Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Your comment plus username makes me chuckle at the idea of setting loose a bot account trained to imitate Scott Alexander as closely as possible (mods, this is a joke)
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I rather doubt it as well, given the effects of the original trench warfare, but given that it's a common talking point I'd like to disprove the theory for myself.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I would explain your situation and the outlines of your personal knowledge to Claude, ask it to write you a CLAUDE.md based on that, and then keep asking that 'new' Claude questions about the basics as you go along. Hey Claude, what's a harness, should I be using one for my project, and what are the trade-offs?
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I'll restrict myself to one point of historical autism (leaving aside things like "slave patrols", where you need to do more serious work to get out of nonsense 2020-history, or LLMs' obsession with easy contrasts): your AI has gotten the role of the Anglo-Saxon sheriff wildly wrong, and has essentially read the later Normans back into it. Anglo-Saxon sheriffs did not preside over a shire court, where shires existed, and accounting for the incredible legal variety of what a "shire" was and how it operated - they were intended as functionary stewards, junior to the (supposed) legal representative, the ealdorman, with minor input into the local lord's justice. Posse comitatus is also a hell of an anachronism even for the Normans. If you mean the levy, the sheriff had no power to summon it except as instructed by his lord, and if you mean the hue and cry, that could be raised by any figure of sufficient local standing.
If you're interested in looking further into the subject, I found in my younger years that the origins of state prosecution are actually the more interesting thread running through early English law. My LLM expands:
Before the twelfth century, prosecuting a wrong in England was the victim's own business: homicide, wounding, and theft were pursued by the injured party or his kin through the appeal, a formal private accusation brought in the shire or hundred court, and liability was discharged through compensation — wergild and bot to the victim, wite to the king — so that the Crown's stake in crime was fiscal before it was jurisdictional. It is precisely that fiscal stake, John Hudson argues in The Formation of the English Common Law, that generated state prosecution, rather than any prior theory of public justice. The Norman kings had already made the community collectively answerable to the Crown for unexplained death through the murdrum fine, and the Leges Henrici Primi (c. 1115) enumerate the placita coronae, pleas reserved to the king's jurisdiction alone, whose profits — amercements, forfeited chattels — belonged to him; but a revenue stream contingent on private appellants was a revenue stream full of holes, since kin might settle, be bought off, be intimidated, or simply not exist. The Assize of Clarendon (1166) plugged the holes: twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every vill were sworn to present anyone reputed a robber, murderer, or thief, and the presented were tried — by ordeal of water, before the king's itinerant justices — whether or not any complainant came forward. This is the decisive step, because it created, for the first time, criminal proceedings that ran entirely at the king's suit: the offender identified by the community's oath rather than a victim's appeal, tried in the king's forum, his chattels forfeit to the king on conviction, and, by the Assize of Northampton (1176), mutilated or exiled even on acquittal if his repute was foul enough. The machinery built to secure the Crown's judicial revenue thus became, almost as a by-product, the machinery of public prosecution: the doctrine that crime is a breach of the king's peace, contra pacem domini regis, answerable to the Crown regardless of the victim's wishes, arrived riding on the Pipe Rolls.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Also the focus of the tender embraces of its richest native son. One could also chart the rise of right-populism in Eastern Europe as a metric of the advances of a hostile postmodernity to which they're reacting.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
State repression of culture is not the same as the loss of culture. Imagine if in just about every place you find yourself in America, that isn't reserved to some newcoming minority or the hipsteriest of hipsters, there's still at least a drawlin' fella wearing a cowboy hat and spurs, a Southie with the broadest Bawston accent, and a Southern gentleman who says "huwhat" and "huwhy", and they all basically act as you expect. Britain's still got a fair bit of that.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I would say in my experience they are significantly less postmodernized, especially Albanians, though it's hard to connect that directly to the 1990s (I think the basic function is how rich a country is) and it's now been a long time since the war. Hungary is billed as reactionary, but it's actually well ahead of the rest of the Balkans in the process.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Quality post, may Allah curse Universal Culture. However, I have become painfully aware that this process is happening almost everywhere, at different rates; America is just ground zero for postmodernity. America has lost much of its Americanness, but Britain has lost an awful lot of its Britishness, Turkey has lost some of its Turkishness, even Africa has lost a bit of its character. I look forward to revisiting Ukraine sometime, to see if the antidote to postmodernity is in fact brutal trench warfare.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
There's no thrill of permadeath whatsoever in fighting a quokka, most derived undead, something you outlevel significantly, or whatever (a rule of thumb for me is "can I safely melee this as a caster? trash fight"). Though you always have to watch for anything walking onscreen while you're tabbing the quokka. What I don't like are the situations where, for instance, your character is at a point where you can mindlessly melee a komodo dragon or a troll one-on-one almost all the time, but suddenly a series of rolls go differently and now you're scrambling to escape this one scrub (early game is awful for this too but that's WAD I guess, early game is supposed to suck). Tying GDR to AC instead of body armour was a big improvement, and I suppose the converse is that characters can escape when they should absolutely die due to the enemy rolling low. My thinking on DCSS's design is that many enemies are meant to be unchallenging one-on-one, depending on your character, so that they can create interesting challenges when they show up in combination with each other, without those group fights being impossible to overcome without luring.
More generally, and I know I always bang this drum, I think a game which can accidentally double player damage without anyone noticing, during a tournament needs to take a long hard look at its philosophy around damage rolls. It also creates a pretty boring version of optimal play (and I say this as someone who can win pretty often, currently have an MDFW tearing up Zot), where you are focused on minimizing your exposure to 1% chances of death. Honestly I don't think you need to play like that to win regularly, just to play as well as the best players, but the devs seem obsessed with taking away boring tools for optimal play without ever asking "why does our design philosophy push players towards this path".
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Wow. A true Hegelian - you are quite literally the only person I have ever seen call it the Lord-Bondsman dialectic instead of the Master-Slave dialectic (following the translations of Kojeve, Lacan, etc.). Though I would say, that, at least through the prism of my Kojevean reading, any honest interpretation of this dialectic for the present has to put capitalists and workers on the same side (as the Slave) against the State.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
To be fair, lab ethanol probably will make you puke (eventually).
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
"He's a bastard, but he's our bastard, and he'll be a bastard to our enemies" is as old as time, and I can promise you it existed in the golden age of machine politics - probably more prevalent then. Physical harm of women and children is just a different ball-game and people react to it differently.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
This is what I find annoying about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: the incredibly swingy damage formulas mean that a trash fight can become a captcha fight and even a challenge real quick, so the optimal way to play is to treat encounters that 99% of the time are trash as if they are about to kill you. The trash/challenge fights both work well (autofight is very quick, and the challenges are good), and it's often the case that multiple trash monsters create combinations that you have to take seriously, but imo the game would be much better if the RNG variance was toned down so that the types were more clearly distinguished.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
The two are related. Almost every Big Guy soccer player is perennially injured - the torque that big muscles or even a big frame puts on your joints really adds up over the levels of sustained work that a soccer player's body is expected to put in just to be competitive. The only exception is the old-fashioned big striker who hangs out up front and doesn't run all that much except to try and score a goal, and those are only fielded by low-ranked teams.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Given that people tend to be somewhat looks-blind across race, my personal standard for black actresses is "if I were swiping on Tinder in Cape Town or Dar or Dakar, would she stand out", and Lupita Nyong'o fails that bar. But she fails it in a very particular way - she's a white liberal's idea of an Attractive But Strong (But Not Too Attractive) black woman. A couple decades ago and Hollywood would have dolled her up in a perfectly spherical afro.
Personally, I suspect she was cast because some extremely canny publicist identified her as ideal to cause controversy to drive marketing metrics, but most people aren't ready for the level of conspiracy theorizing you need to actually understand Hollywood (Mulholland Drive was a documentary).
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I've got some news for you about the average American of beer-drinking age...
This is basically entirely correct. And I feel very bad for the guys who are too autismal or not experienced enough to get it. You can actually just emulate an entire reddit leftist in your head as easily as your laptop can emulate a gameboy advance (the apolitical normie you meet at the dive bar pool table is much more complex and difficult to emulate than the redditor with his Interests and Hobbies), it's not that much processing power, they're not exactly ClaudeGPT Grokopus 69.420 one zillion parameters, they're just basically normal people who are a standard deviation dumber than the average motteposter trying to do what they feel is socially expected of them to be good. They want to be good people. Their rules of being a Good Person are not particularly difficult to understand, emulate, and manipulate, and if you consider yourself a right-winger this should be table stakes to show your face in public alongside not being fat and knowing how a sport jacket should fit.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I have two fond memories of European Starbuckses (Starbucii?) - first, a heatwave in Nuremberg, where the Euro lack of air conditioning meant that the local Starbucks, with its fan and tiled floor, was the closest thing to relief and, secondly, coming to the end of a two-month backpacking trip and finding a Starbucks on the Asian side of Istanbul, and the strange relief of knowing that at least one thing today would be the same as it always was.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
I thought it was half a maB of hefeweizen
Interesting, in my experience watching American football I'm basically unable to tell when the action will resume in a given space of milling around. I assume you pick that up fairly quickly.
In my experience, women go for soccer very quickly, but they only remember the good-looking players (I have an American friend who still occasionally asks about Olivier Giroud) or the villains of a given team. It's easier for sports-agnostic women to experience sports as personal drama between men - see also the explosion of F1 interest.
I think the connection to baseball is a meaningful one, even if cricket is probably closer than baseball to the abstract idea of American football you're portraying. American sports are, generally, optimized for ultra-intense fan engagement with lots of statistics, whereas old-world sports tend more towards "may the best man win, old chap" with relatively less structure around that. Personally, I sort of appreciate that the stats wonks in soccer aren't really that useful, but it also means that there's very little to actually think about beyond watching the games and scouting transfers. Tactics are incredibly important to a team, but you've discussed them to death by Monday.
I can see the Fire Emblem metaphor, though I think the "war simulator" thing has been tortured to death (I could also give a spiel on how soccer and rugby are closer to small-unit infantry tactics - let alone that soccer fans engage in much closer activities to war than any professional athlete...) and we should accept that the war-related psychological inheritances that sport activates in us have almost nothing to do with what happens on the pitch.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
I think a lot of people are basically pretending they have social lives now but in fact spend all the time they can bedrotting with a screen. The men you just don't hear about, they drop out of the offline world completely, but many women still accept invitations from friends, go on dating apps, etc. when they're as stuck inside as a junkie in a traphouse.
I suppose so. Though there's a lot of coaching and player specialization involved in other sports, it's just the most extreme in American football because there isn't the need for players to fill other roles (even in cricket, you occasionally get the equivalent of your big guy needing to kick a field goal). Do you feel that the emphasis in ultra-specializing players physically is good or bad for that chess-style of watching?
Personally, I simply cannot understand the appeal of a sport where you sit around watching largely unimportant nonsense for almost all the time in the hope of catching 30 seconds of action - I already have my girlfriend for that.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Cuba has an estimated 5.5 million tons of nickel deposits (for reference, Indonesia has the most in the world, at 21 million), but produces less than 50,000 tons a year. They have the third largest deposits of cobalt in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they have more minerals I don't see on a cursory google, since the Caribbean is a mineral-rich region. They also have chrome, copper, gold, zinc, etc. and possibly offshore oil. Not enough to fully bootstrap your economy off (Jamaica might get >80% of export value from bauxite, but you want to do better than Jamaica), but a good start for developing domestic industry in a non-Communist context.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
It's not really American football vs soccer. The reality is that, if you haven't grown up watching either rugby or American football, and then you were exposed to both, you'd never choose the latter as a viewing experience. The rest of the world has their own version of American football, but more free-flowing, more naturally physical, and less advertisercucked. Even the Japanese play rugby.
"We had to change some of the details to avoid invoking harmful stereotypes, so now the Jew is a werewolf and the Nazi is a vampire"
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