deluxev2
25d ago
Album that I reference below: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fOO5Lneer9W4UiT9pn9bKf2dvob_rKjN?usp=sharing
(1) On Vulcanus, a space platform foundation literally costs about 1 calcite without any modules.
20 steel + 20 wire = 400 molten iron + 17 molten copper = 1.1 calcite
The build in the album could make my whole post game fleet of 2 freighters and high speed delivery ship, a personal cruiser and 2 legendary asteroid farms every 6 hours. If you want more than that it is tileable up to 8 times with no changes, a minor belt tweak would let you go to 16.
The rocket costs are about .2 calcite and 15 coal per platform delivered to orbit with no productivity on anything. It is a fair bit of processing sure, but not that much. To keep up with the platform build you need 1 lds foundry, 2 em plant for each circuit type and 5 rocket fuel assemblers. Without modules. Or beacons.
(2) The ice platform build generates 0.5 platform per second and takes a bit less than 180 platforms to make, so it takes about 9 minutes to self replicate. After an hour of that you'll already be getting 64 platforms per second and probably have trouble building the platform factory fast enough.
(3) I generated a Fulgora and dropped some 100x100 squares of belts. I think that is what Nailus (a popular factorio streamer) uses but I could be wrong. My train network is 64x64 tiles because I think 100 is way too large. Big square patches aren't incredibly common, but they definitely aren't rare. Fulgora does really force you to use a lot of bots or trains though.
(4) Next is a demo of a Gleba main bus style base. Produces 180spm at 98% freshness and can trivially scale until your mash fills a green belt with stack inserters (about 3600 spm). Obviously needs some more production sections for rocket parts if you don't want to import them. No circuits needed just inserter filters.
I think more could've been done to distinguish them from biters, but there is a a lot of little differences that again aren't very well communicated. Only farms produce spores, and the pentapods give no fucks about anything else you place, so your base can largely co-mingle with them while you heavily defend your farms. Also traditional pollution is free so power and production can be dirty; bring out those steel furnaces and oil refineries. Their expansion parties are always wrigglers and will only move to wetlands so you can wall with very light defenses or landfill them away from your agri towers (a lot of wetlands are entirely surrounded by highlands which don't even need that much landfill to give you free fruit forever with no defenses). Stompers will get lost if they have to travel far enough to reach artillery (strafers too but that is very late game), so artillery outposts need suprisingly little defenses once established. The enemy types are much more varied than the biters/spitters which makes the new turret prioritization much more impactful.
(5) Re Aquilo: I dunno. I guess direct insertion and beacons? I used fission which is probably about the same size as heating towers per watt, but only made like 40MW. If you have a place for things to buffer you can also babysit your other 4 bases or do some victory ship design while you wait for platforms to accumulate.
Re Quality I was more trying to communicate that I think such a system would necessarily be too complex to teach the player in a satisfying way. I agree it is kinda jank, but it also leads to some interesting decisions/math about where in the production chain to upgrade quality, which recipes to use, where to trash materials to simplify logistics and how many machines need to be processing each quality tier. I guess it is a particularly bad fit for main bus style bases because of the explosion of distinct items. Might be why you are feeling it particularly acutely.
I've seen this sentiment from quite a few people and I don't really get it. Maybe Space Age isn't pushing people in the right directions or communicating clearly enough. I'm going to rebut you because I'm a fanboy with nothing better to do, but I don't mean to question your conclusion for what's best for you or call you dumb or anything. If the game isn't making you do things you enjoy then don't play it.
A lot of people say the new planets are super space constrained and you can't build big but that just... isn't true? Space platforms and ice platform are both pretty trivially cheap (especially once you are a Vulcanus enjoyer). Fulgora has infinite islands to claim whose only cost is the rail to reach them and lightning rods which are also pretty trivially cheap. Fulgora limits the max size of any one build, but most big islands are larger than the big city blocks people like to build anyway. It is true these things aren't literally free, but biters and demolishers and cliffs and lakes and lava put a cost on land that is pretty comparable. Only Fulgora constrains the shape of your factory and if you don't like it there you only need to extract holmium ore and make science.
I don't understand why people think bots are good on Gleba (or that belts are bad/hard). The fastest spoil timers are still several minutes, which means you can belt them several thousand tiles on express belts before they spoil. The only output that cares about spoilage percentage is the science which crafts twice as fast as the other new sciences for 1/4 of the "mining" area so it just doesn't matter if it is showing up at the labs at 40% freshness, just ship 2.5x as much. The real unique valuable building from Gleba is the stack inserter, which can quadruple the throughput of all of your belts which is much more game changing than the EM plant. I wasn't a huge fan of the pentapods, they're fine, but to say they didn't change things is probably a result of hyper overinvestment in military.
My first Aquilo science setup targeted 60spm and took just over 500 concrete (1/3 of a rocket load of stone brick processed through a foundry) for the main processing core and rocket silo which both sat on the starter island (so didn't need platform) and about 600 platform to train in my closest fluorine. This was all common quality machines and modules as I hadn't set up any meaningful quality processing yet. Where is all the concrete going? Also why aren't you just making more?
(The quality interface change really bugged me, the move from dropdown to radio buttons helped a lot but muscle memory is a hell of a drug. Also the mixed quality for chance of better output sounds sweet, but is a lot more complicated than people make it sound. What weight do different ingredients/qualities get? There are several different recipes with drastically different efficiencies for making the various materials so using summed ore count is awkward and overweighs processed materials because of productivity. Should I be able to consistently make good circuits from legendary copper and common iron? What I think it really needed was some sort of downgrade machine that didn't feel terribly inefficient to use so you could have your mines output a stream of common and uncommon ore which could go to their own smelting stack without dealing w
deluxev2
1mo ago
I'm not aware of a particular term to describe that argument type, but at least you could successfully communicate the idea more succinctly by referring to trapped priors.
deluxev2
3mo ago
Mostly just offering a different perspective. I'm significantly less convinced than my writing would suggest, but I haven't really seen many/any good competing theories to be honest. I'd like to point out that your response makes less sense than mine despite probably being more helpful. If it is "plain stupid to be envious" why would we have created envy. It is a part of human society we've been struggling with forever.
The rational/evolutionary reason for wanting a social impulse is making allies. The mechanism by which that is implemented is crude.
Also just because you are denying them something they want does not mean you are making their life worse.
deluxev2
3mo ago
If you have some time to invest, I'd suggest you read "Sadly, Porn." In either case I'll poorly summarize with many assertions without evidence (as goes the source material)
The urge that ensures we eat is hunger. The urge that makes us social is a type of pleasure from preventing someone else getting what they want. It is equivalent to our will to power. However this can be deeply antisocial and in modern times you'll be excommunicated for stating the truth.
The lie we most commonly tell to convince others (and ourselves) that we never hunger is the ledger. They don't deserve that because it is not fair. They owe me for how I helped them. Justifications for dessert. The ledger is pro social if your accounting is good, but the point of it is to cook the books.
Your envy is you trying to use the ledger to get to dessert. But the ledger is fake and your math is bad. There gain is not your loss and even if it were that's not why you are here.
Your prescription is to either to stop lying to yourself that there is a ledger. Satisfy this hunger when it doesn't truly hurt someone, not just when you have moral cover. Alternatively you could get better at accounting so your attempts to cook the books aren't convincing to yourself. I'd recommend the second because it is easier.
deluxev2
3mo ago
I'd really recommend you try cold brewing at least once. Fill a water bottle or jar with room temp water, add tea/tea bag and let sit overnight. Get a lot more of the non bitter flavours to shine through.
Re loose leaf, I usually get it because it is cheaper (although the boutique expensive stuff is sold in this form as well), but I just leave it loose in the cup and just toss the last quarter to avoid eating the leaves. Boutique stuff is a good gift to receive but I never buy it for myself
deluxev2
3mo ago
No major/irreversible problems among my group. Hunger fades or at least becomes significantly more like food obsession than suffering after about a day. About the same time you'll usually get bad/off breathe smell (see ketosis breathe). You'll need a lot more water than you expect, food provides water both by being wet and by the fact carbohydrates produce water when used. I think it is a pretty good way to lose some weight in terms of willpower in to pounds out, but don't be surprised/disappointed when you gain half of it back again pretty quick. The lower salt levels cause you to retain less water so you'll gain that back when you get some salt. My friends have described reduced anxiety/less racing thoughts but I haven't noticed personally. I think while fasting their ADHD gets worse though.
As far as risks, if you usually have low blood pressure it can cause lightheadedness and if it is particularly bad probably fainting and possibly worse. In any case I'd avoid situations where your life depends on your physicality. One person's body didn't like the lack of salt and they had some bloody stool and diarrhea, but supplementing magnesium fixed it for them.
deluxev2
3mo ago
Setting up alternative holidays with my friend group that doesn't pull people away from family. In spring we do a fast and then everyone brings a dish or two to enjoy together
deluxev2
3mo ago
I've been doing a spring equinox 2 day water fast, for a couple years. What are you looking to know?
deluxev2
1yr ago
The rumors are true, but a they are particularly competent convection ovens. A lot of ovens are pretty shit and their size makes their job a lot harder.
deluxev2
1yr ago
What is ego but your perception of your status? Oxford Dictionary: Ego: a person's sense of self-esteem or self-importance. Self Esteem: confidence in one's own worth or abilities. Self Importance: an exaggerated sense of one's own value or importance.
I think your response to 2rafa clearly shows it is a status thing, but it may be best to drop the status framing even if it is accurate because a lot of people lose the ability to cooperate when thinking directly about status. They can only see villains maneuvering and thus act that part. WalterODim and FiveHourMarathon have some great advice in my opinion, so if my model of relationships grinds with you I'd recommend trying out theirs.
deluxev2
1yr ago
Sounds to me like you're hoping for your relationship to bestow status upon you which isn't happening because of her (apparent) low standards. Thus the need for verification that you're better than her past encounters. If she chose them and you, you must have something alike.
So the obvious prescriptions (pick your poison as appropriate to the details of the situation and what you can stomach):
a) get your status from something else, your relationship is something you extract resources from/trade with, not something you are proud of
b) realize that nobody else is going to know about her past, they'll just see you with this hot and successful gf. Doll her up and show her off.
c) convince yourself that her past encounters were actually high status. Get to know and respect her exes.
c) convince yourself that she has changed, made mistakes in the past, but now recognized her value. Help her find God/Self Confidence/her talents.
d) find someone choosier or more conventionally attractive.
deluxev2
1yr ago
I'm not really trying to convince anyone that trans women meet the category "men" or "women" I am trying to express that most people I've encountered seem to believe that the actions of trans women are going to much more closely meet the category "female" then the category "male". That might be false, but stating that it is a "fact that trans women are males" disregards even the possibility of examining categories. It isn't an argument or a fact, it is a statement about categories that may be true or false and needs much more detail, namely which features of the categories trans women meet in "men" and not in "women". I think public opinion is swayed by the fact that most trans leaders are very passing where passing is having a large number of visible physical characteristics from the category "women".
deluxev2
1yr ago
I have a lot to say about your post, thanks for posting it.
Anecdotal Engagement to Blanchard Hypothesis/Autoandrophelia
I find this issue very interesting and go out of my way to engage with it because in some ways I think that I am a bit like you in how I see my gender/sex/(dysmorphia? where part of the problem is there isn't a sufficient word for what to put here). I am a.f.a.b. that definitely has some form of gender dysphoria and sometimes I think I might just be a closeted trans man, but that doesn't seem like the complete truth. I really enjoyed the first part about your post because as someone who doesn't engage in rationalists spaces often, I hadn't really heard of the Blanchard hypothesis. I spent a good part of that post trying that on for myself to see how it fit my own experience of life and at first glance it felt right. I do definitely have some autoandrophilia, and perhaps this was the reason I felt I didn't fit into the mainstream ideal of transgenderism. I often tell people that the existence of "tomboy" serves me well enough as a gender role that I am definitely not transgender but actually transsexual is a much more accurate term because I would just like penis. Upon my estimation, my body dysphoria is at max of 30% autoandrophilia. Perhaps I am the first camp, of having been trans minded before puberty (there is a fair bit of evidence here) however I'm also not an Lesbian.
I think there is a lot of value in being able to discuss alternative explanations for gender dysmorphia because the standard explanation just doesn't fit everyone. Here I would say the value is so that people have more hypothesis to pull from when trying to figure themselves out, but my husband (whose account I am stealing to post this) would say it is because having many hypothesis helps us find an accurate one or one close to reality. However there seems no group willing to engage with multiple hypothesis because it all devolves into "for or against", where either you support the current model only or you want to completely deny transition and force people into strict assigned at birth roles with no other allowances. I'm sure if there is an explanation for why all politics seem to devolve this way with a complete inability to understand that something is a nuance, or perhaps the moment something devolves this way is the moment it becomes "politics".
Thoughts on Philosophy of Language as Pertaining to Gender
I have to caveat my following thoughts with the admittance that I don't care much about the specificity of language. I'm easy to change words if I get the sense that the connotation of that word meant something different to someone else. I'll never die on a hill of the true meaning of a word, but change my words to try to communicate my meaning. That said I had some thoughts that might perhaps influence further discussion of your Philosophy of Language.
"To be clear, it's true that categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—categories are "map", not "territory"—and it's possible that trans women might be women with respect to some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, Alexander goes much further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories to make trans people feel better"
Some of the pushback on Categorization of gendered words specifically is exactly because people can sense the sex based Categories do not fit. When someone argues that trans women aren't "women", like you do here:
" It's not that hard to get people to admit that trans women are different from cis women, but somehow they can't (in public, using words) follow the implication that trans women are different from cis women because trans women are male."
They often follow up with because trans women are men/male. However just in the same way that you are stating that the category "women" is made up of a group of features that doesn't match "trans women" and so including them in that category is inaccurate. So too is the category "male" and "male" made up of a group of features that doesn't match "trans women" and for many people when comparing the two, the features in the category "women" match much more closely to "trans women" than the features in the category "male" AND using the category "women" makes trans women's lives "better" as far as they understand. So it seems morally and linguistically correct for them to use the other. "Ennobling the answer that is right for society and not tyrannizing society with the right answer." -Edward Teach. Perhaps it is the case that the category "male" does much more closely match the category "trans women" but it isn't a perfect fit, and to me it seems an equally "wrong answer" to using the category "women". I feel that a lot of information has been lost in using that category. The argument has been framed as whether dolphins match "fish" or "mammal", but perhaps instead of dolphins we should be discussing platypuses.
The argument that most trans women is caused by autogynephilia makes it so that trans women are just men with a different fetish and because fetishes are masculine there is absolutely no difference between the category "trans women" and "male" but part of being a trans women is performing womanhood such that if someone were to try to predict your actions based off of a gender identifier, then you would try to act so that "women" was a better fit. Since categories are used for predictive modeling then perhaps the category "women" is more accurate. I personally think that there are enough failures of overlap e.g. strength in sports, that both are inaccurate. That said I am physically stronger than all the trans women I know (which is many now), and if we worked to be strong to the same degree they would be stronger but they don't because that's not what a woman would do, and likewise I do work at it, perhaps because that's what a man would do. In fact in general the category "male" matches my behavior enough to make people uncomfortable with category "female" despite my making no effort to push any external categorization of me verbally. When we get into gender arguments where I attribute behavior to other women based on my own behavior, my husband points out that I may genuinely be in that 99.5th that is stronger than the average male, I just point out that we are surrounded by programmers and they are likely in the 30th percentile and not average.
I doubt I will change your mind with any of this. I think you see trans women as completely matching the category of "male" because they are men with fetishes. However I am hoping to communicate that your discomfort with the categories being used incorrectly may actually be due to your underlying definition of what it is to be trans. Without that definition (so to most people), the category "women" is actually more accurate than the category "male" for predicting the action of trans women. The category "male" being more accurate is dependent on your definition of what causes trans women to be. So rather than all of these big name rationalists throwing out categories completely in the name of making a group feel a bit better, they have no category that fits completely but by their definition of trans women the category that fits best also happens to make a group feel better. It fits best and it makes them feel better, win win. Should they instead find a category that fits perfectly? No category fits any individual perfectly, we can only really hope for pretty good. Maybe they are wrong to think "women" is a pretty good fit, but I'd guess they genuinely believe that.
Disclaimer for anyone going through post history, I am not the owner of this account. I read rationalist blogs and this content in so much as the owner of this account makes me. This statement does not reflect the thoughts and opinions of the owner of this account :P
deluxev2
1yr ago
No legal prescribing power, totally agree that it is absurdly expensive compared to foreign care, but some cost comparisons of how messed up US healthcare costs without insurance:
$15.00/min Primary care
$7.00/min US based telehealth
$1.15/min Massage therapist
$0.90/min India based telehealth
deluxev2
1yr ago
I'd say probably the biggest benefit is cheaper access to a moderately trained medical professional. In the US, all but 5 states require about a year of training to become a licensed massage therapist culminating in a standardized test with a ~70% pass rate. For something like $70 an hour, you get pretty good combination of competency and attention per dollar compared to a doctor.
For whatever NIH's medical credibility is worth, their review(1) of (the reviews of) the literature finds massage is effective for short term treatment (2-3 days) of low back, neck and shoulder pain, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia generally halving or thirding severity of symptoms. Generally there hasn't been enough study of long term outcomes to reach statistical significance, and the short term data is middling quality. An RCT of dosage response(2) found no benefit from 30 minute sessions but a 3x reduction in pain from 60 minute sessions and quote:
Our findings also suggest that previously published studies of massage for neck pain may have not administered adequate doses. For example, the newest Cochrane review of massage for neck pain reported 9 trials of massage for subacute or chronic neck pain. Among the 7 trials with conceivably relevant designs, 4 trials included only a single session of a single massage technique applied for less than 5 minutes, 1 trial included only five 30-minute treatments over 2 weeks, 1 included five 45-minute treatments over 1 month, and the last was a series of weekly 60-minute massages. In addition, most trials lacked massage resembling conventional massage practice in the United States, where 60-minute treatments administered by licensed massage therapists are the norm, a wide range of massage techniques are used in a single session, and self-care recommendations are provided. This review notes that there is little information regarding optimal parameters for the massage, including the number of treatments per week and the length of each session.
From my understanding, a good 15 minutes at the start of a massage session is just preparing the flesh so it is workable. An hour session is going to have a lot more time to do actual work.
There is a plausible story that reduced pain allows for faster long term improvement by making it easier to follow through with physical therapy exercises (or literal exercises(3)). This requires some level of conscientiousness on the patient's part (and some lack of it on the provider's part, massage therapists in the US are not allowed to prescribe physical therapy), but seems plausible.
Regarding your (lack of) enjoyment of sports massage, it might be useful to think about what is happening as assisted stretching. Many of the deep pressure techniques are attempting to fool your nervous system into thinking the muscle is tighter than it really is, and thus relax it. Like normal stretching the feeling is an acquired taste, and those without it often "guard" by tightening all the nearby muscle groups making a frame to avoid injury and reject the outside force.
Footnotes
-I haven't interacted with any osteopaths, but from the looks of it they are an unlicensed profession and thus going to have a lot more variability.
-I'm pretty close with a licensed massage therapist so included is probably some second hand propaganda
(1)https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/providers/digest/massage-therapy-for-health-science
(2)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948757/
(3)https://today.uic.edu/massage-therapy-beneficial-after-injury-exercise/
deluxev2
1yr ago
I'm no expert but have some familiarity. The LLMs have a limited context window (gpt4 is 8000 tokens) so it can't hold all of that data at once. Probably the easiest way to get it to chew through that much is to ask it for code to do the things you want (directing it to write some pygraph or R code or something). It could plausibly do it inline if you asked it to summarize chunks of data, then fed the previous summary in with the next chunk. The code would act as a much more auditable and probably accurate tool though.
deluxev2
1yr ago
My general read on this stuff is that our moral framework including freedom of expression and thought imply that these things cannot be punishable moral transgressions, and the ick factor comes more from the way it changes our expectations of the phonography viewer.
They aren't causing real damages by doing this (except in the case of distribution and claims of authenticity which is covered by the moral frameworks around libel). Using your likeness moderately infringes your intellectual property but in my experience most people don't have that strong of moral reactions to IP violations. I think there is some sense of sexual property that is infringed in that you should be able to extract desserts from your sex appeal and reproductive potential, but I think there has been a lot of pushback against this moral precept as part of the sexual revolution. The pornography viewer hasn't done anything wrong yet but they have revealed that they want something from you (implicitly, that you don't want to give them).
Imagine you own a boat and your neighbor fantasizes about having your boat. I think it is clear that his fantasies don't constitute immoral action, but it brings into question every interaction you've had. When he gave you his old garden tools to help you get started was that genuine generosity of a lie to get in your good favor. If you leave on vacation can you trust him not to steal it. Some of these are resolved by disclosure, e.g. if your neighbor gives you the garden tools in exchange for lending him the boat for a fishing trip, but it doesn't resolve the unmatched value functions.
Oh yeah, the asteroid resistances are particularly egregious. I think the whole space platform thing could've used some more time to bake. The full cargo rockets of one thing only for automation, the lack of ability to communicate, the only one landing pad for some reason, the lack of ability to transfer items between platforms. I enjoyed Space Explorations interplanetary logistics quite a bit more.
I think you might be just wrong about the railroading on the Gleba enemies. Red ammo in gun turrets at the edge of infinite research need 25 turret x seconds to kill a big stomper. Rocket turrets need 12 turret x seconds and have over twice the footprint. Strafers and wrigglers don't have notable physical resist. Lasers have 16 turret x seconds to kill strafers which is totally respectable. Against stompers they are pretty useless but behemoth biters do the same thing to gun turrets without uranium ammo.
More options
Context Copy link