $30 on too.
Subnautica is a very different game than SOMA, despite sharing some "mysteries of The Deep", "Weird Science", and "monsters that might be best avoided rather than fought" vibes, though. Subnautica's nonlinear exploration is more fun than SOMA's story-on-rails, but the horror is even less horrifying (though whether that's a good thing or a bad one is a matter of taste), and the crafting+construction mechanics might be to your liking (it really does enhance the exploration and make a playthrough feel like your playthrough) or they might not (yay, the 18th most popular survival+crafting+base-building game on Steam - hope you didn't get sick of the genre by #17!). I liked Subnautica better overall but YMMV. It's probably worth trying, at least, especially because Subnautica 2 has multiplayer co-op and those are often the best games to play with the SO and/or family.
roystgnr
2d ago
Did you like it from the start after the time skip, or did it take a while to grab you? I think I might have read 5 pages before deciding I had other things on my to-read list, which might have been unfair.
roystgnr
2d ago
Last third felt like a worldbuilding exercise without a clear point.
I feel like I can't nominate something for AAQC if the audience for whom it hits home is as narrow as "readers who thought the first two-thirds of Seveneves were fine enough but gave up on the last third but also are Neil Stephenson fans and thus wonder if they shouldn't have given up". But speaking on behalf of that group (singleton? is it just me?), thank you!
roystgnr
3d ago
SpaceX's demonstrated mastery of control of a flying object entirely based on a limited number of relatively low-power thrusters with very limited fuel.
I do wonder how much engineering here they're sharing with SpaceX. Falcon 9 uses and early Starship models used cold-gas Reaction Control System thrusters that would have been a lot like these (except using pure nitrogen instead of air), but surely the different optimal sizing would have meant they didn't use the exact same engines, and other SpaceX engines (small methalox and ullage-gas rockets on newer Starship, hypergolic on Dragon) are even more different. But the control problem for Tesla might be much less tricky. With Falcon 9 the hardest part is that, even with just one main engine active, they can't run at a low-enough power to land without a "hoverslam" that uses that higher power at the last second. Control software for cold gas thrusters that can be throttled arbitrarily up and down is probably easy by comparison.
IMHO the scary thing here for SpaceX fans is the Carbon-Overwrapped Pressure Vessels holding the compressed air. They're at least not dumping Roadster COPVs in liquid oxygen (which led to the unexpected failure mode that lost AMOS-6 a decade ago), nor will they have them in a vehicle full of hundreds of tons of fuel (like during the Starship 36 explosion that also trashed a test stand 16 months ago), but even without a force multiplier like that, hundreds of atmospheres of pressure can be scary stuff. It's still been less than a year since SpaceX had a booster turned to scrap by a COPV rupture.
Based on that, as well as the nature of it, it will probably never be useful outside of demos and stunts.
Yup. The flying "Rocket" model is sales-by-invitation-only; the direct target market there is basically "Hollywood" plus "hectomillionaires who like to drive hypercars". The value here is all indirect, trying to improve the brand status and to attract top engineers.
The suction fan is cool too, and might be possible to actually have on a production car sold to the public.
They're claiming it'll be even on the base-level "Performance" model sold to the public. On the other hand, they're only putting a "Not approved for public road use" asterisk on the "Rocket" model, suggesting that the intermediate limited-release "Thrust" model with just the rear "sub-1s 0-60" thrusters will actually be street-legal. I'm betting that's currently true in the sense of "nobody imagined needing a regulation to cover sub-1s 0-60 so it hasn't been written yet", but it might not be true in the sense of "that regulation won't ever be written". Might not be safe to put a deposit down on the Thrust model, at least not unless you're under the aegis of Florida Man.
roystgnr
6d ago
Gillis holds a history degree from Westchester University. I'm not American so I don't know how prestigious that is
Slightly below 50th percentile as a national university. Knowing nothing else besides his degree, best guess would be that he's smarter than average, but ironically "becoming nationally successful in stand-up comedy" is by itself probably better evidence of above-average IQ than the degree is!
roystgnr
6d ago
My first impulse is to scream "I said I could quit any time I wanted!" Impulse control is important but hard.
More seriously, while there's probably better solutions, "Don't lie to your date about them if somehow the topic comes up, but if possible keep the topic from coming up." is probably still Plan A here. The only obvious upgrade (from both dating and personal perspectives) is to make sure it's possible to honestly frame "insane political philosophers" as a small subset of "political philosophers" whose ramblings you read. There are legitimate benefits to reading the crazy rants here (anything topical hasn't had a chance to be filtered by the test of time regardless; most crazy thoughts are not brilliant innovations but most brilliant innovations seem crazy at first, etc), but if the central goal is "philosophy" rather than "crazy" then these should be the condiments, not the meal.
roystgnr
6d ago
The top tier of hobby qualities are "produces something interesting to others" and "done socially with interesting people". If you don't have any of these (Hail Mary attempts: do you re-arrange the scores after analysis? do you have a group who watch games with you? do you play, either music or football?) it's probably worth getting one or two for your own sake, even aside from the question of whether they appeal to dates.
The second tier is "produces positive change in yourself". The "classical musical scores" one is intellectual enough that it might qualify as "positive change in yourself", worth mentioning. You might even be able to elicit genuine interest from someone who is only politely curious at first, as long as you're tracking the ratio of politeness-to-curiosity in the conversation and don't go full autistic-hyperfixation. (not sure if that's a risk for you; maybe that's just me)
There's also a nonlinearity in the above tiers: combining "produces" with "done socially" can be better than the sum of its parts. It's not a first-date offer, but later on "let me bring you in to a group of friends and teach you X" is gold for establishing status and creating attachment.
The last tier sometimes worth talking about is "consumes something interesting to others", but the trouble with those is that people have varied and narrow definitions of "interesting" in this context. You might find a woman for whom either "watching football" or "analyzing classical musical scores" already qualifies. (Or you might find one for whom both qualify - do not propose marriage immediately after finding this out; give it at least a month.) That might be a long shot, but regardless, don't be afraid to talk about hobbies in this tier if asked; good way to weed out narcissistic or closed-minded or superficial dates.
The bottom tier qualities are "consumes something uninteresting" and "produces negative change in yourself". You might think the former case is a paradox, but there are a lot of things that are addictive to the user yet repellent to non-users. "Stupid internet drama" (I say, judgmentally, because surely I could quit anytime I wanted!) and "insane political YouTubers" might fall in both categories (this is worth worrying about for your own sake), and probably fall in both categories to anyone first hearing them. Don't lie to your date about them if somehow the topic comes up, but if possible keep the topic from coming up.
roystgnr
7d ago
Fog of war, grain of salt, etc. etc., but it seems worse than that at this point. No just "claims by pro-UA accounts", but e.g. the Wall Street Journal quoting Ukraine officials. Not just ordinary Starlink (which isn't supposed to be used for military weapons, or with terminals in-motion on any standard plans) but rather Starshield (the military-grade hardware with dedicated satellites, etc., which is supposed to already be disabled inside Russia but which was donated to Ukraine by the Pentagon for military use there, including in Russian-captured areas). Cut off with no warning while missions were in-flight.
Could be a misunderstanding, an attempt to cut off Russian use of captured terminals that accidentally impacted Ukrainian terminals as well ... but given the lack of warning and the timing, I highly doubt it.
roystgnr
8d ago
That makes sense in the Frenchman-attacking-allied-countries case; I just think there are a lot of other combinations of attacker and victim where the international nature of the crime will have the opposite effect.
roystgnr
8d ago
I don't understand the lackadaisical attitude toward likely recidivism in any case, so maybe I'm way off base here, but how would "international" make anybody become harsher? "Good thing for our local criminal that he's in our custody where all we'd have to do to crack down is say the word, not halfway around the world where we'd have to declare war to get him properly punished, because a declaration of war we'd totally do!" If anything I'd expect the modern west to go easier on fargroup members while the "modern" North Korea would be happy to oblige.
roystgnr
8d ago
deliberately allowing North Koreans to remotely defrost French freezers is an act of war by North Korea against France
This would be true for "encouraging", and for some definitions of "allowing", but "allowing" has a lot of grey area. "We thought he deserved a fifth chance!" is a pretty good shield of plausible deniability in too much of the modern west, including France.
roystgnr
9d ago
There's fan fiction that makes Harry Potter more adult (well, as much as possible under the circumstances) for the purposes of drama, but now I want to see it as an adult comedy.
roystgnr
9d ago
It depends on the car (the difference in price used to be much greater than it is now) and the location of the commute (pure-ICE mileage has gotten pretty good outside of stop-and-go driving) and on the future of gas prices too. My daughter picked out a hybrid for environmentalist reasons but I was surprised to see (even pre-bombing-Iran) that, if gas prices don't drop, the break-even point would be under 50k miles in. That would actually have been a reasonable investment if not for the opportunity cost vs the stock market going wild during the past few years.
On the other hand, I have a friend with a hybrid who made the same calculation during a gas price peak pre-fracking. Gas prices did drop. For a long time.
There's also auto work to consider. On average hybrids now are a little cheaper to maintain thanks to less engine and brake wear, but more expensive repairs means that one bad accident or post-warranty breakdown could put her back in the red there.
roystgnr
9d ago
If you like analysis of storytelling, my favorites right now are Brandon McNulty and John Matthew Fox. Their video titles and thumbnails are godawful algorithm-optimized clickbait, but the video contents are actually quite thoughtful and interesting.
roystgnr
9d ago
I went to see how bad it was, so I could write an expanded version of my "why are humans making it so hard to come up with an AGI definition that AI doesn't yet meet but they all do" rant, with the appropriate "considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" reference and everything ... but I actually only saw a single "obliterating water" comment, and it seemed to be satirical rather than serious. I didn't scroll very far down, so I'm not questioning your credibility here, but even if there are a ton of dumb water takes I missed, I'm kind of amazed they didn't reach my screen. Does YouTube now actually have an algorithm (or even more incredibly, a user base) that successfully filters out the dumbest comments?
roystgnr
11d ago
surely they understood that there was no way that a blood purist group would ever give them a good deal once the war was actually won
They might just have been desperate for even allies of convenience. Very risky, but not unheard of.
"Japan Forms Alliance With White Supremacists In Well-Thought Out Scheme"
roystgnr
11d ago
She did start writing well before Twilight started showing us the left side of the female id bell curve, much less 50 Shades of Grey.
The two major artistic reactions to Anne Rice style "sexy vampires" were the Buffy/Angel series (exploiting but subverting the trope), with around 10 million total viewers tops, and the Twilight series (taking that shit to 11!), with around 25 million readers and twice that many movie viewers. Despite its lesser success, I'd give Joss Whedon a lot of credit for trying to show young women that falling for a much-older dark-triad-sociopath-type guy is a tragedy at best and a travesty at worst, but, well, you know.
roystgnr
11d ago
Fanfiction.net lists ... are they kidding me? over 800,000 Harry Potter works? ... so I have to assume that every possible gender swapped romance has been done at least a dozen times before.
I do wonder whether "gender-swapped Harry instead" would have been an even better series overall, if that had been Rowling's canon rather than fan fiction. It would be a big help for some of the "women writing men" problems problems that @Lewyn points out, if those problems didn't apply to the protagonist who occupies most of our attention. I think there are some gender asymmetries that would make a Draco+Harriet romance creep me out way more than Dracina+Harry, but maybe that would just mean I'm not the target audience; Draco+Harriet probably could have made the Twilight/50-Shades crowd go wild.
roystgnr
11d ago
Ha! That's almost the same as my head-canon improvement. Hans isn't an actually-nice guy, but he's not pure evil, he's just as desperate as you'd expect of someone raised with wealth and a nominal title but expecting to inherit jack squat. He rationalizes that "I'll marry Anna and act like I love her" is still a better outcome than would otherwise befall a girl so sheltered and naive, and although he's not too surprised when his kiss confirms that this doesn't actually count as love as far as the spell is concerned, he still tries to monologue to Anna about why he's not a bad person for all of it.
I'd been thinking that he could do a more evil turn at that point, like "you're doomed anyway, so I might as well lock you in here and not be dispossessed in the process", but I like your "Hans genuinely thinks Elsa killed her" idea better. Except... does that allow the rest of the movie to stay the same? My kids have all thankfully outgrown it so I haven't seen it in forever, but I could have sworn the ending required Anna to be conscious much longer to go out and confront Elsa herself.
Tsundere girls are a common archetype because it works
Yeah, but here it seems to work surprisingly specifically, improving the themes and making the plot progress more seamlessly.
Harry grew up unloved, so "the girl who claims to hate the protagonist can't help carpet-bombing him with hints to the contrary and yet he still doesn't believe them" is more plausible than it is in some tsundere stories. The Malfoys end up with actual reasons to oppose Harry, so before the classical tsundere "romantic conflict because she's got personality issues" story can outstay its welcome there's time for an even-more-classical Romeo-and-Juliet "romantic conflict because the world is tearing us apart" story to step in.
Dracina gets to be a less flat character, with more conscious-vs-subconscious personality aspects conflicting in earlier books and conscious ones conflicting in later ones. Perhaps more incidentally but just as importantly, expecting to have (or at least to hint at the possibility of) a future romance would have led any writer to slightly soften some of the one-dimensional-villain writing that made Draco's later redemption feel more contrived. We should have gotten to see a glimpse of Draco's boggart; we wouldn't have been allowed to miss seeing Dracina's.
Making Dracina less one-dimensional and more vulnerable-seeming makes us think more about the "good guys" hostility to her; e.g. the cruelty of the professor in book 4 becomes more of a decent clue and less of a comic gag.
Harry becoming unable to write her off makes Dracina more interesting as a red-herring villain and as a real villain. Harry gets an antagonist who isn't just the obvious person to fight with, but someone with whom later fights feel more and more like a tragic mistake on one or both sides.
Dracina can get a better backstory, with Lucius' conscious "girl dad" doting vs subconscious "no male heir to carry on my name" disappointment making her awful combination of ego and insecurity more natural and more sympathetic, and adding to the internal "trying to look strong while feeling weak" conflict that was already in Draco. Dracina gets multiple potential great sources of quiet or overt external conflict with Lucius, from pride vs loyalty earlier ("Daddy always wanted me to look for a strong match, and this awful annoying boy is famous and successful...") to love vs loyalty later ("I'm actually drawn to him, but now Daddy says he's from a worthless family and Dumbledore's puppet!"), which gives her another challenge to her internal conflict with her loyalty to Lucius.
A bunch of the most-quoted Draco lines gain a little more subtext as Dracina lines (attraction or attempts to impress, rather than just envy and insecurity), and a few things (Harry refusing to take Malfoy's hand in book 1, "Scared, Potter?" in movie 2) become perfect setups for later callbacks.
Harry starts out literally charming a female snake in book 1, and ends up metaphorically charming one by book 3 or 4.
We get more of an inside view of Slytherin and the Death Eaters, and so more opportunities to see what really can drive people to evil, not just cartoonish villainy.
Harry gets a new source of conflict with his friends, who (once he can bring himself to admit actual attraction) are likely to think he's just deluded by hormones to believe a Malfoy might not be a lost cause. This can also give us a much better source of conflicts with Ron, so we don't have to make Ron become weirdly and off-puttingly jealous and paranoid.
We get a much better candidate for a devastating betrayal in book 5 than "Cho's friend whose name nobody remembers", and the betrayal's consequences can be devastating on both sides.
Harry gets a romance with a partner who's actually interesting after book 2, and with more serious external conflict being what keeps them apart, instead of just lukewarm attraction. He gets a partner who doesn't start out star-struck by him and whose eventual attraction can feel less superficial because she's consciously trying to fight it. He gets a partner who challenges him more, pushing him to be more masculine and faster than in canon.
We get a mirror to compare and contrast with Severus-and-Lily, adding to the suspense of Dracina's redemption by reminding us that "redemption but only after an irreparable loss" is a possibility.
Dracina gets a proper redemption arc, with a goal worth her doing the work to redeem herself rather than just Draco's realization that he got in over his head and needs to weasel out of it. We're put in a position to sympathize with Dracina more before her internal conflict in book 6 ramps up, making us care more about how it's tearing at her soul, not just about the impacts of whether Voldemort has an extra pawn or not.
Harry defeats Voldemort via "The Power of Love" again, at least on the meta-level this time, now with a different type of love. Way better than "ha ha you didn't pay close enough attention to the rules about the SuperWand". On the allegorical level, the serpent that was trying to seduce humans with Knowledge and Immorality instead gets defeated thanks to Eve's rejection.
A loving Harry-Dracina marriage crossing the lines of the Slytherin and Gryffindor feud does much more to establish a "happily ever after" epilogue than Harry and Draco seeing each other at the train station and not fighting, or Harry telling his kids that Snape wasn't so bad after all.
I love weird fan theories, but I haven't seen a "that's so incredibly juvenile and stupid ... wait, why does it actually make so much sense?" moment in popular media since the "Darth Jar Jar" post a decade ago.
roystgnr
12d ago
Not sure what fraction of this trend I'm being fed by The Algorithm, but in what I've seen at least half of the images are AI-generated, 100% of the videos are AI-generated ... and very little of the writing is AI-generated. This could be pure selection effects. Nobody can stage a filmed video or draw an animated video fast enough to compete with generative models, so the models are all we get, but the best artists can still keep up with AI-created still images, and the best writers are still significantly better than AI writing so the latter doesn't go viral.
There was one exception I saw. Nearly 2000 likes so far for the first part, IMO deserved (for that part), but the process was basically "human outline, human+AI prompting, AI first draft, human editing".
roystgnr
12d ago
It’s all vibes on Musks being a winner.
Well, it's vibes on future earnings. Lots of folks think those would look better if Musk decided to quit and put Shotwell in charge.
So it should be volatile.
Strongly agreed. I'm kind of a huge SpaceX fan, but I'm only invested in them a little bit, indirectly, via things like index funds and Alphabet. Their market cap really does seem to be taking the possibility of an enormous upside into account; it's a fair gamble, but either buying or shorting it is still a big gamble.
this was one of the easiest buys of my life
On the other hand, I'm getting older and I worry about kids' college tuitions and my own retirement; your definition of "big gamble" may vary. I thought I was being super responsible by ignoring the impulse to dump all my liquid life savings into "one of the easiest buys of my life" in early 2023, keeping 95% in index funds and at least slightly less-risky investments, even though it seemed really likely that NVDA was about to double. Well, it didn't exactly "double"...
roystgnr
12d ago
the "proofs" are so big they can't even be checked on consumer hardware
Fermat's Last Theorem verification squeezes into 256GB, which definitely isn't "consumer hardware", but it is on the workstation my job bought me 5 years ago; this is "prosumer" tier not "industrial". It's possible that OpenAI has come up with even trickier-to-verify formalizations, but I doubt it. Anthropic's FLT proof is 13.5M lines of Lean. All the recent OpenAI formalizations put together add up to 26M lines, but that's for 400 proofs. There's a lot of "library code" shared between proofs, so it's not as straightforward as 26M/400, but you're probably still going to be able to check at least some of them. This blogger/streamer tossed 3 of them at a tiny 7GB RAM cap and found that two hit the cap but one of the 3 topped out under 3GB.
How much would it cost to run Lean on AWS to verify one of these proofs?
For FLT it looks like you'd need a 16xlarge instance for 30-ish hours, so a bit over $100?
Well, it's nearly half g anyway. There's a seeming-paradox where, although you can estimate g from two different sets of tests and get a correlation of .99 between the estimates, that's entirely due to having each set be broad enough not to be too swayed by any individual test, because correlation coefficients between g and individual tests (including in test batteries designed to measure g!) hit .82 (g explaining 2/3 of variance) at the very highest and go way down from there. It's possible that some people just don't spend their time using their g for e.g. "Subtraction/Multiplication" (correlation .59; presumably they used their g for evading the elementary school truancy officer instead?), but a more likely answer might be that Moravec's Paradox has implications for human intelligence alone, not just when comparing human to non-human. Enough general intelligence can augment or compensate for weaker special-purpose systems, but that doesn't mean the special-purpose systems aren't there.
The predicate "makes no sense" is binary, not unary. The history of human progress is a series of discoveries of observations that made no sense, to us, followed by formulations of theories that revealed why the observations had sense behind them after all.
In this case, we observe (repeatedly! this one seems to be surviving the replication crisis!) that most people are unable to solve an abstract logic problem which is isomorphic to non-abstract logic problems they are able to solve. This is even more shocking than being able to catch a baseball without being able to solve the differential equation predicting its motion from observations, but it doesn't seem like it's a difference of kind, just a difference of magnitude. It's been less than 2500 years since humans first classified which possible syllogisms of deductive logic are fallacious; that is not the history you'd expect from a hundreds-of-millennia-old species which has inherently mastered logic and obviated the need to find other ways for our brains to solve logic problems.
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