doglatine
13d ago
Surely part of having a triple-lock on the branches of government allows you to get past varieties of "your rules" towards "our rules"?
doglatine
13d ago
I'd say the flip-side of that is that it's a mistake to read modern concepts of homosexual identity into historical reports same-sex activity. There are lots of contexts - from militaries to prisons to boarding schools - where a significant proportion of men will engage in some degree of same-sex sexual experimentation. This doesn't mean that those men are socially or intrinsically homosexual or even bisexual, any more than it means that the Ancient Greeks were homosexual in the modern connotation of the term.
doglatine
14d ago
Definitely possible that’s the reason, but dudes fucking dudes was definitely a thing in the Middle Ages (and viewed in a very dim light), and notably it didn’t usually take the form of an exclusive sexual identity (cf Achilles and Briseis and Patroclus) so calling them “bisexual” is arguably a bit anachronistic. Maybe there was some Plaion DEI influence, but it’s also possible that they just wanted to expand the romantic options open to players.
doglatine
14d ago
I don’t know, actually. There’s been at least a hint of homoeroticism between Hans and Henry before. Nothing that couldn’t be passed off as “locker room banter”, but it wouldn’t be the first time that young men going to war together and getting up to mischief might do a bit of fooling around.
Yes, my thoughts exactly. While I haven’t reached that part of the game yet, my immediate thought when I heard about this NPC was that his dialogue likely reflects the arrogance or self-assurance of the 15th century Islamic world, and his dialogue shouldn’t be taken as “Word of God.”
In general, KCD does a good job of making its NPCs believably medieval and non-cartoonish, with my favourite example being an Inquisitor in the first game who is literally trying one of your childhood friends for heresy. If you respectfully question him about the need for this kind of policing of the faith, he gives a very good answer — in short, “listen kid, look around, open your eyes, Christendom is in crisis. We have an antipope in Avignon, we’re still recovering from the plague, we’ve lost Jerusalem, and everyone is scared and lost, the last thing we need is more addled fools proclaiming that they’ve got a direct hotline to God.”
doglatine
14d ago
As a huge fan of the first game, I’d flag that in addition to the main antagonist being gay, there’s a very sympathetic novice monk you can meet in Sasau Monastery, and if you dig into his backstory with some snooping, you can learn that he was sent to the monastery after a love affair with another man. You can confront him about this, and either tell him you don’t see what he did as sinful, or that you consider his acts abominable. So gay themes were definitely present in a subdued way in the first game.
doglatine
16d ago
Trump seems to be very interested in acquisitions and land. Maybe it's a legacy thing, or maybe he's just a real estate developer at heart. Possibly Bibi told him words to the effect of "we've got a nice patch of real estate for you on the Med, want to take it off our hands?" and Trump got suckered.
doglatine
20d ago
Perhaps the clearest case here is animal welfare. I care about the issue a lot, and no-one would normally think it relevant to ask me “How does animal suffering affect you personally?”
doglatine
24d ago
the broader rationalist sphere as a bunch of very crazy people
Awesome fiction tho
doglatine
1mo ago
Despite being a huge fan of the 40K universe (and an enthusiastic modeler/painter), I've never actually read any Black Library books, just some old Warhammer fantasy stuff from the 1990s. I take it you'd recommend the Ciaphias Cain books then?
I very much relate to this, and I worry about it, because back when I was a college student I’d read long-form fiction for pleasure all the time. My inclination to do so has been in steady decline since then.
One of my resolutions for 2025 is to try rebuilding my pleasure-reading habits via simpler, more accessible, and more addictive reading projects — cheesy fantasy, military sci-fi, Black Library texts, LitRPGs, etc.. Once I've refreshed the relevant pathways in my brain and once again enjoy long-form reading as a go-to leisure activity, I can get ambitious again. With all that in mind, I’m so far a couple of thousand pages into Alexander Wales’ “Worth the Candle” series and absolutely loving it.
doglatine
1mo ago
Basically all Western immigration systems are incontinent in the sense that they —
(1) allow the right for anyone arriving in the country (legally or illegally) to lodge a claim for asylum in accordance with the 1951 UN refugee convention
(2) provide guaranteed rights for new citizens to sponsor visas for non-citizen family members
(3) do not condition entitlements (benefits, voting rights, etc.) on any basis beyond citizenship; once you’re in, you’re in, and any attempts to restrict this principle can be resisted via the “second class citizen” meme.
On top of this, educational polarisation means that the people actually making immigration decisions (magistrates and civil servants) are almost guaranteed to be sympathetic to any and all asylum and immigration claims.
In short, the West is utterly fucked unless and until governments are willing to make radical breaks in international treaties and national constitutional law.
doglatine
1mo ago
A medium-sized private school in the provinces of England. Sadly, these places have mostly gone woke, and dropped Ancient Greek for Spanish, Rugby for football, etc.
doglatine
1mo ago
Mastery of Latin, Ancient Greek, and (to a lesser extent) contemporary languages is something that can't be faked or bullshitted in the same way as argumentative essays. Being able to translate Thucydides or Cicero requires significant time investment in learning large amounts of vocabulary and complex grammatical rules, as well as cross-textual and historical knowledge. Because elite-status in the humanities used to be gated behind being able to do these things, it served as a selection mechanism for the humanities that meant that 95%+ of people couldn't cut it, and the humanities had a way of choosing a genuine cognitive elite.
doglatine
1mo ago
At the risk of repeating the same points I make every time Tiger Moms come up, I think the traditional elite Anglo work model (largely neglected in the US and UK since WW2) remains the gold standard for producing top-quality elites. A strong emphasis on polymathy, including physical excellence; deep language skills as the no-bullshit zone of the humanities; debate and public speaking as a proving ground.
This is the kind of education I benefited from, and to which I attribute most of my virtues (my vices, on the other hand, I take full personal credit for). Sadly, as a parent I've found it's almost impossible to buy these days; the kind of solid upper-tier English private schools I attended in my youth are now rarae aves, and at best offer slightly more personalised and 'nurturing' versions of what you'd find in any American or European state school. Probably you can still get the old recipe at the right boarding schools, but those come with their own headaches.
I think the definitive piece written on this is Nadia Asparouhova's Tribes of Climate. Introductory quote:
For someone who doesn’t work in climate, trying to figure out which opportunities to pursue – carbon removal, renewables, energy storage and transmission – is a dizzying array of options, with no way to sort or rank their importance. But it seems to me that climate is better understood not as a singular list of technology and policy action items, but as an assortment of climate tribes. Tribes tell us why these opportunities are interesting and help us make better predictions about how they will unfold.
I recommend reading the whole article in full. FWIW, I identify as what Asparouhova calls an "Energy Maximalist" - I regard climate change as a genuine but convenient crisis point that provides incentives for us to transition from the local minimum of fossil fuels to the global minimum of cheap renewable energy. Consequently, for most of the climate activist world, I'm the most despicable class of heretic. This is true despite my acceptance of the general catechism of contemporary climate activism - (i) the earth is warming (ii) it's mostly our fault (iii) this is bad (iv) we can do something about it (v) we should do something about it.
doglatine
2mo ago
I'm no financial analyst but I'm inclined to say yes, keep buying. I really think that despite the AI buzz and hype, most of the business world still hasn't priced in just how economically impactful AGI (and the path towards it) is going to be over the course of this decade. But you might also want to buy gold or something, because I expect the rest of this decade is also going to be very volatile.
doglatine
2mo ago
Yes, thanks for the expectations-tempering, and agree that there could still be a reasonably long way still to go (my own timelines are still late-this-decade). I think the main lesson of o3 from the very little we've seen so far is probably to downgrade one family of arguments/possibilities, namely the idea that all the low-hanging fruit in the current AI paradigm had been taken and we shouldn't expect any more leaps on the scale of GPT3.5->GPT4. I know some friends in this space who were pretty confident that Transformer architectures wouldn't never be able to get good scores on the ARC AGI challenges, for example, and we'd need a comprehensive rethink of foundations. What o3 seems to suggest is that these people are wrong, and existing methods should be able to get us most (if not all) the way to AGI.
doglatine
2mo ago
They have a public dataset and a private one, and compare the scores for both of them to test for overfitting/data contamination. You can see both sets of scores here, and they’re not significantly different.
Of course it’s always possible that there has been cheating on the test in some other way, and so François Chollet has asked for others to replicate the result.
doglatine
2mo ago
Wake up, babe, new OpenAI frontier model just dropped.
Well, you can’t actually use it yet. But the benchmarks scores are a dramatic leap up.. Perhaps most strikingly, o3 does VERY well on one of the most important and influential benchmarks, the ARC AGI challenge, getting 87% accuracy compared to just 32% from o1. Creator of the challenge François Chollet seems very impressed.
What does all this mean? My view is that this confirms we’re near the end-zone. We shouldn’t expect achieving human-level intelligence to be hard in the first place, given all the additional constraints evolution had to endure in building us (metabolic costs of neurons, infant skull size vs size of the birth canal, etc.). Since we hit the forcing-economy stage with AI sometime in the late 2010s, ever greater amounts of human capital and compute have been dedicated to the problem, so we shouldn’t be surprised. My mood is well captured by this reflection on Twitter from OpenAI researcher Nick Cammarata:
honestly ai is so easy and neural networks are so simple. this was always going to happen to the first intelligent species to come to our planet. we’re about to learn something important about how universes tend to go I think, because I don’t believe we’re in a niche one
doglatine
2mo ago
I’m always impressed walking around the produce section of French and Italian supermarkets at how you can smell the tomatoes from 20ft away.
FWIW Grok 3 has not impressed me at all so far. It seems very confused about its abilities and more prone to hallucination than any post GPT-4 class model I’ve used. Additionally, the benchmark scores so far have been underwhelming. For example, a lot of Grok 3’s higher scores (the bits of the bar charts shaded in a lighter colour) rely on cons@64, shorthand for running the input prompt 64 times and then taking the consensus of results, which isn’t practical for most people. xAI are not alone in doing this, but it does make a difference for pairwise comparisons.
Musk has thrown vast amounts of money and compute at xAI and in the process he’s built something not quite SotA. OpenAI still the team to beat on performance, DeepSeek on efficiency, and Anthropic for vibes.
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