Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
22hr ago
From the safety of the cushiest country on Earth, the prospect of war in the Kashmir is a mildly interesting diversion at most.
But there you are, a fellow mottizen, right alongside it.
Good luck.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
22hr ago
Charitably, one could steelman the quote as referring to the development of ideologies that are merely more fit than traditional Christianity, as opposed to such that aim for utopia. Not that secular ideology is able to achieve perfection in any way, but only that it can outperform both Christianity and organic "modernity".
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
1d ago
What is hot chip?
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
1d ago
Worry not. Teenage girls have other things to do.
For me personally, I intensely dislike AI content and the reasons are the following:
- The quality (not quantity!) of AI output is consistently subhuman and also consistently overestimated, so the heuristic of "all AI output is unworthy slop" is reasonable.
- If AIs improve to above-human levels across the board, it won't end well for humans, so it's advisable to keep the primacy of human interests in mind.
If someone tells me they used an AI tool to do their job more efficiently, I immediately assume that any of the following are the case:
- Their job is trivially easy.
- They had to invest a disproportionate amount of time double-checking the AI output and would have been better off doing without.
- They did a sloppy job that only passed muster because nobody looked too closely.
For the Hugo awards panelist pre-selection, I assume that all three are true.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
2d ago
Sensibly so. Sci-Fi is written by humans for humans. Even when AIs are the subject, they need to be limited in what they are allowed to do so they do not usurp the spotlight from the human-on-human drama that humans actually want to read.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
2d ago
Tinkering on my fencing, again.
Successfully helped out at the local tournament (manned the reception, which seemed 100% superfluous but apparently we really need every spectator to sign a waiver so they can't sue us if they end up on a photograph), talked to lots of people, but the first thing I'm organizing now is actually a play/grill/fence date between me and the kid on one side and another fencing parent and their kids on the other. Baby steps. Also signed up for another tournament at the end of the month. Might go to training this thursday, but it's a long, late drive and I'm unwilling to commit. Also talked to some people about organizing weekend fencing sessions, but have not made any substantial progress on that since last week.
No code.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
2d ago
Worry slowly. War between India and Pakistan has historically been a limited affair, with both wasting resources on an inconclusive border conflict and then going back to the status quo.
It's a push factor, true, but only one among many.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
2d ago
Rafael
Rafale.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
2d ago
First the terrorist attack in Kashmir that my family missed by a few hours, now this. Can't catch a break.
Please instruct a non-anglophone - isn't your family missing that attack you already catching a break?
I'm holding onto my dialect for dear life. It's a core element of my experience of "home". Somehow I internatlized early on that it was in fact the others, the dialect-rejectors, the ostentatiously high-german who were LARPing, who pretended not to understand and speak the actual natural language of this place and time. And I had the goood fortune to be among others who practiced their dialect shamelessly and naturallly.
But that was long ago.
It's obvious that young people are socialized not primarily with others from the same place, but above all else with rootless cosmopolitans and their media. The number of those who naturally speak the local dialect are dropping precipitously and, outside of a few isolated villages, are already unsustainably low. Maybe a comprehensive, widespread and sustained LARP might save it, but not nearly enough people have the desire, nevermind the ability, to do it. Things are looking dire.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
3d ago
We have flower fields just like that. You go in, pick flowers, then pay at a piggy bank. Seems idyllic, right? They felt the need to put up a security camera.
There's a farmer's store, integrated into the farm building itself, in the next village. Used to be you'd walk in through the open door, take what you like, calculate the sum you need to pay, then put it into a piggy bank and walk out again with your goods. They recently had to install an electronic lock that only opens to valid debit cards.
These things are fragile. All it takes is one flagrant defector, and they cease to be viable.
Unmanned vegetable stands have become rare. The only ones I still see regularly are for potatoes.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
3d ago
I just caught myself paying in full at the self-service, honor-based work cafeteria. This is not a major insight, but I had to think of your post.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
3d ago
a promise is just a promise
This is an annoying thing to read; an aggravating sentiment to encounter. It seems not alright for a promise to be "just a promise". Yet it's something that very many take to be obvious and true - but then why have promises at all? Promises should be a foundational social institution, not a nonsensical rhetorical flourish like the by-now codifiedly useless literally/"literally" distinction. Breaking a promise should be a big deal.
That vows are impossible in secular society and that someone can say a thing like "just a promise" without getting tarred and feathered is a serious failing of modernity.
...it's always been that way, hasn't it?
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
6d ago
Worked as intended, then.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
6d ago
I have not. Will take a note to do so.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
6d ago
The username was fairly damning and I don't disagree with the ban on that basis, but was the post in itself objectionable?
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1903340/
A French JRPG with French themes made by French Frenchmen from France. I find the premise strangely appealing, ridiculous as it seems when spelled out. I saw the prologue (in French, obivously) and thought "damn, I want to know how it continues". Notably though, the setting and plot are pretty much all I'm interested in. I can't stand JRPGs for the gameplay. Not sure if I want to get into those weeds. Weebs. Weebweeds. That said, this would be just the thing for reactivating my French in anticipation of a visitor I'll host later this Month. But at 30-45€ (depending on where I might get it from), the price is pretty steep. Believe it or not, but I pretty much learned fluent French by playing fully voice-acted text-heavy games in French, many years ago.
The premise, by the way, is that the world has ended 67 years ago, all that's left is a slice of Paris stuck in an ocean, and since then the maximum age for humans has been lowered by one year every year, it's now the year 33, everyone's and the end of their rope one way or another, expeditions have been sent out yearly to try and remedy the situation but so far none have achieved anything. Hence Expedition 33, staffed primarily with 33-year-olds who donate the last year of their lives to giving humanity (or Parisians, anyways) a fighting chance at survival.
It's moving stuff. The game starts of with the festival of erasure, where everyone says goodbye to the 34-year-olds, last gifts are exhanged, some drink, some fuck, some hide, and then all gather to observe as the maximum age gets lowered and their friends, mothers, ex-girlfriends, fathers, brothers, and possibly themselves die on the spot. Newly-made orphans are escorted to orphanages, life continues, at least for the time being.
Above all, it's French. And since I can't stand French filmmaking, French gaming is pretty much the only media I sometimes enjoy in which I can hear French people talk. I'm still debating whether or not that's worth playing a JRPG for, though.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
6d ago
This is exemplified in their treatment of WW2, where much of the country prefers to ignore it in stark contrast to other Axis powers like Germany
I assure you that out of two extremes, the Japanese have chose the healthier way of dealing with it.
Given all the positive reviews here, I decided to watch an episode a day and...I quit. It's not an uninteresting concept, especially since we get the perspective of law enforcement of a totalitarian society instead of the usual "scrappy underdogs dismantle the system in a day and a half" or "observe, in first person, the bootheel coming down on the protagonist's face, until death" stories. It seemed very similar to Ghost in the Shell, in that way. But overall, above everything else, it's still just generic anime, bursting at the seams with tropes, the path so well-trod it's by now below sea level for me.
Not nearly good enough to be worth the time.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
7d ago
I recently dined together with a bunch of old sports buddies, and it was...karmic, I suppose, for an ex-leftist myself, to be surrounded by a bunch of people who all share the same kind of rabid, unquestioning and almost militant casual leftism and discuss it around you under the assumption that nobody they associate with could ever be of a conflicting opinion. I agreed with what I could bring myself to agree with, politely disagreed on a few details here and there, and overall accepted that this was not the venue to start any kind of adversarial debate. It was, in the end, just people coming together over shared views. But it saddened me that we, having known each other for years and getting along great in general, were not above using politics to delineate ingroup/outgroup in a nominally apolitical gathering of friends and fellow sports enjoyers. It saddened me that, no matter how much I value these friendships and prize them far above each one's views and opinions, the sentiment would hardly be reciprocated if I "revealed my power level", so to speak.
Sucks to suck, I guess. Anyone who seriously wants to be a social creature must go with the flow, obviously.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
7d ago
This topic interests me greatly, but I doubt I have much to add.
I'm someone who seek outs kind environments. I come from a small village where everyone knew everyone, lived in a nearby small town where people are already almost entirely anonymous to each other, spent a few years in a much larger town in which I was pretty much a rootless atomized cosmopolitan when not on campus or at work, and eventually returned home to the village. My wife would like for us to move to her home village, but it's 10x the size of mine and people there are already much more closed-off than here. I now work at the largest company in the region (thousands of employees), and it has an aggressively kind culture in which you are required to use familiar second-person pronouns (a language feature comparable to calling someone by their first name in English) and everyone, without exception, greets everyone else.
So here are some random thoughts I take away from all that:
- Even in the big-town apartment block, you can socialize and form fragile, tenuous but productive bonds with people you see semi-regularly. Immediate neighbors, gas station attendants, that guy you regularly see in the elevator, the fruit seller at his market stand, roommates of course. It takes effort and isn't as rewarding as in less urban settings, but it's still better than giving up and retrating into the mode of "cool guy who never interacts with anyone".
- Socializing in the tiny village is so easy it does itself. Take the kid to the playground, meet other parents, bam. Walk out the door, greet your neighbor, have a chat. Go to the festival. Go to church. Work your garden. Talk to the neighbor. Fiddle with your car or bike, someone will come over and ask what you're up to and whether you need any help.
- I have the social skills and graces you'd expect from an autistic German software engineer, but I do make every effort to be polite if not friendly with everyone I meet regardless of the setting. I feel it pays off immensely - for any one person who's put off by the directness or lack of isolation, there are at least two others who are glad to be able to skip the whole "let us dance around each other so that our bubbles may never intersect" anti-social game.
- True urbanites aren't human. They don't return the politest of nods, in any setting in which normal people would share their observations of the situation you can bet your balls they'll pull out their phones put on their earbuds and ignore the hell out of the world, and if you ever are forced to interact with them have fun trying to establish so much as eye contact. Young people love this lifestyle because they're all damaged beyond repair by their all-encompassing doomscrolling addictions.
- The top-down imposition of kind norms at the company I work at seems to have worked. There are some holdouts who refuse to use the familiar address with the top brass, and I can understand that it may feel forced if you've been used to the previous culture for decades, but overall it has a very open and humane atmosphere and I had no trouble assimilating within mere weeks.
- Foreigners suck. The more foreigners there are in the area, the worse the norms get. Having a Pole, a Balkanian, a Russian, an Ukrainian, an Italian and a Frisian in the village is harmless. I wager we might even be able to absorb an additional Turk and perhaps something more exotic. This does not disturb social cohesion very much, because even if those people arrived relatively recently and aren't as deeply rooted here and still maintain connections to their countries of origin, you can at least seamlessly integrate them into the daily goings-on so long as they speak the language. But as soon as there are two foreign families of the same ethnic background, you've lost. It's over. They are now their own parallel community, will maintain their separate identity, will raise their children to speak their language, and will strongly prefer interacting with each other over interacting with the natives. Scale it up, see even just the larger villages with their Russian or Turkish enclaves, look at the towns with their Muslim quarters and nascent African ghettoes, and see how young people gravitate towards "migrantisch" culture once the Leitkultur is no more, and you can tell what the future looks like. The future is someone with sunglasses on, headphones over their ears and a smartphone in his hand, walking past everyone he meets in the street, forever.
Okay, so now let's speculate.
Can you engineer people to be more kind? I'd say yes, but there are some conditions that must be met and doing so may be very difficult.
- You need a high level of preexisting social trust. I'm not sure whether this can be synthesized.
- You need a high level of ethnic homogeneity, or else you just get parallel societies.
- The social norms czar needs sufficient authority to order everyone to maintain eye contact, greet each other, use familiar forms of address and mandate other forms of highly accessible social interaction.
- Profit. Everyone sees their quality of life skyrocket as a consequence.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
7d ago
I had a bit of a week.
The marriage breaking up and coming back together in the space of twelve hours, deciding on a new Kindergarten and then putting that at doubt again, trying to polish up my rusty French because I'll have a visitor soon, having 13 hours of meetings in the space of two work-days, realizing that I optimized my work-code prematurely and its performance is far in excess of what justifies the complexities introduced by my optimization measures, going to a two-day HEMA event including a tournament and realizing that I still love fighting no matter how rarely I get to do it, finding out that being hungover and dead tired can be fixed by running into an old friend and starting a spontaneous grappling match as if the last five years hadn't happened (though I almost puked my guts out by the end of it), hearing that my old fencing club was in dire straits for lack of instructors so I went and tried to badger a friend into stepping up and assuming that responsibility only for him to volunteer me as if I were still active and us finding a compromise in which we would both volunteer only to find out the next day that in fact the previous instructors had no plans of stepping down and it was all a big misunderstanding, then an "awareness" training session that everyone assumed was about wokeness but that actually was about preventing sexual abuse of minors and anyways attendance qualifies me to organize club events so that I can host weekend fencing sessions that don't require me to finagle the 4-hour drive into my work-week, I signed up for another tournament at the end of May, discovered that my historical peak HEMA ranking was actually a lot higher than I assumed (in the top 600s worldwide, at a time when I was decidedly not fencing, which shows merely that lockdowns screwed everyone over and that those rankings are worthless) and then hayfever season started and I bittersweetly discovered that levociterizine works but also pretty much knocks me out for a few hours.
Right now I'm tinkering on how to handle the aforementioned weekend fencing sessions. Can't be too often because I need to keep an eye on the homefront, so it'll be at most monthly, perhaps rather quarterly. I have no idea who would even show up on weekends, so I don't know whether to just provide a time and space for free fencing or a more structured event. I'm no didact, so even with structure it would be simple: Some medium-intensity warm-up, maybe half an hour of non-technical exercises, and then proceed to sparring. Events with low attendance risk degenerating into chatty layabout sessions, and I'd hate to sacrifice half a day just to babysit a bunch of people sitting around and shooting the shit, so maybe some structure might be good. But seeing as I'm neither an instructor nor otherwise very respectable, I might not have the authority to motivate people to exert themselves, so having a pre-defined program might help. But again, with too few people it'd be no good. There's also the issue of novices: If I invite everyone regardless of experience and equipment, then any commmunal exercises need to be feasible for those with less experience and protective equipment. If I restrict it to those with a little more experience, there's a higher risk of not enough people showing up. There's also the question of when - I favor a Saturday morning time-slot, maybe 9 to 12. That puts it two days away from Thursday and Monday practice, and people can still go about the majority of their weekend without needing to cut it up too badly. But maybe I'm overlooking something here. Another issue my own frankly atrocious state of fitness; I probably won't be able to motivate people very much if my pitch is "do as I say, not as I fail to do", so it may be advisable to look for a date at which at least one other very motivated fencer is available to pick up the slack. But first of all I suppose I need to either talk to the club leadership or join one of the organisatonal sessions to hash out the parameters and procedures to organize the event. Step number one to increase my visibility and modest respectability is to show up tomorrow for the big tournament the club organizes and help out as much as I can.
I love May. What a beautiful month. Warm as summer on a good day, everything's green and in bloom, bright, so very bright.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
8d ago
Terraforming being "almost" within reach is quite some statement. We can't even terraform Earth beyond very slightly changing the composition of a preexisting atmosphere under ideal planetological and logistical conditions. But we're almost ready to go creating and maintaining a human-breathable atmosphere and temperature and radiation levels on a deep-frozen desert like Mars, a tiny pebble like the Moon or a comically uninhabitable hellhole like Venus? Using chemical rocketry that barely makes it viable to put communications sattelites into low Earth orbit and can sling tiny little probes to other planets for mere billions apiece?
Space colonization will be done, if at all, in sealed habitats. Terraforming is wishful thinking.
I love this post. No extraneous text, just a direct injection of educational information. Obvious in hindsight, but I'd never have thought about it if you hadn't spelled it out. I am better off for this post, in some minuscule way.
More options
Context Copy link